the tweney review

Frank Luntz has some excellent advice for the environmental movement - seriously: GOP strategist Frank Luntz argues enviros are failing — and they’re mean to boot

Richard Branson has set up a $25 million prize for the first person who can come up with a workable way of removing a billion tons of CO2 from the atmosphere every year.

It’s a clever idea, offering a big prize as an incentive to spur innovative research. Big purses like this (or the X-Prize, which offered $10 million for the first private suborbital space flight) attract a much wider range of innovators than most R&D projects do, for the simple fact that the barrier to entry is lower. To get a $500K DARPA research grant requires serious credentials and a solid academic or industrial R&D track record. But if you’ve got a great idea for how to build a new kind of rocket, the only barriers are your own abilities and resources.

What’s more, it probably costs Branson far less than $25 million to set up this prize. He’ll probably have put up a nominal amount, with the balance to be covered by an insurance policy from an underwriter who is betting that no one will be able to solve the challenge by the deadline. So there’s another incentive for the winner: You’ll be taking money from a rich bastard and an insurance company that bet against humanity’s ability to solve global warming.

Branson’s prize will probably attract all kinds of wild-eyed inventors and innovators, some of whom may actually have interesting ideas. And it will undoubtedly also draw heavyweight competitors who might even spend more than they’re likely to make from the prize, just for the prestige of having won it — and because an innovation like that could be very, very valuable economically. If you’ve got a system for removing CO2 from the atmosphere, you could make far more than Branson’s $25M by selling it to governments or to companies that want to (or need to, depending on government regulations) reduce their carbon emissions.

Incidentally, my personal favorite solution to global warming — nuclear winter — is not going to qualify, because although it would offset the warming, it doesn’t do anything about CO2. Alas. Neither would the proposal to put up giant orbiting space mirrors in order to block out some of the sun’s light. To win Branson’s prize, you actually have to remove some of the CO2 that his jets belch into the air.

The deadline for entries is 2010, although it could be extended to 2012 if no one comes up with a solution by then. So put on your thinking caps, people!

Doing some research into the global PC industry, I discovered that 82.6% of notebooks are made by Taiwanese companies. By 2010, it will be 92.5%, according to a mid-2006 press release from iSuppli. These Taiwanese companies, known as original design manufacturers, don’t just build notebooks–they design them. In fact, about 85% of the ODMs have outsourced the actual manufacturing to China.

So that American notebook you’ve been using? It was almost certainly designed in Taiwan and built in China. With tech support in India, of course. The only thing left for the Americans to do is choose the color of the case (Apple=white, IBM=black), advertise the product, and bill the customers.

Julie Amero is the Connecticut teacher facing a possible 40 year prison sentence because the PC in her classroom got hit by a porn popup storm. This appears to be her site: Julie Amero

Apple: “In 2006, under 2 billion DRM-protected songs were sold worldwide by online stores, while over 20 billion songs were sold completely DRM-free and unprotected on CDs by the music companies themselves.” Apple - Thoughts on Music

Charlie Brooker: “The only way to have fun with a Mac is to poke its insufferable owner in the eye.” Guardian Unlimited | Comment is free | I hate Macs (reminds me of a review I once wrote of Picasa)

Banjo fan? Ukulele fan? You really owe it to yourself to click here: Midnight Ukulele Disco: Video of Il m’a vu nue performed by Kurt Hoffman and Meg Reichardt (thanks India)

I think I speak for all editors when I say we love nutcase feedback like this: Chronicle Podcasts : “Pilotless Drone”

I’m happy to see that the Communications Workers of America (that’s a trade union, for all of you Silicon Valley readers who have never heard of such a thing) is launching a campaign to push for faster broadband for all US citizens. It’s a union issue because it means more jobs pulling cables and fiber. But it’s also a competitiveness issue because, frankly, US broadband speeds suck.

Driving the point home, the CWA’s Speed Matters website has a bandwidth speed calculator. I checked it from work, and was feeling pretty smug about the way Ziff Davis’ pipes had the speed meter pegged at 10Mbps+. But then I took a look at how it compares to international speeds. If we were in Japan, my office’s paltry 20Mbps would be terrible. And the 3Mbps I get at home: Only slightly better than dialup, really. We can, and should, be doing better.

Firefox 2.0, which I finally upgraded to this week, offers two standout advantages relative to 1.5.

• It’s faster. Pages load noticeably quicker — in some cases, as little as 50% of the time they took under 1.5, judging by the performance I’ve seen on Bloglines, Gmail, and an assortment of websites.
• Links that ordinarily pop up in a new window get sent to a new tab instead. This is surprisingly useful. One of the most annoying things a web designer can do is add “target = _blank” tags to every link on their site, so that the simple act of clicking on a few links turns your desktop into a cluttered mess. I’d gotten in the habit of right-clicking and choosing “open link in a new tab” but this new feature saves me having to do that. It’s useful enough that I’ve even switched Google’s default behavior to “open links in a new window” — which, in Firefox 2.0, opens them in a new tab.

It’s also got a spiffier, more Aero-like set of buttons (or more OS X-like, if you prefer) and fixes some security problems with earlier releases. And it’s a painless, easy upgrade. Do it.