Australian town of Bundanoon has become the first in the world to ban commercially-bottled water. The ban, which is supported by local shopkeepers, means water in plastic bottles can no longer be bought in the town in the Southern Highlands, two hours from Sydney. Instead, reusable bottles have gone on sale, which can be refilled for free at new drinking fountains (photo above), reports The Independent. “Bottled...

Really??? The trucking industry says these devices can be used safely, posing less of a distraction than BlackBerrys, iPhones and similar gadgets, and therefore should be exempted from legislation that would ban texting while driving. “We think that’s overkill,” Clayton Boyce, spokesman for the American Trucking Associations, said of a federal bill that would force states to ban texting while driving if...

As the cartoon above says, War is Big Business. This major issue is discussed, if at all, in passing by the mainstream media. Newspapers in India’s capital city had to borrow a news story from The Washington Post that “major US arms suppliers are wooing Indian defence agents and officials.” Emily Wax of The Washington Post continues: Almost every weekend, there are cocktails and closed-door...

By now, most of the stories behind the dazzling rise and ignominious demise of a proud, magnificent bird, the F-22 Raptor, have been told. Stories about the brilliant design and cutting edge manufacturing and assembly technology. A technology that has been described as “the only thing more complex than the human body.” (I was fortunate to visit the “mile-long” Lockheed Martin F-16 assembly line;...

Bo Peabody in the WaPo: I launched the social networking site Tripod in 1995. By 1998, it was the eighth-largest site on the Web. But Tripod was never a successful business. Social networks aren’t great places to advertise. You can’t charge users for their services. And they never gain enough momentum to survive in the stock market. Indeed, no social network has ever made it as a public company....

Following up my Kurzweil Was Right post from the other day, The NYTimes today reports on an experiment testing whether electrodes implanted in the eye can restore sight. No miracle cure, and it doesn’t work for glaucoma, the artificial retina produces the sensation of sight. It draws on cochlear implants for the deaf and is partly financed by a cochlear implant maker: The project, involving patients in...

Philip B. Corbett, the NYTimes deputy news editor, is also in charge of The Times’s style manual. Says he: The folks at Adobe Systems Inc. remind us that “Photoshop” is a registered trademark referring to Adobe’s “digital imaging software products and related services.” It is not, they note, a generic term, and should not be used as a verb to describe the general process of digitally manipulating...

One of the major hurdles in alternative energy is how much land is needed and the variable cost of installation. This solution would largely address both of those issues. The post is critical because they calculate that the cost of replacing all roads is $35 trillion. However, I did some back of the envelope calculations and determined that it wasn’t all that much more than the cost of roads now. Indeed,...

Trending on Twitter, Watch Out, Segway; Honda’s New Personal Transit Device Could Be Next Big Thing: It’s called the U3-X and most people think it looks like a space-age unicycle. And it’s actually fairly striking in its ability to move not just forward and backwards but sideways and diagonally, too. Top speed is 3.7 mph, which for most people would be a power walking pace. The device moves...

That dust storm that blanketed a huge swath of Australia also gave birth to an instant magazine: Strange Light is a 40-page magazine that Derek just published (in this case, I mean “just” as in “sometime during the night, U.S. time”) using MagCloud. So, to recap: The dust storm occurred on Wednesday. Photographers — professional and amateur — headed out into the storm and, with no organizing or...

In The Age of Spiritual Machines, Ray Kurzweil predicts that by 2019 we will all be able to experience 3-D virtual reality through glasses and contact lenses that beam images directly to our retinas (retinal display). Coupled with an auditory source (headphones), we will be able to remotely communicate with other people and access the Internet. These special contact lenses (available also as eyeglasses) will...

Guest post by Jessie Daniels Jessie Daniels is a principal of the Truman National Security Project and is currently an independent writer living in New York City. Most recently, she conducted research on future security challenges and multilateral response at the International Peace Institute in New York. Prior to that, she worked for four years as a national security legislative aide to U.S. Senate Majority...

The big tech news Monday was that Netflix announced a winner in its infamous contest to improve the accuracy of its recommendation algorithm, Cinematch, by 10 percent. The $1 million Netflix Prize was offered three years ago. The race ended in a mathematically statistical tie. Under the contest’s complex rules the winners beat the second place team by only 23 minutes: The Netflix contest has been widely...

I just received an e-mail in Spanish from a friend. It was titled ” La Culpa es de la Vaca,” (It’s the cow’s fault), and started as follows: COMUNISMO: Tienes 2 vacas. El estado te quita las dos y te regala un poco de la leche. (COMMUNISM: You have two cows. The government takes both of them and gives you a little bit of milk) And so it went on with Socialism, Fascism, Capitalism,...

Talk about the Law of Unintended Consequences:

From ReadWriteWeb, In Exactly 100 Words: The Real-Time Web is a paradigm based on pushing information to users as soon as it’s available – instead of requiring that they or their software check a source periodically for updates. It can be enabled in many different ways and can require a different technical architecture. It’s being implemented in social networking, search, news and elsewhere...

HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES TWENTY-FIFTH LEGISLATURE, 2009 STATE OF HAWAII H.C.R. NO. 19 H.D.1 HOUSE CONCURRENT RESOLUTION STRONGLY URGING THE SECRETARY OF DEFENSE AND THE PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES TO AWARD SGT. RAFAEL PERALTA THE MEDAL OF HONOR. 15 WHEREAS, his battalion redeployed to Iraq’s Anbar Province 16 in 2004 as part of Operation Phantom Fury to battle insurgents 17 in their stronghold of...

Guest post by Frankie Sturm and Matt Rhoades Frankie Sturm is communications director at the Truman National Security Project and a free-lance journalist. Matt Rhoades works on Operation FREE for the Truman Project, where he is an intern. ********** Operation FREE, a coalition of national security experts and military veterans, has been a leading voice in arguing that climate change and an out-dated energy policy...

This morning’s Op-Ed piece in the New York Times by Ross Douthat will certainly raise a lot of eyebrows, produce a lot of frowns, bring out a lot of smiles and everything in between—and beyond. For the article is a little bit about the good and a lot about the bad and the ugly of a person whom Americans either love, or love to hate. You guessed it; it is about George W. Bush. What makes the article...

So the long-rumored deed is done: American has decided that the anti-missile shield, parts of which were to be built in Poland and the Czech Republic – is best set aside for other considerations. When one get’s past all the bravado and one-upmanship of foreign affairs, what impact will it have on Russian behavior? This editorial from Russia’s Gazeta newspaper, notably owned in part by Mikhail...

I will never forget then Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld’s answer to a question by Army specialist Thomas Wilson of the 278th Regimental Combat Team, back in December of 2004, nearly two years after the start of the Iraq war. The setting was a town-hall style meeting Rumsfeld was holding with over 2,000 Iraq-bound troops in a cavernous hangar at a remote desert camp in Kuwait. Set out on display...

I caught some flack from my conservative friends last week when I agreed with President Obama on the decision to shelve the star wars missile defense boondoggle in Eastern Europe. While anyone could rightly question my bona fides on such issues, they may want to pay a little more attention when no less a personage than Secretary of Defense Robert Gates weighs in on the subject. Last week, President Obama —...

And not even 1 calorie per hit. From CBS Sunday Morning and The Tomorrow Show. Mo Rocca on the past and future of candy… RELATED: Sweet Old World, The humble origins of American candy dynasties.

Electric cars are quiet. That’s a potential problem for pedestrians and cyclists. The LATimes: Nissan sound engineers have announced that the Leaf electric car set for release next year will emit a “beautiful and futuristic” noise similar to the sound of flying cars — or “spinners” — that buzz around 2019 Los Angeles in Ridley Scott’s dystopian thriller based on a Philip K. Dick...

I lived in the Netherlands for many years and I fondly remember its windmills, its gorgeous fields of tulips, and of course its delicious cheese—made from that great Dutch koe melk (cow milk). I don’t remember, however, seeing any camels grazing in the luscious Dutch pastures. That’s why the headline in this morning’s news.scotsman.com got my attention. Under the banner, “Dutchman...