Joe Lelyveld
"While literally billions of speculative dollars are being amassed, invested and turned into overnight fortunes in this effort to develop and control the means of transmission in the coming age of instantaneous information, investment in the actual gathering of information by conventional journalistic means is in apparent decline, under the banner of cost control, in all but a handful of traditional news organizations. ... The Internet ... is a wonderful place to collect raw data. But it's not, so far, a wonderful place to find reliable and original reporting, real news, except where it has been siphoned off the old."
Sunday Times : Water company ready to launch wind farm at sea
I've always thought wind farms amazingly beautiful.
Phillipe Queau : Unequal terms of electronic trade
"The "invisible hands" of networks and the market are naturally at work weaving a single fabric. It is a familiar lesson, one we have already learned from Microsoft (4). It has turned the geography of Europe and Asia upside down: America has now become virtually the heart of these regions. On average, the cost of dedicated lines between European countries - the famous "information highways" or "backbones" along which Internet traffic passes - is between 17 and 20 times higher than that of equivalent links in the US (5). A Paris-New York or London-New York link is cheaper than Paris-London or Paris-Frankfurt. Virginia has become the hub of intra-European links." The original piece, written in French, can be found
here.