Links for Tuesday February 8^th, 2011

• FTC appoints net neutrality expert Tim Wu as advisor: This is good news, if you ask me.

• Apple's New iPad in Production: Pretty much in-line with what I said back in October. Well, except for the weight thing. And there is a chance that the iPad 2 might come out earlier than late April. (via Mac Rumors)

• How Steve Jobs 'out-Japanned' Japan: Amazing article comparing Sony at its apex, to how Apple is now. Not to be missed if you're at all curious about how Apple has been so successful this past decade, and how Sony has lost its way.

• Larry Page's Google 3.0: Interesting article on who Google is managed internally, and how it's changing with the CEO. It's amazing how fast Google has gone from young, nimble startup to middle-aged Microsoft-ish clone. Only time will tell if Google's latest round of changes will help them avoid Microsoft's fate.

• Space stasis: What the strange persistence of rockets can teach us about innovation: Fantastic article from Neal Stephenson, on how the space race has stopped innovating:

  "There is no shortage of proposals for radically innovative space launch schemes that, if they worked, would get us across the valley to other hilltops considerably higher than the one we are standing on now—high enough to bring the cost and risk of space launch down to the point where fundamentally new things could begin happening in outer space. But we are not making any serious effort as a society to cross those valleys. It is not clear why."

  And on what this says about other areas of humanity's technological progress.