During his weekend radio address to the nation, President Barack Obama said: “They wanted to terrorize us, but, as Americans, we refuse to live in fear.”

One day after saying that on the radio, the President went to Ground Zero in New York for the 10th Anniversary Commemoration of the Sept. 11 attacks and repeated those same words – while standing behind a thick wall of bulletproof glass.

This man knows no fear!

According to figures published by Twitter CEO Dick Costolo, the microblogging platform has reached 200 million registered users, but only 100 million of them are considered active (they log in at least once a month).

Now out of the 100 million active users, only 60 million are logging onto the service to actually saying something, the rest being content with lurking. No mention was made about how many of the “active” actives are spambots trying to give you free iPads and cheap Viagra, but that’s probably for the best because disclosing that information would make their evolution seem a lot less spectacular.

Other figures reveal that over 50 million people log in each day, and that the daily average number of tweets is somewhere around 230 million.

Overall, the stats aren’t too shabby, although for some reason I was expecting them to be a lot higher.

After being left with a slightly sour taste following Microsoft’s reveal of the new ribbon system in Windows 8, the tech giant has restored my faith in their next OS by proving just how fast it is when it comes to booting up.

In the demonstration video posted on their page the test system boots up in under 10 seconds! Granted, it’s probably using an SSD for storage and UEFI instead of BIOS, but looking at the graph above the boot times seem to be relatively consistent on all test systems, which means boot performance should be similar regardless of the hardware used – so everyone will boot faster.

I love the progress they’ve made with Windows 7, and it looks like Windows 8 will continue that trend. Its release day can’t come soon enough!

Michael S. Hart, the man who invented the eBook in 1971 and later founded Project Gutenberg (which now hosts over 36,000 free ebooks), has passed on September 6, 2011 in his home in Urbana, Illinois, at the age of 64.

It’s a sad loss, because Project Gutenberg is one of the most awesome things on the internet. And even though the project will continue without him, it would have been great if Michael could have lived long enough to see his goal of providing all of the world’s literature in over a hundred languages come to fruition.

Michael S. Hart left a major mark on the world. The invention of eBooks was not simply a technological innovation or precursor to the modern information environment. A more correct understanding is that eBooks are an efficient and effective way of unlimited free distribution of literature. Access to eBooks can thus provide opportunity for increased literacy. Literacy, and the ideas contained in literature, creates opportunity.

 

In July 2011, Michael wrote these words, which summarize his goals and his lasting legacy: “One thing about eBooks that most people haven’t thought much is that eBooks are the very first thing that we’re all able to have as much as we want other than air. Think about that for a moment and you realize we are in the right job.”

Rest in peace.