Let’s see. We’re going to build a system to monitor all Internet traffic coming in and out of the country. Hmm… The only other country to do this well is this communist, authoritarian regime over in the East. Hmm… Our democratically inclined, freedom-loving population might mistake this for some dystopian, Orwellian, Stepford-like scheme for the government to invade the lives of our citizens and perhaps use it to control information and the like. So we don’t want to frighten people and give them the idea that we’re going to use it to create perfectly conformist citizenry. Hmm… I know. Let’s name it Perfect Citizen! Perfect! Has a nice ring to it. Reminds me of the 1950s for some reason. And it follows up nicely on the name for that scheme to eavesdrop on all domestic Internet traffic. The one with the cool name that made all of that eavesdropping seem nonthreatening. You know, Carnivore.

Really sad that this is referring to an actual event. And probably played out this way.

Now slacker portable is not the portable music Internet. It’s not the 10,000 college radio stations available online (I guess I’m still going to have to build that app). It’s also not the millions of playlists available on sites like lastfm.com. But it is a great portfolio of radio stations plus any station of your own that you want to create. It’ll probably also go a good way toward finally putting a bullet in FM radio (and therefore part of CBS) as soon as the average consumer figures out how to get their phone playing through their car stereo. iPhone is going  a long way in paving the way here as well.

If you listen to music on your computer check out Slacker.com. It’s like Pandora but has a much better mix when you seed a station. They have some good radio stations as well. And it’s free. Oh and you can listen on your Blackberry.

If you ever need to take screenshots or partial screen shots check out Jing. I take a lot of partial captures for product, marketing, and sales presentations. I also take them for things like this blog. Usually I use SnagIt but Jing is a much cooler, more functional way to take captures. It’s from the same company, TechSmith. Think of it as the Web 2.0 version of SnagIt. And it’s free.

This is one of those ideas that seem so obvious once you hear them. A town in England, Huddersfield, is using power generated from the trash it collects to power its electric garbage collection trucks. Brilliant! How can this not be the future of trash collection. Next we need sun tanning salons to run on their own sunning lamps.

Another one for the “kinda cool” category. A joint team from the University of Maryland and University of Michigan have declared the ability to generate “long-distance” (1-meter) teleportation. They apparently managed to teleport the quantum state of two atoms a meter apart. It reminds me of compact disks coming from Einstein’s work on photons and photoelectric effect. Is it just me or is it really weird and kind of scary that we could possibly harness and use forces we have absolutely no real understanding of.