TangAddict writes "Dr. Alan Weston, who previously invented bungee jumping, led a team of scientists at NASA Ames Research Center to build a $4 million dollar spacecraft in less than two years. The Modular Common Spacecraft Bus is designed to accept payloads of up to 50kg. and can be used for a variety of missions including a rendezvous with asteroids, orbiting Earth or Mars, and landing on the moon. When NASA officials saw the first flight test, they offered Weston and his team $80 million to use their design for the LADEE mission, which will gather dust and atmosphere samples from the moon in 2011."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Congress curtailed the FBI's ability to use National Security Letters (NSLs) a few years ago after it became clear that the FBI was widely abusing the process to request information from organizations with no judicial oversight and with built in gag orders forbidding recipients from talking about receiving the letters. However, the FBI is still using the letters in some cases. Last fall, it sent one to Brewster Kahle and the Internet Archive, demanding info on an Archive user while forbidding Kahle from talking about the letter to anyone but his lawyers. Kahle, the EFF and the ACLU fought back in court and have won, getting the FBI to rescind the demand and also removing part of the gag order, allowing Kahle to say he received the letter (though not discussing what info it demanded). As the EFF points out, this should serve as a blueprint for how others can challenge questionable NSLs as well.

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Just as IsoHunt is gearing up to fight its MPAA lawsuit, a judge has ordered TorrentSpy to pay $110 million to the MPAA in a similar lawsuit. However, despite the MPAA's Dan Glickman giving the expected "this is a warning to other such sites" quote, this actually shouldn't have much of an impact on other such cases -- as the details are somewhat different here. The problem with TorrentSpy's case was that the company was found to have destroyed evidence, which resulted in the ruling. It had little to do with the actual issues at hand. And, yes, while the "destroyed evidence" claim was somewhat exaggerated when the judge included TorrentSpy's refusal to spy on its users, the destruction of evidence went further than just not spying on users. The company was found to have deleted specific evidence, including forum posts and directory info. So, unless all the other torrent search engines out there also deleted evidence, it's hard to see how this case acts as a warning to anyone over anything other than the stupidity of destroying evidence. As for getting any money, given that TorrentSpy has shut down, the MPAA probably won't be getting any money -- not that they'd be giving it to moviemakers anyway.

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RickRussellTX writes "The DOE awarded $126.6 million in grants today to projects that will pump 1 million tons of CO2 into underground caverns at sites in California and Ohio. Environmental groups call carbon sequestration "a scam", claiming that it is too expensive and uncertain to be competitive with non-coal alternatives like wind and solar. I just hope nobody drops a Mentos down the wrong pipe."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

RickRussellTX writes "The DOE awarded $126.6 million in grants today to projects that will pump 1 million tons of CO2 into underground caverns at sites in California and Ohio. Environmental groups call carbon sequestration "a scam", claiming that it is too expensive and uncertain to be competitive with non-coal alternatives like wind and solar. I just hope nobody drops a Mentos down the wrong pipe."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Fred's heart is in the right place. He puts money behind technology he likes. This is bootstrapping. Then he bothers the developers with features he needs. He's a bootstrapper and a hacker. Then Fred reads articles written by other people and listens to a Tim O'Reilly keynote and tries to get everyone into agreement. Reminds me of The Negotiator, William Shatner.

Fred believes in triangulating, I do too. It's how you find the truth. Obviously I agree with Fred's conclusion -- just today I was working with Jay at Switchabit on a very small project. We spec'd it out, I went to work on it, and after I did it the way we discussed I realized there was a much more direct and simple way to do it, so I re-did it, and again I realized it was too complicated, and I re-did it, sent him a report, he integrated it into his project agreeing that it was much better than what we discussed.

People who believe in big-bangs miss that you learn stuff while you're implementing stuff and that learning should be recycled back into the project, again and again.

There was an excellent series on PBS a few years back called Connections; in each episode they take you through a series of developments how little pieces of one thing became something much bigger, you start with something small and every step of the way make small improvements and before you know it you're standing on the moon saying "One small step for man..."

A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.

I've heard bootstrapping described as "paving the cowpaths."

Twitter was a bootstrap too. There were a lot of small things that needed to get solved before Twitter could work. It may look like it popped up out of nowhere if you don't know how the pieces came together, but if you do...

One thing that's feeding epiphany for me is that I'm working with Scott Rosenberg on his history of blogging, which promises to be a great book, and reliving all the steps that got us to where we are.

With all of the fuss finally being raised concerning clickstream tracking by companies like Phorm and NebuAd, there's an effort underway to force ISPs to make any such tracking strictly opt-in. That is, users would have to proactively agree to allow their data to be used in this manner. In response, various marketers are complaining about how much data they would lose, claiming it would be an "armageddon" for the industry. Don't believe them. This is the same thing marketers warned about when the US instituted a "Do Not Call" system, and it's hardly decimated the marketing industry. Instead, it's improved marketing by making firms focus less on intrusive telemarketing and more on useful marketing. The same would happen if ISPs were required to make this an opt-in instead of opt-out setup. It would force the ISPs and companies like Phorm to make sure that the services really benefited customers in meaningful and noticeable ways so that customers would be happy to make use of the services. By whining about an opt-in solution, all these firms are really admitting is that they do not add value to the surfing experience of users.

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When I saw this magazine on the newsstand, I thought it was a gaming magazine with a photo of a character in a video game. But I think it's a photo of a real human being. (Click on thumbnail for enlargement)

An anonymous reader writes "The MPAA was awarded a staggering judgment in its case against the BitTorrent indexing site TorrentSpy. According to Slyck.com, a judge in California rendered a $110 million victory for the MPAA, and a permanent injunction against TorrentSpy."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader writes "The MPAA was awarded a staggering judgment in its case against the BitTorrent indexing site TorrentSpy. According to Slyck.com, a judge in California rendered a $110 million victory for the MPAA, and a permanent injunction against TorrentSpy."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader writes "The MPAA was awarded a staggering judgment in its case against the BitTorrent indexing site TorrentSpy. According to Slyck.com, a judge in California rendered a $110 million victory for the MPAA, and a permanent injunction against TorrentSpy."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Malcolm Gladwell is a truly fantastic writer. However, sometimes he gets so interested in making a story sound good that he misses the real point. His latest piece for the New Yorker starts out as a puff piece on Nathan Myhrvold's Intellectual Ventures (which gets way too many puff pieces), but then turns into a much more interesting article about how just about every major invention or scientific or mathematical discovery came from multiple, entirely independent people at almost exactly the same time. As Gladwell points out -- rarely is it about "genius," but about the fact that all of the previous work in the field naturally leads to this end result -- and if it wasn't one person discovering it, someone else would. The article lists out big name invention after invention that all have "multiples" -- multiple entirely independent individuals who came up with the same thing at the same time. Not only that, but almost always the person who gets credit for the discovery isn't actually the person who discovered it. In fact, someone even coined a term for it: Stigler's Law: "No scientific discovery is named after its original discoverer."

Gladwell uses this to talk up what Myhrvold is doing, suggesting that Intellectual Ventures is really about continuing that process, getting those ideas out there -- but he misses the much bigger point: if these ideas are the natural progression, almost guaranteed to be discovered by someone sooner or later, why do we give a monopoly on these ideas to a single discoverer? Myhrvold's whole business model is about monopolizing all of these ideas and charging others (who may have discovered them totally independently) to actually do something with them. Yet, if Gladwell's premise is correct (and there's plenty of evidence included in the article), then Myhrvold's efforts shouldn't be seen as a big deal. After all, if it wasn't Myhrvold and his friends doing it, others would very likely come up with the same thing sooner or later.

This is especially highlighted in one anecdote in the article, of Myhrvold holding a dinner with a bunch of smart people... and an attorney. The group spent dinner talking about a bunch of different random ideas, with no real goal or purpose -- just "chewing the rag" as one participant put it. But the next day the attorney approached them with a typewritten description of 36 different inventions that were potentially patentable out of the dinner. When a random "chewing the rag" conversation turns up 36 monopolies, something is wrong. Those aren't inventions that deserve a monopoly.

What Gladwell misses (though others have discussed it in detail) is that while ideas may be a dime a dozen, executing on those ideas is what's difficult. Innovation isn't idea generation. Innovation is taking an idea and making it do something useful. Yet, in giving monopoly rights to Myhrvold and his friends, we make it much more difficult for others (even those who discovered the same things totally independently) to help actually make them useful.

In the end, the Gladwell article inadvertently makes the best case against Myhrvold's Intellectual Ventures, while hyping up the company at the same time. It's a strange disconnect, and it's too bad that Gladwell, like so many others, fell so under Myhrvold's spell, that he missed the real story he held in his hands.

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SecureThroughObscure writes "ZDNet Zero-Day security blogger Nate McFeters got an exclusive look at the Microsoft Blue Hat conference. This is an invite-only conference that few media get to attend, but apparently McFeters was brought in with co-worker Rob Carter to talk about some vulnerabilities they had discovered with a few product security teams in attendence, and was also asked to do a guest blog posting about the conference at the Microsoft Blue Hat blog. McFeters also included several pictures of the conference and after conference events."

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eldavojohn writes "Although we don't know what they were after due to the settlement, a gag order was just released that kept Internet Archive member Brewster Kahle quiet. The FBI had issued a national security letter to them under the Patriot Act. Kahle fought it. Hard. The EFF came to the aid of his lawyers and what resulted was one of the only three times an NSL has been challenged: all three have been rescinded. The FBI agreed to open some of the court files now for it to be public. The ACLU added, 'That makes you wonder about the the hundreds of thousands of NSLs that haven't been challenged.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

I admit it: I have no idea what this "Full-Automatic Mahjong Table" actually does, but the name is pretty evocative. I have a vision of a million tiny magnets on servos in the bowels of the table that auto-drag the tiles into place.

Automatic Mahjong table adopts the working principle of electricity, light and magnetism, and it is controlled by microcomputer programs. It can effectively achieve the automatic shuffling and dealing of Poker tiles, and automatic dice tossing in a quick and fair way, with stable performance, long period of non-malfunction, and adding entertainment interests. It used two diffentely colors Mahjong Tiles with magnetic.

Link (via Cribcandy)

Love these Japanese bookcase animal silhouette dividers -- $15 each, give or take. Link (via Cribcandy)

Jason Polan has set out to draw every single person in New York -- sounds crazy, but then, this is the guy who drew every work of art in the MOMA:

I am trying to draw every person in New York. I will be drawing people everyday and posting as frequently as I can. It is possible that I will draw you without you knowing it. I draw in Subway stations and museums and restaurants and on street corners. I try not to be in the way when I am drawing or be too noticeable. Whenever I have a new batch of drawings I will post them on this blog. If you would like to increase the chances of a portrait of YOU appearing on this blog please email me (art@jasonpolan.com) a street corner or other public place that you will be standing at for a duration of two minutes (I will be on the corner of 14th street and 8th avenue on the North-east corner of the street from 2:42-2:44pm this Thursday wearing a bright yellow jacket and navy rubber boots, for example).

Link (via Kottke)