Search Results for: Wired

Bitcoin was drawing the kind of attention normally reserved for overhyped Silicon Valley IPOs and Apple product launches. On his Internet talk show, journo-entrepreneur Jason Calacanis called it “a fundamental shift” and “one of the most interesting things I’ve seen in 20 years in the technology business.” Prominent venture capitalist Fred Wilson heralded “societal upheaval” as the Next Big Thing on the Internet, and the four examples he gave were Wikileaks, PlayStation hacking, the Arab Spring, and bitcoin. Andresen, the coder, accepted an invitation from the CIA to come to Langley, Virginia, to speak about the currency. Rick Falkvinge, founder of the Swedish Pirate Party (whose central policy plank includes the abolition of the patent system), announced that he was putting his life savings into bitcoins. The future of bitcoin seemed to shimmer with possibility.

“The Rise and Fall of Bitcoin.” — Benjamin Wallace, Wired

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Bezos: If you go back to 1999, it’s hard to remember how effervescent the bubble was. People who really didn’t have any passion for technology or the Internet were giving up their careers as doctors and mining Internet gold. And when the bubble popped, a meaningful fraction of our people left. They realized they didn’t really want to be doing this. Some of them got laid off, some of them left of their own accord. Those were not happy days. This super-valuable person you really liked leaves. So your skin gets thicker. Not just me, but all of the executives who stayed.

“Jeff Bezos Owns the Web in More Ways Than You Think.” — Steven Levy, Wired

See also: “The Omnivore.” Sept. 28, 2011

Featured Longreader: Writer Elmo Keep. See her story picks from Wired, Foreign Policy, The Hairpin and more on her #longreads page.

Featured Longreader: Writer Elmo Keep. See her story picks from Wired, Foreign Policy, The Hairpin and more on her #longreads page.

In a secluded area on the ground floor, six brave young men (three Russians, an Italian, a Frenchman, and a Chinese national) are simulating a mission to Mars. For 520 straight days—that’s more than 17 months—the volunteers will be sequestered in a tubular steel stand-in for a spacecraft whose 775-square-foot living area is so cramped and spare it might have been designed by Dostoyevsky himself. Mars500, as their mission is called, is jointly sponsored by the Institute for Biomedical Problems and the European Space Agency. It seeks to answer a question that looms as the EU, the US, Russia, and India all look to put a man on Mars by the 2030s: Can the human animal endure the long isolation and boredom implicit in traveling to a planet that is, at its closest, 35 million miles—and roughly six months of rocket travel—away? Will one of the volunteers crack before the faux mission’s scheduled conclusion on November 5, 2011?

“6 Guys in a Capsule: 520 Days on a Simulated Mars Mission.” — Bill Donahue, Wired

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To many, Milner’s success is not just too much and too fast in a land of too much and too fast but … but … and here people start to petulantly phumpher … somehow unfair: Here’s an outsider who has handed out money at outrageously founder-friendly terms—paying huge amounts for relatively small stakes, essentially buying exclusive access to the most desirable companies on the web! It is his outsiderness that seems most irritating and even alarming. How is it that an outsider has spotted opportunities that the Valley’s best investors missed? Does Milner’s success suggest that the rest of the world is starting to horn in on what has been, to date, as American as apple pie—the Internet future and Internet riches?

“How Russian Tycoon Yuri Milner Bought His Way Into Silicon Valley.” — Michael Wolff, Wired

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Featured Longreader: Jeremy Kingsley, Wired UK contributor. See his story picks from The Guardian, The New Republic, The New York Review of Books and more on his #longreads page.

Featured Longreader: Writer/teacher/musician Matt Cardin. See his story picks from Gadfly Online, Wired, Chronicle of Higher Education and more on his #longreads page.

Top 5 #Longreads of the Week: Wired, New York Magazine, PLoS, OnEarth Magazine, The New York Times Magazine, and a guest pick from Village Voice editor Francesa Stabile.

Harmon calls his circles embryos—they contain all the elements needed for a satisfying story—and he uses them to map out nearly every turn on, from throwaway gags to entire seasons. If a plot doesn’t follow these steps, the embryo is invalid, and he starts over. To this day, Harmon still studies each film and TV show he watches, searching for his algorithm underneath, checking to see if the theory is airtight. “I can’t not see that circle,” he says. “It’s tattooed on my brain.”

“How Dan Harmon Drives Himself Crazy Making ‘Community’.” — Brian Raftery, Wired

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Photo credit: Joe Pugliese