Add to Your Shopping Cart: A Trip to the Edge of Space
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The multibillionare Jeff Bezos sells books and practically everything else through Amazon.com. Will space be his next commercial frontier?
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Future space explorers might bring back more than just pictures from their excursions -- they could mine the planets for profit. By Mark Baard.
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Google buys a mapquest of its own. Also: Sharp takes us to the future of television in 3-D & hellip;.  PayPal finds a way to make amends for mistakes & hellip;. and more.
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There may be something almost nostalgic in our celebration of a âheroic explorer.â
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In the quest for a cheaper route to space, astronauts competing for the X Prize are willing to take risks. But some wonder if blasting off in an untested rocket ship suspended from a giant balloon is taking things too far. By Dan Brekke.
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After years of capturing the imagination of wide-eyed daredevils, dreamers and would-be entrepreneurs, space travel for ordinary people may finally be taking flight.
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A spacecraft in solar orbit reached almost directly above   the south pole of the Sun last week, giving   scientists a rare glimpse of this unfamiliar territory.
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Richard Branson conquered the world. Now he wants to fly you to space. By Spencer Reiss from Wired magazine.
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(InfoWorld) - What makes a great geek vacation? Well, high-speed access from even the most obscure locale is a given. Then throw in some activities to stimulate the brain cells, maybe a dose of electronic entertainment, possibly a bit of techie history, and you're most of the way there. Of course, it also helps if your chosen location is frequented by similarly techie folks and has some out-of-the-mainstream cred, meaning it would make your non-alpha geek friends roll their eyes. Our readers weighed in with their choices. InfoWorld editors share more of their favorites, adding to yesterday's list of top vacation spots.                                                     Mount Everest If you're in search of an adventure getaway that requires you to really get away -- but still don't want to miss that important e-mail message -- there's no reason to mess around at some tropical resort. What you want is to climb the world's highest, most treacherous peak: Mount Everest. At the Base Camp Cyber Cafe, owner and sherpa Tsering Gyaltsen (the grandson of one of Sir Edmund Hillary's sherpa team members) offers satellite-fed 802.11b wireless Internet access at the highest ground-level point on the planet, nearly 18,000 feet above sea level. At about $1 per minute for access, this won't be the cheapest Internet connection you've ever used. But despite Base Camp being situated on a moving glacier on the edge of Everest's Great Ice Fall, at least it's reliable: Service comes via a wireless link between a satellite dish in the nearby town of Namche Bazar and the camp. And there's another good reason to feel good about using the service: Outside of the March-through-May climbing season, the infrastructure provides distance learning opportunities for the sherpa children in town.      Route 128, Boston Anyone who remembers DEC, Lotus, or Wang will enjoy a trip along this tech-heavy highway that runs from Canton to Gloucester in Boston's suburbs. Although more actual work than tourism takes place here, geek highlights include a pilgrimage to the MIT campus and, of course, its science museum. The first modern American factory opened in the town of Waltham; check it out for early examples of mass-produced goods. In Boston, the Museum of Science offers a wealth of exhibits, an IMAX theater, and a planetarium. While you're in town, try the local sport of candlepin bowling. Iceland It's one of the most isolated cultures in the world -- and one of the most wired. Sure, it has a pristine environment with beautiful scenery, an interesting cultural      history, fjords, hot springs, and plenty more to make for a fascinating vacation destination. But on top of all that, broadband connectivity is as plentiful as, well, ice. In fact, Iceland leads the world in per-capita broadband adoption. So wherever you go, chances are you'll be plugged in. Iceland is not a very big place, most of its interior is uninhabitable, and much of its population lives in the capital city of Reykjavik, but there is much to see and do around most of the perimeter of the island, from skiing to rafting to nature-watching. The Visit Iceland travel guide contains lots of good background info for Icelandic activities. If you want to get around, you might want to consider booking flights rather than driving. Roads hug the fjord-pocked coastline, meaning some places that can take upward of nine hours to drive to are but a 45-minute flight away. Also a short flight away: Finland, the extremely tech-friendly Scandinavian country that's home to IT companies such as Nokia. Defcon in Las Vegas      If you've ever wondered how the world's elite cybersecurity professionals get away from it all, look no further than the Defcon computer security conference, which takes place around the end of July every year in Las Vegas. Even with outside temperatures topping nearly 120 degrees, you'll find more black-leather-clad, pierced geeks by the pool at the Riviera Hotel than anywhere outside of a bondage gear trade show. For security wonks, this is a dream come true, whether you're attending lectures and educational sessions about the newest hacking techniques, participating in hacking contests, or shopping for security-themed gear. Where else can you snag a full selection of lock-picking sets, satellite dishes, or a "My kid hacked your Honor Student's e-mail account" T-shirt? When the sun goes down, prepare to experience nightlife, hacker style, with the Black and White Costume Ball; anime and film festivals; and even Hacker Jeopardy -- a live game show featuring experts and volunteer audience members. Just remember: Don't use an unencrypted wireless Internet connection on the premises, or they may project your username and password on the Wall of Sheep, a 20-foot-high screen. Space tourism      You don't have to be an ex-boy bander (ahem, erstwhile *NSync-er Lance Bass) to book a space tourist flight, but you'll probably require a similar cash flow -- and you'll need to learn that the preferred term is "personal spaceflight" so as not to offend your travel agent and/or Mission Control. For the moment, the Russian government is the only outfit offering personal spaceflight, and even with a price tag of $20 million, the Russian Space Agency claims to be booked until 2009. But fear not, intrepid would-be astronauts! The private sector is looking to get in on the action, and at rock-bottom prices to boot, so long as several hundred thousand dollars strikes you as being a bargain-basement price. Richard Branson has jumped to the forefront of personal spaceflight with Virgin Galactic, which he calls "the world's first spaceline," joined by others, including Space Adventures and John Carmack's (yeah, the guy who created Doom) Armadillo Aerospace. Presently, private personal spaceflight offers suborbital flights that serve up a couple minutes of weightlessness and a once-in-a-lifetime view. Not quite the same thing as the trips to the International Space Station that the Russian government has been providing, but still far beyond anything that can be experienced on terra firma.SEE ALSO:Top 10 geek vacations
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Move over, Trekkies. Some new self-described "geeky" enthusiasts are in town.
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Tycho:  It's floating around now, out there on the Wub, and it calls to you.  Or maybe it does, I don't actually know.  In any case, it can be got from 3D Downloads, the Fileplanets, GamersHell, or WorthDownloading.  Download it from mulltiple sites simultaneously for a naughty thrill.  God only knows how this would run on my Vista rig at home, but it's a Vista rig, so you can probably guess.  (CW)TB
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pioneering bid to win a $10 million (5.6 million pounds) prize and prove that space is open for business. space travel as ordinary as a Caribbean cruise.
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Images from NASA telescopes are jewels of the space program, marvelous to behold. But how do you behold them when you can't see? The answer lies between the covers of a new NASA-funded book written in Braille, Touch the Invisible Sky.
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Sir Richard Branson has kick-started a new space race, with plans to start tourist trips to the edge of the atmosphere. But are we ready for holidays at the final frontier?
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Is it a bird? A plane? A planet-levelling asteroid?
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Tycho:   The foe revealed, Armadeaddon is now almost complete.  Monday will see the promised epilogue, so at this point you have very nearly survived the ordeal.  We have endeavored these past weeks to reward the true "enthusiast," that man or woman who, brow heavy, has faced such cruel abuse at our hand for the last seven years.  It is apparently our policy to honor such dedication one every decade.    Since it was announced a couple days ago, the revelation that MS would be actively courting the hardcore boardgame player is something I've thought about almost constantly.  It may be that you weren't aware there was such a thing as a hardcore player of boardgames if your last experience with the context was playing Sorry! with your sister when you were eight.  Things have progressed.   There's a million experiences in this space I could use to lure you in, but one company in particular - Days of Wonder has already decided to make electronic variants of their tabletop crack, so they occupy a twilight space between the worlds.  I hope they see an opportunity to take their (already completed!) games over to the 360, or that Microsoft offers them a locked case containing an unspecified amount of untraceable U.S. Currency, because I'd love to see this prescient move by MS turn into a new era.   Days of Wonder makes a game called Shadows Over Camelot that could quickly become a dangerous obsession, obscuring biological realities with a single-minded focus on grails.  Well, grail I guess.  There's just the one.    But it's a completely cooperative boardgame, so every player is working toward the same goals - fighting back invasions, questing, all of it.  Except there might be a traitor in the group, determined by a hidden draw, who tries to derail the effort.  He's not always there, but the potentiality of that nefarious force can create unbelievable social tension.    The gaming table's fixed coordinate in space is its asset and its obstacle - managing space and time is actually the primary challenge of any gaming group, as opposed to banishing necromancers, though that also ranks up there.  Boardgames are so rich in design that, when one of these gets dropped in front of them on Live, I think many gamers will be shocked at their sophistication.    My thumbs hurt.  (CW)TB out.
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For the first time ever, scientists are taking an incredible journey to the dawn of the universe