Cody Taylor

This little project has been making the rounds as the “new Apple netbook,” which, unfortunately, is way off. But the truth is pretty cool anyway: It’s a beautiful pencil-drawn, wooden model.

I think that number is probably a bit conservative but it’s very likely in the ballpark.

# Report: Bloggers in Myanmar, Iran and Syria work under most oppressive conditions# The Committee to Protect Journalists lists the 10 worst places to blog from# Group: Burmese blogger serves 59 years in prison for posting cyclone video# In Saudi Arabia an estimated 400,000 sites are blocked, report says

The most successful game ever made isn’t World of Warcraft, Tetris, or even The Sims. Click-for-click, nothing has wasted more time than Minesweeper, a little game that debuted back in 1990 as part of the Windows Entertainment Pack. And like most Windows games, there’s more to Minesweeper than just killing time.

An innocent-looking IQ test on Facebook is really a test of your privacy savvy. And ability to read tiny, tiny print.

Ziest points us to NY Times piece on the battle over the site of Nicola Tesla’s last failed experiment. Tesla’s laboratory, called Wardenclyffe, located on Long Island, has been put up for sale by its current owner, Agfa Corp. Local residents and Tesla followers were alarmed by a real estate agent’s promise that the land, listed at .6 million, could “be delivered fully cleared and level.” Preservationists want to create a Tesla museum and education center at Wardenclyffe, anchored by the laboratory designed by Tesla’s friend, Stanford White, a celebrated architect. “In 1901, Nikola Tesla began work on a global system of giant towers meant to relay through the air not only news, stock reports and even pictures but also, unbeknown to investors such as J. Pierpont Morgan, free electricity for one and all. It was the inventor’s biggest project, and his most audacious. The first tower rose on rural Long Island and, by 1903, stood more than 18 stories tall. … But the system failed for want of money, and at least partly for scientific viability. Tesla never finished his prototype tower and was forced to abandon its adjoining laboratory.”

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Lucas123 writes “A case was filed with superior courts in California and Massachusetts involving a former EMC top executive who is trying work for HP. The case is throwing into relief Massachusetts’s and California’s differing approaches to non-compete clauses in employment contracts. California courts have argued that non-competes hamper a person’s ability to traverse the marketplace freely for work, while Massachusetts courts say the agreements actually afford freedom to develop technology without the fear of IP theft.”

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OSXGlitch writes “A post on TechCrunch this morning extends the rumor that Apple wants to buy Twitter with part of their massive cash reserve (estimated at nearly B). The Twitterverse is alive with speculation that the price being discussed is 0 million. This goes against reports that Twitter’s founders aren’t interested in selling, and that they estimate the value of the company at around 0 million. Two questions: How do we all feel about the possibility of Apple owning Twitter? And, can Twitter decline an offer that is nearly three times their estimated worth?”

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An anonymous reader sends along a sharp and snarky article that takes Google to task for taking longer than expected to award M in its competition to find and fund world-bettering ideas. The submitter comments, “After using its tenth birthday as occasion to solicit philanthropic ideas from Web users through its Project 10^100, Google appears to have backed off from its commitment to provide million in funding to the winner. While the company was supposed to reveal the Project 10^100 winner in February, Google has since delayed the vote once and now suspended it indefinitely, due to the overwhelming response — Google says it received 150,000 entries. A Google spokeswoman wouldn’t commit to a new date, saying only it would be delayed ‘for a while longer.’ She further apologized for the company’s ‘over optimistic assumptions about how quickly we could analyze all the ideas that we’ve received.'”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.