Esther Dyson To Train For Space Flight 38
DynaSoar writes "Esther Dyson, known to many as a founding and consistently guiding member of ICANN, and for working with the startups of Flickr, del.icio.us, Medscape and others, is now expanding her interests upwards. She recently announced that she will be heading to Moscow to train as backup astronaut for Charles Simonyi, who plans to fly aboard Soyuz TMA-14 next year. The US$3 million price tag won't be her first cash contribution towards personal space flight. She's already an investor in Space Adventures, the company that arranges the space tourist flights on Soyuz."
Ugh. Esther Dyson. (Score:3, Interesting)
I remember seeing her at a conference. (I don't remember which one.) She was going on about how the domain name system was innovative because it provided a flat address space for everyone on the planet. I'm not sure why phones, postal addresses or even email didn't make a better fit, but I suppose she doesn't run those.
She talked about all the delightful services that whatever she was hawking would provide. When she took Q&A, I asked if it wasn't indicative of something that people had gone to great lengths to avoid all this "value" she wanted to add to the network, and that the true value of the internet was at its endpoints. Damn it, now I wish I remembered it better. Still, I can feel my hackles rise whenever she's mentioned. It makes me think of "The Guy I Almost Was" and Mondo 2K and all that other hucksterism.
Re:Ugh. Esther Dyson. (Score:3, Interesting)
Somebody out there has a funny story about her coming into a Silicon Valley company as a consultant, giving a board room speech filled with technobabble and a pitch for a current investment of hers and walking out with a $10K fee. I can't find it on Google at the moment, perhaps somebody here has it. The quirky thing about it is that I can't separate fact from fiction on this one in my memory, which may be telling.