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.

1939: Germany invades Poland, starting the second European war in a generation and introducing the world to a new kind of warfare: blitzkrieg.

This form of attack, which helped the Germans obliterate the Poles in three weeks and the French in only six, relies on rapid mobility and the coordination of massed armor and infantry, with fighter planes and dive bombers providing air support. It also depends on the element of surprise, one reason Nazi Germany never declared war prior to invading an enemy.

The concept of blitzkrieg was a matter of adapting 20th-century technology -- especially the tank, the airplane and the radio -- to the age-old tactics of mobile warfare. The Germans were not alone in exploring these possibilities -- military thinkers like Britain's Basil Liddell Hart and France's Charles de Gaulle also wrote extensively on the subject during the interwar years -- but conditions within the German army, and inside Germany itself, made for a more receptive audience.

Heinz Guderian is the acknowledged father of the blitzkrieg. Guderian was a signals officer during World War I, but he studied tank tactics in the early '20s and became a proselytizer for armored warfare. He later published a study, Achtung Panzer!, that amounted to a blueprint of German blitzkrieg tactics for the next war.

Adolf Hitler, meanwhile, was in the process of rearming the country when he attended a war-gaming exercise that combined tanks and motorized infantry. Hitler was impressed by the swiftness and the striking power, and he told Guderian -- who was running the exercise -- that this was the army he meant to have.

The tank is the blitzkrieg's decisive weapon. Tactically, the key is to attack en masse rather than committing tanks piecemeal, in an infantry support role, which is what the French did. In Germany, this philosophy led to the creation of the panzer divisions, the world's first truly armored units.

(Guderian, though only a colonel, was given command of the 2nd Panzer Division in 1935. As a general in World War II, Guderian commanded the XIX Panzer Corps during the Polish and French campaigns and, later, the Second Panzer Army in Russia. He also served as inspector general of panzer troops and, finally, as chief of the army's general staff.)

The classic blitzkrieg attack unfolds like this:

Success is achieved through surprise and speed, which keeps the enemy off balance. Maneuvering is coordinated through the use of radio, which was used so extensively by the Germans that individual tanks carried their own equipment. The French, by comparison, hardly used radio at all. The French High Command was not even connected by radio to units in the field. Instead, it dispatched orders by motorcycle courier from its headquarters outside of Paris.

Incidentally, the German Wehrmacht never officially used the word blitzkrieg -- literally, "lightning war" -- though it did appear in several prewar German military publications. It came into popular use after turning up in Time magazine's coverage of the Polish invasion.

Source: Various

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

SEATTLE, Washington -- Besides being a global gamer mecca, the annual Penny Arcade Expo is also an excellent place to pick up some super-cool, super-dorky swag.

Unlike Comic-Con where massive dealers' rooms hold hundreds of vendors that sell everything up to and including the kitchen sink (if the sink was autographed by Mark Hamill), Penny Arcade Expo takes a more conservative approach. Vendors can come to the show only if Penny Arcade likes the cut of their jib.

If you went to PAX over the weekend and didn't return with something at least this awesome, we feel sorry for you. Check out Wired.com's full Penny Arcade Expo coverage, including photo galleries from day one and day two of the expo.

Left: PAX attendees with $400 to burn had the opportunity to purchase one of the rarest videogame systems ever: Colorvision. Produced and sold only in France by various manufacturers, it features five games, each of which has an acetate screen embedded into them. The system lights up the screen and the acetate serves as a colorful, if non-interactive, backdrop. On sale at Y-Bot Classic Video Games.

After years of waiting, the anticipated Xbox Live Arcade game Castle Crashers finally debuted last week. In celebration, its long-suffering fans could buy all kinds of Castle Crashers merch at PAX, including these adorably violent figurines for $10. But not the Castle playset, which was just for show.

For those poor Japanese kids who couldn't afford real videogames, there was Time Lock the Invader. It's an unlicensed combination of Space Invaders and Perfection -- put all of the invaders onto the stand, matching the red tops with the black bottoms, before time runs out and the game explodes. $75 at Y-Bot.

Kent, Washington, anime store, Sweet Kitty, is famous among Penny Arcade devotees. The retailer shared a space with the Penny Arcade creators at a comic convention many years ago, and were subsequently immortalized in a comic strip. Store employees and sisters Flo, left, and Kate Reyes pose for photos while holding plush versions of Hayao Miyazaki creations Catbus ($70) and Totoro ($60) in the exhibition hall.

Pink Godzilla, a Seattle store specializing in imports and gaming collectibles, includes an erotic game for the Atari 2600 in its inventory. Produced by a company called Playaround, it features two different games, depending on which side of the cartridge you insert into your Atari. How they thought anyone would be aroused by pixels the size of your fist, we'll never know. $50.

Brian Coyle of Seattle holds up a shirt that reads "Jesus says: Don't be a dick," one of the many funny shirts that PAX themselves sold at the expo for $20 each. You could also buy the Penny Arcade comic books, Penny Arcade hoodies, Penny Arcade the Videogame, and more.

The Color TV Game 15 is one of the first pieces of game hardware that Nintendo ever made, before it hired Mario creator Shigeru Miyamoto. It plays 15 different variations on Pong. It's a rare find in any condition, but Pink Godzilla had a brand new model, still in the plastic, for $150.

Namco Bandai, makers of Pac-Man, have brought the yellow dot-eater back in a big way as retro gaming chic takes hold of the world. A Pac-Man hat ($27) is always a popular item at PAX; other Pac-tchotchkes included shot glasses and T-shirts.

Pink Godzilla's store mascot is, of course, a pink Godzilla. They sold quite a few of them at $10 each, and some devotees of the store's customer-friendly approach to game sales wanted co-owner Nathan Paine to sign their Gojira's pink ass.

And this is what Wired.com's roving PAX reporter Chris Kohler wasted his hard-earned $13 on: A copy of China Warrior, probably one of the worst games for the TurboGrafx-16. Readers voted on which bad game he should buy from Pink Godzilla's ample racks.

SEATTLE, Washington -- The Penny Arcade Expo is quickly becoming the Woodstock of videogames, and even meatspace games are gaining ground in the halls of the convention center as rooms fill with Warmachine and Dungeons & Dragons players.

Click through the gallery for the latest scenes from the expo and check out Wired.com's full Penny Arcade Expo coverage. Also, be sure to peep the events from day one of PAX 2008.

Left: On Saturday, the creators of the Penny Arcade comic strip Mike "Gabe" Krahulik and Jerry "Tycho" Holkins gave thousands of fans a rare treat -- they created Monday's edition of the webcomic live on stage. Artist Krahulik inked and colored the strip while writer Holkins, his job done, entertained the crowd and answered questions.

Adriana Griffin of Sacramento, California, came to PAX costumed as a Medic from the game Team Fortress 2, a strategic shooter game in which players can be a variety of different characters. While the Engineer and Pyro are her favorites, Griffin chose the medic because other costumes from the game were too hard to create -- but she still wanted have a "big gun."

Remember the fictitious energy drink "Brawndo," from the movie Idiocracy? (Motto: "It's got what plants crave!") It's now a very real energy drink, and PAX attendees could chug an oversized can for free. Well, until mid-Saturday, anway, when the booth ran out of their over 50 cases of the stuff, leaving only a sad array of empties and green spillage for the final days of PAX.

Brian Milne, left, of Vancouver, British Columbia, dressed up as Dante from Devil May Cry 4, while girlfriend Melissa Franklin dressed up as Nero from the same game. Franklin, a big fan of the Devil May Cry series, converted Milne to the series. For other gamers who wanted to get their girlfriends involved in their hobby of choice, women in the gaming industry held a (heavily-attended) panel discussion on Sunday discussing that very topic.

Jake Vincent, right, of Seattle, and Tyrone Powell of Edmonton, Alberta, play Call of Duty 4 at the Razer booth, where the company showed off its high-end gaming keyboards and mice.

Fans of the tabletop miniatures game Warmachine assembled at PAX in some of the most elaborate costumes on the floor. From left, Jarnigan Cook, dressed up as Asphyxious; Tosha Stephens, dressed up as Skarre; and Ashley Cooks, dressed up as Deneghra. The trio, from Eugene, Oregon, where the Cooks own a game store, spent several hours getting into their costumes. Stephens' costume included chain mail.

If a game exists, it's likely you can find it somewhere at PAX. Dan Gallardo, left, of Calgary, Alberta, carefully places a block while playing Bausack, a German game in which players win by building the longest standing stack, as Ashley Alto of Calgary watches.

Josie Stephens of Vancouver, British Columbia, dressed up as an Advent, a race with psionic and telepathic powers, from the game Sins of a Solar Empire. Stephens is co-owner of Ironclad Games, the company developing the game.

The "Omegathon" competition, in which twenty top gamers compete for a trip to Tokyo Game Show, continued on in the final days of PAX. Thomas Chan of Chicago, right, and Jo Ubransky of Litchfield, Ohio, celebrated winning the Rock Band Omegathon round on the main stage.

Penny Arcade writer Jerry "Tycho" Holkins is silhouetted as he and his band, the Sex Generals, perform on the main stage prior to the Omegathon Rock Band round.

SEATTLE, Washington -- What is a "gamer?" Ask ten different Penny Arcade Expo attendees and you'll get ten different answers. Around 50,000 videogame fans have descended on downtown Seattle for this weekend's Penny Arcade Expo, all looking for a different experience.

Some are here to show off their hand-crafted costumes of videogame characters. Some are here to compete in tournaments for thousands of dollars in cash prizes. Some are here to perform videogame music and some are looking to hook up with game publishers and score the job of their dreams. All are here to meet up with like-minded peers from all over the world.

Click through the gallery to see the zaniness of PAX so far. Also check out Wired.com's entire PAX 2008 coverage.

Left: Victor Carino poses for a photograph as Captain Falcon from the game F-Zero on the first day of the Penny Arcade Exposition at the Washington State Visitor and Convention Center in Seattle, Washington, Friday, Aug. 29, 2008.

Jack Waterman, left, and Paul Owens perform "chip tunes," using their Nintendo Game Boy systems as electronic instruments on the first day of the Penny Arcade Expo. Owens directed "Reformat the Planet," a documentary about chip tune artists who create original music using ancient videogame hardware, which is being screened at PAX.

You don't see as much cosplay on the PAX show floor as you do at events like Comic-Con, but there are still plenty of gamers in disguise. Kristopher Benson, left, of Seattle dressed up as Pit, aka Kid Icarus, from the game Super Smash Brothers Brawl. His friend, Hilary Kotzke of Seattle, is dressed as Yuffie -- she's a character from the Final Fantasy series of games, but this particular costume is how she appeared in the Disney/Final Fantasy crossover Kingdom Hearts. Cosplayers are a very specific sort.

The "Omegathon" is one of the most brutal videogame tournaments ever devised. A pool of twenty competitors is slowly whittled down to just two finalists, over six grueling rounds spanning the three days of the show. "Omeganaut" Jo Urbanksy of Litchfield, Ohio, awaits his fate while playing Boom Blox on the Nintendo Wii (during the final match of round two of the Omegathon competition). Urbansky's aim was true, and he moved on to the next round.

Dana White, left, of Seattle says she dressed up as a ninja because she is a ninja. Conversely, Megan Cummings, of Seattle, dressed up as a pirate because she wanted to fight the ninja. (Are they thinking about this game?)

Dungeon Master Sage Kurtz of Portland, Oregon, presides over a game of Dungeons & Dragons. Some gamers come to PAX just to game for three days, whether sprawled on a beanbag chair playing Nintendo DS and trading Pokemon with new friends, or holed up in the tabletop gaming rooms waging pen-and-paper campaigns.

The first two nights of PAX play host to the nerdiest concerts ever. The OneUps, a videogame music cover band, kicked off Friday night's show, which was headlined by Jonathan Coulton, a singer/songwriter who penned "Still Alive," the theme song to last year's cult hit game Portal. Pictured: OneUps guitarist Tim Yarbrough, left, and violinist Greg Kennedy.

Warmachine player Matt Birdsall of Arlington, Washington, rolls the dice while playing Hordes at the Privateer Press exhibit.

Tim Riggs of Spokane, Washington, competes in a Starcraft tournament. PAX's PC gaming room is the stuff of legend: It's sponsored by Intel, and Penny Arcade says it's one of the largest LANs in America. There are 330 computers that attendees can play on, and 300 spots where attendees can set up their own custom rigs. All of those spots had sold out before PAX even began.

As so many years of E3 proved, gamers will do almost anything for swag. To win a the newest version of Brothers in Arms, Kenny Repine of Tumwater, Washington, shaved his head and allowed "HELL" to be painted on his scalp.

There's no Dark Knight videogame that we know of, but that didn't stop Stephanie Lindner and Scott Falkner of Renton, Washington, from dressing up as Harley Quinn and the Joker.

Daniel Smolentsev, right, of Portland, Oregon, and teammate Robert Bosch of Gresham, Oregon, celebrate winning a match in a Team Fortress 2 tournament.

Freezepop vocalist Liz Enthusiasm performs. Freezepop isn't a videogame band per se, but member Kasson Crooker is a senior producer at Harmonix, the creators of Rock Band, and Freezepop's songs have appeared in many of the company's games.

BLACK ROCK CITY, Nevada -- From mind-bending art cars to crazy, tricked-out bicycles, there's more than one way to get around at Burning Man. And sometimes the journey's all in your head.

Left: Adrian Selkowitz rides shotgun as Anela Bence drives Boss Hog across the playa. They're just two of the five creators of the huge hog. There's a fine line between a good acid trip and a bad one, and Boss Hog snorts that line up for breakfast.

Bikes of all shapes and sizes grace the avenues at Burning Man. The amount of energy people waste trying to figure out why someone would build these bikes actually makes them less fuel-efficient than a Hummer.

Maya Peer peers through a kaleidoscope created by "Ivan Idea" while Micha Biterman takes a snapshot of her multiple images. The sign is both instructive and a cry for help.

A forklift is brought in to move The Beast from Camp Apocalypse after the monstrous machine's hydraulics failed, causing a mammoth roadblock in the streets of Black Rock City.

In accordance with Burning Man's archaically inhumane robot policy, The Beast will be put to sleep and thrown in a Dumpster out back, and its creators will be told that it was for the best.

A burner turns heads as she cruises through the streets of Black Rock City on a motorized skateboard. Not pictured are the thousands of angry 13-year-olds from whose fantasies she just escaped.

After a blazing day on the playa, burners Adam Al-Harbi (left) from California and Loren Geenberg (center) from New York come out to play in the Zorb, a hamster-wheel-type contraption powered by Logan Jackson and "Dr. Dave" from camp And Then There Is Only Love.

Shortly after this photo, the Zorb became what one onlooker described as a "vomit washing-machine."

It's love at fur sight: A playa moment between "friends."

Lighting the night on fire, Katrina McFerrin, a fire dancer from Albuquerque, New Mexico, shows off her talent for the Crazy Horse Camp. McFerrin later suffered minor burns when she remembered she hadn't set up her out-of-office auto-reply and lost concentration. (Just kidding.)

A spectacular, pedal-powered, fire-spouting vehicle operated by burners from Camp Department of Spontaneous Combustion blazes a trail up the esplanade. And they say cars are dangerous.

Burners dance to sounds spun by Doug LePre, aka Big Daddy Doug, at Big Puffy Yellow Camp beneath the "air star" by Jim McGuire. Four 50-watt bulbs and helium create the full-moon effect, but there can be no explanation for the mumu.

What it is: Envirosight SuperVision 250

What it's used for: Revealing damage deep inside city pipes

You go, you flush: out of sight, out of mind. Not for city maintenance crews. With 850 billion gallons of sewer and storm water leaking into watersheds around the country every year, the Environmental Protection Agency is cracking down on cracked pipes. And the SuperVision 250 is riding that great, stinky wave of demand. Placed in pipes 10 to 72 inches in diameter, this little guy will track down splits, debris, corrosion, and breaks. Operators can watch the video feed from the 10X optical-zoom autofocus camera and use a joystick to pan and tilt. A ring of high-intensity, shadowless LEDs illuminates the scene; dual lasers help size up defects. A sapphire window shields the camera lens, while hardened stainless steel parts protect the crawler from the harsh sewer environment. And thanks to an ultrathin, Kevlar-reinforced tether (sorry, no wireless), the bot can crawl up to 1,640 feet through even heavily obstructed pipes. Just make sure to hose it off when it comes back.

Last year's TV buzz was 1080p. This year's is all about 120 Hz. That refers to the number of images a set displays each second to make your picture move; 120 is twice the norm, netting the smoothest pans since Teflon.

Samsung LN52A750 $3,700, samsung.com This 52-inch Samsung chewed up stuttering 60-Hz video and spit out glass-smooth motion, leaving few visual artifacts. It sailed through most of our processing challenges, proving especially effective at recombining interlaced video. The set also delivered vibrant color — if a bit more saturated, and thus less natural, than the Sony's — after only minor calibration tweaks, which Samsung's simple menus made painless. The subtle, red-hued "touch of color" bezel imparts a reserved style — think Armani, not Elton John. Wired: InfoLink system displays news, weather, and RSS feeds via Ethernet connection. Side-mounted HDMI/USB ports make for easy gaming and photo viewing. Eight HD and three standard-def inputs. Tired: Room lighting + glossy screen = disco reflections. Only one color option, and it might not work for everyone.

Sony Bravia KDL-46W4100 $2,400, sonystyle.com We loved the color right out of this 46-incher's box, and the video processors aced our tests, removing jaggies and scrubbing noise — even from standard-def sources — with little loss of detail. Plus, the motion enhancer smoothed out movement while introducing fewer visual artifacts than any other TV in this batch. (Purists can turn it off for a true filmlike experience.) One gripe: With great features come overstuffed menus. Time to RTFM. Wired: Elegant silver and black bezel. Tons of video inputs — seven HD and five standard-def — plus distinct color profiles for each. Add-on lets you watch select clips via the Net. Tired: Internet add-on is $300! Attention Sony: YouTube is free; you can't charge three bills for an inferior version. PS3-style menus will appeal to gamers but may confuse others.

Sharp Aquos LC-65SE94U $8,500, sharpusa.com This 65-inch monster "five-ups" the previous standard for a large LCD set, but you'll pay for bragging rights. Thankfully, that price buys more than just 5 extra inches of screen. The set produced very dark blacks and a picture bright enough to see even in strong sunlight. But it's time to join the 21st century with your interface, Sharp; we're running out of Atari jokes. Wired: Trumps your neighbor's 60-incher and cranks out enough lumens to let you watch football in the backyard ... just to rub it in. Great-looking narrow-bezel case — important when your TV takes up half a wall. Excellent default picture quality means you can have green Astroturf without taking a course in color calibration. Tired: No bonus features like USB pictures and music. The array of tiny, identical buttons on the remote probably spells "annoying" in braille.

LG Scarlet 47LG60 $2,500, lge.com The bulky, shiny case and visible-from-space power button mark a bold departure from most manufacturers' minimalist styling. And while LG's TruMotion removes stutter, we saw more artifacts than on other LCDs we tested. Default settings produced harsh, oversaturated color — correctable using the bevy of adjustment options but disappointing for a TV of this price. Wired: Straightforward menus simplify navigation and configuration. Separate color adjustment for each input. This 47-inch set boasts one of the few alternatives to picture-frame bezels that isn't designed for a 14-year-old Japanese girl (cough cough, Hannspree, cough). Tired: You'll need expert help — or a lot of time — to dial in good color. No S-video jacks and only one composite input, so forget most of your non-HD sources.

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.

1965: An astronaut in space holds a conversation with an aquanaut underwater, marking another milestone in human communication.

Astronaut Gordon Cooper, orbiting the Earth with Pete Conrad in Gemini 5, hooked up by radiotelephone with an old pal, astronaut-turned-aquanaut Scott Carpenter, who was living and working 205 feet beneath the surface of the Pacific Ocean near La Jolla, California, aboard Sealab II.

The two men had known each other since 1959, when they were among the seven pilots chosen by NASA to be America's first Project Mercury astronauts. Carpenter, a former Navy pilot, had already been in space, the solo astronaut on a mistake-plagued, three-orbit flight aboard Aurora 7 that resulted in his being effectively grounded.

He was on leave from the space agency when he joined the Navy's Sealab II project as training officer. Carpenter eventually resigned from NASA in 1967. He retired from the Navy in 1969.

Cooper and Conrad, meanwhile, were nearing the end of an eight-day orbital mission to test human endurance in space. Eight days was recognized as the time needed to travel to the moon and back. (Five days was the longest Soviet space flight before then, and the American record was four days. By years' end, American astronauts would complete a 14-day mission in space.)

The radio hookup was partly a gimmick, to take advantage of Carpenter's astronaut status to publicize the Sealab II project. But it was also a method of testing the effectiveness of an underwater electronics lab installed aboard the submersible.

Gemini 5 was not the only long-distance call made from Sealab II. The Navy aquanauts also spoke with President Johnson at the White House and with Jacques Cousteau's Conshelf 3 team, French colleagues conducting a similar underwater-habitat test off Cap Ferrat in the Mediterranean Sea.

Following their chat with Carpenter, Cooper and Conrad readied Gemini 5 for its return to Earth and splashed down in the very same Pacific Ocean later that day.

Thirty years later, in 1995, Carpenter recreated his seabed-to-space call, chatting with astronauts aboard the space shuttle Endeavor while staying at Jules' Undersea Lodge off Key Largo, Florida.

Source: Various