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Chris Rawson for TUAW:

iPhones aren’t made in America because they just can’t be. The infrastructure and labor force doesn’t exist at the levels necessary to support Apple’s operations — it’s not even close.

The Seattle Times:

Seattle can’t limit distribution of yellow-pages phone books with an opt-out registry, and it can’t charge a fee to publishers who want to leave commercial directories on your porch, the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled Monday.The court ruled the city’s law is unconstitutional, saying yellow pages are protected, like other publications, by the First Amendment.

Even though more than 79,000 people wanted to opt out, Seattle, like a lot of places, can’t seem to stop the flood of various yellow pages-type directories that show up on our doors. I don’t know of anyone who likes them or anyone who uses them enough to justify not being allowed to opt out of having them tossed on our doorsteps.

Huffington Post:

A BBC film crew was detained after it breached the back gate of the top secret military facility known as Area 51 while filming a new documentary about UFO conspiracy theories.During the incident in the Nevada desert, a camouflage-dressed guard carrying an M-16 told a member of the British team, “We could make you disappear and your body will never be found,” according to a crew member.“Eight guards wearing combat fatigues immediately came out with their assault rifles and they grabbed us, forced us to the ground and we were all made to lie facedown in a row on the tarmac with a gun at our back.”

You intentionally ignored signage and walked onto a top secret US government base? I’d say you’re pretty luck to A) not be in jail or 2) not be in a shallow grave out in Area 51.

Los Angeles Times:

The space shuttle Endeavour made its final journey last weekend, traveling 12-miles from Los Angeles International Airport, through Inglewood, to the California Science Center in Exposition Park.

This is a very cool time lapse video of the trip. Some of the views of the neighborhoods it passed through are fascinating. Thanks to Tom Negrino for the link.

Yahoo! announced today that Henrique de Castro has been hired as chief operating officer (COO). Reporting directly to Yahoo! CEO Marissa Mayer, de Castro will be responsible for strategic and operational management of Yahoo!’s sales, operations, media and business development … Continued

Esquire:

Red Bull Stratos was, by all criteria, a PR triumph. Fifty television channels covered the jump live, seven-million people watched it stream online, and @redbullstratos has 235,000 followers and counting. But beyond the dazzle, beyond the slickness and the spectacle, is Felix’s achievement really that important?

I won’t ruin the writer’s conclusion for you but what do you think? Was it “just” a corporate sponsored PR stunt? A “leap” forward to science? Something else?

io9: New York Comic-Con is officially over, but the glorious cosplay images live on forever! We saw a whole heap of crazy innovative costumes this year such as Lady Blue Beetle, a gang of Neverending Story cosplayers, a few Korras, … Continued

The creator of Tweetie and Twitter’s app is back on his own.

There is a lesson here.

Incredible pictures.

Sprint may become the property of Japanese mobile carrier Softbank if a $20 billion deal goes through.

Whether you like App.net or not, Shawn is right, the reasons presented in the article don’t make sense.

Risky, but all of the best stories are.

Leave your laptop behind. Imagine having control over your computer from anywhere. Jump Desktop is a remote desktop application (RDP and VNC) that gets you to your computer from any iPhone, iPad, iPod touch, Mac and Android device. With over 4000 reviews, customers have declared it a 5 star app. It is super easy to setup, with automatic configuration you will be up and running in less than 5 minutes.

It is the easiest, the fastest and most secure way to get to your computer.

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WIRED:

For most of the demo, we were running between 5 and 10 watts of power into the LS Concerts — all that’s required to drive the speakers this light and fast. Even at that level, they were loud. Like, really loud. We were pushing roughly 120 decibels out of the LS Concerts, and the sound was absolutely glorious.Tim reluctantly turned it down a few notches when a candle came tumbling off the fireplace mantle.

Holy crap. I’d never pay that kind of money for “just” a set of speakers but I’d really like to hear what they sound like in that kind of environment.

The majority of top decision-makers at the Federal Trade Commission believe that an antitrust case should be brought against Google Inc, meaning the search giant could soon be headed into tough negotiations, three people familiar with the matter said.

Om Malik is in Amsterdam and stopped by Heineken. I’m so jealous.

Amazon Chief Executive Jeff Bezos confirmed on Thursday that the online retailer sells its Kindle e-reader “at cost”, with profit coming instead from sales of online content.

That’s one way to do it I suppose. Or you could just design great products and make money on all of it.

NextGuide, my personal favorite TV Guide app (that I built at the company I run), is now updated to include Amazon Prime and Amazon Instant Video alongside live TV, Hulu Plus, iTunes, and Netflix. It’s really a great experience to browse all providers simultaneously and to search for shows and actually know where they are watchable.

Looks very interesting.

CNET:

To encourage repeat viewings of his latest flick, writer-director Rian Johnson released an audio commentary track that you can listen to on your iPod.The director of the sci-fi action movie “Looper” wants you to bring an iPod into the theater to listen to details of how each scene was filmed.In a Tumblr post, Johnson, who also directed the AMC TV show “Breaking Bad,” provides a downloadable MP3 file to be played during the movie.

This is a really interesting idea and I wonder if it will catch on. I’m a huge fan of commentary tracks on DVDs.

Huffington Post:

There are large phone bills and then there are insane phone bills. Solenne San Jose, a woman from Pessac, in the Bordeaux region of France, received an utterly insane one.After she terminated a contract with the phone company Bouygues Telecom early, San Jose was told that she would have to pay a cancellation fee. The bill she received was for a mind-blowing €11,721,000,000,000,000, the Herald Sun reported. That’s around $15 quadrillion.

The best line in the story is, “San Jose had a hard time convincing the phone company that was the case.” WHY!? How hard should it be for even a mindless bureaucrat to acknowledge that the bill might just be incorrect?

ThinkGeek:

A Candwich Canned Sandwich is one tasty DIY treat, just waiting for you to crack it open. When you pop the top of your Candwich Canned Sandwich, you’ll hear an audible hiss of magic, and out will spill the contents to make one yummy sandwich. And best of all, each Candwich Canned Sandwich has a 1 year shelf life…

I almost threw up just reading about this.

“Partysaurus Rex” is a new short film from Pixar shown in theaters before Finding Nemo 3D. Also online, thanks to Disney.

I like it. I’d never do it, but I like it.

I like this. Lennart Ziburski didn’t just do a shrunken iPhone, but a whole new concept.

The Guardian:

Scientists from Newcastle University have drawn up a table of the least pleasant sounds we may encounter as part of everyday life.They tested reactions to 74 different noises both in outward response and more closely via small changes in the brain.The results are published in the latest issue of the Journal of Neuroscience and show, among other things, that acoustically anything in the frequency range of around 2,000 to 5,000 Hz was found to be unpleasant.

I’m not going to tell you what they are – you’ll have to click through to see for yourself. Then, you will be forced to listen to them out of curiosity. Then you will find yourself in pain – just like I was.

New York Times:

Zipping around on a motorcycle can be fun, but being in a downpour or an accident on one is not. Driving a car is safer and more comfortable, but traffic and parking can be annoying. What if you got rid of the bad parts of both?You might end up with something like the C-1, an electric motorcycle that looks as if it came out of the movie “Tron.”

As a rider myself, I have a hard time calling this thing a motorcycle but as a “single person urban transport vehicle”, it’s kind of interesting. Make sure you watch the video from the company to see how the fascinating gyroscopes work to keep the “rubber side down”. It will be interesting to see if this ever becomes a real shipping product.