But more common metals used in the tech industry could fare better, even if their prices rise due to worldwide demand. For example, lithium-ion batteries for hybrid cars and smart phones won't run out anytime soon because there is an overabundance of lithium, Jack Lifton, an independent consultant for U.S. rare earths, told the Gold Report during a December interview.

Other important elements tracked by the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS):

Iron and steel make up about 95 percent of all the metal produced in the United States and worldwide, and find uses in thousands of products. These are the least expensive of the world's metals.

Aluminum is the second most abundant metallic element in the Earth's crust, just behind silicon. Its light weight, durability, corrosion resistance and malleability make it the most widely used metal after iron.

Copper has one of the oldest lineages of any metal, and has served as the foundation for many ancient civilizations. It still represents the third most-used industrial metal because of its thermal and electrical conductivity characteristics that make it highly useful in power transmission, telecommunication, and many electronic products.

Gold is still coveted for its monetary value and for jewelry, but it is also an excellent electrical conductor. As an industrial metal, its applications include computers, communications equipment, spacecraft and jet aircraft engines.

Silver has been used for thousands of years to make ornaments, utensils, and coins. Of all the metals, pure silver has the highest reflectivity, and the highest thermal and electrical conductivity. As a result, silver has many industrial applications including mirrors, electrical and electronic products, and photography.

Niobium and Tantalum find uses in a variety of high-tech applications. Niobium (also known as columbium) shows up in jet engine components and rocket subassemblies, while tantalum is used to make parts for cell phones, pagers, personal computers and automotive electronics. The U.S. currently imports both resources from countries such as Brazil, Canada and Australia.

• 10 Profound Innovations Ahead
• 7 Gadgets That Changed the World
• Shortage of Rare Earth Elements Could Thwart Innovation

To support electric vehicles like the Leaf, which will be available in Houston toward year's end, the city and Reliant are working to create an infrastructure that places charging stations in convenient locations. Reliant will also be developing a system of support, including home assessments, for people installing home charging stations. The stations will be compatible with other plug-in vehicles as well.

For years Keith Olbermann of MSNBC had savaged his prime-time nemesis Bill O'Reilly of the Fox News Channel and accused Fox of journalistic malpractice almost nightly. Mr. O'Reilly in turn criticized Mr. Olbermann's bosses and led an exceptional campaign against General Electric, the parent company of MSNBC.

Continue reading Triple-shot TASER X3 imminent, deranged employees celebrate with mock executions

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Triple-shot TASER X3 imminent, deranged employees celebrate with mock executions originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 21 Jul 2009 14:20:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

(via engadget)

UPDATE: there is an excellent tutorial and review of the update on the Electric Vagabond.

Yesterday at the Mobile Web Wars event (here's video of that), held right before the TechCrunch party, David Hornik, partner at August Capital (he's the host of the TechCrunch party) told the audience that he would not invest in pure iPhone apps because the iPhone had too small a market share and that anyone who wanted to get big in the mobile space should go after all phones, not just the iPhone, which, while it's hot with early-adopter types and is seeing people waiting in lines to buy around the world, hasn't yet made a dent in, say, Nokia's market share of cell phones overall.

Let's call this the Silicon Valley VC Disease. This disease has been going on for a long time. Seagate's CEO Bill Watkins told me a few months ago that Seagate almost didn't get started because they couldn't get funding from VCs who didn't see a potential market for hard drives.

It's a corrosive disease, too, and is why we get tons of stupid Facebook apps and tons of easy-to-make and likely-to-go-viral iPhone apps. Quick: explain why we don't yet have a really brilliant travel app or even a single political app for the iPhone, despite lots of interest in those topics (especially in this political year). Not to mention many brilliant apps like Evernote (my favorite app so far)?

What is the disease? That you must make bucketloads of money (or at least have a shot at doing that) in the first two years of business.

If you have a plan to make just a reasonable amount of money, or if it will take decades to make a big amount of money, don't come to Silicon Valley.

Walmart would NEVER have gotten funded by Sand Hill Road. It took decades to make bucketloads of money. That kind of business plan would never fit in here.

Why? We have the Silicon Valley VC disease.

I imagine that if we went back in time to 1977. Imagine a small group of geeks wanted to get funding to build apps for the Apple II. It didn't have much market share yet. But imagine those developers wanted to build just Apple II apps. Would they have gotten funded? Probably not. And types like David Hornick would have told them you gotta build apps for mainframes and DEC's, because that's where the market is, not in that Apple II toy.

So, is Hornik wrong? No, he's exactly right. The much bigger market is with regular-old-single-chip-cell phones. You know the type. They are the kinds of phones that make phone calls and maybe do SMS texting. If they have a Web browser it's a small tiny black and white one that can only look at WAP-style text-centric sites, not the full-blown Web that the iPhone has.

But while Hornik is right, he also has the Silicon Valley Disease. He forgets that the small, seemingly unimportant platform today that gets early adopters excited will become the large, dominant platform of tomorrow. It might take 10 years, though, which is too long for VCs to care about. How long did it take Visicalc to happen on the Apple II? Or Aldus Pagemaker to happen on the Mac? A few years at minimum. iPhone is only one year old.

But already we're seeing the writing on the wall. If you can get past your Silicon Valley VC Disease.

First, our society's most valuable audiences are getting iPhones. Last week when I was in Los Angeles, both of the famous architects I interviewed already had 3G iPhones.

Those two guys are HUGELY valuable for advertisers. They are representative. They aren't the only ones.

But even better than the demographics that the iPhone is getting is the usage patterns.

See, I have two Nokia phones and a Microsoft Windows Mobile phone too. They all suck for using the Web. Fine for email and for texting, but really suck for using the Web.

Go see Google's Vic Gundotra (he's Vice President and runs a bunch of the teams that build things for mobile phones). He told me that usage on the iPhone is off the scale when compared to other phones.

Simply translated: people who have non-iPhone phones simply aren't using them for anything other than email. This is easily verified. Sit next to a Blackberry user and watch what they do. I do that all the time. All you see them doing is email and light Web use. Now sit next to an iPhone user and watch what they do. Much more heavily used on photos, maps, Web, and video.

An iPhone user is easier to reach and is easier to get to try new things. Plus, the iPhone app store makes it very easy for an app to be tried out and loaded.

But back to the Silicon Valley VC disease. It's the same disease that Microsoft execs have. Or, really, most big company execs, or worse yet, our government workers, have truth be told.

They won't adopt anything until it's safe and until there's a HUGE business reason to do it. It's why huge parts of our government are still run on paper. Why there isn't a database anywhere of all of our elected officials in the United States. Why Microsoft didn't compete with Google until too late. Why General Motors won't build great all-electric cars until after Tesla or Toyota beats them to the punch. Etc. Etc.

Luckily the Silicon Valley VC Disease is having less and less effect lately.

You can startup a company with very little cash, because you can build it on cloud-based services like Amazon's S3, which let you get started and show the world you're getting adoption even before you go for VC money.

And, luckily, not every VC has the Silicon Valley VC Disease. Lots invest in stupid, small, weird, ideas for platforms that only have a percent or two of market share. Go see Jeff Clavier, for instance. He's been doing that a lot lately. I met him in the office of Tapulous last week, which makes iPhone apps.

Why shouldn't you listen to Hornik and others who have Silicon Valley VC disease?

1. It's easier to start a company on new platforms. Why? Because the big money probably hasn't moved in yet, or at least they haven't become established.
2. People who buy new things are FAR EASIER to convince to buy other new things than people who have had the same stuff for years.
3. It's easier to build a brand on a new technology than it is to do that on an older, more established one (hey, everyone has a radio in their cars, but you don't see VC's funding new radio stations, do you? Why is that?)
4. The best, most transactional and monetizeable audiences are those that pick up new things. Think about it, would you rather have a customer like Dan Reis, one of the world's best architects or someone like my dad who still uses the same TV that he bought from me in the mid-1980s? My dad is a nice guy and very smart, but he's a horrible customer to have and is going to be very expensive to get to adopt something new.
5. It's a lot cheaper to get adoption when influencers (read bloggers and journalists and Twitterers and FriendFeeders) are talking about you. What are they talking about right now? iPhone apps. Look at Summize, the search engine Twitter just bought. What's one of the trending topics on the home page? iPhone. Get over it. They ain't talking about Nokia or Microsoft.

Anyway, I just find it interesting when VCs start telling people not to support a platform when there's lines around the world waiting to buy that platform. If everyone listened to that sentiment we'd never see any innovation in the world.

So, who is working to prove Hornik wrong? Drop me a line.

Oh, and David's a nice guy and throws great parties. Thanks David for letting me in last night and for giving me something interesting to blog about today. :-)

UPDATE: As usual lately a much more interesting conversation about this post is happening over on FriendFeed.

Whatever figure you pick -- $523 billion or $3 trillion -- the obvious point is that the money could've been invested in technology that would do far more to secure the nation's future. Like, what if that had been spent on building nuclear power plants and electric cars? Could the U.S. have vastly accelerated its independence from Middle East oil? Not to mention what that would do for global warming. The latest Wired argues that nukes are the only way to save the planet.

It's all a moot point, of course. The investment opportunity is gone, the money dispersed to military personnel, defense contractors and all that. (As if, just coming off Memorial Day, the dollars even matter compared to the loss of life and other casualties.) But the debate needs to happen. Maybe it will help encourage better decisions going forward, and it's an interesting question of whether new technology can sometimes solve the same problem as a war.

Hansen Living offers a minimalist, natural approach to kitchens that's worth a look. Apartment Therapy took a luck at the company's interesting approach: 1. They get ideas by asking pro chefs what they hate about consumer kitchens and then doing the opposite. 2. They try to limit space intentionally so people don't fill it up with things they don't need. 3. When clients ask for more, they tell them to wait 6 months and see if the need is still there (it rarely is).

Knud explained that when he embarked on designing Hansen's product line, he asked some of the best chefs in Copenhagen what made them laugh at the typical consumer kitchen.' Then he did the opposite. The result is a collection of free-standing units with no overhead cabinets, but rather drawers below counters. Each drawer is lined with a metal perforated bottom to allow air circulation. The base pieces are raised on legs to allow access for cleaning the entire kitchen floor.

The chefs and Knud agree that overhead cabinets decrease the use of available counter space, increase the chances of hitting one's head while chopping vegetables, and make any space look smaller. They also agree not to give people too much space or they might try to fill it with things they don't need. In fact, Knud told me, if clients, ask for more cabinets once the kitchen is delivered, he encourages them to think about it for 6 more months and if they still feel a lack of space, they can call him and he'll concede. According to Knud, they never call.

Place it anywhere, all you need is to hook it up to a water supply and connect the electricity. The kitchen unit contains everything you need: oven, gas jets, electric power, refrigerator and water. To find a suitable name for it was easy: Instant Kitchen.

The Tesla electric supercar, which rockets the driver from 0-60mph in 4.0 seconds, does not look like it will see the light of day as the team has already lost key players, including Tom Colson (VP Manufacturing), Tristan Colson (Software development engineer), Rudy Garragia (lead engineer on Tesla's motor team; creator of Tesla's motor), as well as pretty much everyone else in between. We are sorry to break the electric supercar and flying automobile dream all in one day, but it's like that, and that's the way it is. [Tesla Founders Blog via bookofjoe]

The Museum of Science and Industry announced today that a fully-functional, three-story "green" home will be built just east of the museum on its Jackson Park grounds in Hyde Park this spring. The foundation is currently being laid, and it will be open to the public from May 8, 2008 through January 4, 2009. The 2,500-square-foot home will exhibit some of the latest environmentally-friendly technologies and offer a primer on incorporating these innovations into our homes.

The MSI exhibit was given the catchy title of, "Smart Home: Green + Wired, Powered by ComEd and Warmed by Peoples Gas" because it's a collaboration between Wired magazine, ComEd and People's Gas, as well as some very cool landscape and design architects. The house will feature cutting-edge green technologies such as energy monitoring systems, gray water systems, a living roof, a solar electric generator, and on-demand water heaters, and it will be built with renewable and recyclable materials and non-toxic paints, according to designer Michelle Kaufmann's blog. In addition, the exhibit house will feature "truth windows" that give you a glimpse of the contents of floors and walls.

Body Worlds was O.K. (though it was way over-hyped), but this sounds like the coolest thing they've done at the 75-year-old MSI since that full-sized Boeing 727 was hauled in in 1992. --Mark Boyer

mkSolaire via michellekaufmann.com

While Yahoo's trying to bring sexy email back, Google's busy continuing to diversify into every realm possible. Having begun the mobile phone journey, it's now onto televisions. Google is working with Japan's Matsushita Electric Industrial Co., one of the largest consumer electronics manufacturers, to commercialize flat panel television sets that let you access online videos. Instead of relying on Apple to encourage users to buy a set top in order to get YouTube on their TVs, Google's going straight for the TV manufacturer, and straight to th consumer.

This is Google's first deal with a Japanese consumer electronics manufacturer for television-related purposes, and the literal iterations of an Internet TV are scheduled to be available in U.S. stores as early as this spring. And while this is somewhat of a big step for television, consumer media and GooTube, this isn't the first time we've seen efforts to bring web media to our home television screens, which are all so big and shiny. Several companies out there, from Apple to Dish Network to Netflix are hoping to provide more direct ways in which to get their content onto your television screen, thanks to Internet-connected set top boxes.

As I mentioned in the Netflix coverage, the set top box is an interem solution for bridging the gap between your computer and your TV, and that the content aggregators would soon work directly with the television manufacturers to cut out the middlemen and the middle devices as well, as Sony has begun with its Bravia offering.

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On Clinton/Citigroup:

New York-based, enormously well-capitalized, longstanding market leader whose name is synonymous with the sector it dominates. A powerhouse in the 1990s is having difficulty reclaiming past glory.

Edwards/McDonald's:

Disdained by the media elite as declasse, shunned by the fashionable as too populist and unhealthy to body politic, manages to thrive by working hard and dishing out cheap meat and potatoes to working-class patrons. Worldly sophistication is belied by simple message that appeals to economically disadvantaged consumers.

Romney/Blackstone:

While stock is at 52-week low, can't be written off due to deep reservoirs of cash, ruthlessness, and cynicism.

As for the real-money InTrade markets, the speed with which Clinton and Obama have traded places is nothing short of astonishing. Here's a live chart of Obama, over the past week:

And here's Clinton:

Aptera
Developed over the past five years, the Aptera, a three-seat automobile that gets 230 miles per gallon, is finally available to reserve. Three-wheeled and pod-like, the Jetson-like automobile is what I thought cars would look like in the future when I was younger.

Stratocruiser
Tino Schaedler and Michael J. Brown designed the Stratocruiser, a futuristic blimp they call a "lifestyle zeppelin." Utilizing helium power to smoothly navigate the upper atmosphere, the Stratocruiser focuses on health and entertainment, featuring an on-board spa, gourmet restaurant, swimming pool, resident DJ and most importantly, private cabins.

Virgin Gorillaz Train
If we can't have the bombed subway cars of the '80s, we'll take Jamie Hewlett's art on Virgin trains. Known for illustrating the Gorillaz characters, Hewlett's images adorned this locomotive which traveled between London and Manchester promoting the production of a Chinese opera that he helped put on along with Damon Albarn.

BMW X6
Announced this year but not available until mid-2008, BMW is finally coming out with their version of the hybrid with the X6. A crossover vehicle, it not only looks great but also features a two-mode hybrid gasoline-electric engine that increases efficiency by 20%.

Electroon Electric Bike
Although we like the mod appeal of Vespas, they still burn gasoline which is why we prefer the Electroon Electric Bike. Somewhere in-between a bike and scooter, the Elektroon features the best of both worlds running quieter and cleaner.

Hawley F140 Racing Yacht
If traveling by sea is more your thing, you'll want to hop aboard the Hawley F140 Racing Yacht. Designed to mimic a dolphin and stingray, it's fast and agile. A below-deck cabin offers a refuge to rest and the use of bespoke electronics.

Toyota i-Real
This year Toyota introduced a Segway on steroids, the i-Real. The wheels extend, reclining the passenger for more aerodynamic positioning when traveling at high speeds (it tops out at 20mph).

Jorg&Olif Scout Bike
If you'd rather get some exercise and pedal your way through town, it's best done on the Jorg&Olif Scout Bike. A perfect complement (and pretty much the opposite of) a fixie, this old-world, dutch-styled cycle is now a bit more affordable at $495.

Lexus IS F
The nicest car we actually got to drive this year was the Lexus IS F. Features your everyday standard amenities, Lexus went all-out pushing the technical performance to another level. Capable of zero-to-60 in 4.6 seconds, the IS F (the F stands for Flagship) is Lexus' answer to the BMW M Series, Audi S series and the Saab Viggen series. We'll see if it has the same kind of success as those lines when it hits the market this upcoming year.

Pinel & Pinel Trunks
Sometimes taking everything with you includes your office or home entertainment system. Pinel & Pinel makes this a reality with their meticulously-crafted trunks. Custom finished to your exact specifications and preferences, your flat screen, DVD collection, record player and vinyl will fit securely in the hard-case trunks, making them easily transportable.

Cte et Ciel
If it's just your laptop you want to transport use a Cte et Ciel laptop sleeve to protect without the unnecessary bulk. Free of zippers that oftentimes scratch the laptop's finish, the neoprene offers a snug, quick fit. Simple, functional and slim, they're our new favorites.

If you want safe equities, I'd look for stocks with high capitalizations but low trading volume. The classic example there, of course, is Berkshire Hathaway.

(HT: Kedrosky)

On Christmas Eve, one of Nancy Podschwit's West Chicago neighbors called the police, saying one of Podschwit's dogs had gotten past their electric fence. When police arrived, apparently one officer went to Podschwit's side door, where he encountered Hunter, a 5-year-old German shephard/lab mix.

"The dog approached him and it kept approaching," said Bruce Malkin, West Chicago deputy police chief. The officer "kept backing up. The dog kept approaching, like he was going to bite him."

The officer initially tried pepper spray, Malkin said. "I guess it had no effect. Then he had to resort to his service weapon."

The officer fired once at Hunter's head, but the bullet went through the dog's sinus cavity and out his right ear. Ayee. Police initially told Podschwit that her dog had died, but when she arrived at the vet to collect his dog-mains, she found him alive. His sinuses might be messed up, and his hearing in that ear may be affected, but otherwise the pooch is doing fine. Podschwit blames a "rookie" cop, has already been in touch with her lawyer, and hopes that the police will at least pay for Hunter's vet bills. [Daily Herald, CBS 2, S-T]

Photo via Best Friends Network

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The mien reminds me of the Back to the Future ride at Universal Studios, where the waiting line snaked through the office building of the Institute of Future Technology.

(You can't go on the ride anymore except in Japan; the attraction ceased to attract and was closed in the U.S. this year. Well, I liked it. It was one of those brain-resetting experiences that all mundane existences need, something akin to what I imagine the effect of electric shock treatment must be. I'm easy to thrill. I can get something like the same rush from go-carts. ;-) )

Greets from Germany

Les Paul Gibson Electric Guitar Current bid: $1,500.00 on eBay GIBSON ELECTRIC GUITAR PEWTER PENDANT 18" BRN NECKLACE Current bid: $6.99 on eBay See all 43 Gibson Electric Guitar items on eBay.

I think Google has in the works a global strategy so sweeping and audacious that it is breathtaking, but that's for a future column. This week I want to point out where Google is screwing up, why, and what they should do about it.

My first point is small but significant. If you are a resident of the U.S. you may have used a service called free411.com or 1-800free411. It is a simple service that looks up directory listings for free, saving callers fees of a dollar or more per inquiry. You can look up listings online, but most people call the toll-free number. Where free411 makes its money is by forcing users to listen to an ad before they get the number they are looking for. The service is incredibly successful averaging more than 25 million calls per month.

Free411.com has competitors, of course, and the most daunting just appeared on the market from Google - Goog-411. Goog-411 is actually a bit more sophisticated than free411, offering product and service classifications and suggestions, which, of course, also generate more revenue. But for the most part the two services are comparable.

They should be since Google took a long look at investing in or acquiring free411 under a nondisclosure agreement between the two companies, only to abruptly break off discussions and start its own competing service. Is this beginning to sound familiar? This strategy of getting start-ups to explain their business models and share their technologies was practically invented by Microsoft, which would then break off talks, start a competing product or service and use pressure on industry partners to put the smaller company out of business.

Google doesn't have to behave like this. At their current share price they can acquire any company -- and I mean ANY company -- for little or no cost. Killing little free411 after first cozying up to them is mean-spirited and, if Google continues to behave like this in the future, will hurt the company's reputation long-term. Maybe having a good reputation means little to Google, but it should.

It's time to grow up, kids.

Another problem at Google right now is algorithmic optimization gone mad with the probable result that many of Google's smaller AdWords customers will go broke this Christmas. Killing longtime customers is not a good corporate policy.

Before we get to the details of this little nightmare let's first consider the algorithm's religious significance for Google. Larry and Sergey begat PageRank which begat search which begat AdWords which begat AdSense, which begat the Global Google search and advertising empire that has grown too complex to further characterize in a single, strained Biblical analogy. At the heart of each of these programs is an algorithm embodied in a computer program with each algorithm automagically generating for Google billions of dollars per year. Algorithms -- the smarter the better -- are at the heart of Google's success. But Google's major failing nearly always comes down to confusing algorithmic efficiency with moral, ethical, or even business correctness. Sometimes good algorithms do bad things and the tendency at Google is to simply not care: it was the ALGORITHM's fault. But even worse, since algorithms can't be held responsible like the person who wrote or authorized the use of the algorithm ought to be, there is at Google a sense of unaccountability. Stuff happens, they'll say, when algorithms are fluxing toward optimization and producing collateral damage: it's not our fault.

Only it IS Google's fault. More specifically, it is CEO Eric Schmidt's fault when the company hurts its customers then either pretends it didn't or that the offending code was found under a rock somewhere. I have covered instances of this behavior in the past and it isn't how adult companies are supposed to behave.

Google AdWords used to be a simple and stable way for merchants to make money on the Internet. They'd buy search terms on the Google search engine, their ads would be posted near the search results, and one or two percent of searchers would click on those ads resulting in generally a good living for the advertiser. The system was simple, stable, and would run for months or years with little management on the part of the AdWords purchaser.

But recently Google started messing with AdWords, modifying algorithms and launching new programs that make the company look good to Wall Street, which is always seeking at least the appearance of improvement, but not to Google's AdWords customers.

AdWords customers are suffering from useless pages on unused and "parked" domain pages, or static pages simply filled with ads. The owners of these domains use AdSense participation to suck up more than 30 percent of the total AdWords market. This is one Google program working against another. Nerdtv.com is just such a parked page, owned by someone who won't even answer my e-mails and filled with AdSense ads that just sit there with no relevant page content to support them. And "content" is the issue here since AdWords advertisers have the choice of placing their ads on search pages (along the right side) or on content pages (on the top of the Google.com page, but also on other participating sites). But for some reason AdWords advertisers who opt out of doing content ads are still finding their listings on content sites, including parked domains and MySpace pages.

As always, it comes down to the algorithm. Here's what Google has to say: "Depending on the design of the site, a parked domain site will be classified as either a search site or a content site. That means your ads may show on parked domain sites if your campaign is opted in to the search or content networks." So opting out doesn't always opt you out.

Then there is the expansion of Google Broad Match, which seems to be putting local (geo-specific) ads on the results of national searches. This means if you run a bike shop in Charleston, South Carolina and someone hits your keywords on a search in San Francisco, Google may show them your completely irrelevant ad.

Google Personalized Search now uses the terms from previous searches to help fine-tune the next search, which seems good in principle, but if someone searches first on "childcare" then later on "insurance" they are likely to be served ads for insurance for children, which might not interest them at all.

There are other issues like problems with Google Analytics, and the blogosphere, if you know where to look, is full of this stuff (check my links to the right, please). But what's worst is that this is all taking place in the context of a Google customer support system that is effectively broken. They say it isn't broken, but if it takes weeks to get an answer, customer service is broken.

Google's defense, of course, is that the company will make everything right once you prove to them that they made a mistake. But Google is defendant, judge, and jury. And even if they face reality and do the right thing, it may already be too late for smaller advertisers. An algorithmic change by Google can result in AdWords budgets that worked well for years becoming suddenly depleted. All of the advertiser's money is gone, often with little to show for it. Worse still, there is no money left for ads that might generate revenue. Google says it will do the right thing, but doing that six months later has no effect for a merchant five months out of business.

Google appears to simply not understand this. Maybe with so many big jets parked at Moffett Field they've forgotten what it is like to run a business on little capital. Maybe they don't care.

At the heart of this problem is a flawed computer architecture that makes Google's customer service responses so slow. Google likes to pretend that its distributed architecture can handle anything, but that appears not to be the case here. When a change in the way Google does business bumps up the customer service load, the system becomes brittle and breaks. If Google acknowledges the problem, that generates more queries and the bad system gets even worse, so they say nothing. This isn't peculiar to Google, it happens at eBay, too, where they have to very carefully phase in changes for fear that partner reaction will bring down the system.

So Google says it will do the right thing and maybe even intends to do the right thing, but failures in its IT systems effectively keep it from doing the right thing, which brings us back to Microsoft, which has long been the poster child for inability to follow through because of IT failings.

It's not that Google learned this behavior from Microsoft. It may just be an inevitable part of having an IT monopoly.

There, I said the "M" word.

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Office Depot Featured Gadget: Xbox 360 Platinum System Packs the power to bring games to life!

I was shopping for the MiG-23 because, of course, I need one to launch rockets to the Moon for Team Cringely (HUGE announcements about that are coming in next week's column, by the way). Team members have politely pointed out to me that there are other ways of air launching our rockets ways that might be cheaper and less environmentally damaging than blasting to 80,000 feet in less than four minutes in a plane that's burning one gallon of kerosene PER SECOND. On the other hand, punching such a big hole in the sky sounds wonderfully fun to me and noisy, too.

To more sensible folk there is a strong argument that we ought to launch our Team Cringely rockets from hydrogen- (not helium) filled balloons at a cost of less than $500 per launch compared to the MiG's average $7,500. Not only is launching from a balloon well proven and cheaper, it also leaves a carbon footprint so small as to be invisible. Not so the MiG. Of course the MiG is all-weather (the balloon is not) and the MiG mission can be aborted while that rocket hanging from a balloon is going either into space or into the ocean. Can you tell I still prefer the MiG?

Another team member suggested a way to loft our rockets that to him seemed even better than balloons kites. Specifically, he had in mind tensile wing kites rather like powered parachutes and paragliders. This team member led me through his research, which is the basis for the column you are reading. I don't actually think this stuff up myself: people tell me what to write.

What's cool about these tethered tensile wings, he explained, is that they can be designed in such a way that no aircraft fuselage is needed and yet they can lift (vertically, straight from the ground, no runway even required!) enormous weights. And I mean ENORMOUS weights, like a thousand tons. A fully loaded Boeing 747-400 weighs about 400 tons, so a THOUSAND tons would change the nature of airfreight.

But there's an even better application for this technology than airfreight, he explained, electric power generation. Build a gigantic tethered tension wing and power it with electric motors mounted in the leading edge of the wing. Send the electricity to run these motors up the tether, itself. The wing will take off vertically and once it is at the end of its rope, so to speak, can be made to circle thousands, or even tens of thousands, of feet off the ground without a pilot or any sort of crew.

Remember from your ground school days that wind tends to increase with altitude. Once aloft, circling in the stiff breeze a few thousand feet in the air, it should be possible during most daylight hours to just turn off the electric motors and get them running as generators, taking energy out of the wind. This would be regenerative air braking.

To my knowledge this idea of using a tethered kite to generate power was first put forth back in 2003 by Pete Lynn, a mechanical engineer and second-generation kite designer from New Zealand. He described his work back then in an extensive post on Google Groups as well as on his own web page. (That page is no longer directly available online, but in this week's links we've managed to recover that page thanks to the Internet Archive's WayBack Machine.)

Lynn's explanations in 2003 and 2004 were very clear and the implications of his work even clearer: this was probably the best way yet to extract energy from the wind far better than more traditional windmills.

The problem with wind power is that much of the time there isn't enough of it available to even justify energizing the alternators attached to the large windmills used in wind farms. Unless the wind speed is over, say, 10 miles per hour, it isn't worth running the windmills at all. And above some speed on the order of 40 mph, it again isn't worth the effort, this time because of fear that high winds will damage the windmills windmills sometimes costing hundreds of thousands of dollars each.

But power-generating tension kites are different, as Lynn so ably explained: "the numbers strongly infer that such a wind turbine system can produce power for around a fifth to a tenth the cost of current generation systems, depending on site costs. This is roughly US 0.5 cents a kilowatt hour, with the likelihood that this will reduce further with mass production."

Five tenths of a cent per kilowatt-hour is VASTLY cheaper than the average retail price was for electricity anywhere in the U.S. in 2005, where electricity costs ran as high as 12 cents per kilowatt-hour in California and 14 cents per kilowatt-hour in the state of New York. So even though the kits would have to be all new construction and the old coal, gas, and oil-fired power plants mothballed or dismantled, the payback period for doing so would be measured in months, not years or decades as most such capital expenses are today. Today, with energy costs even higher, the payback would be even quicker.

Getting the cost of wind-power production so low depends on a couple of factors building kites that cost very little for the power they generate and allowing them to harvest energy from a larger slug of airspace than is used by the big ground-based windmills employed in most wind farms.

"The trick is that the propeller is operating at the speed of the airplane, which is many times greater than that of the true wind speed," wrote Lynn. "At an overall lift to drag ratio of ten the air plane speed is ten times that of the true wind, with power proportional to wind speed cubed, the propeller can have a thousandth the swept area of a comparable wind turbine for the same power. This makes for a very compact and effective unit, it is important to exploit this apparent wind directly as it allows for much higher specific speed of the propeller and generating unit, (no gearing)... Line length can actually scale with size, somewhat, a 100MW unit might optimally have around a 1000m line. "

Such wind kites would be cheaper to build than current windmills because their structural efficiency is so high, according to Lynn. In fact the weight of such a kite turbine might be only one percent that of a comparable windmill.

According to Lynn's figures, then, to completely replace the one million megawatts of electricity generated in the U.S. annually by a total of 16,000 generators of various types would require 10,000 of those 100-megawatt tethered flying wings.

That's not many kites at all enough to require approximately 3,600 square miles of territory, or about the size of Puerto Rico.

At this point the figures begin to run together and I feel like Dirty Harry wondering if he's correctly counted the number of bullets in his .44 Magnum. But even if the numbers are off by a factor of 10, such flexible-wing wind generators would mark a huge advancement in renewable energy.

Enter Google, stage left.

Pete Lynn no longer works in New Zealand. Today he works in Emeryville, CA at a company called Makani Power, which is developing exactly the sort of power-generating kites Lynn envisioned six years ago. Go to the people section of Makani's website and you'll see the healthiest bunch of windsurfer/engineers imaginable, including Pete Lynn, who actually seems to play a minor role in the company.

Google is Makani Power's major investor, having put $10 million into the company back in 2006. If Makani makes it possible to convert a huge percentage of American power generating capability to wind, it will be because of Google. If a commensurate amount of carbon dioxide is not released into the atmosphere as a result of this conversion, that too will be Google's fault. And if the conversion leads to lessened demand for Middle Eastern oil and even a slight change in the strategic importance of that part of the world, possibly reducing tensions among nations, blame Google.

The unanswered question is "Why?"

It is rare for a public corporation to do more than token philanthropy and completely unknown for one to catalyze what could be such a fundamental change in how we live just to save some money and save the environment. Google can do it because Google is making huge profits. But Microsoft makes huge profits, too, and Microsoft has never done anything like this.

I can only conclude, then, that Google must be grossly mismanaged.

Good.