[Image from Futesaba]
Earlier this week in Lilongwe, Malawi, some enterprising fellows loaded up a truck with rebar. Unfortunately, they did not properly the weight bearing capabilities of the roof of the lorry cab. They could have benefited from a bit of
Failure Mode and Effects Analysis or FMEA after the mishap. There are important to understand forces at play here, tension and compression are the two that seem to be most relevant

[Image from Futesaba]
In loading the truck, they likely saw that putting the rebar flat on the bed would make it hang off the rear, bouncing with every bump and pothole. In order to make the bars less floppy, they bridged it between the bed and the cab. This could have worked out fine if they had a more stable structure at the cab end, designed to carry the heavy load of the bar. Here in the states, you see trucks with a back rack to facilitate just this kind of loading.

How do you carry incredibly heavy and awkward loads on your vehicle? Africa and the developing world do not have a corner on the market of stupid transportation tricks. It seems that at least a couple times a month I see a vehicle being driven down the road with either 1. the driver holding a piece of plywood on the roof by hand or 2. some crazy thing hanging way out of the vehicle or 3. a mattress on the roof of a car with air bulging up the front of the bedding.

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gollito writes in with news that Microsoft has released an open source alternative to Google's BigTable file system, which is used on large distributed computer clusters. Matt Asay writes for CNet: "I also believe that Microsoft's fear-mongering around open source cost it years of productivity and quality gains that it could have been delivering to customers through open source. I hope that reign of ignorance is over."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

[Photo from Godisa]

Approximately 10% of the world population has a disabling hearing impairment, and 80% of them live in developing countries. The most expensive part of a hearing aid is the battery, which needs to be continually replaced. The Solar Aid solar-powered hearing-aid battery recharger, developed in Botswana, helps those with hearing disabilities afford to continue in school and participate in economy activity. More than 7,000 units are in use in South America, Central America, Africa, and Asia. And because batteries are generally expensive everywhere, Godisa intends to make this affordable technology widely available not just in the developing countries but also in the United States and Europe.

[Via the other 90%]

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ChrisPaget writes "Thinking about buying Alienware (now owned by Dell)? Think again. After buying an almost-new Alienware laptop on eBay, I've spent the last week trying to get hold of a Smart Bay caddy to connect a second hard drive (about $150 for $5 of bent metal). Four different Alienware teams have refused to even give me a price on this accessory, instead accusing me of stealing the machine since I didn't buy it directly from their eBay store. They want me to persuade the eBay seller I did buy it from to add me as an authorized user of his Alienware account — they have no concept of 'ownership transfer' and instead assume that if you're not in their system, you must be a thief."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

After a week of watching the amalgamation of the 100 most followed twitterers, a few observations, and no conclusions.

1. I still hope that by amalgamating this group it will change it, make the people with all the followers more aware of how they look to their followers, and may inspire some movement.

2. There are a fair number of robot feeds in the top 100, channels that are just pushing links to stories that make money for the owners. Examples: @time, @guardiantech, nytimes, @techcrunch, @mashable.

3. The cutest of the top 100 is @anamariecox. Imho. Ymmv.

4. There's an awful lot of classic What I Had For Lunch type tweeting. The biggest offenders, the three Twitter guys, @ev, @biz and @jack. Same with @aplusk and the rappers and sports stars. They tweet infrequently and when they do they're borrring.

5. @oprah's fans got excited about Twitter for nothing. She's followed by 922K, follows 11 (all of them superstars) and has updated 38 times.

5a. Maybe something the stars aren't aware of or prepared for is how visible and transparent they are. In the non-twitter world we can't tell how much of their fan mail they respond to, or who they talk with and what they say when they're being themselves. On Twitter, we can. This might not be what they intended.

6. @timoreilly wins the prize for effort among the twitter superstars. It's pretty obvious he's doing it himself, or as obvious as it can be (he might pay someone to make it look like he's doing it himself).

7. I think people who tuned into it are as bored as I am. The usage was huge in the first few days, about 50K hits per day, but it's tailed off a lot now.

The Star Trek Bridge playset was, hands down, the best toy I owned as a child. I played with it for approximately 10,000 hours. Especially the whirly-twirly transporter cubicle. I loved the psychedelic cardboard viewscreens, the tippy chairs and furniture, the stick-on UI for same that was as inscrutable and ridiculous as the authentic show computers. This toy had the magic, a vinyl-covered, detailed, configurable kind of magic that made you want to play with it for hours and hours on end.

I kept my Bridge playset for all these years. It sat in my Toronto storage locker for a decade, and then got shipped to London, where it now resides, along with my action-figures, in my office. And it still has the magic.

And now: the toy has been reissued, along with all the original action figures, including the two-tone aliens and the lizard dudes. The crew have the tiny blue phasers and the same dead eyes and the miniatures plastic Blundstones from the future. And I just saw the set, in person, in a comics shop, and it still has the magic.

Star Trek: Retro Bridge Playset

Star Trek Retro Action Figures

Murilee sez, "Remember the first generation of cars with voice warnings, from the late-70s/early-80s era? The Datsun 810 was the first, and I've disassembled the voicebox from a junkyard unit. Turns out that Nissan used a tiny phonograph, complete with 3" record with 6 separate grooves (one for each message) and a precision solenoid-controlled stylus. All in a 3" cube. Coolest thing I've seen in a while."

1982 Datsun Voice Warning Box Used Tiny Phonograph Record, Just Like Moon Base Robots (Thanks, Murilee!)

Natalie from CRAFT sez: Diana Eng is hosting a Fashion Hacking: Open Working Studio event on May 10th (tomorrow!) at the NYC Resistor Hackspace in Brooklyn (397 Bridge Street, Floor 5).

Diana writes:

I will be bringing a bit of Project Runway to my hacker group, NYC Resistor on May 10th when we host Fashion Hacking: Open Working Studio. Come and hack fashion with us. BYOC (bring your own clothes) and we'll have the tailoring tools, sewing machines, conductive thread, LED's, soldering irons, and the Laser Cutter to help you hack clothes into fashionable technology. Fashion designers and hardware hackers will be on hand to help you.

This is an open working studio which means that you are free to circulate, work on your own project and look at other projects. Come to session 1, come to session 2, come to both sessions.

Session 1, 1-3 pm, $20
Session 2, 3-5 pm, $20
Buy tickets: http://fashionhacking.eventbrite.com/

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Hugh Pickens writes "Work resumed this week on the five-year project to link a chain of tower-mounted sensors and other surveillance equipment over most of the 2,000-mile border with Mexico. The network of cameras, radar, and communications gear is intended to speed deployment of US Border Patrol officers to intercept illegal immigrants, drug smugglers and other violators, yielding greater 'operational control' over the vast and rugged area. A $20M pilot project for the Secure Border Initiative, or 'SBInet,' carried out in the Bush administration, was generally considered a colossal IT failure. Since that time the DHS has given the prime contractor, Boeing, another $600M. The government says it has learned many lessons and made many changes in the program since the previous pilot rushed off-the-shelf equipment into operation without testing. The Obama administration has lowered the cost estimate for the 5-year project by $1.1B, to $6.7B, mainly by deferring work on the most difficult 200 miles of the border, in southwest Texas."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

For the last couple of months I've done a podcast every Sunday with Jay Rosen. Three Sundays ago he had a great idea, every week let's choose someone to honor as a source of inspiration to the new journalism we see emerging.

We alternate weeks, the first time he chose Edison Carter, the reporter on the Max Headroom TV series of the 80s. Then I chose Jon Postel, the man behind many of the open protocols of the Internet, and the keeper of its spirit, who passed away just as the Internet was becoming a huge societal force. And last week Jay chose Josh Marshall of Talking Point Memo. Now it's my turn.

I gave it a lot of thought. It seems we're doing the Yin and the Yang. Jay comes at it from the journalism side, and I approach from the tech side. This week I will continue in this mode.

My choice is Ted Nelson.

Nelson wrote a book called Computer Lib/Dream Machines, in the 1970s, in which he chronicled, in a very bloglike fashion (long before blogs existed of course) the path that computers took to become the ideal tools for thinking and collaboration. This was a very radical idea at the time, I know because I was talking to people about the same concepts, and getting told that computers are not creative tools, by people who supposedly knew better.

There were a small number of hippie computer types, not much like the guys who wore the nerd pocket protectors. We got dates, were gregarious and outgoing, liked to do drugs, and music -- and thought computers fit into the groovy lifestyle. It was kind of a lonely thing. The hippies didn't know what to make of us and neither did the nerds. But when Nelson's book crossed my path, and the paths of people like me, it gave us a sense that others saw it the same way.

Today, few question that computers are used for thinking and collaboration, although the people who say bloggers will never do the work of journalists sound a lot like the people who questioned computers as human tools in the 70s. The venture capitalists and entrepreneurs of Silicon Valley don't understand why someone would develop technology without a plan to get rich from it, but the hippie tech guys don't have a problem with that. Changing the world for the better is a good enough cause. Helping people share their knowledge and insight is most of what computers do, most people who use them have no hope of getting rich from using them, but they do it anyway. So while the attention focuses on the people who make the money, the real action is with the people who learn and teach and share with them.

Further, Nelson believed, as I did and still do, that computers were primarily tools to connect up to networks. Later Sun Microsystems would codify this with the slogan "The Network is the Computer."

For those who have read Nelson's book, you must have guessed that at some point I will choose Doug Engelbart, and you would be right. But I first learned of Engelbart's work through Nelson's book. I met Nelson before I met Engelbart. Neither of these heroes are perfect, but then heroes who are real people never are. But Nelson's work is monumental, it gave hope and confidence to a generation of people who did make a huge difference. That's good enough to be my choice for this week.

theodp writes "What do you do for an encore after you've shown the world it's possible to build a $2,000 car? Ratan Tata, head of India's giant Tata conglomerate, now plans to build, 30 miles outside of Mumbai, 1,200 tiny apartments that will sell for $7,800 to $13,400 each. Sure, they're small (floor plans), but keep in mind that you can pay a quarter of a million bucks for a 250-sq.-ft. studio in the East Village. Time reports that Tata has had to beef up security to handle the rush of buyers who want to plunk down their $200 deposits (yes, that's two hundred dollars!). Who would've thought you could make IKEA homes look pricey?" The Businessweek.com article says that the apartments are aimed at someone making $6,000 to $10,000 per year (Time says $5,000). In Mumbai, a call center operator with 10 to 20 years of experience barely qualifies at $6,400 annually. 70% of the country's 1.2 billion people live on 1/20 as much.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

IEEE Spectrum has compiled a deeply geeky and interesting article about "25 microchips that shook the world." Here's a bit about one of my faves, the Texas Instruments TMC0281 Speech Synthesizer from 1978. From IEEE Spectrum:

If it weren't for the TMC0281, E.T. would've never been able to "phone home." That's because the TMC0281, the first single-chip speech synthesizer, was the heart (or should we say the mouth?) of Texas Instruments' Speak & Spell learning toy. In the Steven Spielberg movie, the flat-headed alien uses it to build his interplanetary communicator. (For the record, E.T. also uses a coat hanger, a coffee can, and a circular saw.)

The TMC0281 conveyed voice using a technique called linear predictive coding; the sound came out as a combination of buzzing, hissing, and popping. It was a surprising solution for something deemed "impossible to do in an integrated circuit," says Gene A. Frantz, one of the four engineers who designed the toy and is still at TI. Variants of the chip were used in Atari arcade games and Chrysler's K-cars. In 2001, TI sold its speech-synthesis chip line to Sensory, which discontinued it in late 2007. But if you ever need to place a long, very-long-distance phone call, you can find Speak & Spell units in excellent condition on eBay for about US $50.

"25 Microchips That Shook The World"

This proud individual, Teressa Groenwald-Hagerman, is the first woman to kill an elephant with a bow and arrow. She reportedly spent eight months working out to handle a bow big enough to take down an elephant in Zimbabwe. From The Telegraph:

The huntswoman wrote her own blog about her trip to Zimbabwe where she found the elephant in 2007.

She describes leaving the animal overnight lying on its side before returning to check it was actually dead the next day.

On the hunting website 'Hunts of a Lifetime' Hagerman wrote: "A man by the name of Larry, who is a videographer for Orion Multi Media, bet me I couldn't shoot a buffalo or elephant with a bow.

"He indicated only one or two women had completed the buffalo with a bow and no woman had ever taken an elephant with a bow. Of course, I couldn't turn down the challenge."

"Woman hunter kills elephant with bow and arrow" (Thanks, Kirsten Anderson!)

theodp writes "Mirror, mirror, on the wall, what's the noblest Amazon Kindle DX project of all? While other universities announced similar programs, Princeton is boasting its project is unique in that it will focus on sustainability by reducing the amount of electronic-reserve course materials that students print. Under the pilot program, $60,000 will reportedly be used to provide 50 lucky Princeton students with $489 Kindle DX devices loaded with materials for three courses. In a FAQ, students are told not to worry about 'this time of severe economic constraints' — Princeton and Amazon have managed to tap into a fund specifically endowed to support sustainability projects to provide Kindles at no cost. In addition to a $30,000 grant from the High Meadows Foundation, which is headed by Princeton alum Carl Ferenbach (who, coincidentally, serves on the Board of Trustees of the Environmental Defense Fund with the wife of Amazon Director John Doerr), a matching amount will be provided by Princeton alum Jeff Bezos' Amazon. The E-reader Pilot Program has more information."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

daemonburrito writes "Last week, we learned about Elsevier publishing a bogus journal for Merck. Now, several librarians say that they have uncovered an entire imprint of 'advertorial' publications. Excerpta Medica, a 'strategic medical communications agency,' is an Elsevier division. Along with the now infamous Australasian Journal of Bone and Joint Medicine, it published a number of other 'journals.' Elsevier CEO Michael Hansen now admits that at least six fake journals were published for pharmaceutical companies."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Glyn Moody writes "They might be, if a new European Commission consumer protection proposal, which suggests 'licensing should guarantee consumers the same basic rights as when they purchase a good: the right to get a product that works with fair commercial conditions,' becomes law. The idea of making Microsoft pay for the billions of dollars of damage caused by flaws in its products is certainly attractive, but where would this idea leave free software coders?"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

mikesd81 writes "Google plans on advertising with spots promoting its Chrome browser this weekend. Google Japan had already released a 30-second video promoting Chrome on YouTube, but the company will distribute that video through the Google TV Ads network this weekend as an experiment to see if it can drum up interest in Chrome. Google advertised their browser on the New York Times' website on Wednesday."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

[Photo from Pauric on Flickr]

MAKE Flickr pool member Pauric is treating himself to a nice birthday month of making.

Day 4 of my effort to make a lasting 'heirloom' object everyday for a month; a wooden case for my keyboard to go with the design desk project

For one month, starting on my birthday, I will make something of lasting value everyday.

One of his projects is another run at the cablebone excess wire organizer, featured by Phillip a few years ago.

By tagging his photos for the project, it makes the work more accessible to the rest of us. If we want to do a similar project, making an heirloom object every day for a week or a month or a year, we can join our photos with his by adopting his tag makeaday. When we use tags on our work, it helps us to create a more effective search system. Other people can find our work more easily, and we can use it for ourselves to find particular photos, videos, links or posts. If you have a Flickr account, you can check out your tag cloud and see what you are into. You can also look at the MAKE Flickr pool's tag cloud as well to see what all of us are into.

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Meet CCRMA, a group of musical makers who stretch the sonic boundaries by turning personal computers into an electronic symphony. In the Workshop, John Park hacks a Wii controller and turns it into a personal flight recorder that can measure the G forces of roller coasters and other high-speed activities. In the Toolbox segment, William Gurstelle demonstrates the slick, back-cutting action of a super-sharp Japanese saw. The Maker Channel features a tesla coil-powered guitar amp, an RFID reader implanted in a human hand, and LED fan sign to bring to baseball games, and a solar powered bicycle gondola.

Get the m4v, subscribe in iTunes, or what in HD on Blip.

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Afforess writes "In a new file submitted to the Securities and Exchange Commission, Sun Microsystems admitted that 'we have identified potential violations of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, the resolution of which could possibly have a material effect on our business.' The Foreign Corrupt Practices Act makes it 'unlawful to make a payment to a foreign official for the purpose of obtaining or retaining business for or with, or directing business to, any person.' Yet, Sun would not release further details, only that it 'took remedial action.' Oracle, the new owner of Sun Microsystems, also said that they had prior knowledge of the infraction, yet also refused to release any details."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

narramissic writes "In a recent blog post, Josh Fruhlinger muses on the possibility of 3G radio receivers turning up in future Mac notebooks (as foretold by Apple job postings and the mention of WWAN hardware in Snow Leopard beta releases). 'At first glance,' says Fruhlinger, 'this seems like a reasonably awesome idea.' But will the target market be willing to take on the additional telecom charge? 'And, more to the point,' he says, 'most of us have gotten accustomed to the idea of one Internet connection per household, shared with a wireless router. The latter idea could be covered by a router that connects to the Internet over a 3G connection — something like the MiFi hotspot. It wouldn't surprise me if Apple had such a thing in the pipeline, an Airport station (Airport Mobility?) that didn't need to be plugged into the wall. That would explain the search for 3G experts, anyway.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Today is the start of programming at the Toronto Comics Arts Festival, featuring everyone from Scott McCloud to R.Stevens and plenty in between. It's on at the Metro Reference Library, with the show starting at 9 and the programming starting at 10. I can't find any info on admission prices -- I know it was free in years gone by, though.

Toronto Comics Arts Festival

Aaron ALAI's interactive sound piece, titled Stochasticity, explores the contrasrt of imprecise human behavior against rigid techological systems - and it looks like fun too.

When someone uses my art piece they are directly interacting with a very precise electronic tool. It produces musical tones based on the amount of resistance sensed in trails of water. The resistance changes unpredictably, and thus this is where the variability in the system arises from. The water evaporates, the user will flex their muscles, their hearts will pump blood at varying rates, and the conductivity of their skin will change. All of these variables change the placement of the notes in the water and make the system unreliable. I found it interesting that even though imperfect animals such as ourselves are plagued with randomness, we are capable of producing reliable highly precise tools that we can indirectly interact with.

More info available on Aaron's site.

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storagedude writes "The WSJ has a cool article on how the race to digitize literary treasures has led to a trove of new discoveries. Quoting: 'Improved technology is allowing researchers to scan ancient texts that were once unreadable — blackened in fires or by chemical erosion, painted over or simply too fragile to unroll. Now, scholars are studying these works with X-ray fluorescence, multispectral imaging used by NASA to photograph Mars and CAT scans used by medical technicians ... By taking high-resolution digital images in 14 different light wavelengths, ranging from infrared to ultraviolet, Oxford scholars are reading bits of papyrus that were discovered in 1898 in an ancient garbage dump in central Egypt. So far, researchers have digitized about 80% of the collection of 500,000 fragments, dating from the 2nd century B.C. to the 8th century A.D. The texts include fragments of unknown works by famous authors of antiquity, lost gospels and early Islamic manuscripts.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

[Image from Howtopedia]
The Treadle Pump design is very simple and effective at helping people to bring water to their crops.

Treadle Pump is a foot operated water lifting device that can irrigate small plots of land of small holders in regions that have higher water table (not deeper than 25 feet) A low cost system , simple in design and easily manageable it appropriately answers the irrigation need for the small farmers .with an internal rate of return of 100% and a benefit cost ratio of 5,treadle pump is an ideal investment for small land holders whose savings are as small as $12 to $15.

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Tinkerlog posted great instructions on how to create your own arcade controller and set it up with your favorite ROM. For all you emulation lovers who need that extra level of finesse, this will work with USB and MAME. Tinkerlog writes:

HID stands for Human Interface Device class. Common devices of this class are keyboards, mice and joysticks. The great thing, that this interface brings in, is, the devices don't need a specific device driver. If they behave according to the USB HID spec, then they are automatically recognized by all OSs. Every device sends a report, in which it states, which kind of device it is and how it wants to report its data.

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Parz writes "The recent announcement that the upcoming Ghostbusters game will be a timed PlayStation exclusive in the PAL territories — revealed a mere month before release — has set a nasty precedent which could have long-term repercussions for the industry. This Gameplayer article explores how this generation of gaming has spiraled into a tit-for-tat war on third-party exclusivity deals instigated by Sony and Microsoft, and the effect it is having on the psychology of the consumers. The Ghostbusters developers aren't pleased by Sony's deal, and the Guardian questions whether the game will be big enough to really affect console sales."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Ranjit Bhatnagar and Nick Yulman are working on this sound sculpture for the Coney Island Museum; I think it's coming along swimmingly!

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Anonymous Entrepreneur writes "I run a small technology startup company; so small that our offices are still located in a room in my home. We are just some young friends, fresh from college, and we haven't started having regular sales, as 99% of our time is invested in development. A large corporation has just approached us, trying to persuade us to sell our company. The money is fair enough, and the employment conditions would seem excellent, since they would enable us to manage good-sized motivated teams, but we are very emotionally attached to our development and we place great importance to being independent. We founded our company because we didn't want to follow rules. We wanted to be the ones who make the rules instead. Money really doesn't mean much to us as long as we can do whatever we want while excelling at our passions. We feel that by accepting the offer, we couldn't achieve the maximum of our potential, and one of us joked that if we get in contact with the corporate environment and accept their money, we risk becoming lazy. Another member is more pragmatic, saying that accepting some money now is better than waiting for the development to go gold, even though all of us agree that if we finished our thing, we'd earn more than what the corporation has offered us. We would be very interested to know your thoughts and viewpoints, especially if you have ever faced a similar dilemma."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

As we get ready for The Free Summit, I was thinking about some of the recent posts here on Techdirt, and realizing a really common fallacy that seems to destroy all debates around "free." It's the implicit assumption that "free" means no business model. We saw it with law professor Justin Hughes' defense of copyright in The Economist debate over copyright, where he states:

What we have now is a mixed economy for expression in which some expression is produced under a patronage model (foundation grants, universities), some expression is produced under the open source model (Linux, blogs), and some expression is produced under a profit/incentive model of copyright.

And we see it when David Simon goes to Congress and says:

It costs money to do the finest kind of journalism. And how anyone can believe that the industry can fund that kind of expense by giving its product away online to aggregators and bloggers is a source of endless fascination to me. A freshman marketing major at any community college can tell you that if you don't have a product for which you can charge people, you don't actually have a product.

Both of those statements are based on the implicit assumption that "free" means "non-profit" or "not a business." Yet, nothing is further from the truth. Free has always been a part of many business models, and when most supporters of "free" are talking about isn't that content creation and journalism go to an "all amateur/all non-profit" model. No one is saying that at all. We're saying that they learn to embrace other business models that rely on copyright as a kind of crutch.

When you've been relying on that crutch for so long, you forget that you have two legs of your own and can make do without the crutch. We're seeing it all the time, with content based business models that don't rely on copyright which have been shown to be more successful than the old copyright crutch business models. There are lots of ways to make money that involve "free" as a part of the business model.

So, from now on, whenever you see someone arguing against free, and implicitly assuming that "free" means there is no business model, correct them. Let them know that they're arguing against a total strawman. No one says the professional class of content creators or journalists is about to go away. We're saying that they'll earn their money in a different way, and it won't rely on charging directly for their content, but on other goods that their content makes much more valuable.

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whoever57 writes "In response to the school shooting in March in which 16 people were killed, the German Government plans to ban all games in which players shoot at each other with pellets. The rationale for this is that 'paintball trivializes violence and risks lowering the threshold for committing violent acts.' Fines could be up to 5,000 euros."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

whoever57 writes "In response to the school shooting in March in which 16 people were killed, the German Government plans to ban all games in which players shoot at each other with pellets. The rationale for this is that 'paintball trivializes violence and risks lowering the threshold for committing violent acts.' Fines could be up to 5,000 euros."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Hugh Pickens writes "Google, the wireless industry, and consumer advocates have come together to support a bill that would require the federal government to take a complete inventory of the national airwaves to determine what spectrum is being used, how it is being used and who is using it. The government needs to clean up its sloppy record keeping, they say, or the US risks running out of wireless capacity with the increasing use of the mobile Internet. 'Radio spectrum is a natural resource, something that here in the US is owned by all of us American citizens,' wrote Richard Whitt, Google's counsel for telecom and media. 'Most of us don't give it much thought — and yet use of these airwaves is precisely what makes many of our modern communication systems possible.' The new law, if passed, would require the Federal Communications Commission and the National Telecommunications & Information Administration to report on the use of all spectrum bands between 300 megahertz and 3.5 gigahertz, including information on the licenses or government user operating in each band and whether the spectrum is actually in use. The unusual alliance between Google, public interest groups, and big telecommunications companies may be temporary. The telecom companies want to have the opportunity to buy any extra spectrum at an auction while Google advocates the use of new technologies that would allow the spectrum to be shared by whoever needs it."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Hugh Pickens writes "Google, the wireless industry, and consumer advocates have come together to support a bill that would require the federal government to take a complete inventory of the national airwaves to determine what spectrum is being used, how it is being used and who is using it. The government needs to clean up its sloppy record keeping, they say, or the US risks running out of wireless capacity with the increasing use of the mobile Internet. 'Radio spectrum is a natural resource, something that here in the US is owned by all of us American citizens,' wrote Richard Whitt, Google's counsel for telecom and media. 'Most of us don't give it much thought — and yet use of these airwaves is precisely what makes many of our modern communication systems possible.' The new law, if passed, would require the Federal Communications Commission and the National Telecommunications & Information Administration to report on the use of all spectrum bands between 300 megahertz and 3.5 gigahertz, including information on the licenses or government user operating in each band and whether the spectrum is actually in use. The unusual alliance between Google, public interest groups, and big telecommunications companies may be temporary. The telecom companies want to have the opportunity to buy any extra spectrum at an auction while Google advocates the use of new technologies that would allow the spectrum to be shared by whoever needs it."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

I just added a new feature to 100twt.com tonight, with the help of Daniel and Jason at Disqus: You can now comment on the tweets of people in the Top 100. That's just the first toe-dip into commenting on tweets in general, a starting point.

To kick it off I posted a comment on a tweet by @ev, where he talks about a tweetranet at a staff meeting at Twitter HQ today. This is a topic much in the air these days after a blog post by Matt Mullenweg at wordpress.com about a behind-the-firewall Twitter-like system they're using there.

Lots of opportunity here, we did something similar in 2001 at UserLand. It's all coming back around folks.

The cool thing about comments, they're not limited to 140 chars!

Alan Parekh, of HackedGadgets, writes

Daniel Eindhoven sent in his latest creation, this is one killer looking coil gun!

"Fully semi-automatic, up to 14 shots.
Capable of delivering over 18J kinetic energy, and speeds up to 110km/h! (42 gram projectiles). It's a single stage gun, using a 8800uF(4×2200) capacitor bank with max 400v (704J). Max shot efficiency is 2.8% but reaches almost 4% at lower voltages.

Charge time for 300v (12J kinetic energy 396J capacitor bank) is 8 seconds for the mains connection,
and when using the internal batteries about 90 seconds. It also has a Digital voltage display.

Coil overheat after 14 shots at 300v.
Total weight: 5 kilogram.
Total spend: ~~ 100 Euro
Construction time: ~~40 Hrs"

[via HackedGadgets]

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If David and Goliath were to have fought today, we would probably find Congress holding a hearing about why the the "sling" was an unfair advantage, and that future sling users would need to stand within swords reach of their opponents. But, being such an adept warrior, how is it possible that Goliath never foresaw the advent of the sling? In a particularly inspirational piece in the New Yorker, entitled Annals of Innovation: How David Beats Goliath, Malcolm Gladwell explores just how underdogs topple giants. Gladwell follows a basketball team of 12-year-old girls, coached by TIBCO founder Vivek Ranadivè, as they encounter teams whose members are taller and more skillful than they are. But, by employing the full-court press for the whole game, an unconventional tactic that confuses and exhausts teams that are used to more traditional play, they started to win games. By changing the way that the game was played to tailor to their own strengths (and by training them to exploit these unique strengths), Ranadivè was not just winning games, but dominating other teams so much as to ultimately take his team to the national championships.

What was perhaps most fascinating in the article was the research conducted by political scientist Ivan Arreguin-Toft. Arreguin-Toft looked at every war in the past two hundred years and found that when the weaker combatants changed the rules, their win percentage went from 28.5% to 63.6%. That's an astounding figure.

When applied to the business world, it reveals a vast field of opportunity for entrepreneurs, who are, by definition, scrappy upstarts changing the rules to get ahead. People often insist that big companies can simply steal the ideas of the new companies that aren't "protected." In reality, those ideas are oftentimes so game-changing, that established companies scoff at them. And then, after it is evident that they have been left behind, they angrily complain of unfairness, when in reality, the opportunity was always there, they just chose to rest on their laurels. In the past few years, Google has helped tear down the conventional advertising wisdom that ad spending is inherently wasteful, as reflected in John Wanamaker's famous statement: "Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don't know which half." By building tools that allow advertisers to closely track and monitor the performance of their ad budgets down to the penny, Google has drawn the ire of traditional newspapers, who have seen their print ad market shrink as they look for a way to compete in this new, ROI-driven world that Google has defined. Similarly, when Craigslist first started, its audience paled in comparison to that of the newspapers. By offering a simple, bare-bones service that only charged for certain classified ads, it too changed the game and now thrives in the face of the struggling newspapers.

That said, in today's world, Google and Craigslist have become the Goliaths, and are vulnerable to the same rule changing tactics that they employed to get to where they are today. So, newspapers, perhaps instead of trying to have Congress officially un-change the rules and legislate your businesses back to health, maybe it's time for your own style of a full-court press and figure out how to innovate and change the rules yourself. That said, history tells us that incumbents have a very difficult time breaking free from their own rules, so my money would be on an upstart that's brewing in someone's garage right now.

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Check out this detailed R2D2 reproduction. Using the accelerometer or OSC slider control on the iPhone makes this R2 unit's dome whirl back and forth. There are also buttons that control banks of sounds for different moods. Eventually more controls will make it over to the iPhone. Right now it's taking its first steps forward.

Astromech R2D2 [via ApplePhoneHacks]

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Red Flayer writes "Popular Mechanics is running a story that describes one of the more interesting explanations for the Tunguska explosion of 1908: 'Now, a controversial new scientific study suggests that a chunk of a comet caused the 5-10 megaton fireball, bouncing off the atmosphere and back into orbit around the sun. The scientists have even identified a candidate Tunguska object — now more than 100 million miles away — that will pass close to Earth again in 2045.' Note that Popular Mechanics' definition of 'close to' is somewhat different than most people's — the comet will be 3.8 million miles away at its closest. At any rate, the key to this theory is that hydrogen and oxygen in the ice shard exploded upon entering the atmosphere, resulting in the difficult-to-explain blast pattern (previous theories contend that the object must have 'skipped' on the atmosphere and then re-entered at the exact same spot). This would also, sadly, dash the theory that Nikola Tesla was responsible."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.