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Thought leaders in the field - including Bruce Sterling, Jamais Cascio, Bill McKibben, Witold Rybczynski and Jay Oglivy - will kick-start the launch by blogging about what "prevailing" means to them. Readers will be encouraged to become authors and help direct the discussion in groups devoted to everything from "Creating Stronger, Faster Communities" and "Human Enhancement" to "Revolutionizing Learning" and "Foresight - How Can We Think Critically About the Future?" "Prevailproject.org will be a place for everybody from my mother to technologists inventing the future to grapple with some of the most pressing questions of our time: How are the genetics, robotics, information and nano revolutions changing human nature, and how can we shape our own futures, toward our own ends, rather than being the pawns of these explosively powerful technologies?" said Joel Garreau, the Lincoln Professor of Law, Culture and Values at the Sandra Day O'Connor College of Law at Arizona State University, and director of The Prevail Project: Wise Governance for Challenging Futures.

"Approval of Bolivia's revolutionary 'Mother Earth' law is an historic step by social movements in a long struggle for real ecological transformation of their economy and society."

Something immense is happening as the world transitions to a hyperconnected state where, for many, the distinction between the real and virtual worlds has ceased to exist. All the trailing paraphernalia of states and borders and government-to-government palavers, not to mention privacy laws, look so 20th century.

"This year's Slush conference in Helsinki has been a terrific event, with a very high standard of startup and a disproportionate number of great ideas floating around. One of the most intriguing has been that of Futureful, a sort-of-browser app that's going to be made available to iPad users in the U.S. in January. Futureful has been under rather stealthy development for two years, and the team is backed and mentored by Skype co-founder Janus Friis. It's a bit like StumbleUpon, in that it's an app that contains a browser (as opposed to being a browser - you can't enter a URL) and is designed to help the user find new content. However, Futureful is all about semantic tagging and artificial intelligence. As you browse, the app presents subject tags in a row at the top - click on a tag, and you get taken to another related page with its own set of tags. So, clicking on a 'Silicon Valley' tag may take you to a tech story, with the fresh tags above it including something like 'Moore's Law'. It basically provides an intelligent chain of content discovery."

Absent significant changes on the spending and/or revenue sides of the federal budget, long term deficits will encumber a growing share of federal resources and test the capacity of current and future generations to afford both today's and tomorrow's commitments. Continuing on this unsustainable path will gradually erode, if not suddenly damage, our economy, our standard of living and ultimately our national security. Incremental approaches to budgeting will need to give way to more fundamental and periodic reexaminations of the base of government, ultimately covering discretionary and mandatory programs as well as the revenue side of the budget. Having identified the major fiscal challenge facing the nation, and given our role in supporting the Congress, we believe that GAO also has an obligation to provide policymakers with support in identifying issues and options that could help to address these fiscal pressures. In this report, we draw on our past and pending work-about 90 percent of which is either requested by the Congress or required by law-- to provide policy makers with examples of the kinds of hard choices stemming from these challenges in the form of questions for elected officials and other policy makers to consider.

Yesica and her lawyers have exercised a legal right now dubbed the "Right to Be Forgotten" that allows you to remove embarrassing pictures or information you put on the Web - and do it permanently, totally. Which means you can tell Yahoo or Google or Facebook, "I don't want that there anymore. I want this to be forgotten. You have the image or the email or whatever in your computers. Remove it. And if you don't, you are breaking the law."

Welcome to the future! Here you will find a speculative timeline of future history. Part fact and part fiction, the timeline is based on detailed research that includes analysis of current trends, projected long-term environmental changes, advances in technology such as Moore's Law, future medical breakthroughs, and the evolving geopolitical landscape. Where possible, references have been provided to support the predictions. FutureTimeline.net is intended to be an ongoing, collaborative project that is open for discussion - we welcome ideas from scientists, futurists, inventors, writers and anyone else interested in the future of our world

Malcolm Turbull on Wikileaks, "There will be a medium term impact on the candour with which people talk to American officials. Frankly if I were an American citizen I would be less outraged with Assange than I would be with a Government that can allow such a gigantic breach of security. The United States will need to demonstrate that it has changed its ways, and it is not that hard. Most large organisations will not permit downloading of material to an external medium without express authorisation as those of you who work for large firms should already know. And it goes without saying that if a young Private can copy so much classified material off his own volition, how vulnerable are US systems to more sophisticated operatives who have the backing and expertise provided by foreign intelligence agencies. We will remain forever, I imagine, rightly angry at the recklessness of receiving and publishing so much confidential material. So far it seems less harm has been done than might have been the case, but the risks are extraordinary and if only one life was lost, if only one sensitive operation was compromised then the heavy responsibility for that must lie with Assange. I would like to hope that in the future such revelations will be more discriminating, but it is hard to be confident. The lesson for Governments, apart from improving their security, is to assume that everything said or written will, sooner or later, see the light of day. That may not be a good thing, and it certainly doesn't make life easier, but it is, I fear, a reality. The Governments with most to fear from such disclosure are those whose public statements are at odds with their private opinions - and as I noted earlier so far it appears, to its credit, that the US State Department's private cables have been consistent with their public policy."

The world is more addictive than it was 40 years ago. And unless the forms of technological progress that produced these things are subject to different laws than technological progress in general, the world will get more addictive in the next 40 years than it did in the last 40.

AARHUS, Denmark, Jun 15, 2011 (IPS) - Images of the immense, dark stain of oil covering the waters of the Gulf of Mexico made their way across the globe last year as one of the largest oil spills in history unfolded. Other images - of the 'Great Pacific Garbage Patch', a gigantic pile of litter floating in the North Pacific Ocean; of countless felled trees in the Amazon; of tar sands in Canada - have gained much fewer headlines, but are likely to remain as monuments to the price tag of wanton human appetites.