technology

Remember the IBM computer, called "Watson," that played Jeopardy and won?  That was a delightful stunt. Now, Watson is getting real.

In December 1972, Eugene Cernan took a long climb up a short ladder on the lunar surface and became the last human being to set foot on another world. It was forty years ago this week that Apollo 17 completed its quarter million mile journey home, marking the last time to date humans have traveled more than a few hundred miles from earth.

Consumers are justifiably confused when it comes to picking out a smartphone. Many high-end iPhones and Androids contain features that are not terribly useful in everyday life. Not-so-early adopters also worry that they will purchase a state-of-the-art phone for $399 and then, just a few months later, burn with envy as a less expensive unit offering many more features hits the market.

Last April, the Iranian Oil Ministry and the National Iranian Oil Company noticed a problem with some of their computers: A small number of machines were spontaneously erasing themselves. Spooked by the recent Stuxnet attack, which had wrecked centrifuges in their nuclear labs, the Iranians suspected a piece of computer malware was to blame. They went to the United Nations’ International Telecommunications Union and asked for help.

Investigating Chinese surveillance is a rather lonely job. For all the dissidents yammering about dramatic arrests and torture and harvesting of organs, you can’t really guarantee publication or much of an audience unless you can prove that there are links to America: brand name corporations, scary cutting-edge U.S. technology, insidious Washington collusion. That’s the trifecta—and, now, if you could somehow squeeze the elections in there somehow…

The passing of Steve Jobs has sparked an immense amount of reflection and appreciation—just as his retirement did months ago, and the publication of Walter Isaacson's biography of Jobs will do later this month. But for all the talk of Steve Jobs and the world that he created, attention must be paid to the world that created him: Silicon Valley.

Andrew Biggs and Matthew Jensen: Cutting spending, not raising taxes, is the path to prosperity.

Walter Russell Mead: Beware of global weirding.

Michele Bachmann officially left her church shortly before officially entering the presidential race.

This week the Senate Judiciary Committee will hold hearings on COICA (the Combating Online Infringements and Counterfeit Act). It sounds like harmless enough legislation, or at least it did to members of the committee who voted for it unanimously, 19-0, during the lame duck session last year. But it's worse than it sounds.

The New York Times has published a piece on Charles Krauthammer's love of chess:

Charles Krauthaammer, the Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist for The Washington Post, occasionally takes up his pen and instead of lashing liberal causes writes about one of his passions: chess.

Krauthammer, in a recent interview, said he had written many columns on chess, including one each year for 20 years in Time magazine. When he was nominated for the Pulitzer in 1986, he said one of the 10 columns submitted to the judges was about one of the world championship matches between Garry Kasparov and Anatoly Karpov. (He did not win the Pulitzer until the following year, when all of the submitted columns were political commentary.) [...]

The Great Obamanomic Job Creation Machine rumbled into action again over the Fourth of July weekend, promising to spend as much as $2 billion to support creation of 1,585 “permanent” jobs by two solar energy companies. That comes to a potential cost of over $1.25 million per job.

Last week, the Chinese government issued a new propaganda piece in the form of a policy paper on its Internet control policies. It serves as a typical example of Beijing's Orwellian use of language and formalism to dress up its authoritarianism as legal and rational.

Over in the New Republic, Jack Goldsmith has an essay that cuts through the fog surrounding the subject of cyber warfare. The piece's occasion is a new book on the subject by Richard A. Clarke and Robert K. Knake that sounds the alarm about the danger we might face one day from a concerted attack on the computer systems that underpin our economic and military infrastructure.