BLACK ROCK CITY, Nevada -- It's hot in the desert, but not too hot to set something on fire.

Amid other activities, Burning Man attendees spit flames and gaze at fiery art installations as the annual festival's iconic Man awaits his inevitable fate.

Left: In the biggest harshed mellow at Burning Man so far this year, the sun decides to come up again. Early risers and those who have not slept wallow confusedly in the solar judgment.

The streets of Black Rock City hustle and bustle with activity as a swarthy unknown by the name of Swearengen arrives seeking wealth and power by any means necessary.

The Cheshire Cat makes its way across the desert and sheds a tear for the old, more wholesome, wonderland.

Burners walk far out on the playa to experience a light and music show created by a team of 20 with weather balloons, off-the-shelf Christmas tree hardware and software, and various insulation and irrigation pipes. This year's decorations are sooo going to one-up the more perfect and WASP-y anarchist festival across the street, Flaming Dude.

A huge ship sails burners across the night desert until the 8-year-old who drew it thinks it looks crappy and throws it away.

Mutopia -- a tech piece of interactive, flame-throwing art depicting a mutant alien life form going through its stages of development -- delights burners. The piece was created by a San Francisco Bay Area group known as the Flaming Lotus Girls.

A costumed burner stops to watch Mutopia.

Natalie Spence works the controls of Mutopia.

Flames shoot from the mouth of a literal burner who just shotgunned a can of lamp oil. This has to be the coolest thing someone can be able to do and still be poor somehow.

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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.

OK, we'll admit it. Some of us are drawn to dangerous gear like bears to a picnic basket. There's just something devilishly appealing about mixing a few of our favorite things (tech toys) with one of our least (a ride in the back of a squad car).

Although we'd never condone breaking the law with these five gadgets, we can't deny our morbid fascination with them. Just remember: If misused, these gizmos could get you slapped with a set of handcuffs along with a criminal record.

1. The WASP Knife

A vicious double-whammy of sharpened steel and freezing gas menaces watermelons everywhere.

Designed to quickly dispatch marauding undersea predators, this 5.25-inch hunting/tactical blade conceals a catastrophic one-two punch. After you shank say, a Great White Shark, a flick of a button injects the beast with an 800-psi blast of compressed air. This basketball-sized sphere of freezing gas decimates the interior of whatever it's injected into; whatever's left simply floats to the surface. It works great on watermelons, too.

Why It'd Get You Arrested:

Stabbing random objects on dry land (and then making them explode) is the fast track to a vandalism charge. Turning the WASP Knife on an innocent creature for non-defense purposes, though? Depending on the state, you're looking at aggravated assault, assault with a deadly weapon, animal cruelty or even the rarely used "mayhem" charge.

2. Sonar II Burner

The Sonar II can burn through garbage bags and retinas with equal aplomb.

Look, everyone wants a lightsaber. But we can't have them because: A) midi-chlorians don't exist and, B) law enforcement agencies are already less-than-enthused over high-power handheld lasers. Consider for a moment, Wicked Lasers' Sonar II Burner. Essentially a more powerful version of the lasers found in Blu-ray players, this six-inch tool doesn't have to compensate for anything; it can light matches, burn holes through paper and melt plastic.

Why It'd Get You Arrested:

Where to begin? At 60mW, the Sonar II is totally capable of starting fires (arson), burning retinas (assault) and disorienting airline pilots (Gitmo).

3. EMT Paintball Sentry Turret

Fires 30 rounds per second. Fully automated. Illegal in virtually all forms of competitive paintball.

May the Flying Spaghetti Monster's noodley appendage help the poor schmoe who ends up in the cross hairs of the Sentry Turret. This remote-controlled, tripod-mounted paintball cannon unleashes oil-based vengeance at 30 rounds per second on full-auto. And all you paint-balling pros take note: The EMT is not some glorified sloppy-shot Brass Eagle. Integrated-vibration dampeners plus rotation/tilt mechanisms make rounds fired from this gadget highly accurate.

Why It'd Get You Arrested:

With the amount of paint the Sentry is capable of unloading, you'd definitely be facing accusations of assault, disturbing the peace and any other charges your welt-covered victims care to press.

4. Fiber Laser Marking System

It may not look menacing, but this portable laser can sear images into rock, glass and metal.

If you're going to deface public property, you might as well get an assist from technology. Laser Photonic's unintentional contribution to this practice is the "Handheld Fiber Laser Marking System." This portable, high-power laser was originally designed for etching graphics into industrial surfaces like metal, glass and stone. Sure, it lacks the DIY charm of spray paint. But it makes up for this by running off a car battery, and being able to etch almost any graphic you can load on a multimedia card.

Why It'd Get You Arrested:

Tagging public property with such creativity and zeal is likely to bump up the charge. A number of states reserve the right to boost vandalism charges to the felonious level if the damage exceeds $400, is especially malicious or is performed by a repeat offender.

5. Lil' Buttie LB110

Don’t let the name fool you; this gadget is not your friend … if you get caught illegally tapping a phone line with it.

You don't have to work for the NSA to listen to other people's phone calls. A nifty lineman's handset like the Lil' Buttie LB110 is enough to do the trick. This cheap, easy-to-find gadget is the cornerstone of tapping a phone line. All it really takes is hooking the handset's alligator clamps to a set of exposed telephone wires and syncing up the handset. Once you're on the line, you can snoop on conversations, record them or even dial out at your leisure.

Why It'd Get You Arrested:

Despite what you may think, owning a "butt set" isn't illegal. Don't be fooled though -- unless you're using it for running diagnostics on your own phone line, someone's bound to drop the hammer. Getting caught using (or even installing) an unauthorized line is the express lane to a felonious wiretapping charge, and/or a lifetime of government scrutiny. Trust us on this one.