A California inventor has developed a book-binding machine that makes it cheap and easy to print professional-quality books within minutes.

This is a great technology that i truly hope catches on. I'm an avid reader, and one who can't stand to read anything more than a few pages long on a computer screen. I maintain that ebooks, if the correct form factor ever comes about, will be of great utility for technical books and references, in which hyperlinking and annotation capabilities are critical.

For pleasure reading, however, there's nothing better than a book. There's something really luxurious about a well made book, the texture, smell and heft, and the unabashed inefficiency of bound paper.

] Care to drop the pages-long descriptions of minutia unrelated
] to the plot, too? Done.
I have some reservations about the kinds of modifications or scalability enabled by such technology, because i think it's dangerous to encourage people to excise "undesirable" pieces of an artwork (which a novel is). Literature (art in general, really) is a passtime where the efficiency of information transmission should not be a concern...

However, i think the positive features will far outweigh the negative, allowing (eventually) cheap access to public domain works and newcomers and permitting flexibility in the edition sold (some people like the short, fat trade paperback, where i'd prefer a midsized hardback... no problem, offer multiple bindings).

Definitely something to keep an eye on...

Book-Binding Technique Could Revive Rare Texts

] In a statement released at the December 17th flight,
] Allen said: "Being able to watch today's successful test
] flight in person was really an overwhelming and
] awe-inspiring experience. I'm so proud to be able to
] support the work of Burt Rutan and his pioneering team at
] Scaled Composites."

SSO/WK is one of the top contenders for winning the X prize, for anyone not following it. I'm not at all surprised to find that Allen is the guy behind the guy.

Paul Allen Revealed as SpaceShipOne Investor

] Sony Corporation today announced the development of
] dramatically enhanced motion of Sony's humanoid robot,
] enabling integrated motion control for walking, jumping
] and running.

...

] Sony will continue to utilize the QRIO platform for various
] technological advances, leading to outstanding entertainment
] robots highly suited to the co-existence with humans and to the
] development of various technologies which can be applied to other
] Sony products.

I, for one, welcome our new QRIO masters. Kidding, but man, sure seems like remarkable things are happening in the robot world.

Sony Global - Press Release

Grokker takes the data culled by an online search and organizes it visually into categories that enable you to quickly dig deeply to find the exact site or information you need. The application that works on top of many different databases, including the all-important Google.

sounds like someone finally grasped some key issues with data mining for ordinary humans. Now, I want it to have the ability to do the same thing for my files.

We're talking about a personal knowledge manager now, but, as we start filling up our 40, 80, 120 gig drives, we're gonna get more and more lost in that data sea. I already have trouble finding things, and i try to follow a relatively strict hierarchical model (which has it's own problems...). Broad support for proprietary file formats is a stumbling point here, as are binary data (music, movies, images), but the future of your "desktop" is a smart interface to your data... semantically indexed and organized and available within one query and a click. maybe groxis will lead us there?

[edit] They should try to steal less from Aqua for their web site, by the way, especially since they don't even have a MacOS version yet.

also, Java? It's possible that this is one of the 2% of Java programs that aren't infuriatingly slow, but, i have my doubts.

Going Deeper than Google

] Seiko Epson Corporation ("Epson") has developed the uFR
] ("Micro Flying Robot"), the world's smallest flying
] prototype microrobot.

neat... robots kick ass.

Epson-News Release

neat! maybe.

Anchorage Daily News | Village invited to test cheap, clean nuclear power

cool tech, with potentially major utility.

probably far more likely than using quantum entanglement in the near term... ;)

New Sun Microsystems Chip May Unseat the Circuit Board