Thanks, Jeff, for covering this event. Jim Dunstan and I explain why the land grants proposed by Simberg and Wasser simply aren't permitted under the Outer Space Treaty but how the Treaty DOES allow for other forms of property rights, which are both more defensible as property rights (as opposed to government subsidies, which is what land grants really are) and more economically necessary for Lunar business models: http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2012/04/opinion...

Thanks for pointing out Jay's excellent piece! I agree that we need to allow business model experimentation, but I'd hate to see a diversity of funding sources replaced by growing subsidies from Washington. If that happens, political control of the media will follow.

Watch who you're calling a Leftist! I work at The Progress & Freedom Foundation—which, despite that evil-sounding p-word in its name, was founded by Newt Gingrich and others back in 1993 as a way of stealing that word back from the Left and presenting free market, libertarian ideas about technology. I was a delegate candidate for Ron Paul here in DC and have been a pretty active critic of the Left.

I can appreciate the concerns about Google being close to this administration, but that doesn't mean every accusation is fair or true. Again, this story doesn't quite bear up to careful inspection.

That's an excellent point. And I would be very concerned if that's what was happening here, but what makes you think he was actually discussing policy matters in an official capacity over Gmail or Buzz? That's what the article implies but if you read closely, I think you'll see that it's just implication.

Again, it's hardly surprising that he would keep up with his former colleagues at Google as a personal matter. It's also worth noting that some of the folks highlighted above aren't at Google any longer.

I'm all in favor of techno-exposes, and have asked some tough questions (here and here) myself about the number of FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski's visits to the White House, which raise serious questions about the independence of the FCC as an independent regulatory agency from direct political pressure from the White House. But this story is a bit of a stretch for a few reasons.

First, I count about 76 names among Andrew's followers. Since I believe Google Buzz only auto-followed 24 users, it's really hard to assume that the names highlighted above of key Google people were among the ones auto-added because they were his most frequent contacts. As the article notes, it's hardly surprising that Andrew would be friends with a lot of folks at Google, since he worked there for what, five years?

Second, the article is asserting that, if these Google folks were auto-added as Andrew's top contacts, he must have been in close touch with them after becoming CTO in June. Again, he probably DID talk to them as personal friends, but my own experience with Buzz's launch and with Gmail's top contact list suggests that the "top contacts" average is based on a long time period. For those of us who've been using Gmail for many years, our "top contacts" today might not be our top contacts for the last month or even last 6 months because Gmail seems to give a lot more weight than you might think to past interactions. So that might explain why these folks would have shown up as his "top contacts" even if he hadn't been chatting with them daily about policy as the article implies. And, again, since the screenshot above was taken after he added about 52 followers (76-24), it's impossible to say which of those shown above were actually auto-followed.

Finally, I seriously doubt anyone would use Buzz as a way of chatting with their former colleagues about sensitive policy matters when doing so might raise such serious ethical questions if true.

This article seems like just another attempt to turn Googlephobia into a partisan issue...

Fascinating. So how did you gather the data in the first place?

Thanks, Stowell. I assume this is the plan to which you're referring. We are not calling for any specific technological solution, but rather for creating the environment in which technological solutions can compete in terms of cost-effectiveness., To do that, we need to remove certain legal obstacles and also create incentives that rewards entrepreneurs with creative technical solutions for effectively removing debris.

Here's another test comment.