The big three lighting companies — General Electric, Sylvania and Philips — are all working on energy efficient incandescent bulbs, as is Auer Lighting of Germany and Toshiba of Japan. The NYTimes: Indeed, the incandescent bulb is turning into a case study of the way government mandates can spur innovation. “There’s a massive misperception that incandescents are going away quickly,” said Chris Calwell,...

CNet on the Twitter-inspired rise of URL-shortening services: URL-shortening services are abundant and becoming more so. They’re usually designed with a priority on minimum character length, not easy reading: Is.gd, Bit.ly, Twurl.nl, Tr.im, Sn.im”, Cligs, and TinyURL. If you want to see dozens more, Mashable has a long list. And the traffic they handle is large. On a typical day right now, Bit.ly...

Britain’s top judge has expressed concern about the use of pilot-less drones as weapons of war. His comments come at a time when there is a growing international concern about the danger these pose to the civilians. Drones have become an important weapon against the Taliban in the remote mountainous borderlands of Afghanistan and Pakistan, reports The Independent. “Last month the US admitted to...

I suggest you watch full screen… Web Site Story is a beautifully shot & acted, wonderfully witty parody of West Side Story that’s burning up the internets. It was written and directed by Sam Reich for CollegeHumor. On his blog Sam says it’s a tribute to his three big loves — film, theater, and the internet: Jeff Rubin, king of puns, thought of the title. The opening Google Maps shots...

I did not say yesterday that I believed there would be paid content on the web. I do. As does Fred Wilson, a VC who puts his money where his mouth is. Says Fred: [L]et’s talk about freeconomics. I don’t believe everything will be free on the Internet. There will be plenty of paid business models. For example, if you want to watch Major League Baseball games live over the Internet, you’ll pay...

Wired: A federal judge on Thursday overturned guilty verdicts against Lori Drew, issuing a directed acquittal on three misdemeanor charges. Drew, 50, was accused of participating in a cyberbullying scheme against 13-year-old Megan Meier who later committed suicide. The case against Drew hinged on the government’s novel argument that violating MySpace’s terms of service was the legal equivalent of computer...

Some recent changes at YouTube… They’ve doubled the allowable size of uploads: We’re happy to announce that the size of standard uploads has doubled from 1GB to 2GB. The increase means you can upload longer videos at a higher resolution as well as large HD files directly from your camera. In addition, the team’s implemented some new features to make it easier for you to show these videos...

Michael Masnick provides a link-filled road map to the star-studded fire touched off by Malcolm Gladwell’s critical review of Chris Anderson’s Free: The Future of a Radical Price. Masnick rolls in his own critique of the book and concludes: Gladwell’s review…does Anderson’s book a disservice. It criticizes it because it doesn’t answer questions the book didn’t set out...

What’s at the intersection of politics and technology? More than a thousand people at 60th and Broadway on June 29 and 30th, aka Personal Democracy Forum 2009. I attended Day 2 of PdF and suggest that first, before anything else, you check out the new IT Dashboard that lets you see how your taxpayer dollars are being spent by the federal government in a way you’ve never seen before (the system is...

Many amazing things were accomplished in the days before computers became ubiquitous and the world wide web became a distraction as well as a tool. Nazi Germany built the first jet fighter in the world, and was in the process of building a plane that bears a remarkable resemblance to the modern B2 bomber (although I think the stealth aspects of the “Hilter’s Stealth-Fighter” were an accidental...

From Woot: New mascot: a wide-eyed lemur voiced by Justin Timberlake DRM limitations require biometrically encoded MP3s audible only to the purchaser Each torrent will include a 4GB “bonus pack” with different versions of Solitaire and a playable demo of “Dinosaur Alphabet Learning” Seeders get points that can be redeemed for novelty pencil erasers or plastic whistles Before you can...

John Timmer at ArsTechnica raises good questions about the study I pointed to on Saturday. Says Timmer: The results need to be interpreted very cautiously, as they were based on only 69 contributors from a single nation [Israel], a tiny drop in the Wikipedian ocean. … Wikipedia’s own survey of its contributors racked up roughly 12,000 original contributors (and another 32,000 sporadic contributors)....

I’m liveblogging the Personal Democracy Forum all day today and you can follow the current session below. Vivek Kundra is the administration’s Chief Information Officer and has demonstrated the beta version of the IT Dashboard which lets us access government data in an unprecedented way (whether that’s good or bad, you decide). If you’d like to follow all the live-blogs today from PdF,...

Andrew Stuttaford remembers the good old days when liberals defended the president’s critics from accusations of deficient patriotism, or even treason. Normally, I wouldn’t call out Paul Krugman twice in one day, but this exception is worth it. Krugman writes, As I watched the deniers [who voted against the Waxman-Markey climate change bill] make their arguments, I couldn’t help thinking that...

1969 was the year I began my career as a journalist with a leading Indian daily. That was also the year when a memorable event called The Woodstock Festival took place in a far-away rural town of Bethel, New York, and caught my fancy. As The Independent recalls: “Performers flying in on helicopters – a portentous sight in the Vietnam era – food and drinks spiked with LSD, acts going on 14 hours or...

Slide 11 from Wagner’s presentation. In the face of three government antitrust investigations, Google’s “senior competition counsel,” Dana Wagner, is trying to persuade the world that its competition is just a click away: [T]he boyish, 33-year-old Mr. Wagner [is] a former antitrust lawyer at the Justice Department who drops words like “goofy” and “whacky” with an aw-shucks grin into discussions...

Tomorrow (that is Tuesday, June 30) would be a shameful day for Boston…. It is disbanding United States of America’s first mounted police unit. The AP report states: “(The Boston Mounted Unit’s) 12 horses would be given new homes — at least until the city can come up with funds to restore the unit.” What a shame that the budget cuts would hurt this 136-year-old historic police...

I have no hesitation in admitting that I generally turn to The Economist when I am looking for details regarding any hot world issue, or if I fail to understand its different dimensions. This venerable British magazine has some interesting points to offer regarding the US health-care reforms. “Because health insurance is so expensive, nearly 50 million Americans, an obscene number in such a rich place,...

I’m not buying the Republican bromide that passage of a revolutionary energy bill is nothing but a tax increase. Of course it will cost money for the transformation just as my first Apple computer cost $3,300 in the early 1980s and about a third of that in today’s market The Congressional Budget Office estimated that the average American household would pay an additional $175 a year in energy costs...

Recently I noted Twitter hype punctured by a study that found Twitter users to be self-obsessed. Today Nicholas Carr points to New Scientest and a report that finds Wikipedians are generally “grumpy,” “disagreeable,” and “closed to new ideas.” Forget altruism: [T]he scholars paint a picture of Wikipedians as social maladapts who “feel more comfortable expressing themselves...

Narrowly: In a triumph for President Barack Obama, the Democratic-controlled House narrowly passed sweeping legislation Friday that calls for the nation’s first limits on pollution linked to global warming and aims to usher in a new era of cleaner, yet more costly energy. The vote was 219-212, capping months of negotiations and days of intense bargaining among Democrats. Republicans were overwhelmingly...

Amateurs like me. If you’re not a scientist, how much can really you know? Even if you are a scientist, how much can you really know? This week, the New Yorker has a profile of James Hansen, the director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, written by Elizabeth Kolbert. When I saw, something rang a bell. Two weeks ago, the Weekly Standard ran a piece on Hansen called The Man Who Cried...

If The Beatles managed to convey the increasing dominance of machine over man — with their voice and script struggling to rise over the clamour and force of musical instruments, Michael Jackson’s songs, accompanied with his unbeatable mechanical body movements, went a step further to deliver a similar message — the human beings gradually turning into robots. Thus, The Beatles and Michael Jackson...

Kimberley A. Strassel at the Wall Street Journal writes about the growing number of skeptics on “human caused global warming”: Among the many reasons President Barack Obama and the Democratic majority are so intent on quickly jamming a cap-and-trade system through Congress is because the global warming tide is again shifting. It turns out Al Gore and the United Nations (with an assist from the media),...

GMA reported this morning that Google was “down for 40 minutes” on news of Jackson’s death. An overstatement, I suspected. Cnet clarifies in a comment from Google: Some Google users complained that the search engine’s News area was inaccessible for a time. A Google representative confirmed that “between approximately 2:40 p.m. PDT and 3:15 p.m. PDT today, some Google News users...