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Ford confirmed Thursday that the company is considering an offer to sell its Jaguar and Land Rover subsidiaries to Tata Motors of India.

"Ford is committed to focused negotiations at a more detailed level with Tata Motors concerning the potential sale of the combined Jaguar-Land Rover business," Lewis Booth, an executive vice president at Ford, said in a statement.

"There is still a considerable amount of work to do, and while no final decision has been made, we will proceed with further substantive discussions with Tata Motors over the forthcoming weeks with a view to securing an agreement that is in the best interests of all parties concerned," said Booth, who oversees Ford's Premier Automotive Group businesses and is also the chairman of Jaguar, Land Rover, Volvo, and Ford of Europe.

"We can confirm that we have had positive discussions so far with Ford, concerning the possible purchase of Jaguar (and) Land Rover, and we are now entering a period of more focused and detailed negotiations with Ford," a Tata Motors representative said in an e-mailed statement. "We hope both parties can reach an agreement in the forthcoming weeks, though these are complex discussions, and there is still much work that needs to be done before that position is reached."

"We are pleased by the progress in the discussions to date and very positive about the prospects of this business, going forward," the Tata representative said.

Reports have put the deal at between $1.5 billion and $2 billion dollars, though neither Ford nor Tata has not confirmed any number.

Land Rover's Range Rover Sport

(Credit: Land Rover USA)

Tata, which claims to be the largest automaker in India, posted revenue of $7.2 billion in its 2006-2007 financial report.

The company is part of the Tata Group, one of India's largest conglomerates. Founded by Jamsetji Tata in the mid-1800s, the Tata Group companies, which include Tata Steel, Tata Tea, and Indian Hotels, among others, employ about 290,000 people worldwide.

The Tata Group stated 2006-2007 revenue to be $28.8 billion, roughly 3.2 percent of India's GDP, according to company statistics.

It's hard to believe that 10 years ago a cell phone was still a novelty. Now it's nearly impossible to imagine life without mobile communication.

As new modes of communication open up, will others go by the wayside? There may be a generational divide opening here, as younger adults in particular start asking themselves what good is a landline anyway? About a quarter of adults age 18 to 29 rely on a mobile phone as their only telephone service.

I am tempted to dump my landline, not because I have an amazing relationship with my mobile phone, but because telemarketers have turned my ringing landline into an incredible nuisance. An admittedly unscientific study of my caller ID log reveals that I've been getting four junk calls for every call I actually want to receive.

There's a silver lining in the war on terror. The need for beefy, bulletproof buggies to patrol the Afghan and Iraqi outback has translated into factory jobs on the home front for at least one NATO ally.

Described as "a Land Rover on steroids," the new MWMIK (Mobility Weapon Mounted Installation Kit) 4x4 looks more like an armored forklift chassis. But with a top speed of 80 mph and wide range of armaments, it won't be pulling pallet duty anytime soon.

(Credit: U.K. Ministry of Defence)

The U.K. Ministry of Defence has ordered 130 of the new vehicles from Plymouth-based Devonport Management Limited (DML) to the tune of 30 million quid. Traditionally a shipbuilding outfit, DML has "been forced to expand its skills base and diversify into new markets such as the super yacht sector because of the dwindling need for surface ship work," according to The Herald newspaper of Plymouth. The new line is expected to generate 120 jobs.

Designed by Supacat, it will have a chassis by Universal Engineering, a Cummins engine and an Allison transmission; assembly will be at DML's Devonport dockyard. The vehicle, which carries a team of four, a .50-caliber machine gun or a grenade launcher, will augment--and possibly replace, eventually--the Brits' current fire support model WMIK, which resembles something that saw duty in the Falklands. (See clip below.)

DML has its eye on the prize. "Once people understand that this is what we can do and what we are capable of, it should lead to a lot of interest and hopefully more contracts for us," CEO Dennis Gilbert was quoted as saying. "We are in a really good position to take off in terms of expanding our involvement in the market sector."

The vehicles were obtained under "urgent operational requirement," which means British troops should be sporting them sometime in 2008, according to Lord Drayson, minister of state for defense equipment and support.

A piece of land owned by Hewlett-Packard since 1963 was sold to two nonprofit groups for $4 million, according to the Associated Press.

The 534-acre property, known as Little Basin, is located in the Santa Cruz Mountains and has long been used for company picnics, events and camping trips. The land is reportedly worth $13 million, and HP says it is selling it because the company's employees are not all located in or near the PC maker's San Francisco Bay Area headquarters.

"It's not a cost issue. Basically we had a minority of employees who were getting a benefit that wasn't consistent across the company," Steve Brashear, HP's vice president for real estate and workplace services, told the AP.

The new owners are two Bay Area nonprofits, the Sempervirens Fund, and the Peninsula Open Space Trust. Both say they will work with the state government to make the property open to the public as a state park.

(Credit: Pocket-lint)

The humble land line is finally getting some love. Not only can the home phone now have its very own ringtones, but at least some models are getting updated for the 21st century--and that means they've got to toughen up to survive, especially in today's unforgiving domestic conditions.

To that end, Siemens says its new "Gigaset E455 SIM" is dust-proof, splash-proof and "comes equipped with rubber pads for shock protection, meaning you also no longer need to worry about dropping and smashing it," according to Pocket-lint.

All that may be true, but we hope Siemens has concentrated a bit more on the basics than it has with land lines in the past. We personally spent a small fortune on a multi-handset "Gigaset 2410" system awhile back, only to end up dumping the whole thing less than a year later when the phones began to die. But we can say it gave us the occasion to do some of our own endurance testing--by throwing them out the window.

There's no easy way to clear a path through a minefield. Options range from tracked vehicles pummeling the ground with whirling flails to individual soldiers gingerly poking the ground and then defusing mines one by one. The Defense Department, cognizant of the need for both speed and safety in beach landings and other operations, is looking at another alternative--masses of small darts raining down on suspect terrain.

The April edition of Popular Science offers a quick look at that laboratory project, which falls under the auspices of the Office of Naval Research. (The ONR isn't just about ships and submarines--its projects range from Humvee replacements to the biomimetic robolobster.) In this scheme, a precision-guided bomb would release 6,500 darts that would cover a 60-foot circle and penetrate two feet of sand or seven feet of water, the magazine reports. The seven-inch Venom darts would either detonate the land mines through impact or, with their coating of a compound called DETA, cause mines to essentially overheat and self-destruct.

(An undated document from the ONR project leader, Brian Almquist, offers more insights on the effort.)

The system won't be ready anytime soon, however. Backers say the military probably wouldn't deploy the system until 2015, pending further R&D and the inevitable bureaucratic back and forth.

And even then, don't count on the dart system helping out with humanitarian, postconflict demining efforts, where low-tech approaches are still the order of the day. It's bound to be far too expensive.