Breaking up with your wireless provider just got a bit easier -- but as with the termination of any bad relationship, timing is everything.

Following a spate of announcements from Verizon, Sprint and T-Mobile earlier this year, AT&T officially began pro-rating its early termination fees on Sunday. According to the company, instead of paying one single flat fee of $175 to jump ship, you'll now be able to shave off $5 from that amount for every month completed of your one- or two-year contract.

"We have not yet provided specifics on our new approach," an AT&T spokesperson said on Tuesday, "but we remain committed to the idea that wireless customers who leave their contract early should not pay a flat early-termination fee."

Unfortunately, this new policy does not extend to those who signed up for a contract prior to May 25, 2008.

So why the sudden change of heart? According to most wireless analysts, this newfound flexibility on the part of AT&T and the rest of the industry is largely the result of a number of pending class action lawsuits, in several states, by customers who claim they were either misled or charged excessive penalty fees.

"If you take a look at what AT&T did, they basically matched Verizon's current policy," says Current Analysis analyst William Ho. "You can argue that this is carriers being proactive against pending legislative penalties and the coming open access environment, but to me, this is really about staying competitive. With everyone else agreeing to pro-rate their termination fees, AT&T didn't want to be seen as the bad guy."

Verizon, which currently faces a $1 billion suit related to its early termination fee policy, is actually in the midst of proposing two separate remedies to the FCC, Congress and various other consumer groups.

The first is similar to what all major U.S. carriers are already planning on doing: pro-rating their ETFs over the course of a given contract. The alternate option would have carriers agreeing not to charge any termination fee during the first month of a contract; after that, all bets would be off.

Theoretically, these half-measures would give carriers some degree of wiggle room when it comes to any pending and future ETF-related lawsuits.

For years, U.S. carriers didn't seem to mind the "bad guy" label and justified early cancellation fees based on the fact that the majority of customers still purchased subsidized handsets.

Many customers rightly assume the cheap phone they get in the deal is a part of entering into a one- or two-year contract with a given carrier, but subsequently forget that breaking that contract can mean parting with a significant chunk of change.

"In essence, it's the carrot-and-stick approach," says Ho, "where the carrot is the subsidy and the stick is the early termination fee."

Things are starting to change, albeit very slowly. Currently, the ongoing ETF legal battles are being waged at the state level, but the FCC announced last week it will be holding its own hearing in mid-June to decide whether the government should in fact take over jurisdiction of the fees -- the theory being that one national policy applicable to all wireless carriers would eliminate much of the confusion and lawsuits.

In the foreseeable future, you can bet on one thing: If there's a contract or a subsidy involved when you sign up with a new carrier, expect to get whacked with some manner of ETF should you decide to walk away early. The only difference is it might not hurt as much as it used to.

585 B.C.: A solar eclipse in Asia Minor brings an abrupt halt to a battle, as the warring armies lay down their arms and declare a truce. Historical astronomy later sets a likely date, providing a debatable calculation point for pinning down some dates in ancient history.

This was not the first recorded solar eclipse. After failing to predict one such in 2300 B.C., two Chinese astrologers attached to the emperor's court were soon detached from their heads. Clay tablets from Babylon record an eclipse in Ugarit in 1375 B.C. Later records identify total solar eclipses that "turned day into night" in 1063 and 763 B.C.

But the 585 B.C. eclipse was the first we know that was predicted. The Greek historian Herodotus wrote that Thales of Milete predicted an eclipse in a year when the Medians and the Lydians were at war. Using the same calculating methods that predict future eclipses, astronomers have been able to calculate when eclipses occurred in the past. You can run the planetary clock in reverse as well as forward. To coin a word, you can postdict as well as predict.

The most likely candidate for Thales' eclipse took place on May 28, 585 B.C., though some authorities believe it may have been 25 years earlier in 610 B.C. Hundreds of scholars have debated this for nearly two millenniums.

Predicting a solar eclipse is not easy. You need to calculate not only when it will happen, but where it will be visible. In a lunar eclipse, when the moon passes through the Earth's huge sun shadow, the event is visible on the whole side of the Earth that's in nighttime, and totality often lasts more than an hour. But in a solar eclipse, the moon's shadow falls across the Earth in a relatively narrow path, and the maximum duration of totality at any given place is only about 7½ minutes.

So you need to know the moon's orbit in great detail -- within a small fraction of a degree of arc. The early Greeks did not have this data.

We do not know the method Thales used to make his prediction. The method may have been used only once, because we have no other records of the Greeks of this era accurately predicting further eclipses. Thales is believed to have studied the Egyptians' techniques of land measurement (geo metry in Greek) later codified by Euclid. One has to wonder whether Thales made the famous eclipse prediction himself, or if he simply borrowed it from the Egyptians.

However he made the prediction, and however precise or vague it may have been, the eclipse occurred. Aylattes, the king of Lydia, was battling Cyaxares, king of the Medes, probably near the River Halys in what is now central Turkey.

The heavens darkened. Soldiers of both kings put down their weapons. The battle was over. And so was the war.

After 15 years of back-and-forth fighting between the Medes and the Lydians, the kings of Cilicia and Babylon intervened and negotiated a treaty. The River Halys, where the Battle of the Eclipse was fought, became the border between the Lydians and the Medes.

Source: NASA, Crystalinks

I'm looking forward to the upcoming Mortal Kombat vs. DC Universe videogame. I'm not looking forward to playing it, as such. I'm not really into fighting games, mostly because they have these huge lists of moves that I feel I have to memorize in order to get anywhere. The actual game ends up like an extremely fast, violent trivia contest:

"For 45 Hit Points: What is the proper response when your opponent is launching a Double Chainsaw Uppercut Blast?"

Download audio files and subscribe to the Alt Text podcast.

"Well, Bob, I believe the answer would be GAAAARGH GOODBYE STERNUM I'LL MISS YOU!"

So while I'm probably not going to buy the game, I am looking forward to it existing as an actual product in the real universe, because the whole concept is nose-pokingly ludicrous.

To begin with, there's Superman.

Superman-based interactive entertainment products tend to be very bad, because an accurate Superman game would have one button labeled "Use Powers" and you would press it and win.

With the upcoming Mortal Kombat vs. DC videogame on the horizon, you may be asking everyone around you, "I wonder what other matchups would make for a good fighting game?"

How long is Sub-Zero going to stand up against someone who can picnic on Pluto? Even considering that Subby's powers are magic, and thus can actually affect Superman, then all Supes has to do is fly into the upper atmosphere (Up, Up, High Punch) and fry Zero with his heat vision from 50 miles away (Down, Back, Down, Low Kick, Give Opponent the Finger). From Sub-Zero to Well-Done in eight seconds flat.

Yeah, some of the Mortal Kombat characters are gods and stuff, but the fact remains that they can be torn in half by a movie star, a vulnerability that is not on Superman's bizarre list of weaknesses.

But that's great! I'm tired of reasonable matches. I was exhausted by Enterprise vs. Imperial Star Destroyer arguments 10 years ago, but I'm terribly amused by the idea of an Imperial Star Destroyer against, say, the Kon-Tiki. Especially if you can figure out a scenario in which the raft wins.

So let's make this happen! I desire an endless series of videogames that pit an overpowered team against hapless underdogs! Here are a few to get you started, game-designing people.

DC vs. AC/DC

If a guy named "Reptile" has a chance against any given member of the Justice League, then Australia's crowd-mooningest rockers should have a shot as well. Just as it looks like Angus Young is down for the count, he can use his ultimate final move: YouTube AMV Barrage! Nobody can stand up to dozens of crappy homemade videos for "Highway to Hell"!

Street Fighter vs. Strawberry Shortcake

Old version, new version, banned Penny Arcade version, whatever. I just want to see Plum Puddin' take on M. Bison. I also want them to come out with a series of scented Street Fighter dolls. Zangief smells like jellied veal!

SoulCalibur vs. Animal Crossing

This is a game that I would definitely play, but not against other people, or for that matter against the computer. I would just set Tom Nook up as the second character and have him stand there, then I'd play Astaroth and slice him into Tanuki Patties over and over again. Here's your mortgage payment, Nook! I'll just make the check out to "Pulpy Mass of Laceractions!"

Mortal Kombat vs. Frightened Grocery Store Employees

Who will win the battle? An undead ninja or a middle-age, cowering cashier? Can Raiden possibly stand up to the awesome power of a catatonic bag boy? If you can beat all the main characters, you finally face down the big boss: the lifeless corpse of Barney Kroger!

Everyone vs. the Guy in This Coffee Shop Who's Running His Entire Business by Cellphone in a Very Loud Voice

Seriously guy, shut up.

- - -

Born helpless, nude and unable to provide for himself, Lore Sjöberg eventually overcame these handicaps to become a street fighter, a street sweeper and a streetwalker.

Dear Orson and Zoe, Fifteen years ago, when your mom and I started Wired, you weren't even born. And now look at you — you guys were playing Go Fish with the original crew at the magazine's 15th anniversary party.

Back in 1993, we had only the slightest glimmer of what the Internet would eventually become. But we had a very clear idea what Wired was supposed to be about: the people, companies, and ideas driving the Digital Revolution. The results of that revolution — Googling your homework, iChatting with your cousins in Paris, buying your Lego NXT off eBay — seem like so much background noise to you now, but back then it was a big deal. In the very first issue, I wrote, "The Digital Revolution is whipping through our lives like a Bengali typhoon."

Got a lot of grief for that typhoon reference — as if it were a pretentious exaggeration instead of the understatement it turned out to be. Should have said the Digital Revolution was ripping through our lives like the meteor that extinguished the dinosaurs. Practically every institution that our society is based on, from the local to the supranational, is being rendered obsolete. This is the world you are inheriting.

Louis Rossetto, the founder and former publisher of Wired, tells how the magazine was formed out of San Francisco's early '90s digital underground.

We at Wired saw it coming, because our mission was to connect our readers to the reality of our times. It's the evolutionary function of media: Those individuals/tribes/societies that are most connected to the larger world, as it really is, are most likely to survive and thrive — and move on to the next level in the big game of life. We were successful as an enterprise not because we used eye-popping fluorescent colors (although that didn't hurt) but because we did the hard work of accurately describing the world as it was changing. Of course, we didn't get everything right.

1. The End of History Francis Fukuyama proclaimed that history ended with the demise of the Soviet Union. The future would be characterized not by the literal but only the figurative war of ideas. We believed him.

We were wrong. Wired failed to see how a new generation of fanatical geeks would use the Internet in their effort to take over the world. Instead of ending, history looped back on itself, and we are now confronted by a recrudescent and particularly virulent religious ideology straight out of the Middle Ages.

We recognized a world in transition, but we missed the danger in front of us. We eschewed conventional wisdom, but we couldn't escape it. Takeaway: Be contrarian, and then be contrarian again.

2. The Death of Media We predicted the demise of what we called Old Media (aka mainstream/lamestream/dinosaur media) over and over again, and yet it's still alive. True, we said the Internet would erode Old Media's monopoly on interpreting reality, and we were right about that: If you're surfing Boing Boing, you're not reading the paper edition of The New York Times. The result is imploding Old Media and exploding Google ad revenue.

But we underestimated how slowly Old Media would auger in — and how irresponsible it would become in its death throes. As John Perry Barlow put it on our first TV show, the purpose of media isn't, ultimately, to inform; it's to sell our eyeballs to advertisers. And how better to do that — if your monopoly is being eroded by this newfangled Internet — than to scare the shit out of us? Then we're so paralyzed that we stick around through the commercials.

Faced with fierce competition for those eyeballs, Old Media is hawking the apocalypse: The world is inundated by war, poverty, destruction, fascist Republicans! It's about to be swept away by tidal waves unleashed by melting polar ice caps! More on how this is humanity's own fault — after the break.

Wired Promo From 1993: This publicly aired promotion for Wired in its debut year, 1993, shows a style that was frantic but advanced for its time, swiftly conveying the mission and content of the magazine.

3. The Death of Politics We envisioned the eclipse of the nation-state. Electronic networks were enabling the friction-free movement of capital and ideas. This would take power out of the hands of politicians and bureaucrats and put it in the hands of super-empowered individuals and networked communities.

Wrong. Governments are still here, presumptuous and bossy as ever. And what's worse, although the zoo door was pried open and the monkeys peered out, we chose not to step into the brave new tomorrow, preferring to go on playing games inside our cage.

So instead of spending a decade rebuilding civil society — reinventing how we resolve conflicts and build consensus — we got MoveOn and Daily Kos and Soros-funded 527s that divert immense energy into the mud of politics, all in the naked pursuit of political power. This has resulted in one of the most toxic and least productive eras of public discourse in our history.

1. We Called the Long Boom In 1997, we published "The Long Boom." Some pundits snarked that it was dotcom-stock boosterism. Instead, it pinpointed what was behind the unprecedented increase in material well-being for most of humanity: the spread of liberal democracy, globalization, and technological revolutions. The boom began with the introduction of the personal computer, and it will continue until at least 2020, when you two might have kids of your own.

Skeptical? Recent reports say that illiteracy worldwide has fallen by half since 1970 and is now at an all-time low of 18 percent; more people live in free countries than ever before; the number of armed conflicts worldwide has declined by almost half since the early '90s. Indeed, the average human born in 2025 will live to be 73 — 25 years longer than one born in 1955.

There's a lot of noise in the media about how the world is going to hell. Remember, the truth is out there, and it's not necessarily what the politicians, priests, or pundits are telling you.

Wired Promo From 1997: A later promotional video from 1997 features some of the big players, such as co-publisher Jane Metcalfe, cofounder Louis Rossetto, executive editor Kevin Kelly, designers John Plunkett and Barbara Kuhr, deputy editor John Bartelle, and associate publisher Drew Schutte, discussing the challenges and rewards of putting out the magazine.

2. We Foresaw the One Machine We didn't name it; founding executive editor Kevin Kelly came up with the term only recently. But we certainly predicted a new planetary consciousness based on humans using ever-more-powerful PCs and networks. Take our current hardware/wetware mashup: 1 billion CPUs on the Internet; 8 terabytes of traffic with 2 million emails per second; 3 billion cell phone users; 264 exabytes of magnetic storage. The One Machine now has a million times as many transistors as your brain has neurons. Let's say that gives it processing power equivalent to a single human brain — 1 HB; by 2040, the One Machine should surpass 6 billion HB, exceeding the processing power of humanity. In an era when even progressives are trying to stop time to preserve some notion of planetary perfection, it's clarifying (and humbling) to note that evolution has not ceased — and that we are not evolution's ultimate product.

3. We Knew Tech Would Change How We Relate We wrote about how every institution — businesses, schools, churches, the courts — was being pounded to obsolescence by the Digital Revolution. So we stressed the need to join together and not just vote but directly rebuild civic society — how we live together as human beings — for the 21st century.

We tried to describe new ways of relating to one another — how we do business, how we invest, how we can defend, educate, cure, shelter, and govern ourselves. We coined the term Netizen to describe this new social actor. We invented the Digital Nation, the Netizens' new homeland. And we championed new heroes, chronicled new successes, and encouraged those struggling to create this new world.

Millennial Moments: In an unusual, Zen-like campaign, Wired tells us, "This is the age where you can finally do it all."

Fair trade, the organic movement, pressure on manufacturers to improve conditions for their workers overseas, blogging, social networks, Surfrider Foundation, One Economy, Amnesty International, One Laptop per Child, networked homeschooling, cracking the human genome, YouTube social media as a means of creating new political consciousness, distributed artistic expression, up to and including the One Machine — these are all reinventions of the institutions we rely on as social animals.

If Wired was the Scout for a generation, Kevin Kelly was the scout for Wired. One chewy chunk of fresh kill he brought back early on was a book by William Strauss and Neil Howe called Generations. It concluded its generational history of the United States with the Millennials, members of the next major demographic cohort, the first of whom were born around 1980.

Strauss and Howe's description of Millennials inspired us: "This generation will show more teamlike spirit and more like-mindedness in action than most Americans then alive will recall ever having seen in young people... Millennials will carry out whatever crisis mission they are assigned — as long as they can connect it with their own secular blueprint for progress. If crisis brings war, soldiers will obey orders without complaint. If it involves environmental danger or natural resource depletion, young scientists will make historic breakthroughs. If the crisis is mostly economic, the youthful labor force will be a mighty engine of renewed American prosperity. Whatever their elder-bestowed mission, these rising youths will not disappoint. Assuming the crisis turns out well, Millennials will be forever honored as a generation of civic achievers."

One of the original visionaries of Wired magazine, Kevin Kelly, reflects on where it all started and how it's evolved in 15 years.

What's heartening to me, Orson and Zoe, is that even though you and your peers have grown up watching your parents become self-absorbed, hypocritical, and now plain crotchety and rancorous (not Jane and me, of course), and even if you stand in the rubble of the social institutions toppled by the Digital Revolution, your response is not the me-me-me of your parents' generation but us-us-us. Whether you're addressing climate change or serving in Iraq, you are simultaneously more traditionalist and future-forward, more practical and idealistic, than your parents.

The challenge is obvious, the dangers present, the need great. But be optimistic. I would say that, wouldn't I, since we were often accused during my time at Wired of being overly optimistic. But optimism is not false hope, it's a strategy for living. If you are optimistic about the future, you will step up and take responsibility and attempt to make it better for yourselves and your own children.

Yes, we didn't know it at the time, but we were making Wired for you.

All love, Dad

The Phoenix Mars Lander, which completed a heart-stopping, autonomous landing on the Martian surface on Sunday, has begun beaming pictures the millions of miles back to Earth.

If you missed the landing, this gallery should provide a photographic catch-up on a mission that is likely to allow scientists to examine extraterrestrial water for the first time ever during this initial exploration of a Martian polar region.

Now that the lander is in position, NASA will use the craft's robotic arm to dig into the red planet's regolith to look for the subsurface ice that scientists believe exists there. If they find it, instruments aboard the craft will melt the ice and analyze the water to look for organic compounds, which contain carbon, the building block of life.

These photos take an amazing path to get to your desktop. First, the Surface Stereoscopic Imager snaps them. Then the Lander sends data at about 15 kilobytes a second via an UHF antenna to two spacecraft orbiting Mars. The orbiters relay the data to NASA's Deep Space Network antenna arrays in Canberra Australia, Madrid, and in California's Mojave Desert.

Raw images are sent to the Jet Propulsion Laboratory and posted to the Phoenix Mars Mission website.

Left: The small blue object in the center of the Martian Arctic plain pictured is NASA's Phoenix Mars Lander, as seen from above by NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter.

The lander touched down safely and scientists have been delighted to find all its instruments in working order. Now, NASA, Jet Propulsion Laboratory and University of Arizona scientists will race to do as much research as possible over the next three months before the Martian winter incapacitates the lander.

This image shows where the Phoenix Mars Lander touched down in the desolate northern polar region of Mars. The region was targeted as part of NASA's long-stated "follow the water" exploration strategy for Mars. Scientists believe that ice exists underneath the flat surface of this plain. The "polygonal cracking" visible in the picture has also been observed in permafrost terrains like the Siberian tundra, so scientists believe it results from seasonal freezing and thawing of surface ice.

While the Mars Phoenix Lander does not have a true video camera, NASA scientists can pan around a very high resolution image to create a video like this one of the Martian arctic plain.

In a space-exploration first, NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter captured the Phoenix Lander, and its parachute, during its descent to the Martian surface. It marks the first time that a spacecraft has visualized the descent of another craft.

After two previous landers were lost entering the Martian atmosphere, the Phoenix mission has gone smoothly.

In an image that has circulated around the world, this picture shows one of the Phoenix Mars Lander's "feet" settled on Martian rock and soil. It was essential that the craft land in an area where it could dig into the soil because the lander, unlike the Mars rovers, can't move. It appears that the area within the lander's reach -- a mere 160 square feet -- will provide scientists with their shot at touching Martian ice.

The lander touched down at 4:53 pm Pacific Time on May 25 in an arctic region called Vastitas Borealis. Some scientists believe the area was once covered with water in the distant Martian past. Now, it features polygonal patterns that look similar to icy ground in earth's arctic regions.

This image was one of the first color images released by NASA.

After nine months and 422 million miles of travel, the lander reached the ground near its intended touchdown spot. The Martian landscape around the landing site is barren except for small pebbles and polygonal lumps that are widely associated with permafrost regions on Earth.

Here we see one of the Phoenix Mars Lander's octagonal solar panels. After it touches down, the two panels unfold on either side of the spacecraft to unveil a total solar-cell area of 45 square feet. The panels are the sole means the craft has of recharging its two 25-amp-hour lithium-ion batteries. Each battery stores about five times as much power as your correspondent's MacBook battery, so the lander has about 10 MacBooks' worth of stored power.

This image shows a small-scale polygonal pattern in the ground near NASA's Phoenix Mars Lander. It was acquired on what NASA is calling Sol 0, the first Martian day of the mission.

While the rocky, lifeless surface is similar to images delivered by the Mars rovers, scientists believe the warping of the land is due to water ice under the surface. The prospective ice has raised hopes that some liquid water, which is required for life as we know it, exists under the surface.

"There's this idea that there are reservoirs of liquid water down there and as soon as you see liquid water, you say, 'Why couldn't there be microbes?'" Edward Young, the principal investigator of the UCLA IGPP Center for Astrobiology, told Wired.com. (Young is not involved with the Phoenix mission.)

Mars is roughly half the size of Earth, yet the Phoenix Mars Lander will only end up excavating a tiny living room-sized slice of the planet. Still, the lander is loaded with a variety of instruments, including a gas analyzer and a weather station, that scientists hope will turn this barren landscape into a rich scientific tapestry that adds whole new chapters to what we know about Mars, the rest of the solar system and the possibility for life on other planets.

After a decade of tough luck for Martian missions, Phoenix team members celebrate the craft's landing on Mars, May 25, 2008. Wired.com brought you live coverage of the team's giddy press conference.

This image is a screen capture taken from NASA TV just after radio signals were received from the lander.

Now, with the initial excitement of the landing over, the Phoenix team is settling in to do the heavy scientific lifting that got the mission $420 million in funding. Digging for ice could begin as early as next week, and that investigation could provide a host of surprises about the history of the water and life on Mars.

Like previous missions, the Phoenix Mars Lander has a message for future Martian explorers in the form of the mini-DVD that you see next to the American flag. It was created by the Planetary Society and contains video of Earth's visionaries like Carl Sagan and Arthur C. Clarke talking about the future. For the earthbound present, NASA has embraced Twitter to send out status messages on the mission. The Mars Phoenix Twitter stream has amassed almost 8,000 followers.

Call it the Tom Sawyer approach to selling CPUs.

VIA Technologies, the self-proclaimed No. 3 maker of Intel-compatible processors, has unveiled a new "reference design" for ultra-portable computers based on the company's own low-power chips.

Making a reference design is common fare in the high-tech industry. Chipmakers like Intel have been doing it for years as a way of proving the technical viability of a product concept. What sets VIA's approach apart is that the company is posting the computer-aided design (CAD) files for its OpenBook PC under a Creative Commons license. Anyone with design skills and a burning desire to get into the PC business can download the files, modify the design and go into business selling ultra portables.

Taiwan-based VIA will even help aspiring Michael Dells find Asian manufacturers to do the hard work of turning those CAD files into real, plastic-and-silicon products.

VIA's design is on the commercial end of a growing spectrum of "open source" hardware. On the other, more noncommercial end are hackable hardware kits like the Arduino platform, which was used by many exhibitors at the recent Maker Faire in San Mateo, California. Open source aficionados were also buzzing last week about the release of the OGD1, a development kit that could be used to create open-source graphics cards.

If VIA's idea takes off, it could help add more juice to the already-humming market for ultra portables. That market, which had long foundered on the impractical aspirations of a tiny minority of mobility-obsessed hardware geeks, took off in earnest last year with the success of the Eee PC, Asus' $400, Linux-based ultra portable.

For industrial designer Scott Summit, VIA's move is part of a gradual shift toward more highly-customized manufacturing, in which small companies and even individuals are able to design and build their own products, thanks to the decreasing costs of fabrication.

"The idea of open source manufacture is taking shape, and we're going to see more of it because the barriers (to highly customized production) are really starting to evaporate," says Summit.

VIA's design calls for a 2.2-pound PC with an 8.9-inch screen, a webcam, up to 2GB of RAM, an 80GB or larger hard drive, and built-in Wi-Fi and Bluetooth (or, optionally, WiMax or 3G cellular data). It's not wanting for ports, either, with an Ethernet jack, three USB ports and an SD card slot.

The design is aimed at smaller design-manufacturers and upstart PC companies rather than big PC manufacturers like HP or Dell, who create their own designs (like HP's new MiniNote) from scratch.

"When we look at reference designs, they're helpful, they're insightful, they give us an optimal layout from an engineering perspective -- but they don't target what we're aiming for," says Stacy Wolff, a notebook design director for HP.

VIA's hope is that its design will encourage new designers to make ultra portables that are a little less ugly than the usual fare. It's a bet that the PC market will soon follow in the footsteps of the cellphone market, where what's under the hood is less important than how it looks.

"It's not really about the components inside at all," says VIA vice president Richard Brown. "It's personal jewelry."

Almost makes the idea of starting your own computer brand sound a little sexy, doesn't it? And for the chipmaker, it's not far from the notion that if you want to get a fence painted, start painting it yourself and try to make it look fun.

The bridge is among our most ancient technologies. The moment some distant ancestor thought to place a log where he (or she) wanted to cross the stream, and not where the logs happen to have fallen, the bridge was born.

A bridge inspires us. A bridge overcomes an obstacle and connects someplace to someplace else, with strength and often with grace and beauty. A bridge lets us go to the other side.

The spiritual connection is old. The high priest of ancient Rome carried the title of Chief Bridgemaker, or Pontifex Maximus. The head of the Roman Catholic Church still carries that Latin title, pontiff or pope in English.

The bridge can give reassurance to lovers holding hands, hope to the thwarted and consolation to the broken-hearted. The bridge connects, physically. It unites the divided. It makes one of what had been two.

The world has millions of bridges. To say Happy Birthday to the Golden Gate Bridge, we share with you a dozen of our other favorites.

Left:

Really Old: Ponte Vecchio It's in the nature of bridges that they draw traffic, and it's in the nature of real estate (especially commercial real estate) that value is based on location, location, location. "You want to cross the river, you're going to have to see my goods." Thus, people built shops (with homes above) on many medieval bridges. The old London Bridge of nursery-song fame is one such and Venice's Rialto another.

The Ponte Vecchio (Old Bridge) across the River Arno in Florence, Italy, dates back to Roman times, but the current bridge (so to speak) dates back to 1345 (by Taddeo Gaddi), with the long upper gallery added by the great Renaissance architect Giorgio Vasari in 1564. It is probably the oldest segmental-arch (that is, the arches are not the full semicircles of Roman design) bridge in Europe. It is certainly among the most romantic.

Photo: DuccioBartolozzi/Flickr

Be not deceived by its Gothic design. This iconic London landmark was designed in 1884 and built from 1886 to 1894. Architects Horace Jones and John Wolfe Barry solved the problem of access for ship traffic on the Thames with two gigantic hydraulic bascules, or drawbridge spans. The side spans are suspension design. The high-level walkways were designed to allow pedestrians to cross even when the bascules were up.

There's a story that the buyer of the old London Bridge thought he was buying this one to move to Arizona, but it's apparently just a story. Both buyer and seller have denied it.

Photo: Christopher Chan/Flickr

The asymmetrical main pylon of Erasmus Bridge inspires Rotterdam residents to call it the Swan. Like other cable-stayed bridges, the 1996 structure also evokes a harp or lyre. Architect Ben van Berkel's design crosses the River Maas. Sidewalks, bicycle lanes, streetcar rails and vehicle lanes connect the old city with new development to the south. It's 456 feet high and 2,631 feet long, including a 292-foot bascule that allows large ships to pass beneath.

Photo: Blond Avenger/Flickr

The Gateshead Millennium pedestrian and bicycle bridge crosses the River Tyne between Newcastle and Gateshead in northern England. It's both a cable-stayed bridge and a drawbridge. Completed in 2000, the unique design by Wilkinson Eyre Architects (with Gifford & Partners engineering) rotates on its longitudinal axis (counterclockwise in this view). The arched upper span tilts downward (about 45 degrees) as the curved pathway tilts up, so that both are high enough above the water to allow boats to pass beneath. Locals compare it to a winking eye. It stands just downstream from a series of historic low- and high-level road and rail bridges.

Photo: Pickersgill Reef/Flickr

When I first saw pictures of the Forth Bridge, I thought it ungainly, even ugly. After learning its history and seeing it in person, I realized I was wrong. The 1890 rail bridge across the Firth of Forth near Edinburgh is strikingly beautiful, its muscular cantilever structure robustly suited to its task and its time.

Designed by John Fowler and Benjamin Baker, its three 330-foot towers carry two clear spans of 1,710 feet each. The main structure is 5,350 feet long, not counting the approaches, and the bridge still carries up to 200 trains a day, connecting Edinburgh to the north of Scotland.

Photo: Simon Bradshaw/Flickr

What fun! It may look like an amusement-park ride, but the Magdeburg Water Bridge carries a canal on a 748-foot span across the River Elbe in eastern Germany. Originally conceived in 1919, it finally opened in 2003. It connects the Elbe-Havel Canal to the important Mittelland Canal, linking Berlin to the Rhine-Ruhr industrial heartland. The main span directly above the river is 348 feet long.

Photo: Chris Lori/Flickr

The Millau Viaduct carries the A75 motorway across the valley of the river Tarn in southern France, allowing a major north-south route to bypass a tangle of mountain roads. Designed by Norman Foster and completed in 2004, it's the world's longest cable-stayed bridge, at 8,660 feet, and the world's tallest, at 1,125 feet. It's taller in fact than the Eiffel Tower, which remarkably was built by the same firm.

Photo: chericbaker/Flickr

Kintaikyo (Kintai bridge) near Iwakuni City was first built in 1673. It washed away in a flood the next year. Its replacement lasted until a typhoon destroyed it in 1950. The new bridge was built in 1953. The five graceful arches each span 131 feet for a total length of 656 feet across the Nishiki River. Because of its beauty, the bridge got its name from kintai, or gold brocade sash.

Photo: kamoda/Flickr

The Akashi Kaikyo Bridge, the world's longest and tallest suspension bridge, links the city of Kobe with Awaji-shima Island, as part of the highway connecting the Japanese islands of Honshu and Shikoku. Completed in 1998, it stretches 12,828 feet across the stormy Akashi Strait. The center span is 6,527 feet, more than half again as long as the Golden Gate Bridge. The towers are 928 feet high.

Photo: kamoda/Flickr

The Oresund Bridge carries rail and road traffic between Copenhagen, Denmark, and Malmö, Sweden. The bridge-tunnel combo is the longest border-crossing structure in the world. Completed in 2000, the 10-mile length includes an artificial peninsula at the Danish end, a 2.2-mile tunnel, a 2.5-mile artificial island and a 4.9-mile cable-stayed bridge. The toll for a passenger car is about $50.

Photo: Lauri Väin/Flickr

That's Asia on the right and Europe on the left -- with Istanbul's Ortaköy Mosque. The suspension bridge links the ancient city with its Asian suburbs. Completed in 1974, the Bosporus Bridge is just short of a mile long end-to-end, with a center span of 3,524 feet. Venus Williams played an exhibition tennis game on the bridge deck in 2005, with the volleys crossing from one continent to the other.

Photo: pictalogue/Flickr

Australia's Sydney Harbor Bridge doesn't link continents, but symbolizes one. Its 1,650-foot steel-arch span used to be the world's largest, but Chinese bridges now surpass it. Completed in 1932, the Sydney Harbor Bridge connects Australia's biggest city with its northern suburbs, carrying rail, vehicle and pedestrian traffic. It used to get called the Coathanger a lot, but that name seems to be fading. Perhaps, like the Parisians with their at-first-reviled Eiffel Tower, the Aussies are getting used to it at last.

Photo: semuthutan/Flickr

John A. Roebling's masterpiece, the Brooklyn Bridge, killed him in a construction accident in 1869, soon after work began. The composite of suspension and cable-stayed design (hence its trademark criss-cross cables) enabled a bridge 50 percent longer than any other suspension bridge when it was completed in 1883. It pioneered bridge-construction technology both with pneumatic caissons below the water and steel cables in the air.

The bridge celebrated its 125th birthday last Saturday, but from its beginning has inspired artists and writers. Edward Steichen and Walker Evans photographed it. Georgia O'Keefe painted it. Hart Crane praised it: "O harp and altar." Jack Kerouac had his "Brooklyn Bridge Blues" there.

Poet Marianne Moore sang of it: way out; way in; romantic passageway
first seen by the eye of the mind,
then by the eye. O steel! O stone!
Climactic ornament, a double rainbow

The Brooklyn Bridge inspired politicians, too. So firmly did the bridge link the separate cities of New York and Brooklyn, they merged in 1898 to form Greater New York.

The bridge is what we see in it. It is what we wish it to be. And it's also still a workaday way to get from the Lower East Side to Brooklyn Heights.

Photo: ehpien/Flickr

1937: After nearly four-and-a-half years of construction, the Golden Gate Bridge opens to pedestrians. Approximately 18,000 people are waiting to walk across the span when it officially opens at 6 a.m.

The bridge opened to automobile traffic the following day, when President Franklin Roosevelt -- at the White House 3,000 miles away -- pressed a telegraph key that simultaneously announced the fact to the world.

That was the easy part.

The idea to span the Golden Gate, the mile-wide strait connecting the San Francisco Bay with the Pacific Ocean, was originally proposed by a madman. Joshua Norton -- a San Francisco merchant who went bankrupt and lost his marbles, declaring himself Norton I, Emperor of the United States and Protector of Mexico -- decreed the building of the bridge in 1869.

A few years after Norton's decree, railroad magnate Charles Crocker, a lot less endearing but a lot more influential than the good emperor, presented the first concrete plan, with cost estimates, for spanning the Golden Gate. Despite his clout, Crocker got about as far with his plans as his dotty predecessor did.

It wasn't until 1916, when a proposed design for a bridge published by the San Francisco Call caught the eye of the city's chief engineer, Michael O'Shaughnessy, that serious planning began. The original cost estimate came in at a staggering $100 million (nearly $2 billion in today's money). That might have deep-sixed things again if not for the appearance of Joseph B. Strauss, a structural engineer with 400 bridges under his belt, who said he could complete the project for around $30 million.

Things simmered on the back burner while United States ran off to the World War, but in 1921 Strauss came back again with a formal $27 million bid and won the contract. The 1920s were spent lining up political ducks, fiddling with design proposals and dealing with the War Department, which had final say on the construction of anything that might affect ship traffic or military logistics.

By late 1929, the Golden Gate Bridge District was formed, and Strauss' original prosaic cantilever-suspension hybrid design had been replaced by an all-suspension bridge. Irving Morrow, a local architect, is the man responsible for the Golden Gate Bridge's graceful art deco design, as well as choosing its distinctive color: international orange (which contrasts with the surrounding sea, sky and land regardless of weather or season). The structural calculations provided by consulting engineers Charles Ellis and Leon Moisseiff persuaded Strauss to abandon his own design in favor of Morrow's, for which the world can give eternal thanks.

With things nearly set to go, along came the Great Depression. That, along with additional soil testing and political infighting that eventually cost Ellis his job, delayed the start of construction until January 1933. It was a testament to the Bay Area's faith in the project that, only a year into the Depression, voters overwhelmingly approved a $35 million (about $450 million today) bond to finance the project.

(Emperor Norton, beloved and coddled by his fellow citizens, had also ordered a bridge to be built connecting San Francisco with the East Bay. And eventually the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge was built -- at the same time as the Golden Gate Bridge.)

The Golden Gate Bridge was an engineering marvel. The site alone -- buffeted by high winds and split by the swirling currents of the Golden Gate -- made construction treacherous. The sheer size of the bridge (the longest suspension bridge in the world until the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge opened in 1964) required several innovations in bridge-building technology, especially where it came to constructing the two colossal anchorages in -- and under -- turbulent water.

Of all the mind-boggling statistics surrounding the bridge's construction, and there are plenty, perhaps the most jaw-dropping involves the two main suspension cables. Each measures 7,659 feet in length and each used hundreds of pencil-thick wires bound together to make a cable just over three feet in diameter. In all, more than 80,000 miles of steel wire was needed, enough to circle the earth three times.

Since a fall from the roadbed practically guaranteed death (a fact that more than a thousand suicide jumpers have confirmed), an enormous safety net was slung under the main span at a cost of $180,000. It was money well spent: At least 19 lives were saved as a result of the net.

In fact, it looked as though the bridge would be finished without the cost of a single life until tragedy struck only several months from the end. In October 1936, Kermit Moore, an ironworker, was crushed to death by a falling beam. Then, the following February, 11 men plunged to their deaths when the platform they were working on fell off the bridge and tore through the safety net.

Yet the work continued, and the bridge was finished ahead of schedule and under budget. On the first day it was opened to automobile traffic, an estimated 32,300 cars crossed the span between noon and midnight. That number is slightly higher today.

Source: PBS, City of San Francisco

NAIROBI, Kenya -- For veteran wildlife ranger Joseph Kimojino, the traditional tools of his trade -- binoculars, off-road jeep and a rifle -- have been supplemented by Twitter, Flickr and a blog.

A ranger in Kenya's acclaimed Mara Triangle wildlife park, Kimojino is a member of the Masai tribe. He first learned how to click a computer mouse in November. Now he blogs about the Mara Triangle and posts wild animal photos on Flickr nearly every day.

Kimojino's online outreach is an effort to raise awareness and money for the park, and it's urgent: Without the funds he raises online, his employer, the Mara Conservancy, would go broke. Admission fees from park visitors are the conservancy's primary source of revenue, but tourism dropped to almost zero during Kenya's post-election violence, and hasn't snapped back.

But the park's online efforts are working. Despite relatively modest traffic, the blog raised $40,000 from donations in March. Kimojino's Facebook page drew about $2,000; and a handful of safari companies bought advertising on the blog in exchange for sponsoring rangers.

"All the rest has been from single donations from individuals around the world, from donations as small as $5 to our biggest, which was $5,000," says William Deed, the experienced blogger behind the park's online outreach effort.

Kenya's wildlife is seriously threatened by poaching, except in parks like the Mara Triangle, which employs rangers to protect animals. The rangers' salaries are paid from park fees, but tourism has dropped 90 percent. To keep the conservancy running, the park's online outreach needs to raise $50,000 a month until the tourists return -- a job that's fallen into Deed's lap.

Two years ago, Deed, 28, was an office temp in Rotherham, England, "a really shitty, shitty town near Sheffield," he says. Deed was so bored with his lot, he started a blog about the banalities of waiting in line.

The blog became popular, and within months, Deed was recruited by the conservationist blog network WildlifeDirect, brainchild of famed Kenyan conservationist Richard Leakey and his son-in-law, Emmanuel De Merode.

Deed's assignment: Help wildlife rangers set up blogs about mountain gorillas and other animals in the Congolese guerrilla stronghold of North Kivu.

Eastern Congo was much less boring than Rotherham, Deed found. After surviving more than a dozen evacuations and being ultimately driven out of the park by Laurent Nkunda's rebels, Deed found a more peaceful but no less adventurous assignment with the Mara Conservancy.

Now Deed is the producer of the conservancy's expanding online presence, always looking for compelling storylines about animals and rangers, and coaching Kimojino on the possibilities of online communication tools. Deed likes to text in news from ranger patrols to Twitter, like this message from April 9: "Three poachers have been caught, found with dried meat from a hippo."

The duo's blog, Flickr page and tweets from the savannah make for an unfolding plot, like a reality television show -- with ads asking for donations. It's the kind of material that earnest animal lovers eat up.

It's more dangerous work than most bloggers are used to. In late April, Kimojino's blog reported on an hourlong gun battle between cattle rustlers and park rangers. One ranger was shot twice during the raid and had to be airlifted to a hospital in Nairobi, where his life was saved by an infusion of four pints of blood.

Most of Kimojino's work is a little less violent. A gentle man devoted to the animals of the park he works for, Kimojino takes a drive every morning at 6:30 to check on the predator population that has been attracting tourists and documentary filmmakers to the Triangle for more than two decades. Kimojino notes the weight and behavior of lions and cheetahs that his sharp eyes spot in the vast fields of tall grass, and takes photographs.

On a game drive one morning, the ranger stops his car in front of a herd of antelopes and whips out a camera. "I have never had a Coke's Hartebeest on Flickr," he says, taking a picture.

The publicity project started in February when the conservancy's purse emptied of emergency buffer funds. The first month, Deed says the blog had only five to 10 hits a day, but through frenetic online promotion and press, Deed says the audience has grown to 450 unique visits per day.

Kimojino's Flickr page has more than 520 contacts from the world over. Before he finishes tagging and naming his pictures one Sunday in April, there are already adoring comments from a woman in the United States about his pictures of cheetah cubs. Flickr's analytics report that he had 1,688 views the previous week.

Getting online has not been without its risks for Kimojino. He explains that for him to be speaking about the park to the public, instead of his boss, breaks traditional Kenyan decorum and was at first difficult for him. But he got used to being the public face of the Mara Triangle.

Deed mentions that after a few months of this online activity, Kimojino went to the optometrist -- he was worried the computer would damage his eyesight, hindering him from spotting, for example, a leopard in a tree two kilometers away, as he did during my visit. (I couldn't even see the spots with an 84mm zoom lens.)

Will Kimojino keep blogging after the tourists return? "If I stop as soon as we have enough money, people will say -- these guys, they were just doing it for the money," he says. "I must continue."

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If you ran the airline with the nation's worst on-time record and one of the worst lost-luggage rates, would you begin charging your customers for the privilege of checking a bag?

You probably wouldn’t, but it's Gerard Arpey who runs American Airlines, the nation's largest airline. So beginning next month, American and American Eagle, its wholly owned commuter carrier, will charge most passengers $15 to check a piece of luggage.

As that comic says, you can't fix stupid. And this fee is going into the Airline Stupid Hall of Fame. Not only will it infuriate flyers—who are already annoyed with American’s lousy operating efficiency and its recent maintenance snafus—it's likely to further erode American's on-time and baggage-handling rates. And it probably won’t generate any additional cash for American.

It goes without saying that American needs the scratch. Its $328 million first-quarter loss was, uh, fueled by what the company says was a $665 million year-over-year increase in energy costs. As the price of oil skyrockets, Arpey is so desperate that he's cutting American’s route network by more than 10 percent, grounding dozens of aging, fuel-guzzling aircraft, and laying off thousands of workers.

To Arpey, baggage must seem like an easy target for quick cash. Many European airlines charge for checked luggage and, in the increasingly à la carte world of U.S. aviation, baggage is the next logical candidate for unbundling. And American did have a moment of clarity: When Arpey announced the $15 first-bag fee at last week's annual meeting of AMR, American's parent company, he was careful to exempt full-fare customers (its most profitable segment), elite frequent fliers (its most loyal) and international passengers (who get a mulligan due to competitive and logistical factors). Arpey aimed the $15 fee directly at the travelers who pay the lowest fares and contribute the least to American’s bottom line.

But that’s where rational thinking ended. Arpey set the fee to kick in on tickets purchased beginning June 15, the start of the busy summer-travel season. That means travelers will have to adjust with just three weeks' notice. American's frontline staffers have no more of a cushion, since they were only informed of the move a few hours before Arpey publicly unveiled it.

And American seems to have imposed the fee without actually calculating how much revenue it could raise. When asked, Arpey couldn't say how many checked bags will fall into the charge-to-check category and was vague about the revenue target.

Worse, the customers targeted with the fee are the ones most likely to try to duck the $15 addition by using larger carry-ons. That's dangerous because these less-experienced fliers (think families and once-a-year vacationers) think any bag with wheels qualifies as a carry-on. It doesn’t. American's website says the largest acceptable carry-on bag is no larger than 45 linear inches (length plus width plus height) and weighs no more than 40 pounds.

So be prepared for time-consuming arguments at the ticket counters and check-in kiosks. Unless it’s prepared to countenance ticket-counter madness, American will have to deploy additional staff to do the baggage triage. There goes some of that extra revenue Arpey was counting on.

Then there's the stress that more carry-on bags will cause at security checkpoints. Fliers who would have normally checked their lotions-and-potions and other troublesome checkpoint items will now have them in their carry-ons. That'll mean more time spent preparing for the screening process and clearing security.

Once these slowed-down, baggage-laden fliers reach their departure gate, they'll run into dozens of other travelers who've also maxed out their carry-on allowance. With airlines running 80 percent full, that means a free-for-all for available carry-on space. American's overworked flight attendants will have to police the planes, often going row by row to ensure that travelers have loaded bins effectively and used their under-seat space. That's sure to delay flights—American ran an industry-trailing 62 percent on time in March—and delayed flights cost money. There goes more of Arpey's $15-a-bag revenue stream.

But, wait, it gets worse. No matter how efficiently passengers and flight attendants arrange luggage, some passengers probably won’t have room to stow their gear. That means American’s gate agents will be required to gate-check the extras. That’s a time-consuming process. An agent must get a luggage tag, affix it to the bag, then hand it off to a baggage handler on the ramp, who must then stow it in the belly of the aircraft. More time lost.

How much time? No one really knows, but an international airline executive tells me that his flights have run an average of 15 minutes later since the carrier adopted a pay-for-bags system two years ago. "I don’t know how much is due to extra carry-on bags, but it’s a factor. It’s eating into the ancillary revenue we get from the baggage charges."

Now the big fly in Arpey's revenue ointment: The high cost of delayed and lost baggage created by too much carry-on luggage. Delayed flights mean missed connections and missed connections mean more of what the industry euphemistically calls mishandled bags. (American already mishandles 7.32 bags per 1,000 passengers; American Eagle's rate is 13.08 per 1,000.)

My sources tell me it costs an airline about $60 in labor costs and trucking fees to return a late bag to a customer. That means each additional delayed bag American creates will wipe out the revenue of four checked bags. And woe to American if it loses more bags. Airlines are on the hook for as much as $3,000 in liability for lost luggage. Carriers rarely pay fliers that much, of course, but let’s say a lost bag eventually costs American $2,250 in cash payouts and administrative costs. At that rate, each additional bag that American loses will wipe out the revenue from 150 checked bags.

Like I said, you can’t fix stupid. You can only wait for Arpey to realize that charging $15 for a checked bag isn't enough. Then he'll raise to it $25, leading even more customers to try to fly only with carry-on bags, thus starting the cycle all over again.

The fine print: None of American's direct competitors—United, Delta, Northwest, Continental or US Airways—have yet matched the $15 checked-bag fee. But history indicates that they will. On the other hand, Southwest Airlines, the industry's only profitable major carrier, has announced that it will continue to allow travelers to check two bags for free.

CNN introduced Wired magazine in January 1993 by saying it was "a combination of high technology with rock 'n' roll delivery." Rossetto & Co.'s initial advertising campaign -– wild postering and bus signs in five cities -– had the tagline: "Finally, a Magazine for the Digital Age." Here, Wired's cofounder Louis Rossetto talks with CNN in December 1992, just before the launch.

Photos courtesy of Louis Rossetto

Creative director John Plunkett (left) and his design partner/wife (and soon to be HotWired creative director) Barbara Kuhr (center) examine proofs of the magazine on the press check for the first issue in Danbury, Connecticut, in late December 1992. The duo already had an established graphic design firm, Plunkett+Kuhr, when they joined Wired to create its look and feel. (Their firm remains in business today and recently designed the TED 2008 program.)

Executive editor Kevin Kelly collates Wired's heuristics from assembled senior staff during Wired's first retreat soon after the 1993 launch. On the list were a number of business and editorial standards, some of which were revolutionary for the magazine publishing industry back then and remain so even today: "a place people want to work," "entrepreneurial spirit," "should look like a large home office," "no editorial calendar, not marketing driven," "lead, not follow," "stay lean and mean," and "legendary contributor relations."

A man falling into a seemingly never-ending city appeared on the cover of Wired's third prototype. The collage is by artist Stuart Cudlitz.

The January/February 1980 issue of Language Technology, Rossetto and Metcalfe's first magazine venture, was published in Amsterdam with a small global circulation. Rossetto edited, and Metcalfe directed ad sales. The art director was Max Kisman, who would later join Wired TV and design many of its stunning visuals. Language Technology was about the people and companies creating and using technology to handle word-based information, from word processing to machine translation of natural languages. Kevin Kelly saw in this magazine what eventually happened with Wired: "It wanted to be bigger."

The cover of "The Wired Manifesto"—the first prototype of the magazine—featured one of its earliest and most prominent contributing writers, John Perry Barlow. The prototype was put together in a four-day charette in April 1992 by Rossetto, Metcalfe, Plunkett, and Kuhr in photographer Neil Selkirk's New York studio in Chelsea. Wired was one of the first publications to put writers on the covers, beginning with Bruce Sterling on the very first issue.

The magazine's first offices were located in the South Park area of San Francisco's SOMA (South of Market) neighborhood. The figure at the desk in the foreground is then-managing editor John Battelle, who later founded The Industry Standard, and more recently Federated Media. Kevin Kelly is silhouetted behind him by the window. And creative director John Plunkett is over to the left. The current Wired office sits not too far away along Third Street in SOMA—an industrial and tech-heavy neighborhood.

HotWired, which launched in late October 1994, was the first Web site with original content and Fortune 500 advertising. Rossetto's answer to the Web magazine, HotWired was editorially independent of the print publication and generated all its own content. It was also visually conceived by Barbara Kuhr and John Plunkett. The icons are by Max Kisman.

The lofty, technicolored HotWired office in 2005 was located one floor up from its current location at 520 Third Street in San Francisco. There are 125 people in this picture — average age 24. Suck, the first blog, was born here, too.

The stock certificate, from when Wired Ventures attempted to go public in 1996 contained (in very tiny type) the quote from Alfred North Whitehead: "It is the business of the future to be dangerous." The Goldman Sachs-led IPO failed, but the innovative and complex design was a clear success. The certificate was designed by Erik Adigard and art directed by John Plunkett.