Kent Couch plans on attaching 150 giant latex party balloons filled with helium to a lawn chair and flying from his home in Oregon to somewhere in Idaho, preferably Boise, this 4th of July weekend. This is actually Kent's third attempt. The first trip ended abruptly when he shot out too many balloons trying to descend and he had to use a parachute to land. This time Kent has corporate sponsorship, duct tape and zip ties for emergency repairs, extra clothes and a blanket to ward off the cold at higher altitudes. If all goes well, the lawn-chair pilot says he'd like to fly across the English Channel and even Australia. Assuming he can remember the lyrics to 'The Imagination Song,' Mr. Couch might even make it to Imaginationland one day.

cartman94501 writes "My wife and I use Vonage for Voice over IP at home, mainly for work-related phone calls so we don't have to give out our home number to clients and colleagues. Most of the time it works fine, but when I'm using BitTorrent or other high-bandwidth applications (purely for legal and non-copyright-violating purposes, of course), the call quality gets choppy. I have used my Linksys (not a WRT54G, so 'upgrading' it to Linux probably won't work) router's QoS feature to assign high priority to the MAC address of the Vonage box, low priority to the BitTorrent box, and medium quality to everything else, which helps a little, but not enough. Is there a router out there that would allow me to reserve, say, 75-90kbps of bandwidth off the top for VoIP and never, ever allow any application to use that, regardless of whether there's a VoIP call going on at the moment or not?" (More below)

An anonymous reader writes "The Industry Standard has put together a list of 10 dot-com stars from the Internet bubble of the late 1990s, and tracked down what happened to the services and their founders. A lot of the services are still around, albeit under new ownership, including eToys, Garden.com, and DrKoop.com. Others have been completely reinvented — Boo.com, an online clothing retailer that burned through $125 million in funding in the late 1990s, is now an online travel community. Of the founders, many were able to cash out early and/or achieve later online success. Excite's Joe Kraus and Graham Spencer later started JotSpot, which was bought by Google, and Kraus now directs work on Google's OpenSocial initiative. Others did not fare as well, such as two of the co-founders of Garden.com, who declined to cash out at the height of the bubble, and are currently 'between business ventures.' The insiders' post-mortems of the failed dot-coms are interesting — several suggest the concepts were good but too early for their time, while others identify specific factors that led to the failures — ranging from a lack of advertising to 'intense' greed."

An anonymous reader writes "OpenBSD 4.3 is now available! Released today, May 1, 2008, 4.3 introduces many new improvements and upgrades. The complete changelog is here. Torrents can be found here." As usual, this release is accompanied by a song.

technirvana sends us to ReadWriteWeb for the scoop on the announcement this morning that representatives from Google and Facebook are joining the DataPortability Workgroup. Quoting: "The group is working on a variety of projects to foster an era in which users can take their data from the websites they use to reuse elsewhere... Good bye customer lock-in, hello to new privacy challenges. If things go right, today could be a very important day in the history of the internet. The non-participation of Google and Facebook, two companies that hold more user data and do more with it than almost any other consumer service on the market, was the biggest stumbling block to the viability of the project. These are two of the most important companies in recent history — what's being decided now is whether they will be walled-garden, data-horders or truly open platforms tied into a larger ecosystem of innovation with respect for user rights and sensible policies about data."

A 1up feature looks at the influence that Ridley Scott's amazing cyberpunk film Blade Runner has had on gaming. In addition to outlining the (underappreciated) late 90's direct game adaptation, the article discusses the film's subtler touch on tone, music, and content in other titles. "Try as William Gibson might to distance himself from Blade Runner's influence, the game adaptation of his seminal novel ironically takes a lot of its visual cues from Blade Runner, particularly in its realization of the urban sprawl. Even better, we got a little proto-cyberpunk musical influence in the soundtrack. Neuromancer boasted a technically impressive, if scratchy, Commodore-synth rendition of Devo's "Some Things Never Change" playing over the title. Truth be told, the song is actually much improved by the necessary excision of all the lyrics except for the chorus."

NewsCloud writes "Last week, Facebook quietly removed sign-in restrictions that previously hid third party applications from the public Web. In other words, Facebook now allows its third party applications to be viewable on the Web by anonymous visitors and indexable by search engines. Web developers can now build an application using Facebook's platform usable by anyone on the Internet — not just Facebook members (e.g. the Lending Library). In doing so, developers can leverage Facebook's login and registration as well its other platform services, which are becoming increasingly substantial. Facebook may be trying to gain advantage as a universal authentication gateway for public Web applications. If successful, it could further hamper efforts to establish OpenID. This will also help the company break out of its earlier AOL-like walled-garden strategy."

Stitch_Surfs writes "Blognation is reporting that the IM client FriendVOX has gone live for Facebook. This is the first time that Facebook users (of which there are now some 32 million) can communicate with one another from directly within the Facebook application. This development, by UK-based Techlightenment, effectively closes the loop for any external applications to be used (or necessary) for communication among Facebook users.'It will be interesting to see how quickly FriendVox is adopted and could it ever replace Twitter by simply using the Facebook status. The other question is what will Facebook do if FriendVox ever became too popular? Would they seek to buy it or replicate it themselves? This is the real dilemma facing all Facebook developers living inside the Facebook walled garden, and recently this happened when a developer showed Facebook their new marketplace application which would run inside of Facebook. Inside of two weeks Facebook had suddenly launched their own marketplace!'"

Some nine months ago veteran MMOG designer Raph Koster announced his new game company, called Areae ... but not what they were making. To go along with the TechCrunch40 Conference, the company has finally taken the wraps off of their project: Metaplace. Essentially, Metaplace is going to be a virtual world toolkit. The whole thing is built on open standards, and attempt to 'bring virtual worlds to the web', instead of keeping them boxed away in a separate little garden. As the site puts it: "We knew it was all coming together when one of our team made a game in a day and a half. And then stuck that game on a private MySpace profile. You can inherit someone else's world (if they let you) and use it as a starting point. You can slurp whole directories of art and use them as building blocks. Cut and paste a movement system or a health bar from one world to another. Use an RSS feed for your NPCs. We made puzzle games, RPGs, action games... and set up doorways from one to the other." Virtual World News and GigaOM have writeups of the presentation at the TechCrunch Conference, while Areae's Community Manager Tami Baribeau writes in a post why gamers should care. Over at his site Areae President Raph Koster just breaths a sigh of relief.

BioShock, the moody drama-driven FPS for the Xbox 360 and PC, was released last month to rave reviews from the major gaming news sites. Since then the internet has been ablaze with outcry about the game's high rating scores. It's hard to understand why. The work of Ken Levine and Irrational Games on the spiritual successor to System Shock 2 is sublime. It's incredibly atmospheric, the game's story is well written and compellingly told, and the first-person shooter gameplay is a respectable, tightly crafted experience. It's a really, really good game. I'll tell you now: it's a 5/5. So why all the angst? Why the backlash? Read on for my review of BioShock, and a few comments on the dangers of 'merely' being a good game.

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