competition

If you follow the money, the numbers show that the U.S. is being outpaced by China and other countries in a global race to develop green-technology industries.

The Pew Charitable Trusts, in conjunction with Bloomberg New Energy Finance, is publishing a report on Thursday that characterizes different countries in developing and adopting clean-energy technologies.

The U.S. is strong when it comes to technical innovation, with venture capital and private equity outpacing other countries. But China last year took the lead in "asset financing," or investment in renewable-energy projects. It also is poised to pass the U.… Read more

If human progress can be measured by the number of blades we've managed to fit on a single razor, it's clear we have arrived on a massive scale. Both Gillette and Schick will shortly have a five-blade razor on the market.

Certainly it's progress of some kind, but whether its utility outweighs its cost is another question (and one that Wall Street Journal columnist Neal Templin answers in the negative). It also leaves plenty of room for a one-bladed, disruptive innovator to steal a march on the Gillette/Schick arms race, as Jeff Stibel argues in Harvard … Read more

Prisons separate inmates from society with walls. But the winners of eVolo magazine's 2010 Skyscraper Competition have a very different vision: a prison in the sky where height itself becomes the barrier.

The annual contest recognizes designs that redefine skyscrapers through the use of new technologies, materials, aesthetics, and spatial organization. This year, the contest drew 430 entries from 42 countries.

The Malaysian architecture students who created what they call the Vertical Prison present a futuristic design, to be sure, but it's inspired by current studies showing high levels of post-release offenses that many associate with a lack of prisoner rehabilitation. With resocialization in mind, the designers imagine a kind of parallel prison universe complete with agricultural fields, factories, and recyclable plants. Inmates would work in those ventures to contribute to the host city below, thus maintaining a connection to the world they aim to re-inhabit one day.

Transportation to and from the prison in the sky would take place via various pods--for inmates, prison employees, medical personnel, cargo, and so on. The pods could also provide daily surveillance.

But as envisioned by Chow Khoon Toong, Ong Tien Yee, and Beh Ssi Cze, the Vertical Prison is a fundamentally optimistic place. The modular prison cells would even have openings to reveal life beyond the inhabitants' confined spaces, hopefully inspiring them to want to recapture some of what they have lost while incarcerated.

Second place in the contest went to the Indonesian team that conceived of the Ciliwung Recovery Program, a giant edifice that looks like a cross between a sculpture you'd find outside a modern-art museum and an uber-cool playground climbing structure. Actually, it's a 100 percent sustainable skyscraper that provides housing and office space while collecting garbage from the Ciliwung River river bank in Jakarta and purifying the river's water through a system of mega-filters. … Read more

Wilson's made a fully recovery and is back on today's show, just in time to help us celebrate St. Patrick's Day! We're celebrating the best way we know how without actually drinking alcohol on the show--anyone else notice that Jeff looks eerily Irish today?

As usual, the episode collects the most random tech-related stories from the Internets, starting with a glimpse into the future of monitoring workday productivity. KDDI R&D Laboratory in Japan is testing a technology that lets managers check up on their drones using the accelerometer in corporate cell phones. The hardware tracks day-to-day movement and interactions and, in conjunction with desktop software, matches subsequent acceleration patterns and notifies managers if workers deviate from their regular tasks. Employers will also receive a notification e-mail if works attempt to skirt the system by "forgetting" their phones at home. We highly doubt that this will take off in the U.S., but I'm buying our IT guy a beer tomorrow just in case.

You'll notice watching today's video that none of us are wearing green, and that's partly because we're not 10 years old, and also because being green makes you mean! A new study suggests that eco-friendly consumers are more likely to cheat and lie, based on the idea that people have a "limited stock of goodwill" and that "being virtuous in one part of life leads to meanness in another." We all know a few entitled greenhorns, but what do you think? Do you buy this idea of "compensatory ethics?" Let us know in the comments below!

New Jersey might be the home of Jeff's favorite hockey team (and thanks to Che for the sticka pitcha you see over there <---), but it's also the home of Donna Simpson, a 600-pound woman attempting to break the record for world's fattest mother! We should note that she already holds the title but plans to reach 1,000 pounds with the support of her 150-pound husband.

Currently, her $750-per-week grocery bill is paid for by her Web site, where people pay to watch her eat via Webcam. This story has us all seriously questioning whether NDC and I should actually go through with this hot sauce competition.

We also have plenty of 404 stickers left, so send us a SASE and don't forget to send us a picture of where you stick them; there's a good chance I'll use it on a blog post! Unique, high-quality pictures in landscape are ideal. Send to the404(at)cnet[dot]com.

Happy St. Patty's Day, everyone! Be safe tonight, and don't drink and drive, dummy.

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Microsoft left little doubt Friday that it was one of the companies leading the charge against Google worldwide.

In a blog post entitled "Competition Authorities and Search," Microsoft Vice President and Deputy General Counsel Dave Heiner said part of the motivation for Microsoft and Yahoo's search deal was "we are concerned about Google business practices that tend to lock in publishers and advertisers and make it harder for Microsoft to gain search volume." The post comes at the end of a week in which European authorities asked Google to explain its search algorithms after complaints … Read more

WASHINGTON--More than scientific breakthroughs, the U.S. needs to deploy existing green technologies faster to keep pace with China and other nations, people in the renewable energy industry said this week.

At the Renewable Energy Technology (RETECH) 2010 conference here, the subject of national competitiveness in the burgeoning clean-energy industry was a frequent topic. The concern is that the U.S. is lagging because of wavering policies, complex permitting, and a skittish financial community.

"We're still pretty good at invention or discovery but in terms of deployment, we're losing ground. In fact, you could say we suck,&… Read more

Comcast and NBC Universal executives went to Washington, D.C., on Thursday to answer lawmakers' questions about the proposed deal for Comcast to buy a controlling stake in the media and network TV giant.

In separate subcommittee hearings, lawmakers in the House of Representatives and the Senate questioned Comcast CEO Brian Roberts and NBC Universal President and CEO Jeff Zucker. Specifically, they asked how the $37 billion proposed merger between the nation's largest cable company and the TV network and movie studio would affect consumers' cable prices, the budding online TV business, and the distribution of cable and broadcast … Read more

For some, the definition of software freedom begins and ends with source code. Such people have apparently never heard of market competition.

It's arguably even more important, and doesn't necessarily derive from a software license (though it's no doubt better when protected by an open-source license).

Over the last few weeks, we've seen signs that key open-source vendors are waking up to this fact, with both Canonical (Ubuntu) and Mozilla (Firefox) sniffing around Yahoo/Microsoft to replace Google with Yahoo/Bing as their default search engine.

Choice, you see, is good, even when it's not … Read more

Apple dominates the smartphone market today, allegedly because of its 100,000-plus applications. Does that mean it will be completely indomitable when it has 200,000? God-like at 300,000? And Microsoft-esque at 400,000?

Of course not.

As former Googler and current Apache Software Foundation developer Greg Stein points out, an app store's dominance has little to do with sheer volume of applications and everything to do with their relevance to you:

The [Google] Android Market is definitely behind--it is missing some nice applications. But not many! All the apps that I used to have on my iPhone … Read more