Panelists included our host, Marty Barrett, Stephen Johnson of G4TV’s The Feed, Jeremy Rosenberg of ThinkTank LA, Filthy Book Reader Simone Williams, writer Steve Javors, and Wayne Akiyama of Plan 9 Media.

The setting was postmodern: Mavervorl Media’s soon-to-be-vacated office in downtown Los Angeles. Might this have signified the scrapping of something perfectly suitable in favor of something new and flashy? And the proceedings were filmed with a handheld camera, something that the iPad does not have. Speaking of that, the video is in Flash…

Join the inaugural meeting of the near-Futurists below; an entertaining 45 minutes of educated guesses and speculation.

Mission statements of government agencies rarely have such recognizable taglines as does the U.S,. Department of Education’s “No Child Left Behind.” But at what cost?

As an act and as a motto, the 2001 NCLB (or Nicklebee, inviting comparison to both the overearnest but flawed Dickens character Nicholas Nickleby and also to the Canadian VH-1 staple Nickelback) is widely viewed as a failure, underfunded and unsupported by its Bush Administration sponsors, and onerous to teachers, who feel the program teaches to a test and sets unfair expectations.

The Obama Administration seeks to revamp NCLB, even changing its name to reflect the Department of Education’s new “race to the top” strategy.

And what better way to slap the Nikelbackwash from our mouths than with an unlikely combination of The Five Stairsteps, Guns ‘n’ Roses, and Deep Purple?

What better way???

“Ooh Sweet Child o’ Mine Left Behind in Time” will still, Obama said on Saturday, “set a high bar — but we also provide educators the flexibility to reach it.”

The overhaul will shift focus from punishing poor schools to rewarding good ones.

“Under these guidelines, schools that achieve excellence or show real progress will be rewarded, and local districts will be encouraged to commit to change in schools that are clearly letting their students down,” Obama said, adding that the only child left behind in the new plan will be “that horrible Bush baby.”

People of a certain age remember their mothers telling them to finish what was on their plates in deference to “the China babies.”

The understanding being that China babies were starving and that my eating my creamed tuna on toast would mean that my mother would not be forced to add insult to their injury by sending them the uneaten, vomitous sludge.

“Seriously,” the China Babies’ Collective would say, “eating this will make us starve more.”

Anyway, search engine giant ^TM and King of Pop^TM Google appears to be more and more ready to leave China behind, due to its failure to convince that country not to censor Internet searches.

“We’re pulling out of China,” Google said, “and, just in case you were wondering, that does not mean we’re going to push back into it an hour later. We don’t even get that joke, to be honest.”

Chinese Ministry of Industry and Information Technology officer Li Yizhong warned the Mountain View company that it will face consequences if it fails to obey Chinese laws.

Rather than play by China’s rules, Google will likely shutter Google.cn within the next few weeks.

A spokesman for Chinese search engine Baidu, whose stock has risen sharply due to expectations of Google’s imminent departure, said “things are gonna get easier.”

See also: Nickelback, Guns ‘n’ Roses, The Five Stairsteps, Deep Purple, Google, U.S. Department of Education

“Now you can have the versatility and blazing speed of the iPad in a model that fits in your pocket,” Apple CEO Steve Jobs said at today’s unveiling. “The iPadito will revolutionize mobile computing by filling the gap between iPod Shuffle, iPhone, iPad, MacBook, and Mac Pro in a home or business that already includes AppleTV and an Airport Extreme base station with Time Capsule, preferably the 2-Terabyte version.”

Jobs said that, between the comparative bulk of the iPhone and iPad and the slightness of the the iPods Shuffle and Nano, the new iPadito, which comes in 8GB, 32GB and 64GB models, would “have the pleasant solidity of a bunch of credit cards tightly wound with rubber bands.”

Added Jobs, “… except you could play your Dokken in crystal-clear AAC format.”

With prices beginning at $799 for the 8GB version the iPadito, Jobs said, “ushers in a new era of connected pocket computing, especially when your iPad is way over in the other room.”

Watch the progression:

It looks cool! I want the best one!

But how would you describe it?

It’s like a larger iPod Touch plus the data plan of an iPhone minus the camera capabilities. It’s also like a smaller laptop with up to 64 GB of Flash memory for entertainment and office applications.

So you’d still need a phone?

To be reasonable, Yes. Though it will support Voice over Internet (VoIP) programs like Skype, the iPad as a phone will look like the i-quivalent of the bricklike portable phones of “A Night at the Roxbury.”

Wait – I don’t want a phone with a $40 data plan plus an iPad with a $40 data plan in addition to the Internet I’m paying for at my home and office…

But the iPad looks cool.

But you’d still need a computer?

Well, yes. But it’s like a portable computer.

That’s what my laptop already is. Why do you want something that does all the things your laptop does already?

Because you can fling the iPad like a frisbee!

No you can’t.

Such is the iPad’s cool factor that it is causing people to search for ways to shoehorn it in to an existing personal technology profile. The iPad feels like the superfluous union dockworker the local mob boss makes you hire.

And, like the mob, Apple makes you pay for the dubious benefits it offers.

“Check it out! I can search the Internet on a larger portable screen without the hassle of unfolding it first!”

Now how much would you pay? Upwards of $800, depending.

According to our research, the only real advancement the iPad offers is in the arena of technological douchebaggery.

Now that garish, flashing bluetooth headsets are universally recognized as tools of tools and thus have lost that thin sheen of deniability that allows a douchebag to operate, the iPad may step in as a kind of douchePad Flava Flav.

Wearing an iPad like a necklace, douchebags can display the message of the day (“Hey Good Lookin’: Be back to pick you up later!”), a slideshow, or the weather in one’s pants (“Mudslides likely”).

We really want the iPad to fill an actual need, but it won’t.

That is why we will only buy two.

Previously: The iPhone alternative: a non-hysterical view; Suppressed hatred for original iPhone emerges as iPhone 3G debuts

See also: iPad

In school we were told to not be Indian givers. This term is now offensive, in the same way that “cotton-picking,” “Druid-baiting,” and “Krautsploding” are now offensive. But back then, on the rez, we all laughed.

Toyota has recalled more than Ronald Reagan could, and soon will have taken back so many cars that it will demand the 1998-2001 series of Ford Explorers to feed the monkey.

“You get a taste for it,” one Toyota exec didn’t tell me.

At issue is the unintended acceleration or overintended but ultimately fruitless deceleration of Toyota products, including the Prius. Many stateside Toyota dealers are staying open 24 hours to deal with the recalls, which have provided an unintentional acceleration to the sales pitches of Toyota’s competitors.

My favorite: This Dodge Charger crashes when you want it to.

But, unlike that embankment, the moon is not a place Americans will be visiting anytime soon. At least with federal funding.

President Obama’s 2010 budget cuts the cash for NASA’s Ares I booster and its Orion capsule, and scuttles the Constellation program, already $9 billion into its mission to replace the Space Shuttle.

The plan does call for a commercial taxi service to the moon, the International Space Station (ISS), and points beyond, but Boy are people scratching their heads about what happened to the audacity of hope. Who knew that moon was a four-letter word? It’s even a four-letter word in Spanish, but that’s understandable.

Antonio Banderas has never been to the moon.

“We believe that NASA can inspire Americans and lead to scientific advances,” said Office of Management and Budget director Peter Orszag, pointing out NASA’s new Try Reaching Laterally for Now program with troubled teens in the Kissimmee/St. Cloud area.

In Washington, we sit in the snowbank, front wheels spinning lazily, and stare at the moon. The tow truck will not be here for a while. Our 2005-2010 Avalon slides in and out of view of three lanes of oncoming traffic here on the inner loop, and we recall the final resting place of King Arthur, that other presence-challenged Avalon. So that’s what happened to the Hyundai Brigadoon.

See also: Toyota Recall info; White House briefing on Constellation program; DC Snowmageddon; Avalon in HTML history

Used to be that there was enough room, enough lunch, and enough bandwidth for all of us, but the comparatively cozy press luncheon at the Venetian has been removed, leaving only the free-for-all at the Las Vegas Convention Center, something humane slaughterhouse advocate Temple Grandin might recognize from the barbaric pre-squeezie chute days.

People continue to look at their screens when the Internet is down.

A clear tarp has been put down on the carpeting as bloggers, editors, reporters, and photographers sprawl to a vanishing point down the long hallways leading to the Sands Exposition Center. They loll like sea lions, hoping for the Wi-Fi to work again.

Only those with personal access points and a bag lunch from Subway are thriving.

It reminds us that systems break down and, even as millions gather, superficially, on social networks, consume identical Blackberrys and iPhones, and leave cyan vapor trails while sporting Bluetooth headsets, our technology tends to isolate us.

See also: 2010 International Consumer Electronics Show

Norman Joseph Woodland was lounging on Miami’s South Beach in 1949, when an answer materialized to a problem he’d been puzzling over since the previous year. He started tapping Morse Code into the sand.

“I just extended the dots and dashes downwards and made narrow lines and wide lines out of them,” Woodland said.

The year before, Woodland had been a graduate student and instructor at Philadelphia’s Drexel Institute of Technology. A classmate, Bernard Silver, had overheard a local supermarket owner complaining to a dean about the problems of automating grocery checkout. The dean offered no solutions, but Silver brought the issue to his friend Woodland.

The pair first tried a system involving ultraviolet ink, but ink’s instability and cost proved prohibitive. Then Woodland quit his job and moved to Florida, where he could think.

That’s what I said when I moved to Florida, too.

“You’re like ultraviolet ink,” my wife said.

Woodland and Silver returned to Drexel and, on October 20, 1949, they filed a patent application for their new invention, which involved shining a light through varying transparencies of concentric circles. The patent was granted on October 7, 1952.

After numerous iterations, this process of interpreting shifts in light as it passed through different media was adopted by railroads and then, after a 1972 test at a Kroger’s supermarket in Cincinnati, became the standard by which billions of products are scanned daily.

But how does Satan fit in? Here is a reading from The Book of Revelation in the New International Version of the Bible:

He also forced everyone, small and great, rich and poor, free and slave, to receive a mark on his right hand or on his forehead, so that no one could buy or sell unless he had the mark, which is the name of the beast or the number of his name. (Rev. 13:16-17)

Eschatology has been around since the first person thought “Oh you’ll pay when the Rapture comes.”

Various scholars have interpreted the mark of the beast to be universal data identification systems like credit cards with RFID codes, the microchips with which we trace our beloved pets and sharks, and bar codes.

Was the Devil sunning himself, too, on South Beach that day in 1949? One can only speculate, and present those speculations as fact.

So Yes, the Devil was sunning himself on South Beach in 1949. And he was drinking Pepsi.

See also: Barcode Generator

“For when you come back,” Facebook said, weeping.

But it’s been ten days and I’ve already got so much more work done. Not only that, but the compulsion to check in has gone away – the urge to see if she has anyone new. This is how I know that Facebook isn’t Real.

Had Morgan Freeman been my Facebook Friend, he might have said, “Well, they weren’t your real friends, anyway.”

Notwithstanding the creepy and poorly-justified factoid that Facebook-quitting recidivism is high, the Palo Alto-based company is almost Scientologist in its refusal to let go.

Having been a member of primordial social networking site Friendster (99 friends) and, later, MySpace (20,000 strangers, robots, and people I’d have nothing to say to if bent backwards over in Twister), I knew what I wanted and didn’t want out of my Web 2.0 experience when I joined Facebook.

I wanted an elegant, uniform interface. I wanted greater levels of privacy and stalker-blocking. I wanted to share essential contact information as a gateway to deeper offline business and personal relationships. Lacking these, other social networking sites were either non-starters or quickly wore out their novelty; not difficult considering MySpace’s interface looked like a GIF hemorrhage.

Facebook, at first, offered the clear alternative.

From its lowbrow beginnings as a Hot Or Not? tribute using purloined Harvard student IDs, Facebook launched in 2004 and currently has 300 million members internationally. It’s likely that this paragraph isn’t necessary, as you are probably a member.

Regardless, Facebook quickly evolved into an application that appealed to sober-minded Internet users interested in initiating and maintaining contact with friends and colleagues as well as to college students and texting teens as an adjunct to their MySpace accounts.

But I think Facebook’s success as the perfection of social networking has revealed that SN is ultimately flawed, in the same way that early compact disc versions of vinyl albums proved the limitations of the source material. Facebook is too big to be useful; the virtual intimacy of reading what someone had for breakfast, and multiplying that by every participating member of one’s friend list, adds up to neither Intimacy nor Interesting.

Or it may be that I – and, by extension, all humans – have reached an addiction threshold where I am aware that each time I visit Facebook, there is less to gain from it.

Two weeks into my Facebook membership a night came where I realized I had spent two hours surfing when I should have been working. After that I determined to only spend five minutes a day on Facebook. This worked for a while.

And I added other rules. I would not admit anyone as a friend who didn’t write a personal note accompanying his “add.” I designed status updates to promote discussion. I routinely went on purges of friends I hadn’t heard from after we’d added each other. Do I really know Alec Decaneas?

Because it had quickly become clear that, despite the hype about social networking (I attended at least seven conferences about it), it added little beyond the cool factor to stimulate business; I paid more attention to personal e-mails than I did to Facebook invitations, I chafed at having Facebook host my posted links, and, like most other adults, I noted with disdain the proliferation of third party applications and the type of people who used them.

I should mention that the five-minute rule was for work hours. At home, if I couldn’t sleep, I would spend most of that time updating Facebook. In my tenth month of membership I instituted Facebook Free Days, wherein 24 hours of other peoples’ horoscopes, coffee-drinking habits, Mafia Wars, and wall posts would go by unheeded.

Leaving Facebook was ultimately a decision that mixed lack of business with lack of pleasure. The nature of friendship consists in tangible contact. And this is not “evolving.” There is no way for a human to utilize a social networking application that will sustain more than a certain exponent of his actual physical social circle. After that a social networking application becomes broadcasting, a one-way form of communication.

I had 470 Facebook “friends.” There were a few trophies in there (Amy Fisher told me when she got pregnant!) but there were six times as many people who added me because I was on the Friends list of someone else, wrote no note, and who I ignored. In the rare case in which I questioned the add, I got no response most of the time. One New York actor I’d apparently gone to school with was indignant. “Well Facebook recommended you,” she said.

When I decided to leave, I wrote a week of status updates asking for the e-mail, phone number, web, and snail addresses of my Facebook friends (because Facebook offers no export option). I received 80 replies.

Were these 80 people my true friends? Not necessarily, but they’re definitely on my Christmas card list now, and if I ever get a spare room they’re welcome there. But, aside from 30 or so people who didn’t submit their data because of extenuating circumstances (lived next to me, shared a babysitter, had a crappy computer, never kept in contact anyway, just had a baby), I’m fairly certain that a majority portion of anyone’s Facebook friends wouldn’t show up on moving day.

Facebook pleaded for a while. It asked what made me leave, provided checkboxes, and offered solutions. It suggested that perhaps the failure of the relationship was my fault – that Facebook couldn’t be all things to all people, and that I should modify my unrealistic expectations. It showed me pictures of people who would be sad that I left. I knew that some of them couldn’t care less.

So I will return to personal and business websites and the various evolutions of traditional media. I will wait for what Web 3.0 offers. I have a feeling Facebook, MySpace, and Twitter will shut down, as will their inevitable successors, in a few years. The experiment will fail, unless social networking is rebranded as These People Aren’t Really Your Friends.

I got two adds the week I began saying goodbye. One was from a woman I’d met as a National Park Ranger, who is now a professor in the American Southwest. “Yeah,” she said, “my students are making fun of me, so I thought I’d join.” The other was from someone I’d known since Mrs. Emerson’s kindergarten class. I told him I was leaving Facebook, but I thanked him for writing a note.

“Mrs. Emerson always told us that letters were polite,” he said.

Is Mrs. Emerson on Facebook?

No. She’s dead.

This means that, four decades after the seminal group of the 1960s broke up, The Beatles are still raking in cash from a perpetually reimagined catalog.

Not only that, but a campaign to package the constantly evolving Liverpool lads that began when each was alive and that capitalized on their own whims – mop tops, impishness, psychedelia, Indian music, peace – has also updated the group for contemporary consumption, and created myths only vaguely connected to the source material.

Maybe because they were so iconoclastic in life, and perhaps even more so because they’re dead, John Lennon and George Harrison have been the major beneficiaries of mythmaking marketing. On the new Beatles website (http://www.beatles.com), a group of travelers is seen trekking across Abbey Road, interacting with a Lennon who is beatific and Christlike.

Anyone who has watched the great anti-date movie “Let It Be,” a film that documents the Beatles’ unraveling, knows that Lennon at the time was more into the crucifixion downside of being bigger than Jesus. His joyful wonderment at “Rockband”‘s release seems out of character.

It was Harrison’s experimentation with Eastern religion in general and Indian music in particular that proved such a Godheadsend in the 60′s, as the Beatles’ marketing machine finally knew what to do with him. To Paul (cute), John (sarcastic), Ringo (pathetic but lovable), could now be added George (mysterious).

So in an animated “Come Together” video released in 2000, we see a cheerful, Jerry Garcia-like John, an eight-armed George, and an along-for-the-ride Paul and Ringo, waiting only for their deaths before they could be reinvented as The Walrus and Snuffleupagus, respectively.

The Beatles have been a financial sacred cash cow in each of the decades since they disbanded. In the past 15 years alone they have released their B-sides “Anthology” containing group versions of two John Lennon songs (“Free As A Bird” and “Real Love,” with a posthumous Lennon lead vocal, were the “Unforgettable” of the late 90s), the Beatles’ BBC sessions, a rerelease of their Number One hits that itself reached Number One, and Cirque du Soleil’s “Love” soundtrack, an elegant Beatles mashup produced by Sir George Martin and his son, Giles.

Clearly there is something equally elegant about the choice of 9/09/09 for this major product launch (adding the numbers together, we get 27, and 2 + 7 is also 9; four numbers greater than the sum of their parts, much like the four individual Beatles’ solo careers – it is unlikely that Ringo will issue a major retrospective on 12/12/12) but, to quote an early Lennon/McCartney song released on “Let It Be,” what can we expect “after 909″?
<ul>
<li>Following resolution of Apple Corps’ copyright infringement suit against Apple Computer, Beatles-branded MacBooks</li>
<li>Phil Spector’s jailhouse remixes of “Yellow Submarine” and “Sgt. Pepper” (with Billy Preston)</li>
<li>Wings and Plastic Ono Band reunion on a charity cover version of “Valotte”</li>
<li>McCartney successfully sues for partial credit on “Pet Sounds” and “At Her Satanic Majesty’s Request.” Mono and stereo versions re-released</li>
<li>George Harrison lyrics shoehorned into “Quadrophenia.” Mono and stereo versions re-released</li>
<li>NASA resuscitates Space Shuttle program, somehow involving payments to Yoko</li>
<li>Celebrity cover band versions of Beatles catalogue includes The Police (“Revolver”), “Rubber Soul Coughing,” “Yo La Tengo Submarine,” and “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Dave Matthews Band” (with J. Geils)</li>
<li>Monkees start a rumor that Peter Tork is dead to boost sales, but Peter Tork actually dies</li>
<li>U2 and Van Halen collaborate on “Let It BU2.” Bono and stereo versions released</li>
<li>Corporate naming rights sold for selected properties, such as “Being for the Benefit of Bank of America,” “Across the Universal Studios,” and “I Want to Hold Your Spam”</li>
<li>And, as usual, the Kinks get nothing</li>
</ul>
It is said that the Beatles will make more money this month than they did in the year 1965. Credit counselors suggest that completists have got to hide their wallets away.

See also: <a href=”http://beatles.com/”>The Beatles</a>

If Obama doesn’t act now, people will say “blackberry” when they mean “phone.” And by the time the tech hysteria has abated, ice will once again cover the Earth.

First there was Timothy Geithner who, as Obama’s nominee for Secretary of the Treasury, hit bumps in the confirmation process when mistakes were found on his income taxes. The problem? Geithner said he didn’t understand Intuit’s TurboTax software. (Geithner was confirmed, but to have let Health And Human Services nominee Tom Daschle and “Chief Performance Officer” designate Nancy Killefer dodge the tax bullet, too, would have been like repeating the same joke at a party.)

Then there was the proposed delay in recovering the nation’s precious analog spectrum. Didn’t you have plans for your share of the spectrum? I did.

But now Obama is in danger of shepherding into the language a term that can only help Research in Motion.

Candidate Obama was rarely scene without his Blackberry smartphone during his 17-month campaign, but the Blackberry’s encryption limitations concerned the Secret Service and NSA, who at first gently requested he give up the phone so 14-year-old Malaysian hackers couldn’t read his e-mail.

“They’re going to pry it out of my hands,” Obama actually said to CNBC, which seemed about as cavalier as Bush’s “Bring it on” remark.

But the Secret Service and National Security Agency have found a way to allow a first smartphone to live in the White House. The issue is that it can’t possibly be a Blackberry.

The Blackberry does not support the type of security that would be required for the president’s top secret correspondence. While it runs its own operating system, the Blackberry is only capable of handling For Official Use Only (FOUO) data, nothing classified, and only uses Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) encryption, which is easily hackable (though I couldn’t do it).

So Mr. Obama will probably use the clunky but secure Sectera Edge from General Dynamics, currently in use by the military and paranoiacs worldwide, and certified by the NSA.

Unfortunately, “Blackberry” has been bandied about so much in the media that the word is in danger of becoming synonymous with “smartphone” and “phone” the way generic flying discs are all brand-name Friebees, colas are “Cokes,” and performing WWW searches has become googling, with a small “g.”

It is up to the Big G himself to not refer to his Sectera Edge as his “blackberry,” if for no other reason that that’s a couple of short hops to “nucular.”