The last time Wired reviewed equipment designed to survive the highest mountain in the world (May 2000), climbers were schlepping 9-pound, $11,000 sat phones on the trek to Everest's 29,000 feet. Climbing tech these days is ultralight, cheaper, and practically Everest-proof. Any season now, mountaineers will be Twittering from the summit ("OMG my toz R bLk!"). Here's some of the latest gear to leave us breathless.

1) Zeal Optics SPP Goggles Besides 100-mph winds, Everest is legendary for causing snow blindness. In 2003, Zeal Optics was one of the first to offer photochromatic polarized lenses in goggles. The new SPP adds a spherical lens design for better peripheral vision. The combo equals near-perfect acuity in all conditions, preventing scorched corneas and errant steps on cliff edges. $200

2) Spot Messenger At the touch of a button, the Spot Messenger grabs coordinates from GPS satellites and sends them to your Spot Web site so Mom can track you on Google Maps. Hanging from an ice wall? Hit the 911 button to ping the International Emergency Response Center. (But try to avoid drama above 21,000 feet, where Spot's accuracy can stray.) $170

3) Roper SwitchBack UltraMobile PC Back in 2000, even mountain-ready laptops weren't up for Everest: "You can actually hear the hard drives screaming," one documentarian said. Standard drive heads ride on a cushion of air, which thins out as you climb. The rugged SwitchBack is available with a solid-state drive that works up to the brain-scrambling height of 20,000 feet. $6,000

4) Black Diamond Cobra Ice Tool The carbon-fiber Cobra features a sawtooth pick on the business end (for ice penetration) and a modular head design that lets climbers attach an adze for chopping steps or a hammer for driving pitons. Everest hopefuls sucking wind up to base camp will barely notice its 600 grams. $300

One key change they had in mind was something called a multiprocess architecture, the system that helps the computer keep going when an application crashes or freezes. Why not extend that idea to browsers, so if something crashes in a tab, the other tabs are unperturbed? Also, for that matter, why not set things up so that you can drag an existing tab to create a new window? Starting from scratch had other advantages. You could design it to look cleaner and run faster, the twin dogmas of the Google corporate religion.

Around June 2006, Goodger, Fisher, and another former Mozillan named Brian Ryner cooked up a small prototype. Their first big decision involved the choice of a rendering engine, the software that processes the HTML code of a Web page into the stuff that appears on your screen. The two major open source options were Gecko, used by Firefox, and WebKit, which powers Apple's Safari browser. The word was that WebKit (which had already been adopted by the group developing Google's Android mobile operating system) could be nasty fast — three times as fast as Gecko, in one example.

In a few weeks, they had a simple application running WebKit on Windows that kept going even when a Web page crashed a tab. Early on, Goodger recalls, "our prototypes had a picture of a little tab that was unhappy, and if a tab died you'd see that. It was the first piece of personality in the product."

Not long after that, Brin and Page came by to check in on the furtive beginnings of their browser. "I remember sitting at my desk, which at the time had a stuffed snake running along the back of it," says Pam Greene, an engineer on the team. "Sergey was bouncing on one of those exercise balls, watching Darin give a demo, and petting the snake."

No one will say exactly when the browser project got the official green light. Pichai recalls an executive meeting when Schmidt no longer seemed as opposed as he had been. If Google did go for it, the CEO said, the team had to produce something very different from Explorer and Firefox. In addition, a Google browser would have to be fast, and it would have to be open source. Which, of course, was exactly what the team already had in mind.

In any case, by the autumn of 2006 the line between unofficial concept and formal project had been crossed. "One Friday, there was a meeting called with like an hour's notice," engineer Brett Wilson says. "We were told, 'The management is thinking about doing our own browser — what do you think about that?' Everybody was a combination of excited and freaked out." Part of the freak-out was they knew full well that building a competitive browser was a massive undertaking. There were also mixed feelings because of the group's attachment to Firefox, an icon of open source development and a hedge against Microsoft's dominance. "The fear was that people were going to read this as sabotaging Firefox," says Erik Kay, an engineer who joined the team in October 2006. The Googlers were mollified by the fact that their browser would be 100 percent open source: Google's innovations could potentially find their way into the Mozilla codebase. "We really want to make Firefox successful, as well as other open source browsers," Upson says.

As part of Google's Firefox effort, Pichai had been meeting with Mozilla head Mitchell Baker, and at some point he told her about Google's project. Baker now says a Google browser is a mixed bag for Mozilla and Firefox. She sees the effort as a vindication of Mozilla's belief that browser choice is essential. "If Google comes up with some good new ideas, that's really great for users," she says. "Competition spurs the best in us." But she also understands that many of her users will download Google's app. "We expect people will try it and come back," she says. "Mozilla exists because independence is important."

A less weighty issue was what to dub the product. After considering some ridiculous codenames (Upson says they were so awful that he took the un-Googly step of a top-down veto), the project borrowed its moniker from the term used to describe the frame, toolbars, and menus bordering a browser window: chrome.

One more hire was key. Because Chrome was supposed to be optimized to run Web applications, a crucial element would be the JavaScript engine, a "virtual machine" that runs Web application code. The ideal person to construct this was a Danish computer scientist named Lars Bak. In September 2006, after more than 20 years of nonstop labor designing virtual machines, Bak had been planning to take some time off to work on his farm outside Århus. Then Google called.

Bak set up a small team that originally worked from the farm, then moved to some offices at the local university. He understood that his mission was to provide a faster engine than in any previous browser. He called his team's part of the project "V8." "We decided we wanted to speed up JavaScript by a factor of 10, and we gave ourselves four months to do it," he says. A typical day for the Denmark team began between 7 and 8 am; they programmed constantly until 6 or 7 at night. The only break was for lunch, when they would wolf down food in five minutes and spend 20 minutes at the game console. "We are pretty damn good at Wii Tennis," Bak says.

They were also pretty good at writing a JavaScript engine. "We just did some benchmark runs today," Bak says a couple of weeks before the launch. Indeed, V8 processes JavaScript 10 times faster than Firefox or Safari. And how does it compare in those same benchmarks to the market-share leader, Microsoft's IE 7? Fifty-six times faster. "We sort of underestimated what we could do," Bak says.

Speed may be Chrome's most significant advance. When you improve things by an order of magnitude, you haven't made something better — you've made something new. "As soon as developers get the taste for this kind of speed, they'll start doing more amazing new Web applications and be more creative in doing them," Bak says. Google hopes to kick-start a new generation of Web-based applications that will truly make Microsoft's worst nightmare a reality: The browser will become the equivalent of an operating system.

Google also brought in reinforcements to implement the multiprocess architecture that allowed each open tab to run like a separate, self-contained program. In May 2007, it acquired GreenBorder Technologies, a software security firm whose technology was designed to isolate IE and Firefox activities into virtual sessions, or "sandboxes," where malware intrusions couldn't mess with other activities or data on your computer. When the deal was announced publicly, tech pundits wondered whether it meant that Google was going into the antivirus business. Only after the acquisition did GreenBorder's engineers learn that their job was to construct sandboxes for the tabs of a new browser. "It was confusing," says Carlos Pizano, one of the GreenBorder hires. "They would not say what they wanted to sandbox."

The team was growing, but the process never got bogged down in bureaucracy. In the project's early stages, Chromers would all have lunch together at a table in one of the Google cafés. Soon even the largest table couldn't accommodate them all. Working in an open source spirit, every engineer was free to check out any piece of code and tweak or improve it. Rakowski always tried to keep things light, one day awarding tins of chrome polish to the best bug catchers.

As the plumbing aspects of the product fell into place, activity focused on user interface. From the beginning, the Chrome team hoped that its visual presentation would be so understated that people wouldn't even think they were using a browser. The mantra became "Content, not chrome," which is sort of weird given the name of the browser. ("We've learned to live with the irony," Mark Larson says.) The clearest expression of this comes when you drag a tab containing a Web application like Gmail to its own separate window and specify that you want an "app shortcut." At that point, the tabs, buttons, and address bars fall away and the Web app looks pretty much like a desktop app. Welcome to the cloud era.

When deciding what buttons and features to include, the team began with the mental exercise of eliminating everything, then figuring out what to restore. The back button? No-brainer. The forward button? Less essential, but it survived. But if you're a big fan of the browser status bar — that meter that tells you what percent of a page has loaded — you're out of luck with Chrome.

And then there was the bookmarks bar. At first, engineers thought they could kill it. Chrome introduces several new navigation methods, including one where the browser figures out where you want to go next with no typing required. And when you do type something in, you use the "omnibox," a combination of address bar and search box: Just tell it what you're thinking and it delivers a Web address, search results, or popular destinations that fit your query, all in non-intrusive text underneath the box. It's a bulked-up version of "I'm Feeling Lucky." Still, user tests showed that some people just love to navigate by clicking on the bookmark bar. The compromise: If the user has previously configured the bar in IE or Firefox, Chrome will import the setup. Otherwise, users won't have a bookmark bar unless they choose to.

It's incredible that something as potentially game-changing as a Google browser has stayed under wraps for two years. It wasn't until mid-2007, about a year into the project, that the team let employees outside the group even see what they were doing. At the first of a series of Tech Talks featuring the current prototype (events designed, in part, as a way of recruiting internally for the ever-growing team) the reaction was volcanic. Googlers broke into spontaneous applause when various features, like dragging a tab into a new window, were demo'd. As the number of people who knew about Chrome increased, the inevitable occurred — word did leak out to a blog or two, yet nothing came of those stray items. No reporter put it all together. "I think it was because rumors about Google browsers have been around so long — it's like sightings of Bigfoot or the Loch Ness Monster," Upson says.

On the eve of the launch, Pichai shares some of his ambitions for Chrome. How many people will use it? "Many millions," he says. "I want my mom to use it. I want my dad to use it." The Google imprimatur doesn't assure success, but Pichai believes that even if Chrome doesn't snare huge market share, its innovations will improve the landscape. "We benefit directly if the Web gets better," he says.

As launch approaches, the team has just moved into new space in a freshly renovated building on the Google campus, and there's another all-hands gathering in the biggest conference room available. It's standing room only. Milk and cookies are provided. After some initial business, Rakowski hands the floor over to Goodger. The rumpled engineer talks about the benefits of making Chrome an open source product — the code will be publicly released and a community will emerge to determine the browser's evolution. "We'll be able to scale our testing efforts," he says. "It'll enable people to do things we haven't thought of. And it'll generate trust that we're not doing something evil."

As the meeting breaks up, the energy level is over the top, and not just because of the sugar rush. The Chrome team is close to unleashing the product that Google was destined to create. First, though, there are five bugs to swat.

Senior writer Steven Levy (steven_levy@wired.com) also writes about Jay Walker's in the October issue of Wired.

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Jack Flack is normally quite suspicious when a supposedly accidental leak leads to wide, mostly positive coverage. Particularly about a new product. And particularly on public holiday that ensures little competitive news on the business pages the next day.

But the Google leak felt like a genuine miscue, detected only because Kara Swisher's Weber apparently has a 3G card.

What makes it seem like a genuine mistake? Well, while the company moved quickly to confirm the reports, it was not prepared to make the new browser downloadable, thus squandering the full benefit of the coverage.

The launch confirms that the war for the supremacy in the next tech era is fully on. Just as Microsoft cannot afford to have Google operate virtually uncontested in search, nor can Google afford to have Microsoft operate virtually uncontested in browers.

Here's the parse.

Google: At Google, we have a saying: "launch early and iterate."

Translation: Outside Google, it's sometimes misheard as "launch early and dominate."

Google: While this approach is usually limited to our engineers, it apparently applies to our mailroom as well!

Translation: Heh, heh, heh. Even our mailroom guys are go-getters.

Google: As you may have read in the blogosphere, we hit "send" a bit early on a comic book introducing our new open source browser, Google Chrome.

These athletes are turning the stereotype of the inarticulate jock on its empty head. But they have more on their minds than endorsements and bad calls. Just try to match the pros with their prose.

1) "Life comes at us in stages. Sometimes, those stages develop slowly ... Other times, they sneak up on us like a sadistic bunk mate with a sockful of pennies."

2) "I think that what's really unpatriotic is sitting by, allowing a president to make bad decision after bad decision ... Silence is the enemy of democracy."

3) "I've done a lot of writing these last two years ... I have written from the heart. I have written as a human being ... To those who have doubted, rest assured I know how to take care of business when it's time."

4) "It seems that in the daily grind of life we get so caught up ... that we don't have time to change and evolve. It's like day to day we are just collecting puzzle pieces, and we need some time and space to actually put it all together."

5) "Just back from CES ... I wanted to throw some kudos to the guys at Flying Labs. I am arguably the last person on the planet to think pirates and that whole genre are cool, but from my first 30 or so minutes of exposure to [Pirates of the Burning Sea], I can't say enough good things about it."

A) Curt SchillingBoston Red Sox, 38pitches.com

B) Ian CrockerUS Olympic swimmer, swimroom.com

C) Evan Tannerformer UFC middleweight champion, evantanner.net

D) Etan ThomasWashington Wizards, huffingtonpost.com

E) Paul ShirleyMenorca Bàsquet, espn.com

Rollover the ??? to reveal the answers

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Bob Rice has had many careers. He was an attorney with the U.S. Department of Justice, a partner at law firm Milbank Tweed Hadley & McCloy, C.E.O. of a tech startup, and now runs merchant bank Tangent Capital, which he founded in 2005.

In his spare time, Rice managed to write Three Moves Ahead: What Chess Can Teach You About Business, one of the more interesting business reads to come down the pike this year, in which he uses the tried-and-true strategies of chess for insight into running a business.

Today, he's squeezing in some blogging. One day. One place: Portfolio.com.

Ah, those Sand Hill Road visionaries, the venture capital guys who finance the future and dictate the trends. It must be fun out there, getting the first glimpses of tomorrow. But suddenly there's a wonderful irony at work: That very future is destroying their industry.

Newspapers are rife with stories about the decline of big V.C. investments, pointing to the trend as a sign of a more conservative investment environment. But I don't think that's really the issue.

Instead, something much more profound is going on: The basic V.C. model is broken. And new technology is driving a much more efficient system for capital allocation to startups.

In fact, technology is largely at fault both for what's wrong with the V.C. world and for what's replacing it. The problem with the industry is this--it's just too cheap to start new companies these days.

Virtual offices allow talent to gather from around the country to work on a new idea without having to quit full-time jobs too early. Servers, computers, and bandwidth are essentially free, and a robust telecommunications platform can be rented for a few tens of dollars a month. Software development can be outsourced without taking on big fixed costs. There are countless programs to manage customer relations, mine contacts, handle the books, and plan and monitor projects. And of course, the internet has reduced the costs of finding customers and testing new concepts to nearly nothing.

Okay, so what? Well, the classic V.C.'s simply have too much money under management, and too expensive a talent pool, to waste time looking at investing anything less than $10 million in a project. Meantime, no entrepreneur wants to give up equity by taking in more money than he absolutely needs. So, when it only costs a few million to get a serious new company off the ground, how can the V.C.'s really play? They have to find places to make gigantic gambles, usually overpaying because the other big V.C.'s are also trying to invest in the few really big-dollar opportunities out there. It has become a system doomed to failure.

The flip side of the story is the rise of angel investor groups. These investment consortiums have always been ideally positioned to provide $500,000 to $5 million equity injections; but until recently, that wasn't enough to get a serious effort off the ground. More fundamentally, however, they have historically not been terribly investor-friendly, largely because the individual members have other occupations.

The individual members didn't work in the same place or even at the same times, so angels were terribly inefficient at evaluating transactions, sharing information, and negotiating and documenting deals.

Those days are over, thanks to software developed by David Rose, founder of the New York Angels (yes, I belong). Angelsoft is a wonderful collaboration platform that manages deal flow, helps match talent and expertise to projects, provides easy-to-use data rooms for potential investors, and generally drives the investment process. It combines project management and social networking in a way that, for the first time, makes the angel process efficient for both the company seeking capital and the potential investors.

The big news now is that, in a period of just a couple of years, over 400 angel groups around the globe have standardized on the platform. That means, of course, that they will also be able to share deals between themselves, vastly expanding the capital and expertise available for any given project.

And entrepreneurs can now create one submission to get access, literally, to a world of sophisticated, organized investors. It sounds like a revolution to me. Check it out at the group's website.

And so, once again, technology is driving a paradigm shift. But this time, it's France in 1789: The progenitors of change are becoming the victims.

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Mike Pfeffer, a 26-year-old IT professional, was thinking about buying a Kindle, Amazon's pricey new digital book reader, but he wanted to look at the screen and touch the buttons before shelling out $359 for it.

So he went to the Amazon site and, through the See a Kindle in Your City message board, found a current Kindle owner in Manhattan who was willing to meet up. The woman worked in the building across the street from him and enthusiastically showed him everything from how the screen looked to how to turn pages on the device.

"I told her she should go work for Amazon," says Pfeffer, who wound up buying a Kindle the very next day.

To help sell its high-priced digital reading device, Amazon is relying more than ever on its tried-and-true sales strategies of word of mouth and customer reviews, and it appears to be working, although the total market for the device is questionable.

In August, Citigroup analyst Mark Mahaney projected that Amazon would sell 380,000 Kindles this year, up from an earlier estimate of 190,000, adding in a report that "Kindle is becoming the iPod of the book world" since its release in November 2007. (However, Mahaney's estimate that about 240,000 Kindles have been sold so far this year was, by his own admission, based on fuzzy numbers since Amazon hasn't released any sales numbers for the Kindle, and Amazon has reportedly sought to distance itself from those numbers.) Another analyst, Tim Bueneman from McAdams Wright Ragen, reported last week that several new versions of the device are in development, including a textbook model.

Amazon says its approach to selling the Kindle—no outside advertising and just relying on the Kindle community and stumping by Jeff Bezos to drive sales—is deliberate. The Kindle currently has over 4,200 customer reviews on the Amazon website, more than for any other top-selling item in Amazon's electronics category, and the vast majority are positive.

"Customer reviews of Kindle have been terrific—that tends to help sell the product," says Ian Freed, the Amazon executive in charge of the Kindle. More than three quarters of the reviewers give the Kindle at least four stars out of five, with many using words like fabulous, must-have, and changed my life.

The See a Kindle in Your City program, which was started in May, is just another extension of that idea. Freed and members of his group saw that people were especially curious when they saw one in public and decided to capitalize on the phenomenon.

"We tapped right into that, allowing customers to create a space where potential customers could physically meet, like at a coffee shop or a restaurant, and show each other Kindles," says Freed. Since the Kindle is an expensive new technology, selling the device at retail outlets where customers could see and touch it would seem to make sense, but Freed says that would diminish the community-based marketing that's propelling sales. But there may be another reason for See a Kindle in Your City—it could be that stores just don't want to carry the device.

"Kindle is actually a tough product to sell at retail," says Michael Gartenberg, vice president of mobile strategy at Jupitermedia. Sony's e-book reader, a similar product, may have set the tone. It was released earlier than the Kindle in September 2006 and uses the same E Ink technology for its screen—and doesn't seem to have sold particularly well as a retail product at either Sony's own stores or at Borders, although Sony, like Amazon, has not released any kind of sales figures for its device. "It's going to take a fair amount of evangelizing to explain the product, and the best people to evangelize are the users of the products," says Gartenberg of the Kindle.

Among the features that Kindle users have been most enthusiastic about is the wireless-downloading feature that differentiates it from Sony's reader, which requires a computer to first receive the books. Digital books can be delivered almost anywhere to users in less than a minute using Sprint's nationwide high-speed wireless network, fulfilling users' desires for instant gratification. Indeed, instead of cannibalizing sales of physical books, Freed says Amazon's statistics show that Kindle owners more than doubled their overall number of book purchases after getting the device, and that they still bought just as many physical books after getting one as they had before.

Those avid Kindle users have become effective proselytizers, often talking up the device with the zeal of religious converts. Citigroup's Mahaney raves about the ease of taking e-books with him when he travels, and one journalist (who wished to remain anonymous) says that he was initially skeptical about the whole notion of e-books and only got a review copy of it to trash it. "But I love it," he says. "I couldn't find anything bad about it. I use it all the time."

Though the idea of Kindle get-togethers may sound suspiciously like Tupperware parties, Gartenberg thinks Amazon's strategy is different.

"There's a difference between selling and evangelizing," he explains. "Amazon is not asking its customers to sell, it's asking its fans to sell. And they're not making any commission on those sales."

To be sure, Amazon's call to Kindle fans to push the product has had its detractors.

"What an outrageous request from Amazon!" one respondent wrote when Amazon introduced its See a Kindle in Your City message forum. "Take your time, go out in public with your Kindle, and help us sell more Kindles and make more money. I appreciate the offer to become an unpaid pimp for the Kindle, but no thanks, Amazon."

The four-day 2008 Democratic National Convention in Denver this week is not just a political event -- it's a celebration of social media, high-definition video and really kick-ass internet connectivity.

"This is America's convention, and we're using new technology this time, like text messaging and Google and YouTube, to really break down these walls to make this [convention] more open and interactive," says Brook Colangelo, the DNCC's director of technology.

This year's convention sees multiple firsts in technological innovations for the quadrennial political party gathering. For starters, the Democratic National Convention Committee is providing bloggers (and floor delegates) with "video-upload booths" where they can upload their footage to YouTube or any other online-video platform.

The DNC is using text messaging and streaming video to keep delegates (and those following along at home) up to date.

Separately, an alliance of groups, including progressive group blog the DailyKos, ProgressNow and the Alliance for Sustainable Colorado, are hosting and sponsoring an 8,000-square-foot "bloggers tent," where attending bloggers, vloggers and podcasters will have a place to work with a high-bandwidth internet connection.

Here's a look at some of the tech inside the Pepsi Convention Center, where the event is taking place.

The convention committee hired top talent to design its futuristic-looking stage: Designer Bruce Rodgers came up with the idea for the Democrats' flashy podium. Rodgers' other clients include Madonna, Mötley Crüe, the Dave Matthews Band and the National Football League. The DNC convention setup features 8,000 square feet of video-projection surfaces, and that includes three 103-inch Panasonic LCD HD screens, the largest of their kind.

The screens will project daily themes of the convention and other relevant pictures as events unfold.

The DNCC says that more than 50 technicians and 70 local stagehands have worked more than 25,000 hours to create the 70-foot-wide and 60-feet-high stage and podium.

Craigslist Founder Craig Newmark is blogging and vlogging about the Democratic National Convention for his personal blog cnewmark.com, Reuters and The Huffington Post. He's one of more than 120 bloggers who have been credentialed to "cover" the convention.

On Monday, Newmark worked in The Big Tent, an 8,000-square-foot space for bloggers. His gear: A Lenovo ThinkPad x300, an iPhone 3G, a Flip Video, a Nokia n95, a Nikon P80 and a pedometer.

He plans on streaming and shooting video during the convention, as well as writing, and he has plans to attend tech round tables taking place at the convention, as well as several parties with celebrities.

"I've never been to a convention, and I've never done anything political before," he says.

Newmark is a surrogate for Obama and speaks about technology issues.

CNN chief national correspondent John King, at the "Mini Magic Wall." The touchscreen is a smaller version of the "Magic Wall" that CNN has used in election coverage. It is produced by Perceptive Pixel, a company founded by multitouch pioneer Jeff Han.

Josh Braun, CNN Producer of New Media, works on a map of the convention floor, which will be geo-referenced to real-time voting data. His computer is connected to the nearby giant touchscreen used by John King.

CNN uses a "Polecam" system on one corner of the floor for correspondent Candy Crowley. The monitor and controller at the opposite end of the pole holding the camera are shown here.

A state-delegation voting kiosk with internet connectivity for bloggers is shown here. There are a total of 56 of these kiosks in the convention hall. The foreground computer is used to tally delegate votes. The monitor at right is for those who are sight- or hearing-impaired. A phone is on each side of the voting computer: one connected to Obama for America and one to the DNC secretary, both used to coordinate issues on the floor. The connection is hardwired so as not to compete with RF devices (such as video cameras) from the news media. The yellow cable gives internet access to bloggers.

In background is the DNC network hardware and in foreground is an OC-192 circuit, providing 10 Gbps of bandwidth -- enough, convention organizers say, to connect 220,000 homes to the internet.

With 56 blogging kiosks, a massive OC-192 internet connection, blogger-friendly amenities, streaming video and 8,000 square feet for bloggers nearby, the Pepsi Center is about to host the most-blogged event ever.

DNC Committee technology director Brook Colangelo holds a cable at a state-delegation voting kiosk. The connection is hardwired so as not to compete with RF devices (such as video cameras) from the news media -- plus, it will provide a more reliable connection than WiFi could in an environment where so many people want internet access.

Joe Silber and Lysandra Nelson from San Francisco mug at the podium for a photo op. Behind them are three Panasonic 103-inch HDTV displays; 8,000 square feet of video projection area is behind that.

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Have Google and Verizon Communications finally kissed and made up?

The two heavyweights, last seen sparring over opening up the wireless spectrum, are in talks over a deal that would make Google the default search on Verizon devices and give the search giant a piece of the ad revenue, the Wall Street Journal reports.

A deal could eventually cover Verizon's web portal and its FiOS TV service, the Journal says.

Any agreement would be a turnaround from their public clashes after Google lobbied the government to open up access to the wireless spectrum. Verizon fiercely fought back that effort.

In June, Russ Mitchell noted that with the acquisition of Alltel and with an agreement with the Federal Communications Commission, Verizon looked prepared to keep throwing its weight around.

Wireless providers are looking for an edge in services amid fierce competition. Verizon Wireless—a joint venture between Verizon Communications and Vodafone of Britain—has talked to other possible search partners in the past, including Microsoft, the Journal says.

A deal is equally important to Google.

"Google wants closer integration with carriers like Verizon so it can enhance the relevance of the ads it shows—for example, by making them sensitive to a user's location," the Journal says.

Rival Yahoo has deals with several wireless providers.

But Rafat Ali on mocoNews.net says that such deals offer only short-term gains: "As phones open up, users will be able to use whichever search engine they desire, not the ones deemed official by the carriers."

And for those who are worried about Google's crushing dominance in search and its inroads into media, there is now a modified search engine that lets you search without getting results from Google sites like Knol, Blogger, and YouTube.

Yes, it's Google minus Google.

I fear for the future of time travel. Not the real thing: That seems to be coming along swimmingly, according to a handful of renegade physicists (more on that in The Future! of this column). No, I'm more worried about that venerable pop institution fictional time travel. It's getting airier, subtler, distressingly less Rube Goldbergian: No fewer than four extant network shows — Heroes, the soon-to-return Lost, and two newcomers, Life on Mars and Fringe — involve some form of time travel minus any obvious chronos-crunching machine. The new time travelers epoch-hop on pure longing, head injury, or strength of will alone — sizzling portals and sparking gizmos are now rendered beside the point. Sure, some might see this as the genre maturing, but to me it looks an awful lot like downsizing. Hello? McFly? Whither the DeLoreans of yesteryear? Outta time, it seems.

Which says something about The Present. Time-travel stories are wonderfully dated, pristine core samples of the ages that birthed them. In A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court (1889), an early instance, Mark Twain was essentially refighting the Civil War in satire. His mode of transport? A bump on the head. Twain was in the machine age but not of it. But just a few years later in 1895, H. G. Wells embraced the industrial: The Time Machine was an au courant postcolonial parable, but more to the point, it described time travel via device in detail — and became a timeless source of inspiration for future generations of geeks. One of these is Ronald Mallett, a University of Connecticut physics professor who is, in all seriousness, working on a time machine. As you might expect, his tastes fall along the gizmo end of the spectrum: "I'm into the realm of technology and control. My leaning is definitely toward science fiction based on some sort of instrumentality." Mallet's design involves a circulating ring laser that could hypothetically twist spacetime the way a spoon swirls coffee.

Time machines stayed in fashion through the atomic age, undergoing both design and thematic updates that often cast them as vehicles for cautionary tales of science gone awry: See Ray Bradbury's seminal short story A Sound of Thunder (the "butterfly effect" urtext) and the BBC's Doctor Who. The sober political retrenchments of the '70s gave rise to Time and Again and Somewhere in Time, in which time travel is a form of reflective meditation, accomplished via hypnosis. In the '80s, heavy metal resurged with Back to the Future and The Terminator, two films that differed radically in theory and tone (BTTF's zippy Freudian destiny-defiance versus T1's grim, apocalyptic determinism) but shared the muscular, plutonium-fueled ethos of the Reagan era. Quantum Leap may have been light on tech, but it was almost neoconservative in its morality: Sam Beckett traveled the timeline, righting wrongs — the continuum's beat cop. And Bill and Ted's phone booth? A thing of naive, idiotic, self-congratulatory excellence, much like triumphal glasnost America itself. For these time travel shows, history was like other world problems — ornery but correctable. By 1991, Terminator 2's happy ending seemed to be telling us that the timeline was finally fixed. And then, for the rest of the '90s, the time machines were scrapped. We didn't need them anymore.

That's been the case even as, in the last couple of years, time travel has returned to the cultural forebrain — sans the machines. Lost's Desmond has seizures of chronology fueled not by plutonium but by romantic longing and the drive for redemption; for Heroes' Hiro, era swapping is a personal test of will; and the time traveler in Life on Mars may either be trapped in the '70s or a coma victim dying of guilty nostalgia. (Talk about a parable for our times!) Methodology-wise, though, we're practically back to King Arthur's Court. This is time travel in the cloud era: The DeLorean would never even pass emissions, and classical Wellsian futurism has given way to pure wish fulfillment.

But in the next yet-to-be-writ age of time-travel fantasy, I say we re-commit to the machine. Be it Mallett's circulating ring laser (Spike Lee has already bought the film rights to the prof's life story — really) or a mylar-sided Prius (Mr. Spielberg, that one's on the house), let's mechanize something, not just squint hard and wish. Let's get ambitious again. Let's shoot sparks. Let's burn rubber. Heck, maybe just once, for old time's sake, let's go back and father ourselves.

Email scott_brown@wired.com.

I met Daisuke "Dice-K" Enomoto in Star City, Russia, in August 2006. Enomoto, 37, is slight with tired eyes and a shock of bleach-blond dyed hair. His idea of space travel comes from comic books and Star Wars. He grew up as a self-described otaku, coding his own computer games and dreaming of space—or, at least, space as it was portrayed in Star Wars and manga. His favorite anime show, Gundam, chronicles a future full of giant robots in which humans are abandoning this planet for the stars. "People who live on Earth, their souls is tied up by gravity, you understand?" Enomoto says. "I sympathize with this idea. Maybe in the future people should live in the space."

Enomoto applied his programming skills to building Internet companies, making millions. He bought a swanky wraparound penthouse loft overlooking Tokyo's famous electronics district, Akihabara. He tooled around in Porsches and Segways, and threw raves. He redecorated the moon-age pad himself, tricking it out with sinuous white walls modeled after the International Space Station. But life was bearing down on him. He married and divorced, had a couple of kids. One of his former companies, Livedoor, was embroiled in criminal lawsuits over stock and accounting issues. He needed to get away from the money, the demands, the scandal. And what better place to go than space? "I just want to go up there," he says, "and chill."

This giddy club kid paid $20 million (the price of a trip to the International Space Station at the time) to Space Adventures. He left behind his sci-fi penthouse and moved into a tiny two-room apartment in Star City to train for his 10-day space trip. He bunked with a Russian translator named Sergei, who stayed up every night shoving wads of newspaper into the window cracks to keep out the freezing winds.

The months of intensive cosmonaut training was hard on the keyboard jockey, especially the fitness regimen. When he arrived, he could do only two chin-ups. Swimming 800 meters took him 26 minutes. He was also unprepared for the antinausea conditioning in the whirling vestibular chair. Enomoto had his own technique for trying to deal with the looping around. "I imagined that I was driving in the PlayStation game Ridge Racer," he says. It didn't work. Within minutes, he was spewing borscht all over his blue spacesuit.

The longer Enomoto stayed at Star City, however, the more he came to enjoy the simple life there. Gone were the pressures of life in Japan. "I realize life is more than just money," he says. The broadband access in his cramped Star City apartment and several seasons of 24 on DVD didn't hurt.

Enomoto had big plans for his ride into space—and not just the ultimate iPod playlist he put together for the trip, a meticulously arranged mix of techno and trance. He also intended to take cosplay to a whole new level. He would dress like his favorite anime character—the mighty Char Aznable from Gundam. He had his assistant make a custom space suit, an orange and black number complete with a homemade Dice-K patch stitched on the front.

Every Space Adventures client can do experiments during his or her trip to space—most have chosen to conduct scientific research. Enomoto decided to see if he could assemble Gundam toys in weightlessness. Enomoto explains, "I make robots in these bags!" as he reaches his hands inside what looks like an elaborate Ziploc filled with robot parts, "just because it's fun!"

Enomoto's space dreams came crashing down one August morning shortly after my arrival in Star City. The discovery of a kidney stone means he can't fly. Enomoto's backup, Anousheh Ansari, a 41-year-old Iranian woman living in the US, will be taking his seat in the next Soyuz launch. After a visit to the hospital, he's sitting in his apartment with a steaming cup of tea. Enomoto's phone rings off the hook from friends just getting the news. But Enomoto is all smiles.

"My flight isn't canceled," he tells his friend on the phone, "it's just postponed." With his training complete and his condition treatable by a blast of ultrasound, Enomoto is in even better shape. He'll be up in space in no time. Best of all, he says, now he can work out some final details like getting the space station manuals translated into Japanese. And, he says, maybe he'll use the extra time to negotiate a spacewalk outside the ISS.

In the meantime, he's happy Anousheh is getting her crack at the flight.

Any chance he'll let her assemble one of his robot toys in space when she goes? "I don't think so!" he says, with a nerdy laugh and a snort. He spent $20 million, and the robots are coming with him.

As of August 2008, Enomoto hadn't returned calls, and Space Adventures wouldn't comment on his future flight status.

In the woods an hour outside Moscow, a sign on the road reads zvyozdny or "star." You are now approaching Star City, home of the Russian space program where cosmonauts have trained since the time of Yuri Gagarin. Clients of Space Adventures who shell out tens of millions of dollars for a trip to the International Space Station can expect to spend up to eight months training here before blastoff.

Star City cosmonauts and workers, and their families, reside in these apartment buildings. Some 8,000 people live in Star City year round.

Buses wait outside the entrance to Star City. There is a security booth, and nearby is a kiosk selling cigarettes, snacks, and souvenirs.

The Cosmonaut House is the main community center in Star City. It has a theater for events, a indoor flea market, and a museum that includes Yuri Gagarin's office and artifacts.

A sculpture outside the Cosmonaut House represents Gagarin flying effortlessly through a ring that symbolizes earthly limitations.

This photo collage at the entrance to the Cosmonaut House is just one of many memorials to Yuri Gagarin around Star City.

This is a replica of the MIR mock-up/trainer inside the Star City space museum.

Inside the Star City museum is a simulation of the Soyuz vehicle. The two holes lined with bright aluminum are parachute containers that pop open at lower altitudes for a soft landing.

A MiG monument stands at the air base entrance of Star City.

Artwork celebrating flight shows the MIR at the center, surrounded by images of planes.

Richard Garriott, dressed in his flight suit, stands in the stairwell near his one-bedroom apartment in Star City.

Rostislav Bogdashevsky, the renown Star City psychologist who has been training cosmonauts for more than 45 years, instructs Richard Garriott and Nik Halik with the aid of a translator.

Rostislav Bogdashevsky conducts psychological training of the cosmonauts inside this room. Note the picture overhead of a smiling Gagarin, one of his former pupils.

The bare-bones gymnasium in Star City houses exercise equipment, a pool, and a locker room. Space Adventures clients may spend several hours a day in here.

Gagarin's locker, preserved behind glass in the Star City gym, holds his tennis racket, shoes, and towels.

The Soyuz TDK 7 showing the habitation chamber atop, and descent module below.

A peek inside the Soyuz TDK 7.

Richard Garriott, bottom, and Nik Halik, top, train in the Soyuz TDK 3. Richard Garriott points out: "Note the very close quarters that in real life are even tighter. If you see the green at the bottom of the screen, that is where a door has been cut into the side for easy access. In reality, that is where the parachute compartment sticks into the passenger area. Nik and I are going line by line in the Flight Data Files as the sim progresses. Each line has a time and action to perform and the result we expect. Note that I have a stick in my right hand. When strapped in, especially when in a space suit, it is hard to reach some buttons, so that device is for reaching and pressing buttons that might be hard to reach. Near the right of the screen, you can see the small periscope viewport. At this moment in the sim, our attitude is aligned with Earth. This is likely just after insertion, or just before reentry."

This building houses the TsF-18 centrifuge.

The TsF-18 centrifuge is one of the largest and most advanced in the world. It can simulate the gravitational forces that cosmonauts experience during liftoff and landing—up to nine times as much as Earth's gravity. Space Adventure clients don't endure the full level of the machine's torture—30 gs for unmanned runs—but they are warned to keep their mouths shut at all times, as the extra gs can break their jaws.

The Hydrolab is an underwater training facility used to simulate a spacewalk outside the International Space Station. The mockup section of the ISS shown here can be lowered by the crane into the tank. Cosmonauts wear Orlan spacesuits as they perform spacewalk maneuvers.

The Soyuz Café is a private gathering place for cosmonauts and others celebrating special events in Star City. The blue chamber to the side of the lodge is modeled after the Soyuz, except it contains a wine cellar and comfy sofas.

Richard Garriott holds the old Star City planetarium, a handheld device. A sheet of black paper with holes would be slipped into the viewer and held up to the light.

There's a full-scale Soyuz replica in a Star City facility known as Building 1. Garriott and Halik squeeze into the fake spacecraft and slip on their headsets. It's time to run through another descent exercise, an instructor tells them over an intercom. And this time, no one is nearby to help them.

The capsule is so cramped that Garriott and Halik can't lean forward in their seats to reach certain buttons; they have to jab at them with 18-inch metal wands. The exercise today involves separating the Soyuz from the ISS and returning to Earth. They go through the motions of releasing the latch from the space station.

Garriott begins the countdown in preparation for firing the thrusters. "Ten, nine, eight, seven, six ...," he says. His finger is poised over the Manual Fire button in case the thrusters don't kick in at the right instant, which could cause the Soyuz to skip off the edge of the atmosphere like a stone on a pond.

But the thrusters work fine. One minute later, Garriott begins a second countdown, this time to signal the end of the thruster burn. "Ten, nine, eight, seven, six ..." The thrusters click off. Just before entering the atmosphere, the Soyuz separates from the habitation and instrumentation chambers, and, as Garriott puts it, "we wait to fall out of the sky."

This simulated landing is a success. No ballistic reentry. Touchdown complete.

Aside from surviving the trip, Garriott has one more wish—to earn the title of astronaut. As a gamer, he cares deeply about the difference between character classes—whether a ninja, merchant, or citizen spaceman. But the moniker he has dreamed of all his life is not coming easily. NASA has strict rules about how it titles its explorers, and Garriott cannot qualify, no matter what he does, because he's a private citizen. Instead of an astronaut, they'll call him a space flight participant.

Garriott thinks that's ridiculous. "Every dictionary says that astronaut and cosmonaut are synonyms," he says. "It means anyone who trains for or participates in space flight, period. And once you start training at Star City, they call you cosmonaut."

But they sometimes call him something else, too. As Garriott steps out of the Soyuz, a Russian guard in green fatigues is there to meet him. Garriott has never seen him before, but the dude—clearly a diehard Ultima fan—knows him. "Hail Lord British!" he says, in his thick Russian accent. Velcome home.

Contributing editor David Kushner (david@davidkushner.com) wrote about AI researchers in issue 16.02.