Moon Lift

LiftPort, the space elevator company, has been resurrected with a Kickstarter that was funded over 1000%. The special materials required for an Earth elevator don't quite exist yet, so focus has been switched to the moon, where plain Kevlar will suffice. I contributed a small amount to this one; if you missed it, we are assured there will be other opportunities. We are not properly living in the Future if we don't have robots delivering our stuff down a ribbon to the surface of the moon!

New Robots

Robots have been helping in factories for some time now, but this one is different, and not just because he has a face. Baxter is a gentle robot; this means he doesn't have to be put in a cage like his predecessors. He is slow and careful enough to not hurt puny humans when they inevitably get in the way. To program him, you can take hold of his arm and show him what to do. In the future, robots will be our friends, only rarely going back in time to kill our ancestors.

Lawyers

Slashdot has a nice write-up of the nearly 10-year saga of SCO and it's legal action to basically inflate their share price and scare people from using Linux. They claimed they could prove Linux stole code from Unix, which they owned, and sued IBM who were distributing a version of Linux. This gamble initially worked, but it gradually became clear their code evidence was wrong and they did not even own Unix. But, as the article says, the "legal juggernaut ... could not be stopped". Well it's rolling to a halt now as SCO are bankrupt (again). While this is a good write-up (Groklaw has the most detailed), as one of the comments mentions, there is no naming of who perpetrated this. Most of the blame goes to crazy CEO Darl McBride, but also there is good evidence that a certain major software company bankrolled the action. Seems their latest operating system wasn't selling very well. *cough*vista*cough*

Monkeys

Note to self - if I get a black touchscreen phone, I must build a charging station for it like this:

Swords

Someone's email this week reminded me I have a Neal Stephenson link in my To-Blog queue, so here it is:
CLANG!
No, I didn't just drop something, this is a new project of his, on the Kickstarter "Crowd Funding" website.
Although he is best known for writing sci-fi, a few of these novels reveal he has a strong interest in the low-tech pursuit of sword fighting. He has also noticed that modern computer games do not do it justice (pressing a button to swing a sword is not much fun). So he is co-founding a company to make a swing-able game sword. The main video is worth watching as it is quite amusing; I haven't watched the update videos near the bottom yet. They have only 9 days to go to reach their target... perhaps they will make it, who knows?

Phonecall

*riiiiing*
"Hello, is that NASA? Hi. I'd just like a quick word about your space telescope. Yeah, the Hubble one. I heard it was getting old and you haven't been able to get enough money together to buy a new one. It just so happens we have two spare to give away. Do you want them? No, I didn't give my name, and I can't tell you who I work for. They are good ones - you just need to strap on a few cameras and put 'em on a rocket. No, I'm serious, really. Shall I tell the boys in the warehouse to ship 'em over? Hello?

Tubes

I initially thought this article, Return of the Vacuum Tube, was about how tubes are still being used in high-end amplifiers, but no, it is about a new version of the old ones. The researchers have found a way to embed very tiny tubes is silicon, and anything in silicon is easier to mass-produce. Although not technically a vacuum or a tube, these hybrids of old and new turn out to be faster and less prone to the cosmic rays of space. The work was done at NASA. Perhaps they'll collaborate with the nanodiamond guys and make Space Transistors.