Sean Parker is already famous in today's Web-connected tech world, mythical perhaps. He was around at the start of Napster, Facebook and more recently Chatroulette. But Parker's getting even more famous thanks to a profile in Vanity Fair, and the upcoming Facebook movie.

The movie is The Social Network, David Fincher's biopic about the birth of Facebook--already controversial because of its portrayal of CEO Mark Zuckerberg. But Sean Parker, a speaker at our Fast Company Innovation Uncensored conference, played an absolutely crucial role at several pivotal moments in Facebook's early history. One example: an huge argument in a branch of Silicon Valley Bank over whether or not his partner Zuckerberg should go back to finish studies at Harvard--Zuckerberg was unsure, Parker was convinced about Facebook's future (Mark stayed). So Parker gets a starring role in the movie too--played by Justin Timberlake.

Vanity Fair's David Kirkpatrick delvies deeper into Parker's life, and reveals exactly how tricky a character he is. Parker was arrested aged 16 for hacking into Fortune 500 companies, thanks to a slip-up by his angry dad who pulled the plug on a late-night hacking session before Parker could cover his tracks. Then he co-founded Napster, with Shawn Fanning, which famously upset the entire recording industry and landed Parker back in court to defend the service against allegations of copyright theft. Mere moments later, it seems, he spotted Zuckerberg's fledgling TheFacebook.com college friending site and saw its potential. The rest is history--and Parker's now worth nearly a billion dollars (in Facebook shares).

The magazine profile paints him as "complex and [...] interesting," "Web-world savvy," and "undisciplined" with the "life of programmer-as-rock-star--often spent among real rock stars." The genius tendencies and eccentricities don't make him an easy character though. He was asked to step down from Facebook's board in 2005 after a kiteboarding trip to North Carolina resulted in his arrest "during a party at his rental house" on "suspicion of cocaine possession." Though he wasn't actually charged, "some of Facebook's investors and employees felt Parker could no longer effectively serve as company president."

So why do his colleagues and friends tolerate him? Jo Green, a former classmate of Zuckerberg at Harvard and now partner to Parker in a Facebook charity-giving app called Causes, sums it up neatly:

Why do we all put up with it? ... For two reasons. He adds a lot of value in the time he’s there. And he’s very loyal. When you really need him, he will be there. That builds up a reservoir of goodwill.

Given the roaring success of Facebook, the triumph of Napster in reinventing a whole industry (would we have had iPods if it weren't for Parker?) and so on, it would seem that the "value" Parker adds is definitely worth having him crash on your sofa, or disappear into the ether once he's contributed his ideas.

 

To keep up with this news follow me, Kit Eaton, on Twitter.

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Google's mysterious press event is still hours away, but it seems the details are starting to leak. According to several sources, Google's rumored (and revealed) "streaming" or "real-time" search engine, which shows automatically updated results with each letter typed, has already hit the Web. Many searchers reportedly have access to the engine already, and at least a few videos are now online showing off the streaming service. Does this mark the end of the "Search" button?

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In the above leaked clip, results are shown popping up with every key stroke, as expected. An X now appears in the search box, allowing users to cancel a search à la OS X Spotlight, and "I'm Feeling Lucky" now appears beside each drop-down result. The "Search" button remains, but it now sits next to an option for turning streaming search on or off.

If these leaks aren't enough to convince you of what Google has in store for its announcement, the search-giant also dropped a bit hint today on its homepage in the form of an interactive logo. With each key typed in the search box, the letters of a grayed-Google logo automatically begin to fill in with color--a cursor even hops along for extra effect. Sounds familiar, right?

And these rumors and hints fit in perfectly with a new Google Labs product called Google Scribe, which surfaced this morning. The application is essentially a text document that offers "autocomplete suggestions as you type." When users type a few letters, a numbered-list of suggestions pops up. It won't just help complete a word but whole phrases--as you type "streaming," suggestions offered include "streaming video," "streaming music," or "streaming quotes are available." All options can be sorted alphabetically, by "Scribe score," relevancy, or from one's search history.

All these leaks point to Google launching its streaming search engine today. But it's possible Marissa Mayer has something else in store for us as well. Google's press conference begins at 12:30 Eastern, and it will be streamed live.

Anyone have access to the real-time search service yet? Drop us a line with details or let us know in the comments.

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Tested only in Africa, the service will now be available in the Middle East and beyond.

South Africa's telecommunications giant, Vodacom, has announced that it's popular mobile-only social network, The Grid, is expanding globally. Started in South Africa in 2008, the Grid was recently expanded to two developing nations, Tanzania and Nigeria. "The response to the product launching in Tanzania and Nigeria was very positive, and that was what supported our thinking in opening it up to the rest of the world," Vodacom Executive Phillip Boshielo tells Fast Company.

But how well will the product be received in completely different markets--such as in developed countries? "We will obviously take our learnings in marketing the product forward," says Boshielo.

"The Grid aims to make it easy for people to stay in touch with others and take part in the lives of their friends and acquaintances," says Boshielo. But the "global rollout" will be gradual and the product will adapt as the expansion moves forward. "We don’t want to restrict our users to only a few select countries. We want the Grid to be a truly open mobile service," but "even though the Grid is open to all countries, our focus initially will be on growing the user base to the youth in Africa and the Middle East," says Boshielo.

Unlike many of the early social networks coming out of developed countries, conceived initially as online, computer-based social networks, Boshielo says the Grid, which makes sharing photos, text, and other media easily shareable on mobiles, "was developed with mobile in mind. It has a chat/IM functionality with other-world integration, but in addition users can drop ‘blips’ linked to their profile. ‘Blips’ can contain photos, video or text–which means your profile can be compared to that of a mobile blog viewable to your friends in the Grid community. In South Africa, where the Grid was launched, this functionality is integrated with location–a feature that could be rolled out internationally if the demand exists."

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Welcome to another edition of Work Smart with Gina Trapani. This week, Daniel Beck, a technical writer for WebFaction in Philadelphia, PA, asks for advice on how to get and stay organized after traveling. Syncing desktop computers with a laptop and other devices can be complicated, but it doesn't have to be. Along with offering Daniel my tips, I called on David Allen, author of Getting Things Done--my favorite productivity book of all time--to offer his solutions as well.

Here is the Popplet mind map used in today's episode:

To print this mind map, click here (PDF file).

Special thanks to David Allen, and to Popplet for the mind map. You can download Popplet for the iPad.

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Airport security scanners that literally see through your clothes are contentious. Because ... well, think about shadowy TSA guys peeping at your bits. Hence some firms are now tweaking them to anonymize your "x-rays" to protect your decency.

The issues surrounding through-clothes airport security imagers are complex, and the matter has got stickier in the wake of several stories about abuse of the data by the TSA and its operatives. Many people don't like the idea on all sorts of grounds, even while some safeguards have already been implemented (on some systems) to automatically cover intimate regions in the image with a digital "figleaf."

Now L-3 and Rapiscan's machines, often used by the TSA, are implementing a software upgrade that takes the raw data from the scanner and displays it as a generic human-formed figure on the monitor of the TSA agent. As such when you stand in front of the viewing system, your own body parts aren't subject to ogling. The software merely highlights regions of "interest" on the body where its pattern recognition code has calculated you may be hiding something--ready for a more traditional pat-down.

L-3's already tested the system at Amsterdam's Schiphol airport, and presented its new software for consideration by the TSA. The agency for its part noted "TSA continues to explore additional privacy protections for imaging technology" via spokesman Greg Soule, and remarked that "testing is currently underway."

It's easy to argue that anything that's a positive score for privacy is a good thing, as long as it meets two important requirements: The protections put in place shouldn't compromise security, and they must actually work to protect individuals' sense of decency. This last piece is all the more tricky when you see optical tricks like this one, worked out by a young Mormon to trick his mind into thinking photos of bikini clad women (morally acceptable to his faith) are actually naked (unacceptable images).

To keep up with this news, follow me, Kit Eaton, on Twitter.

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When engineering and computer science grad students Akshay Kothari and Ankit Gupta were struggling to come up with a new software product for the iPad, they turned to the Institute of Design at Stanford for some direction. Six weeks later, they had set up a company, Alphonso Labs, and successfully launched their product—a popular news aggregator app for the iPad called Pulse.

Less than a month after it hit market, Pulse made headlines when Steve Jobs showed it off at an Apple keynote and was at one point the most popular iPad app in the iTunes store (even after it ran into a bit of controversy). "We're a great example of how truly analytical types got to explore our creative sides," Kothari says. "All we needed was some guidance."

Design-speak can be fluffy and conceptual, and practical-minded types can have problems soaking it in. But if you can get it past your left brain, Kothari and Gupta say, the basic blueprint that designers use to propose projects for clients can be useful in helping you think outside the box in a business setting. Here are the five steps they followed to apply design thinking to their business:

1. Empathize: Like any good design project, your business is about the people you're designing for. Choose one stakeholder in your business (end user, investor, distributor) that you need to empathize more with. What questions would you ask them? What situations would you want to observe them in? For Pulse, Kothari and Gupta spent hours interviewing random people at a nearby cafe and watching them browse the news on an iPad. Through that process, they were able to understand everything from how a luddite interacts with a touch interface to how a tech-savvy geek with 100+ sites on his RSS feed distributes his attention from one site to another.

2. Define: Are you focused and open to what your team needs in order to thrive? Define your personal point of view in pursuing your venture, and then think about what your end user, your team, and your business need. Even if your end goal is to reach all 6.7 billion inhabitants of the earth with your product or service, key in on a niche user to start and identify what works best for him. By observing and empathizing with the tech geek, for example, Kothari and Gupta were able to define his need: a better way to catch up with older news and other treasures that might get buried in linear feeds like Google Reader or NetNewsWire.

3. Ideate: It's time to brainstorm. "This is the most fun part of the process," Kothari says. "It's the stage where you don't block any ideas and embrace all your wildest ideas — there might be a small piece of it that could be integrated in the final product." Many business start with ideation, but if you've followed the design process through to this stage, you'll have a much deeper understanding of who you're designing for and what their needs are. Invite some people who aren't part of your business to come to a brainstorming session and tackle this with you. Draw pictures of the different possibilities.

4. Create a prototype: Can you physically build a prototype using Post-Its or popsicle sticks that can help you answer some questions? From 20-25 rough illustrations and Post-It diagrams, Kothari and Gupta created a series of slides that showed how users could interact with the news using Pulse. From there, they narrowed down three favorite prototypes and coded them.

5. Test your prototype: Take your prototypes out for a spin in the real world. Ask strangers what they think of it. Failure is okay—it can be built upon. Since Alphonso Labs didn't have an office yet, the guys spent up to 10 hours a day in a cafe near Stanford testing earlier versions of Pulse on customers. "We were meeting 7-10 people every day," Kothari says. "I would do user testing on the spot, and Ankit would sit there and change the code."

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While you slept, Justin Bieber's fans supposedly used 3% of Twitter's server infrastructure. Twitter did not confirm the claim, it was an overheard utterance from "a guy who works at Twitter" that was picked up by dozens of news outlets after being posted on--where else?--Twitter.

1. Mark Hurd gets ousted from HP, then takes a job at Oracle, raising competitive concerns for his former board members. Now this HP versus Oracle business is getting messy: In a snappy press release, Oracle quotes its CEO Larry Ellison: "Oracle has long viewed HP as an important partner" he begins, citing the obvious as the two have conducted multi-million-dollar business for years. But then: "By filing this vindictive lawsuit against Oracle and Mark Hurd, the HP board is acting with utter disregard for that partnership, our joint customers, and their own shareholders and employees." This is a classic tactic--push things up a notch by involving a greater population in the dispute. And there's more: "The HP Board is making it virtually impossible for Oracle and HP to continue to cooperate and work together in the IT marketplace." See what Oracle did there? It planted the notion of a failed board in HP shareholder's minds, alleging that if Oracle and HP's relationship suffers--potentially hurting HP's bottom line, and thus shareholder income--it's all their fault. Touché. It also opens the door for Hurd to go on an acquisition spree for Oracle, mopping up players that will make it more competitive against HP.

2. Under what some see as draconian rules that sweep aside the notion of civil liberties, the TSA has been empowered for a couple of years to seize and deep-search your laptop if you cross into the U.S. They need no warrant, and in some cases they've taken weeks to return the hardware--without ever filing charges. Now the ACLU has decided to file a lawsuit against the Department of Homeland Security claiming personal data on computers means warrantless searching constitutes unreasonable search and seizure, a violation of the Fourth Amendment. Go ACLU! But also ... good luck with that. The DHS is already the U.S.'s third largest bureaucracy, and it's huge funding pool will pay for some mean lawyers.

3. NASA's warned that two large asteroids will pass by the Earth today, at a distance closer than the Moon. Is this worrying? No--50,000 to 100,000 miles away is still pretty far, unless you're talking about astronomical-style distances, in which case it's really freaking close indeed. You know that enormous, impact crater in Arizona? It was made by a ball of rock just a few tens of meters across. Like these are. 2010RX30 will zip above the North Pacific followed by a nearish pass over the Antarctic by 2010RF12. Luckily there's no third to split the difference and hit the ground or ocean--think "tsunamis," big ones. Not that there's much we could do if such a third rock did exist: Scientists only found these two on Sunday. Hey Congress? Grant more money to NASA, please?

4. Online morals are a tricky subject ... but Microsoft, and more specifically Xbox Live, has just had to embarrassingly apologize to one poor 26-year-old gamer from West Virginia. In the spirit of keeping Xbox Live "clean" they suspended him because he violated the terms and conditions. How? By declaring he's from a place called Fort Gay. Which he is, like about 800 other folk. Xbox Live's chief "enforcement officer" Stephen Toulouse noted that they slip up rarely, and keeping up with slang is tricky. We hesitate to point out to him how long "gay" has been acceptable, nor how long Fort Gay has been called Fort Gay.

5. Visit Google today to hunt for more news and you'll see something mysterious--the logo is grayscale, only colorizing when you type letters into the search box. It's not a tribute to Pleasantville (remember that movie?), it's more of a hint that later today Google will be announcing Live Search, a system that shows you updating search hits as you type in your query, like it's trying to predict what you're ultimately searching for. The new doodle is a follow-on to yesterday's, apparently, meaning we were wrong with our prediction. Hey ho. We should've used Google to predict the future. The press conference starts at 9:30 am pacific.

To keep up with this news, follow me, Kit Eaton, on Twitter.

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We've been following Google TV very closely, and not just because Google is one of our Most Innovative Companies. Google TV is one of the riskier attempts to connect the living room we've ever seen--rather than adding a simple set-top box that plays back videos and music (like Apple TV or Boxee), Google TV isna transparent upgrade to your existing system--a supplement, not a replacement. Your cable TV will still look like your cable TV, but with a Google search bar for added utility. Of course, it offers video from sources like Netflix, but it's still an unusual product.

That Google TV would be launching in the U.S. this year was pretty much a foregone conclusion. It'll be packaged into some Sony TVs and Blu-ray decks, as well as made available in its own set-top box from Logitech. But at his keynote speech at this year's IFA technology conference in Berlin, Google CEO Eric Schmidt dropped a few more tantalizing hints about Google TV.

First, he confirmed that Google TV would be launching worldwide in 2011, in what the Wall Street Journal calls a "move to expand its reach outside its core U.S. market." Google will also launch "support for applications" on the platform during that year. It's not specified what that means--we could be looking at an app store, or a set of pre-approved apps from content providers like the one offered by Boxee or Roku (Pandora, MLB, Hulu, that kind of thing--but nothing from independent developers).

Interestingly, Schmidt also confirmed that Google TV will support voice control. Google is one of the unsung pioneers of voice control--its implementation in Android is fantastic. Just imagine changing channels with your voice.

It's still not a sure thing that Google TV will be a hit, but these announcements certainly bode well, especially the app repository, in whatever form it ends up.

Dan Nosowitz, the author of this post, can be followed on Twitter, corresponded with via email, and stalked in Brooklyn (no link for that one--you'll have to do the legwork yourself).

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Tech companies file patents for all sorts of reasons. Sometimes they're already discarded ideas that the company would rather other companies not use. Sometimes they're for a potentially valuable concept. Sometimes they're for crazy or impractical ideas that will never see the light of day. And then there's this odd little filing from RIM, the company behind BlackBerry smartphones.

RIM filed for a patent for this "adaptive roadside billboard system and related methods." Essentially, the patent is for a smart billboard that measures the speed of passersby and adjusts its content accordingly--but the only adjustment mentioned specifically is length.

Recklessly speed by one of these billboards at 95 miles per hour, and you'll see a particularly brusque message--something like "Buy BlackBerry!". But if you're stuck in a traffic jam in front of said billboard, you'd get lots more information. Maybe you'd see a full spec sheet and pricing details for the new BlackBerry Torch, or a more detailed comparison with a competing handset.

RIM doesn't lay out one essential way to measure the speed of passing cars, mentioning several possible options. The most obvious, in terms of compatibility with RIM's core business, is the use of a smartphone's GPS. But it's not clear how much more effective that would be than a more traditional light sensor.

Also of note is that the billboard itself won't necessarily just be for RIM products. The sample artwork depicts a restaurant, which suggests that if RIM were to actually go ahead and create this billboard tech, it would license it out to other companies. But even if it's just an idea a RIM engineer thought up, it was one that RIM thought best to own outright--even if it never achieves a BlackBerry-like ripeness.

Dan Nosowitz, the author of this post, can be followed on Twitter, corresponded with via email, and stalked in Brooklyn (no link for that one--you'll have to do the legwork yourself).

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Piracy and the policing thereof is a messy business, often without clear answers. Today marked a huge crackdown on top-level pirates, with several of the largest and most popular BitTorrent sites either down or offering only spotty access. It's hard to say exactly what happened, but here's what we know so far.

TorrentFreak reports that police in 14 countries across Europe launched a coordinated raid that may have been in the works for two years. Sweden, arguably the most pirate-friendly western nation, was hit in seven separate locations, including the PRQ headquarters in Solna. PRQ is perhaps best known for hosting WikiLeaks, leading observers to suspect WikiLeaks (which has angered several governments) was the main target.

In an email, PRQ said that five policemen (and a locksmith!) came to PRQ's headquarters, but were not allowed to enter the premises until PRQ's legal representative arrived:

"The raid was about the usual file-sharing crackdown, which they have each year, so not directed directly against PRQ or it’s customers. They (the police) just wanted to know who or whom had used two different IPs during a couple of dates in 2009. Since we did not have this information (no logging) there was no information and/or hardware for them to seize. The police did not enter the datacenter, only the office, so no servers or network have been touched by them. No information given or hardware removed."

PRQ later stated that the company did hand over the emails behind those IP addresses, but that "it's rare that our clients have mail addresses that are traceable." The company denied that the raid had anything to do with WikiLeaks, which was confirmed by Swedish prosecutor Frederick Ingblad in an interview with Swedish news outlet Expressen.se. Ingblad and his Swedish forces spearheaded the effort on request from Belgium.

Other targets hit included locations in The Netherlands, Belgium, Norway, Germany, the U.K., and Hungary, with one notable target in the Czech Republic--a student dorm at Czech Technical University informally known as "Silicon Hill."

The police effort was far smarter than usual. Typically, raids are directed at individual sites like Oink, the British invite-only music-sharing site that was shut down a few years ago. That's the equivalent of yanking out a plant but leaving the root--new sites will invariably pop up, often with the exact same content as before.

This time, the raids were directed at what's known as the Warez Scene, or simply The Scene. The Scene is a loose network of pirates with no clear leader, structure, or headquarters that's responsible for much of the pirated music, TV shows, movies, and software that millions of users download. The Scene is especially renowned for its ability to crack any protected software--which is often much more valuable than music or video. Releases from The Scene are prized among pirates for their quality and rarity--if you find an album online months before its official release, or an expensive bit of software that comes with a pirated serial code, chances are it originated in The Scene.

So far, the raid seems to have been aimed mostly at securing information on particular IP addresses relating to The Scene, though Ars Technica reports that at least four people have also been detained.

The raids have had an adverse effect on some of the most popular and extensive BitTorrent sites. The Pirate Bay and BTJunkie have both been down for most of the day, mostly returning nothing but an error message. The Pirate Bay has been shut down before and always seems to spring back to life, but it's been out for an unusually long time today. Mediafire and Waffles.fm, among others, are also down. (A new favorite on The Scene, KickassTorrents, is still up and running.)

One interesting outlier is What.cd, the invite-only music site that took over from Oink. What.cd is down, sporting a cryptic message stating, "Theseus did it or something." Theseus was the founder of Athens, known as the great unifier, but how that might relate to a torrent site remains unclear. I've been told by insiders that What.cd was not a victim of the raid, but is instead down while the site administrators repair a routine (and unrelated) database corruption.

As smart as the raid was, it is unlikely to have any real, lasting effect on BitTorrent piracy. The BitTorrent world is a many-headed hydra. As soon as one head is cut off, another grows in its place. But it will certainly make it trickier for users to download pirated episodes of Mad Men for a while.

Dan Nosowitz, the author of this post, can be followed on Twitter, corresponded with via email, and stalked in Brooklyn (no link for that one--you'll have to do the legwork yourself).

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Today the Obama administration formally launched Challenge.gov, a tool that enables government agencies to solicit ideas from the public to solve issues plaguing the country. Announced by U.S. CIO Vivek Kundra at the Gov 2.0 conference, Challenge.gov is essentially a digital age-version of JFK's "ask not" plea--with cash prizes.

Unveiling a crowdsourcing initiative at a summit created to demonstrate the most advanced marriages of technology and government? Yawn.

Sure, it's great to see the public sector harnessing the potential of its citizenry. And this same model worked for the X Prize, which help spur the development of a low-cost, reusable spacecraft with a $10 million incentive. And Challenge.gov is offering similar rewards: $10 million from the Department of Energy for a 100 mile-per-gallon vehicle; $15 million for a replacement for the common light bulb; and $1.65 million for an aircraft that can fly 200 miles using 1 gallon of gas per occupant.

"This is a fundamental shift in power," Kundra told his audience. "This engages the American people as co-creators in solving some of the toughest problems this country faces."

But we've seen these "innovations" before. IdeaScale, for example, lets the public submit and vote on ideas for anything from state budgets to health care and priorities. The Princeton-developed All Our Ideas helps organizations collect and rank ideas more effectively. Innocentive offers cash prizes to problem solvers. Any number of these platforms already exist, and the idea of crowdsourcing has been around for years. (Remember: Netflix launched its $1 million challenge, which sought improvements to its movie recommendation technology, as early as 2006.) So why should we applaud the government for creating this "new" site?

Kundra is the country's first ever Chief Information Officer. He's part of a young, social-media savvy administration. Many observers expected this meant the government would start keeping pace with the private sector. Instead, we got a sleek, expensive Web site with $1.3 trillion in fact-checking problems (USASpending.gov) and now an X Prize clone. Ask not what your government can do for originality online, because we haven't seen it yet.

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Fresh water is one of the most abused resources in the world. Hundreds of millions of people lack access to the stuff, even in urban areas. The problem isn't helped by our reliance on soda and junk food that require large amounts of water for production. Food and drink giant PepsiCo claims in a new report that it is doing its part for water stewardship. But is this just the latest version of greenwashing--bluewashing?

PepsiCo has certainly set some ambitious goals. It wants to improve water use efficiency by 20% per unit of production by 2015, while providing access to safe drinking water to three million people in developing countries by the same year. The company aims to do most of this by establishing public-private partnerships.

And PepsiCo already made strides in improving its water use. The company is on track to provide clean drinking water to a million people in drought-heavy areas by 2011--via public-private programs that construct rainwater harvesting systems, improve public sanitation, and establish water health centers in countries such as Brazil, China, Ghana, and India. PepsiCo also claims that its India manufacturing team has cut water usage by 45% since 2005, saving 3 billion liters of water. And in one Frito Lay facility in Casa Grande, Arizona, a water filtration and purification system recycles 80% of all water used in production.

But there is still plenty of work to be done. As Food and Water Watch explained in a recent statement, "PepsiCo has faced extensive and well-deserved criticism around the world for depleting groundwater resources, undertaking unsustainable inter-basin water transfers and polluting water sources, all of which leave these local communities and ecosystems suffering from increased water scarcity and degraded water quality" Earlier this year, the junk food giant was accused of depleting local groundwater near one of its India plants. And how can a company that shills bottled water to millions of people who do have access to clean tap water claim that it practices good water stewardship?

PepsiCo's water stewardship report at least indicates that the company knows there is a problem, and that it is taking steps to become part of the solution. But we'll know the company is really getting serious when it takes a more critical look at its Aquafina brand.

Ariel Schwartz can be reached on Twitter or by email.

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While a tenth of America's work force struggled to find employment, Mark Hurd, the former CEO of Hewlett Packard who was caught fudging expense accounts and accused of harassing a 1980s Playboy bunny, found a job as director and co-president of Oracle. Now, after giving Hurd a severance package in the $50 million range, his former employer is slapping him with a lawsuit.

HP filed its complaint Wednesday in California Superior Court, accusing Hurd of breach of contract. The tech-giant argues that since Hurd was intimately involved in HP's business plans, the very fact that he's working with Oracle -- a strong rival in the computer server and storage market -- might harm HP. And that would be a violation of his employment contract, according to the claim:

"Despite being paid millions of dollars in cash, stock and stock options in exchange for Hurd’s agreements to protect HP’s trade secrets and confidential information during his employment and following his departure, Hurd has put HP’s most valuable trade secrets and confidential information in peril. Hurd accepted positions with Oracle Corp., a competitor of HP, yesterday as its President and as a member of its Board of Directors. In his new positions, Hurd will be in a situation in which he cannot perform his duties for Oracle without necessarily using and disclosing HP’s trade secrets and confidential information to others."

Hurd has yet to respond to the allegations. But Oracle CEO Larry Ellison's recent criticism of HP can't have helped matters.

"The HP board just made the worst personnel decision since the idiots on the Apple board fired Steve Jobs many years ago," Ellison told The New York Times. "That decision nearly destroyed Apple and would have if Steve hadn't come back and saved them. HP had a long list of failed CEOs until they hired Mark who has spent the last five years doing a brilliant job reviving HP to its former greatness."

No word yet on what Ellison thinks of the "idiots" who filed this lawsuit.

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Frequent readers of this blog know that one of the most successful tools, or if you prefer, PR gimmicks, we did for The No Asshole Rule was an online quiz called the ARSE, the Asshole Rating Self-Exam. This is a 24 item quiz to determine if you are a certified asshole. Approximately 250,000 people have completed it so far, and I still have people come up to (or email me) and say things like "I scored a 2, I am very good" or "I got a 9, I am borderline, watch out." The items on ARSE appeared in a book, but the name was added by Guy Kawasaki and he recruited the wonderful folks at Electric Pulp to develop an online version.

In the spirit of the ARSE--and once again with some great coaching from Guy--I have developed the BRASS, the Boss Reality Assessment Survey System (I know it is dumb spelled out, in fact if you have a better idea, let me know... one suggestion that I kind of liked was "Bob's Roughly Accurate Superior Survey"). The 20 items on the BRASS draw on major themes from Good Boss, Bad Boss, which are used to rate your boss on items including:

Is so pushy and overbearing that it drives us nuts

Lacks confidence in his or her ability to lead others

Doesn't have our backs, won't go to bat for us, and doesn't protect us from the idiocy that rains down from on high

Leaves me feeling drained and de-energized after even a short conversation.

Is a chronic credit hog.

The higher the score, the worse your boss. If your boss is really bad, if he or she scores "true" on 15 or more items like these, then you have the misfortune of working for a certified brasshole. And if your boss scores below five, my advice is that you better treat him or her right, because one like that is hard to find!

Reprinted from Work Matters

Robert I. Sutton, PhD is Professor of Management Science and Engineering at Stanford. His latest book is Good Boss, Bad Boss: How to Be the Best...and Survive the Worst. His previous book is The New York Times bestseller The No Asshole Rule: Building a Civilized Workplace and Surviving One That Isn't. Follow him at twitter.com/work_matters.

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The Obama administration is committed to transparency, at least in theory. To track the mountains of cash we're spending on contracts, wars, programs, initiatives, and stimulus packages, the government launched USASpending.gov, a tool designed to help the public understand where our tax dollars are heading. And where is all that federal spending going? Not to USAspending.gov, where an estimated $1.3 trillion worth of data is missing or wrong. If only there were a website for tracking cash missing from the cash-tracking site....

Oh!

According to Ellen Miller, director of D.C.-based watchdog the Sunlight Foundation, the federal spending database is missing more dollars than the U.S. deficit. Speaking at the Gov 2.0 Summit this morning, Miller told audience members that after analyzing more than 10 million rows of data to other sources, Sunlight discovered that "broken reporting" accounted for $1,361,672,559,288 of missing spending in 2009, showing that USASpending.gov is anything but reliable or complete.

"It's pretty impressive -- looking," said Miller. "Unfortunately, its data is almost useless."

In its analysis, Miller's team compared data from USASpending.gov to data from several agencies, including the Office of Management and Budget, the Catalog of Federal Domestic Assistance, and the General Services Administration. Sunlight discovered many discrepancies--for instance, the USDA's $9 billion in grants for school lunches were not reported; some $340 million in grants for firefighters were misreported by the Department of Homeland Security. Sunlight also found issues with misreported "obligations," money the government has committed to a recipient (and thus can't be spent elsewhere), though they may have not yet cut the check. Last year, there was a 30% increase in incompletely reported obligations. All in all, of the $2.6 trillion of government spending in 2009, 50% was incorrectly accounted for on USASpending.gov. "Things just don't add up," explained Miller. "[The] drive for data transparency has stalled."

To combat these widespread issues, Sunlight today launched ClearSpending, a site that analyzes how well government agencies are reporting their spending data on USASpending.gov--a fact-checker for the fact-checkers. ClearSpending will offer the public a system to assess federal spending in key areas: over reporting, under reporting, non-reporting, and late or incomplete filings.

If the Sunlight's new program works, it will shed new light on spending and bring improved transparency to the government, which normally just wastes millions on tools that are more "style than substance," as Miller phrased it.

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Energy efficiency has only recently become a popular concern among vehicle owners, but some people have been thinking about it for a long, long time. Craig Henderson and Bill Green designed the Avion, a fuel-efficient sports car, in 1984. Two years later, the vehicle set the Guinness World Record for fuel economy, getting an average of 103.7 mpg all the way from the Mexico border to the British Columbia, Canada, border. Now Henderson has revived the Avion for another jaunt from Canada to Mexico.

The latest iteration of the vehicle is just 1500 pounds and features an aluminum monocoque frame, a carbon fiber, kevlar and fiberglass body, and Goodyear "Fuel Max" tires. After receiving a sponsorship deal from Goodyear, Henderson decided to go from border to border once again--this time, on a single tank of gas.

Jalopnik reports that Henderson began his latest journey on August 29th. He stopped only to go to the bathroom, grab food, and catch a night's rest. The result: Henderson burned only 12.4 gallons on his journey to the Mexican border for a fuel economy of 119.1 mpg, breaking his own Guinness World Record from 1986. (He drove at a pretty constant 55 mph.)

Henderson is gearing up for limited commercial production of the Avion. If our fascination with fuel economy is any indication, he won't have any trouble selling it.

Below, check out a video about the Avion from 1982.

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Ariel Schwartz can be reached on Twitter or by email.

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BP's Deepwater Horizon disaster in the Gulf of Mexico served as a wake-up call for many of us who never before paid attention to the destructive energy projects happening all around the world. But while Deepwater Horizon may have attracted the lion's share of media attention this past Spring and Summer, there are a number of other toxic projects still going on. Below, we look at some of the worst.

Alberta Tar Sands

Alberta, Canada is home to the second biggest recoverable oil reserve in the world: the infamous Athabasca tar sands. But the massive deposit of heavy crude oil (aka bitumen) is under a staggering 54,000 square miles of boreal forest and peat bogs, which are slowly being destroyed by the open pit mining used to recover Alberta's oil. These open pit mining projects also deposit toxic mercury, arsenic, cadmium, and lead into the Athabasca river system, creating "masses of toxic soup." Suncor Energy, Syncrude Canada, Shell Canada, Marathon Oil, and Chevron are all pursuing projects in the Athabasca sands.

Three Gorges Dam

China's Three Gorges Dam, a hydroelectric dam in the Yangtze river, is world's largest electricity-generating plant. Completed in 2006, the dam has already produced 348.4 TWh of electricity since its inception. But the Dam has its drawbacks--construction displaced 1.2 million people (not the only Chinese water project to displace huge populations), increased the risk of landslides in the area, and made nearby Shanghai significantly more vulnerable to flooding.

Africa's Biofuel Land Grab

A new kind of colonialism is quietly taking over Africa as European companies snatch up land to grow biofuels. Major projects are located in countries including Mozambique (over 183,000 hectares allocated for jatropha), Benin (400,000 hectares of wetlands to be converted to oil palm crops), Sierra Leone (Swiss company Addax Bioenergy purchased 26,000 hectares for sugarcane), and Ghana (over 800,000 hectares purchased by international biofuel companies). They're a boon to European nations that want the clean fuel, but these projects also increase soil degradation, trigger the loss of arable land for food, increase food prices, and cause water depletion for local communities.

Sidoarjo Mud Flow

As the result of a now defunct energy project, the largest mud volcano in the world spews out 1 million cubic feet of mud every day, and is expected to continue expelling mud for the next 30 years. The volcano, located in East Java, Indonesia, was triggered by the blowout of a natural gas well drilled by PT Lapindo Brantas. The mud flow is partially controlled by levees, but flooding still affects local towns and highways.

Pascua Dam

A proposed dam project in Chilean Patagonia would flood over 15,000 acres of local wilderness and mar the landscape with 1,500 miles of power lines. The $4 billion HidroAysén project, which will consist of five giant dams that bump up Chile's power supply by 20%, could also cause downstream soil to lose fertility and destroy local plant and animal species.

Pavillion, Wyoming's Natural Gas Wells

This small town disaster is an example of what happens when gas drilling sites go unregulated. Natural gas drilling sites in the Pavillion, Wyoming, area have leeched oil compounds, methane and 2-butoxyethanol phosphate (a fire retardant and plasticizer) into local drinking wells. Residents have even been told to use extensive ventilation when showering so that they can avoid explosions from all the nasty chemicals in their water.

Greenland Gas Drilling

The Deepwater Horizon disaster hasn't stopped oil companies from pursuing other dangerous deepwater drilling projects. Case in point: Cairn Energy's recent discovery of gas off Greenland's west coast. In a statement, Cairn's CEO touted his "belief in the exploration potential" of the area--but neglected to mention that deepwater drilling in Arctic waters is high-risk because of the remoteness of the drilling sites (the Coast Guard won't be able to send in supplies on the quick like in the Gulf of Mexico, for example).

Appalachian Mountaintop Removal Mining

The Appalachian Mountains of the eastern United States are often subject to mountaintop removal mining, a coal mining technique that slices off soil, wildlife, plants and anything else sitting on top of coal seams. Once the coal has been mined, the top of the mountain is restored. Among the nasty environmental impacts: the destruction of ecosystems, species loss, deforestation, and decreased aquatic biodiversity. Mountaintop removal mining also exposes local residents to airborne toxins.

[Photos by International Rivers (Three Gorges); Flickr/The Sierra Club (mountaintop removal)]

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Solar power is inefficient. Whenever those plains of panels are laid out, the sunlight they convert into stored energy also degrades their effectiveness. With each day the panels spend smoldering under the sun, they become more unreliable in harvesting the rays. For many new systems, designed for lower cost and flexibility, degradation is a huge issue: In just 60 hours, efficiency can sometimes plummet as much as 90%.

To fix that problem, researchers from MIT turned to some excellent harvesters of sunlight for inspiration: plants. Chemical engineering professor Michael Strano recently had a eureka-moment while reading about plant biology. "I was really impressed by how plant cells have this extremely efficient repair mechanism,” he told MITNews. To mimic this process, his team began work on a set of self-repairing molecules, called phospholipids, that can turn sunlight into energy, and reassemble even after being broken down. By adding or removing a solution, the phospholipids create a structural support that responds to light and can realign the system once electrons are "knocked loose" by the particles of light.

With a grant from the MIT Energy Initiative, Strano built and tested a prototype of the synthetic molecules, discovering the system to be 40% efficient--about double the efficiency of the most advanced solar cells currently available. In one 14-hour trial, the cells were repeatedly assembled and disassembled, with no efficiency lost.

Strano also said the new "photovoltaic" technology could one day near 100% efficiency, and in the meantime, his team is working toward increasing the amount of electricity the cells can produce.

“We’re basically imitating tricks that nature has discovered over millions of years,” Strano explained.

[Photos by Patrick Gillooly]

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Samsung just pulled the veil from its dual-core Orion low-power chip, based on ARM Cortex A9 designs. It's powerful, impressive. It may also be the secret behind Apple's next iPad/iPhone CPU.

Apple's decision to supply its own ARM-based CPU chip for the iPad was novel, even while it was not necessarily surprising given Apple's preceding acquisition of ARM-expert companies. With hindsight, it was a masterstroke (and as we've noted, Apple's since hinged huge percentages of its income on that little sliver of silicon, plopping it in the iPhone 4, iPod Touch, and Apple TV): It's powerful, creates economies of scale in all sorts of ways, and places control of a vital element of its hardware in Apple's own hands.

But the chip is actually made by Samsung since Apple has no chip foundries of its own, and the design--while based on ARM references--was definitely informed by Samsung's own expertise. That's not to say the A4 isn't a smart piece of custom design all by itself, however.

Now Samsung's revealed Orion: It's based on ARM's Cortex A9 reference design, sporting dual cores each running at 1GHz, and it's powerful enough to handle full HD 1080p video encoding and decoding at 30 frames a second. It's unquestionably a model for the next generation of low power-consuming CPUs inside smartphones and slate PCs--the 1080p part is a clear sign of that since it'll also boost the ability of these devices to take full-resolution HD video with their increasingly powerful cameras. Those twin cores will also enable truly powerful 3-D graphics rendering powers, ready to take smartphone/tablet gaming to a point where it can almost compete with (entry level) desktop PCs. Are you listening, Blizzard? It's also got integrated GPS, and on-chip HDMI 1.3a circuitry.

But knowing that the A4 is an ARM Cortex A8 model, based on super-customized Samsung designs, we can use it as a touchstone for the Apple A5 chip--the chip that's surely in-bound in next-year's iPad, iPhone and so on. Because Apple is certainly busy finalizing the chip right now, so it's ready in time. It's unlikely to be as closely-matched as the A5 and Samsung S5 because Apple has had a whole year to build on the A4's foundation, including incorporating more expertise from its acquired talent. Plus the A5 (or A8? A9?) will be optimized specifically to meet Apple's own stringent requirements for its next-gen devices, which at this point are secret to Apple itself. Given the arrival of the A4-sporting Apple TV and the impressive graphics of Epic Games' Epic Citadel demo running on the iPhone 4, no doubt the next Apple chip will have developers falling over themselves with excitement at the apps that'll be enabled.

To keep up with this news, follow me, Kit Eaton, on Twitter.

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