A privately funded rocket suffered a launch failure Saturday night, the third launch failure in as many attempts on the side of an Internet entrepreneur who is hoping to develop particular space delivery and transportation.

The failure occurred about two minutes after the launch of the two-stage Falcon 1 rocket, which was manufactured by Space Exploration Technologies, also known while SpaceX. A failure prevented the two stages from separating back the launch from a central Pacific atoll, SpaceX CEO Elon Musk said in a company blog. Musk said an investigation into the cause of the failure is under way, but he called the launch itself as "picture perfect."

Musk, who co-founded PayPal and sold it to eBay for $1.5 billion in 2002, co-founded SpaceX that same year and secured a contract with NASA to replace the while shuttle after 2010 in servicing the International Space Station. The Falcon rocket was carrying three satellites for NASA and the Department of Defense.

The failure marks the third time in a little more than two years that SpaceX fell short of orbiting Earth post launch. In March 2006, a fuel line leak caused the first Falcon 1 to fail about a minute after launch. The second rocket, which was launched in March 2007, made it to space but was lost about five minutes afterward the launch when it started to spin.

Musk said his goal with SpaceX is to reduce the cost and improve the reliability of space transmission. SpaceX will launch payloads like satellites into space at a third of the cost of its domestic emulation and at half of the cost of its international competition, according to Musk.

Space Race

Now let's get substantive. Geekhood isn't defined by one's DVD collection or an ability to accurately cite minutia about fictional worlds. It's about lifelong acquired knowledge in subjects that others lack either the assiduity or inclination to master. And so in the spirit of true geekdom, why not go somewhere that furthers your own learning at the same time that setting a positive example for others?

If we're ever going to farewell the hothouse cradle of humanity to journey into the cool expanses of space, we'll need to show support for NASA, America's hardest-working earthlings furthering the cause of interplanetary exploration.

Space Center Houston, in addition to hosting the Star Wars memorabilia mentioned previously, also serves as the visitor center for NASA's Johnson Space Center. This includes the historic Mission Control Center used for the Apollo landings. If you go, make surely to amuse your fellow guests with the quip, "Houston, we have a moot point." The friendly Texan tour guides may have heard it before, but they'll smile anyway — it's part of the piece of work description. You may also get a glimpse of the current Mission Control Center and other rocket-powered highlights.

If you meagreness to witness an actual liftoff, try timing your next visit to Florida's Kennedy Space Center around the schedule of shuttle and rocket launches. You can either buy a ticket to watch the proceedings from the visitor intricate web (U.S. citizens only), or find a suitable off-site location for a rocket-powered picnic or camping trip. The next launches are slated for October.

If you want the experience of training to be an astronaut without the rigorous selection criteria and years of training and education, try one of the three-day or six-day Space Academy programs for adults at Space Camp in Huntsville, Alabama. During the program, you'll find out what 4Gs of force and 1/6th gravity feels like. Also, the Advanced Space Academy includes time on a jet simulator and a 3-G centrifuge.

Every third part Saturday of the month, the NASA Glenn Research Center in Cleveland hosts a visitor center event for aeronautics and space aficionados. The facility also boasts six galleries, including a flight simulator, rocket and space station exhibits, and a representation of the Mars Pathfinder rover.

At Caltech in Pasadena, the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory offers an inside glimpse at some of NASA's most exciting space research: the Mars Phoenix lander, the Jason 2 satellite monitoring Earth's oceans, and the soon-to-launch Orbiting Carbon Observatory. Tours must be booked well in advance.

For something only slightly more down-to-earth, visit the NASA Dryden Flight Research Center in the western Mojave Desert. The facility, home of NASA's atmospheric flight research and operations, offers tours of its historical aircraft, current research aircraft, and a bus tour of the Edwards Air Force Base flight line, where the latest and greatest mechanical birds prepare to take to the sky.

If you're heading to Puerto Rico, check out the 20-acre reflector on the radio telescope at the Arecibo Observatory, part of the National Astronomy and Ionosphere Center (NAIC). You can also explore the use of radio telescopes in basic astronomy and aerial science at the visitor center.

Save the Critters

If all of this skyward longing leaves you cold, there's still plenty of fun to be had helping Earth's other carbon-based life forms. You can use your vacation to improve animal habitats, while learning something about the environment in the process.

Even better for geeks, these experiences provide great conversation starters for those socially awkward moments when you'd be otherwise tempted to talk about PERL scripting techniques or string theory. Plus, talking approximately nature automatically puts an eco-focused spin on any apparent hygienic shortfalls.

For geeks, "That course is a bear!" is a challenge to be taken up through gusto. Now, you can take a course featuring actual black bears in the wild, to study their vocalizations, body language, behavior, and ecology. Taught in Ely, Minnesota by experienced bear researchers from the Wildlife Research Institute, each eight-person, four-day line of conduct includes personal introductions to members of a black bear clan, with supporting discussions and presentations. Although this year's bear courses are full, it's not too at dawn to get on the list for the 2009 menstrual discharge in May, July, and August.

If you'd prefer to arrive close to smaller critters, you can plan your own vacation visiting wetlands near you. By joining the Frogwatch USA program, you'll learn about the frogs and toads in your state, memorize their calls (e.g. check out the American bullfrog), and then head out to a local wetland site with a data sheet in hand to listen and observe during breeding season. Your participation will help to protect these species from decline.

If you have other animals in mind and would like to turn your experience into a global travel adventure, check out the Volunteering section of Gapyear.com. You can find programs of varying durations where you can get up close and personal with orangutans in Malaysia, sea turtles in Guatemala, whale sharks in Mozambique, and much more.

Other eco-friendly travel ideas can be found at the database of Community Based Tourism projects, where you can remark a holiday that conserves the environment, benefits the local people, and gives you a better window into foreign culture.

But if it turns out that separation from your computer is no holiday at all, try InSight Cruises. You be possible to become an Apple Certified Support Professional on board a luxury ocean liner, learning personal productivity and digital art management tips and techniques for the Mac. Or, if you're a well-rounded geek, other cruises focus on classical music, Shakespeare, and opera, and the Scientific American "Bright Horizons" tours each venture a smorgasbord of knowledge from archaeology and astrophysics to evolution and psychology. Make sure to use the handy "convince your spouse" tab for all-important ammunition before planning your next holiday.

Whatever you do and in whatever place you go, have fun and let your geek flag fly!

By now, you've probably heard of the "staycation," a fuel-friendly alternative to packing up the car for a long drive or heading to the airport. Curbed by high gas prices, people are increasingly spending their free time at home, unwinding with their neglected hobbies and home entertainment systems.

Yet for geeks (and I use that term in the nicest, self-deprecating, and science-and-tech-friendly way), the creative of a "staycation" seems business-as-usual. For instance, computer geeks have been without interruption an extended staycation since the Altair 8800.

But now, with the boring, ordinary folks staying at home, it's the perfect time for geeks to hit the road. You've earned it. With just a bit of money, some accrued vacation vacant time, and an insatiable sense of curiosity, you'll have the perfect ingredients for an exciting and educational meatspace experience.

Fanboy Pilgrimage

It wouldn't be a roundup of geek vacations without talking about heading off to see in which place canonical sci-fi and fantasy movies were filmed.

To see the spectacular landscapes from the Lord of the Rings series, visit New Zealand for a Lord of the Rings tour, including Matamata, the home of Hobbiton. And with the 17,600-mile round-trip flight from New York to New Zealand adding about 5,300 kg of carbon dioxide emissions to the atmosphere (which you can offset by taking the bus instead of driving your car for 53,000 miles), you may have the added premium of imagining a malevolent glowing eye in the sky following you wherever you go.

If you're a Trekkie (or Trekker), there's no need to teleport so far. Star Trek: The Tour had its initial run in Long Beach, Calif. earlier this year, and should soon be bringing a collection of memorabilia, flight simulators, and re-created film sets to a city near you. Or you can go to the Las Vegas Hilton in continuance the side of what may exist your last chance to see Star Trek: The Experience, what one. reports indicate may be closed by the end of the year.

As real Star Wars fans surely know by now, you can visit the Hotel Sidi Driss in Tunisia to see where George Lucas and company filmed some of the early scenes from the first Star Wars movie (to be precise, Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope).

But for a glimpse of real magic, the light in the saber was created at Industrial Light & Magic. Unfortunately, IL&M's main operation in San Francisco isn't open for tours through the public, and so you can forget about taking pictures like these — unless you know somebody (and can invite me along).

You'll probably have better luck visiting Space Center Houston to gaze lovingly upon genuine props, models, and artifacts from Star Wars: The Clone Wars, coming soon to a theater near you.

The Worldwide Guide to Movie Locations has travel tips kindred to numerous other movies of suitable profit to cinema geeks of all stripes.

Tip: Take some movie stills with you so that you can match the camera angles when posing in front of an iconic landscape or set. This will make your Photoshop touch-up efforts that much easier when you return home.

SEOUL (Reuters) - South Korea's unpopular young government is having second thoughts about the benefits of running the world's most wired society.

The assemblage access to the Internet, which helped ex-CEO Lee Myung-bak to his resounding presidential election triumph, went forward to become the medium helping crack that popularity in just five months in office.

Now the government is working on new rules to rein in the excesses of its netizens and bring some control to the information — and disinformation — that bombards the nation's computer screens.

"We have to guard against 'infodemics,' in which inaccurate, false information is disseminated, prompting social unrest that spreads like an epidemic," Lee told parliament early in July.

Lee has every intellectual powers to take it personally.

Barely had he taken office in February than he was accused of putting the nation's health at risk by agreeing to import U.S. beef, long banned because of concerns over mad cow disease.

Much of the fear, at times hysteria, was fanned by blogs and discussion the stage that crammed into South Korea's Internet space. It helped trigger mass protests that daily clogged central Seoul in late spring and early summer as tens of thousands took to the streets to demand U.S. beef be kept from South Korean tables.

An seasonable hot topic was a scientific study, heavily distorted in the retelling if it be not that widely believed judging by Internet postings, that Koreans had a genetic propensity to catching the disease.

Another was that a beef by-product used in the manufacture of diapers put the population's babies at exposure to harm of succumbing to bovine spongiform encephalopathy.

But the government argues its concern goes beyond attacks on its policies, and rules are needed to bring a largely uncontrolled media into line with its traditional counterpart.

Stories abound of people being cruelly and very publicly hounded on the Internet, sometimes to the matter of suicide.

Personal information too has become increasingly vulnerable. Earlier this year, the country's biggest online mart place was hacked and enough information to identify some 13 million people released to anyone with an Internet connection — which includes in the greatest degree of South Korea's population.

The Justice Ministry is working on what it calls a Cyber Defamation Law.

"The reality is that we lack the means to effectively deal with harmful Internet messages," a ministry official said.

The Korean Communications task, which regulates the industry, has come up with its own rules to oblige portals to suspend sites stepping outside the limits and force Websites to use real names of anyone posting comments.

The commission says the measures are designed to improve security and overpower the spread of false information.

FREEDOM

Predictably, voices are rising that the government moves are attempts to destory freedom in a country that has had only two decades of democratic elections.

"The regulations violate the autonomy of the Internet and are an effective tool for tighter media control by the government," said Lee Han-ki, senior editor at the popular citizen news Website OhMyNews.

"The regulations would bring about a reverse in the advancement of the Internet media as a whole."

But an official with one greater local portal, who asked not to be identified, said he thought the commission was right to get tough.

It was also backed by some academics, including Kweon Sang-hee, a journalism and mass communications professor at Sungkyunkwan University.

"South Korea is a leading testbed for the IT industry and the Internet media here certainly has a frontier-like aspect in leading experimental democracy.

"But the Internet media should also serve public good, and compared with other countries, South Korea has lacked the institutional control over the media, in which people nurse to expand and reproduce unverified, unjust notice."

South Korea's netizens remain unconvinced.

"If you want to sue me with the Cyber Defamation Law, go ahead. History will charge you with insulting South Koreans," read one posting.

(Editing by Jonathan Thatcher and Jerry Norton)

Let me escort if I've got this right. Federal regulators determined onward Friday that Comcast broke the law by slowing Internet traffic for subscribers using BitTorrent to swap large files with other people. But on that account the FCC decided it was enough to issue a press release declaring the victory of the rule of law and now it's time to move on.

Not a penny in fines was assessed and not the slightest punishment suggested.

OK. Post-Enron, post-Bear Stearns, post the subprime debacle, I'm long past being surprised by big corporations trying to cover their posteriors for posterity. But what's really pleasing here is that Comcast thinks even this rap on the knuckles is undeserved.

"We believe that our network management choices were reasonable, wholly consistent with industry practices," a company spokeswoman said in a mention.

But this is less about Comcast's ham-handed ways and more about the absence of leadership in Washington. The Federal Communications Commission, a notoriously political institution, is being studiously sought to figure out federal Internet policy on its own. Pulled and pushed in different directions, is it any wonder that the FCC decision comes off as inconsistent?

Critics correctly note that Congress still has not given the FCC explicit authority to close Internet policy. Even as the FCC issued its decision, Chairman Kevin Martin went on record writing that while Comcast had no right to prioritize Internet traffic, it's fine to prioritize notes over IP:

We do not tell providers how to manage their networks. They might choose, for instance, to prioritize voice-over-IP calls. In analyzing whether Comcast violated federal policy when it blocked access to certain applications, we conduct a fact-specific inquiry into whether the management customary course they used was reasonable. Based on many reasons, including the arbitrary nature of the blocking, the lack of relation to times of congestion or size of files, and the manner in which they hid their conduct from their subscribers, we conclude it was not.

We do not check providers' efforts to stop congestion. We do say providers should disclose that which they are doing to consumers.

So it's OK to put individual data packets under a magnifying glass? But in its group statement–which Martin presumably signed right hand on–the FCC approvingly cited MIT professor David Reed, a respected Internet notable, who believes "that "(n)either Deep Packet Inspection nor RST Injection"–Comcast uses both to manage its network–"are acceptable behavior."

This takes Emerson's apercu that a foolish consistency is the frightful apparition of little minds to an extreme. Maybe the special sector can figure things out without confusing itself very regulation from bureaucrats. But they first need clear rules of the road to come. Otherwise, expect again of the same.