Back before the world knew the Segway was going to turn out to be just a fancy Scooter it was a secret project that was going to change our lives.  Riding in on the trailing waves of hype as we were reaching the bitter end of dot com mania, it was going to be the object of desire that changed everything back.  A new new thing that was going to get us excite us all over again about technology just when we were giving up.
One of the reasons that we believed that was that …

With as much fanfare as they can muster Amazon has launched their $400  e-paper digital book reader called the Kindle.
You can read the loving Newsweek cover story and get up to speed.
Then let’s meet back here tonight and I’ll tell you why I think there’s a good chance it’s dead on arrival.
Meanwhile, feel free to leave your thoughts on the “death of the book” in the comments.

Advertising a hardcore video game isn’t as straightforward as selling a TV show or movie.  Selling linear entertainment is as simple as giving a taste of the thing that your selling.  If you want to make a movie you stitch together a few scenes, throw on some music, hire one of the five big trailer voice guys and you’re good to go.  It’s a tiny version of the story, possibly more evocative and action packed than the movie itself, and it even uses the same talent and a similar format. Even print ads …

It’s hard to say what the films are going to look like twenty years from now. What is clear is that since the introduction of computer graphics and editing the medium is far more fluid than it was before Neo broke through the wall of reality in The Matrix. And that trend isn’t slowing down.
While some directors opine over the good old days of “real movies”, others are diving straight into the pixellated world. Zemeckis has already made one fully digital magnum opus, but this time he’s going for psuedo-literary violence …

There probably isn’t a greater living practitioner of the genre short story than Ray Bradbury. 
At 87 he’s still got something to say about what may have been his greatest work:
Bradbury has decided to make news about the writing of his iconographic work and what he really meant. Fahrenheit 451 is not, he says firmly, a story about government censorship. Nor was it a response to Senator Joseph McCarthy, whose investigations had already instilled fear and stifled the creativity of thousands.
?Television gives you the dates of Napoleon, but not who …