s31523 writes "A while back it was reported that cell phone use was given the OK on Emirate airlines. The BBC is now reporting European agencies back the use of cell phones in air. Plans have been developed to introduce technology that allow cell phone use on planes without any risk of interference. A spokesman for the UK regulator Ofcom said there were still many stages to pass through before final approval was given to the roll out of the plans, but the regulator said that the technology could be implemented next year."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

WheezyJoe writes "The Washington Post reports that a little old lady took a hammer to Comcast. Apparently fed up with the lousy service she received from a botched Comcast installation of "triple-play", and a completely humiliating experience at a customer service center, 75-year-old Mona "The Hammer" Shaw took her claw hammer back to the customer service center and bludgeoned the office equipment into tiny plastic pieces."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

It always amuses us when supporters of the patent system attack our views on patents as being somehow uninformed. Over the years, we've pointed to plenty of rather detailed research on how the patent system tends to hold back innovation -- and how there's no correlation between stronger patent systems and innovation. Usually, when we point this out, the response is to insult us, rather than respond to the research. Fortunately, though, those doing this kind of research keep getting plenty of validation for their work. We've already pointed out that at least one Nobel Laureate in Economics, Joe Stiglitz, has been speaking out on how patents harm innovation. Now comes the news that one of the latest economics Nobel winners has also done research in the space. Evan R.S. writes in to point out that the NY Times article on the winners notes that Nobel winner Eric S. Maskin recent research is on how patents can hold back innovation. The good folks over at Against Monopoly (who include some economists who have been leading the charge in studying this topic) point us to Maskin's paper on this topic. The paper argues that patents tend to harm innovation in high tech fields, mainly because so much innovation is sequential and complementary -- at which point handing out monopolies is guaranteed to slow down the innovation process, because the innovation gets more expensive (need to license any time you do anything), more limiting (because you have to get approval before innovating) and much more time consuming (especially if you have to keep going to court). This isn't a new idea or even new research -- but it's yet another reminder that the economic research continually shows how patents will often hold back innovation, rather than help it.

Some small but significant details of the next major release of Windows have emerged via a presentation at the University of Illinois by Microsoft engineer Eric Traut. His presentation focuses on an internal project called "MinWin," designed to optimize the Windows kernel to a minimum footprint, and for which will be the basis for the Windows 7 kernel.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

There's a lot of talk about the new "guidelines" that were announced today mainly by the big television studios, along with a few smaller players in the online video space. The press coverage highlights two things: this is a big deal and it's notable that Google didn't agree to join. I'm not sure either thing is really true. Reading through the actual principles, about the only thing that's noteworthy is how pointless they are. If anything, they're basically a "full employment for Audible Magic" document in that they require companies to install the type of filters that Audible Magic is selling (though, it's still questionable how well they work). There are some totally meaningless statements about supporting fair use, but no details on how that's actually to be done. In other words, these principles are basically "everyone should install filters that block unauthorized content and... uh... the content companies will remain aware that fair use sort of exists sometimes." That's somewhat meaningless. Google's reason for not joining, even though it has come up with its own filters, is that it doesn't see why it should agree to stand by any specific guidelines that go above and beyond what the law requires, as there could be conditions under which such guidelines hold back necessary innovation. The bigger point, though, is how truly meaningless these guidelines are. If those guidelines are truly effective in stopping some unauthorized content on these sites, that content (and many users) will simply migrate elsewhere. In other words, it won't stop that unauthorized use of content and it won't help any of the companies that have agreed to the principles. That means that the impact of such things is likely to be pretty much nil.

cleetus writes "Today Senator Chris Dodd decided to put a hold on the FISA bill, one of the provisions of which would have granted immunity to any telecom which, if found to have acted in good faith, violated U.S. laws in turning over customer data to the government. According to TPM Election Central, "By doing this, Dodd can effectively hold up the telecom immunity bill, because bills are supposed to have unanimous consent in the Senate before going forward. One Senator can make it very difficult to bring a bill to the floor by objecting to allowing it to go to a vote." This throws a fairly big roadblock in front of this bill, covered by Slashdot earlier today."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

TJ_Phazerhacki writes "A new high tech weapon system demonstrated one of the prime concerns circling smarter and smarter methods of defense last week — an Oerlikon GDF-005 cannon went wildly out of control during live fire test exercises in South Africa, killing 9. Scarily enough, this is far from the first instance of a smart weapon 'turning' on its handlers. 'Electronics engineer and defence company CEO Richard Young says he can't believe the incident was purely a mechanical fault. He says his company, C2I2, in the mid 1990s, was involved in two air defence artillery upgrade programmes, dubbed Projects Catchy and Dart. During the shooting trials at Armscor's Alkantpan shooting range, "I personally saw a gun go out of control several times," Young says. "They made a temporary rig consisting of two steel poles on each side of the weapon, with a rope in between to keep the weapon from swinging. The weapon eventually knocked the pol[e]s down."' The biggest concern seems to be finding the glitches in the system instead of reconsidering automated arms altogether."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

It seems that everyone wants to be the person who calls the next bursting bubble, as we're suddenly seeing a... well... "bubble" in articles and blog posts worrying about whether or not we're in a new dot com bubble that's bound to burst at some point soon. The latest such discussion seems to be focused around a NY Times article on the frothiness of Silicon Valley these days, leading various commentators to agree or disagree with the idea that we're in a bubble and/or that the inevitable bursting of the bubble is about to happen. Instead of weighing in on one side or the other, I'd like to argue that it doesn't (and shouldn't) matter to most entrepreneurs. What happens may change your strategy, but it isn't necessarily a bad thing.

I have a presentation that I've done a few times at various events in Silicon Valley (and which I'll be doing again in a few months in Scotland) which is really focused on the history behind Techdirt and the changes we've made over time to our strategy, plan and business model. The point of the presentation is to make some suggestions in how to build a sustainable company that doesn't go out of business at the slightest hint of a downturn -- and I spend a fair amount of time talking about "bubbles" and why they shouldn't matter to most entrepreneurs. That's because everything has a relative price -- and when some things get more "expensive" (or scarce), other things tend to get "cheap" (or abundant). The trick is simply recognizing what's cheap at what point and what's expensive. Then focus on buying what's cheap and avoiding what's expensive. So, for example, after the dot com bubble burst, it was certainly true that money in terms of venture capital dollars became "expensive." That is, it was relatively harder to get. It was scarce -- and even if you could get it, it was often at great cost.

If you grew up in the dot com bubble, where success seemed to be judged on how much money you had raised, then of course this would seem to be awful. But, if you looked around, you realized that plenty of other stuff had become "cheap" or abundantly available. Technology, for example, was getting cheaper all the time. Remember all those stories about how cheap it was to startup a company these days? That isn't because of any magical change in the world. It was because companies who discovered that VC money was "expensive" were realizing they could be more creative and do other things. Another important thing that happened after the bubble burst is that good employees became "cheap." I don't mean that they could necessarily be employed for low wages (though that was true in some cases), but they were suddenly much more available. There were lots of fantastic people who were out of work or unhappy in dead end jobs. If you had a good idea, it was a lot easier to hire good people. Marketing was also quite cheap, because there was a lot less noise to compete with.

These days, things are a little different. Hiring good people is getting increasingly difficult. They're scarce -- and, thus, expensive. Marketing is a lot trickier, as you need to stand out from all that noise. But, the point is that everything is relative again. So, it shouldn't be any surprise at all to see that lots of money is flowing from VCs again. As things like people and marketing get more expensive, it only makes sense that the investment money gets "cheaper." It really just becomes a big pendulum. So, if you're working on a startup and are worried about the possibility of a bursting bubble, at least recognize that it only impacts one resource that you're looking for, and many of the others are likely to get cheaper as well, meaning that if the bubble bursts, you probably won't need as much VC money anyway. So, stop worrying about the bubble, and learn to buy into what's abundant and avoid what's scarce.

Vosges Haut-Chocolate offers a milk chocolate bar laced with smoked Applewood bacon bits. From the product description:

Crisp, buttery, compulsively irresistible bacon and milk chocolate combination has long been a favorite of mine. I started playing with this combination at the tender age of six while eating chocolate chip pancakes drenched in maple syrup. Beside my chocolate-laden cakes laid three strips of fried bacon, just barely touching a sweet pool of maple syrup. Just a bite of the bacon was too salty and yearned for the sweet kiss of chocolate syrup. In retrospect, perhaps this was a turning point, for on that plate something magical happened: the beginnings of a combination so ethereal and delicious that it would haunt my thoughts until I found the medium to express it--chocolate.

Link (Thanks, Jason Tester!)

An anonymous reader writes "A law firm with all sorts of interesting views on copyright has decided to go the extra mile. As reported on Tech Dirt, they've decided that viewing the HTML source of their site is a violation of copyright. From the site's EULA: 'We also own all of the code, including the HTML code, and all content. As you may know, you can view the HTML code with a standard browser. We do not permit you to view such code since we consider it to be our intellectual property protected by the copyright laws. You are therefore not authorized to do so.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

It really was just a month ago that AT&T's CEO said forced bundles were bad. Specifically, he said forced bundling "is an old mind-set. We need to get over it." Apparently, it's not that easy. Broadband Reports lets us know that AT&T's new U-Verse service requires you to bundle broadband internet access with TV -- but it's okay, because they claim it's got nothing to do with how desperate the company is for TV subscribers, but because it's really the best thing for customers (and, apparently, those customers are too dumb to make that decision on their own): "Because AT&T U-verse members will gain the most features and benefits from having both AT&T U-verse TV and AT&T U-verse Enabled Internet, Internet must always be bundled with TV." Old mind-set indeed.

Dennis Eusebio asks:

Many design thinkers really advocate deep, rich design research. Its a lot of documentation, interviewing, meetings and even more documentation just to get to the planning/prototyping stage. After reading some of the literature 37signals has put out, it seems like you guys stray away from this workflow in general. What’s your general workflow like? Is it different from traditional design workflow?

We conduct research all the time. But it’s a different kind.

It’s important to know that research is guesswork. The further out you try to guess, the bigger your margin of error. Like you said, many people do research before they start building their product. They write lots of documents and diagrams and specifications. The problem is, it’s all hypothetical. Until you’ve actually thrown the ball at the wall, you don’t know how it’ll bounce back.

People often think that research is like preparing for a long journey. Like the more food you stow on the ship the safer you are. But you don’t want to go on a long journey. You want to take as short a journey as possible, and come back for a reality check. See how you’re doing, then go for another short trip. Long journeys are the death of software.

I said we do a different kind of research. Here’s how we do it. We build something, then we collect feedback on what we built. For unreleased products, that feedback is our own opinions and review process. Does it do what we wanted? Does it feel right? Is it easy to understand? Will it support more features and future changes down the road? In the case of released products, we always listen to emails and forum posts from our customers. In both cases, the feedback on what we’ve built arms us for the next phase.

It’s like a conversation. You don’t sit down at the cafe, listen to your friend for two hours straight, and then talk for two hours straight. You take turns, constantly going back and forth, and the discussion finds its way.

Of course, you might wonder how to start. We build products we need ourselves, so our initial research is made of our own wishes, itches, and frustrations. When it comes to client work, my best advise is to become friends. Spend time together and discuss what they do until you can see through their eyes a bit. Pay special attention to their language and the words they use. Make notes, but don’t put them in the documentation shrine. As soon as you know enough to build the first, basic feature, do it. Break away for a week or two and build it. Then come back, talk about it, learn more, and decide what to build next.

Research can make you feel informed, but I guarantee that building real software in many small steps gives you a lot more knowledge and confidence. If you’re interested in how to better share headspace with your clients, I highly recommend absorbing the Ubiquitous Language pattern from Domain Driven Design.

Jesse Brown from CBC Radio's SearchEngine sez, "This week's Search Engine is a special episode that may be of particular interest to BoingBoing readers. It's entirely devoted to the political and cultural impact of video games in China. We cover the gamut: anti-gaming laws, 'internet addiction' paranoia, propaganda games by the state, and the most thoughtful documentary about gold-farming I've yet heard." MP3 Link, Podcast feed SearchEngine homepage

(Disclosure: I am a paid columnist for SearchEngine)

For just over $1,000, GlamGuns will sell you this super-custom Hello Kitty AK-47 assault rifle. Comes with hand-crocheted shoulder-stock muffler. Link (via Neatorama)

Viacom has announced that it's going to post the entire eight-year Daily Show archive, with advertising, to the web, and include with it a bunch of community and mash-up features. This is great news -- but can Viacom deliver a service that's 0.25% as good as YouTube (whom they're suing for $1 billion)? Given that, as of this moment, I can't get the Viacom site to serve me any video, the signs are not hopeful.

Viacom's decision to post its entire archive--while fighting YouTube in the courts--sets the scene for a battle between the established media players and their high profile entertainment brands against the user generated content sites, most notable YouTube.

Link (via /.)