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Google says the First Amendment should apply to its search results — even if this allows the company to favor its own products over those of its competitors. Is this a legitimate argument? photo:  Aaron Amot Rumors are swirling that the federal government is about to sue Google over claims that the company rigs its search results. Google has responded by invoking its right to free speech — but not everyone is buying this. Tim Wu, a prominent law professor at Columbia, is not convinced that Google is invoking its First Amendment rights in good faith. He suggests that Google and other big companies are cynically invoking constitutional freedoms as part of a corporate deregulation agenda. “We’re living in a golden age of First Amendment opportunism,” said Wu, speaking Friday at a Penn Law School conference titled  “The Evolving Internet.” In Wu’s view, search results are not really speech in the first space. Instead, he argues, Google’s algorithms are closer to oth...

Dr. Michio Kaku talks about brain-to-brain communication, recording videos of your thoughts and the fears of science fiction. There’s no doubt that the internet is creating what is called an intelligent planet, that is, the skin of the planet earth is becoming a network by which intelligent creatures communicate with each other. But that’s just the first step. Some people think that the next step in the coming decades is not going to be the internet. It’s going to be Brain Net because we’re at the point now where we can actually connect computers to the living mind. In fact, I was just at Berkeley a few weeks ago where I had a demonstration of this: we can actually create videos of your thoughts. These videos are not perfectly accurate, but I saw a demonstration in a laboratory at Berkeley where you can actually see in a video screen what people are thinking.