One of the most-beloved software apps among programmers, writers and Mac geeks, the "Bare Bones" text editor BBEdit receives a substantial upgrade. New features include a management utility for keeping track of multifile projects, an auto-completion engine for writing code and integration with Apple's MobileMe backup service.

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Bob Rice has had many careers. He was an attorney with the U.S. Department of Justice, a partner at law firm Milbank Tweed Hadley & McCloy, C.E.O. of a tech startup, and now runs merchant bank Tangent Capital, which he founded in 2005.

In his spare time, Rice managed to write Three Moves Ahead: What Chess Can Teach You About Business, one of the more interesting business reads to come down the pike this year, in which he uses the tried-and-true strategies of chess for insight into running a business.

Today, he's squeezing in some blogging. One day. One place: Portfolio.com.

Ah, those Sand Hill Road visionaries, the venture capital guys who finance the future and dictate the trends. It must be fun out there, getting the first glimpses of tomorrow. But suddenly there's a wonderful irony at work: That very future is destroying their industry.

Newspapers are rife with stories about the decline of big V.C. investments, pointing to the trend as a sign of a more conservative investment environment. But I don't think that's really the issue.

Instead, something much more profound is going on: The basic V.C. model is broken. And new technology is driving a much more efficient system for capital allocation to startups.

In fact, technology is largely at fault both for what's wrong with the V.C. world and for what's replacing it. The problem with the industry is this--it's just too cheap to start new companies these days.

Virtual offices allow talent to gather from around the country to work on a new idea without having to quit full-time jobs too early. Servers, computers, and bandwidth are essentially free, and a robust telecommunications platform can be rented for a few tens of dollars a month. Software development can be outsourced without taking on big fixed costs. There are countless programs to manage customer relations, mine contacts, handle the books, and plan and monitor projects. And of course, the internet has reduced the costs of finding customers and testing new concepts to nearly nothing.

Okay, so what? Well, the classic V.C.'s simply have too much money under management, and too expensive a talent pool, to waste time looking at investing anything less than $10 million in a project. Meantime, no entrepreneur wants to give up equity by taking in more money than he absolutely needs. So, when it only costs a few million to get a serious new company off the ground, how can the V.C.'s really play? They have to find places to make gigantic gambles, usually overpaying because the other big V.C.'s are also trying to invest in the few really big-dollar opportunities out there. It has become a system doomed to failure.

The flip side of the story is the rise of angel investor groups. These investment consortiums have always been ideally positioned to provide $500,000 to $5 million equity injections; but until recently, that wasn't enough to get a serious effort off the ground. More fundamentally, however, they have historically not been terribly investor-friendly, largely because the individual members have other occupations.

The individual members didn't work in the same place or even at the same times, so angels were terribly inefficient at evaluating transactions, sharing information, and negotiating and documenting deals.

Those days are over, thanks to software developed by David Rose, founder of the New York Angels (yes, I belong). Angelsoft is a wonderful collaboration platform that manages deal flow, helps match talent and expertise to projects, provides easy-to-use data rooms for potential investors, and generally drives the investment process. It combines project management and social networking in a way that, for the first time, makes the angel process efficient for both the company seeking capital and the potential investors.

The big news now is that, in a period of just a couple of years, over 400 angel groups around the globe have standardized on the platform. That means, of course, that they will also be able to share deals between themselves, vastly expanding the capital and expertise available for any given project.

And entrepreneurs can now create one submission to get access, literally, to a world of sophisticated, organized investors. It sounds like a revolution to me. Check it out at the group's website.

And so, once again, technology is driving a paradigm shift. But this time, it's France in 1789: The progenitors of change are becoming the victims.

Google's widly popular free publishing service launched a new feature that lets bloggers display friends they are "following" on their Blogger-powered websites. The feature brings Blogger closer to a social networking platform, and it mimics similar features in newer social apps like Twitter and Tumblr.

The U.S. needs to find new ways of funding basic science research in academia and corporate America, says former Cisco CTO Judy Estrin, author of the book Closing the Innovation Gap.

Comcast, the nation's second-largest Internet service provider, says it will set an official limit on the amount of data subscribers can download and upload each month. On Oct. 1, the cable company will update its user agreement to say that users will be allowed 250 gigabytes of traffic per month, the company announced on its Web site.

How is it fair that employers offer incentives to take mass transit but not to ride bikes? It's a question corporate America is starting to ask itself.

There has always been a solid corps of Apple adherents for whom the company could do little wrong. But as it extends its reach further into the mainstream even casual users have come to identify so strongly with Apple's high-end, individualistic vibe that they're willing to look the other way when products and execution are less than perfect.

The Pentagon is seeking help from NFL gear makers to create helmets that will make U.S. combat soldiers safer.

John McCain's vice-presidential pick, Sarah Palin, has gone on record in support of teaching creationism in schools.

Having finished its nominal mission time of 90 days this week, Mars Phoenix enters extra innings as one of NASA's most successful missions, even if it didn't discover evidence for past or present life on Mars. Review the mission with this story and interactive timeline.

1965: An astronaut in space holds a conversation with an aquanaut underwater, marking another milestone in human communication.

Astronaut Gordon Cooper, orbiting the Earth with Pete Conrad in Gemini 5, hooked up by radiotelephone with an old pal, astronaut-turned-aquanaut Scott Carpenter, who was living and working 205 feet beneath the surface of the Pacific Ocean near La Jolla, California, aboard Sealab II.

The two men had known each other since 1959, when they were among the seven pilots chosen by NASA to be America's first Project Mercury astronauts. Carpenter, a former Navy pilot, had already been in space, the solo astronaut on a mistake-plagued, three-orbit flight aboard Aurora 7 that resulted in his being effectively grounded.

He was on leave from the space agency when he joined the Navy's Sealab II project as training officer. Carpenter eventually resigned from NASA in 1967. He retired from the Navy in 1969.

Cooper and Conrad, meanwhile, were nearing the end of an eight-day orbital mission to test human endurance in space. Eight days was recognized as the time needed to travel to the moon and back. (Five days was the longest Soviet space flight before then, and the American record was four days. By years' end, American astronauts would complete a 14-day mission in space.)

The radio hookup was partly a gimmick, to take advantage of Carpenter's astronaut status to publicize the Sealab II project. But it was also a method of testing the effectiveness of an underwater electronics lab installed aboard the submersible.

Gemini 5 was not the only long-distance call made from Sealab II. The Navy aquanauts also spoke with President Johnson at the White House and with Jacques Cousteau's Conshelf 3 team, French colleagues conducting a similar underwater-habitat test off Cap Ferrat in the Mediterranean Sea.

Following their chat with Carpenter, Cooper and Conrad readied Gemini 5 for its return to Earth and splashed down in the very same Pacific Ocean later that day.

Thirty years later, in 1995, Carpenter recreated his seabed-to-space call, chatting with astronauts aboard the space shuttle Endeavor while staying at Jules' Undersea Lodge off Key Largo, Florida.

Source: Various

: Photo: Kat Wade/Wired.com

BLACK ROCK CITY, Nevada -- Wild rides, fireworks and letting it all hang out. That's the updated American dream at Burning Man 2008.

The annual desert gathering always celebrates that most-American ideal: freedom. Freedom to ride a giant red, white and blue tricycle across the playa; freedom to blow your mind however you want; freedom to traipse around wearing nothing but body paint.

That kind of ingrained whimsy, rather than politics, seems to be the point of this year's American Dream art theme at Burning Man. "What has America achieved that you admire?" is the event's official statement. "What has it done or failed to do that fills you with dismay? What is laudable? What is ludicrous?"

Groovy, man. Let's get it on.

Left: Red, white and blue abounds at the festival this year.

Red, white and blue abounds at the festival this year.

: Photo: Kat Wade/Wired.com

A stagecoach rolls up the esplanade on Tuesday evening.

: Photo: Kat Wade/Wired.com

Duane Flatmo from Eureka, California, steers his fire-breathing dragon around the esplanade Tuesday.

: Photo: Kat Wade/Wired.com

After hunkering down during Monday's sandstorm, burners break out their colorful costumes Tuesday -- including some that are just painted on. Robin Bowles, right, and her friend Cowboy Curtis chill on the playa on a "fuzzy bunny." The Man can be seen far off in the distance on the left.

: Photo: Kat Wade/Wired.com

A group of burners break out a desert "boat" to parade across the playa.

: Photo: Kat Wade/Wired.com

Black Rock City is humming Thursday.

: Photo: Kat Wade/Wired.com

Lamp Lighters walk down the esplanade Tuesday.

: Photo: Kat Wade/Wired.com>

A panel van decked out with a lit-up Golden Gate Bridge makes its way across the sand Tuesday.

: Photo: Kat Wade/Wired.com

Tutu-wearing burner Diana Zanelli of Texas delights in the swirl of lights from inside artist Crispell Wagner's "modern version of the dream machine," an interactive piece of light art.

: Photo: Kat Wade/Wired.com

Home is where the art is at Burning Man.

: Photo: Kat Wade/Wired.com

The Man glows with neon as Helen Corley from San Ramon, California, twirls her flow lights below the festival's namesake icon in Black Rock City.

: Photo: Kat Wade/Wired.com

A giant duck lights up the night Tuesday as it rolls across the dusty desert floor.

Find out the reaction online to Obama's speech.

Your favorite music sites let you listen to songs all day for free, but only as a stream -- if you want to load one of those songs onto your iPod and take it with you, you'll have to go buy it. But your browser stores streamed MP3s temporarily on your hard drive. Learn where to look and save them for later with our guide.

Posting videos on your website? Go beyond the basic embed code with the first installment of Webmonkey's YouTube tutorial. We'll show you the ins and outs of YouTube's Player API, including how to embed and resize the player, skin it to your liking, and control the video playback with your own code.

Suddenly, General Motors has a competitor in its race to wrest the green mantle from Toyota.

A Los Angeles-area man arrested Wednesday on charges he uploaded nine pre-released recordings of Gun N' Roses tunes has allegedly confessed to the crime, which carries up to three years in prison. Kevin Cogill, aka Skwerl, released the songs to his music-review blog, antiquiet.com, according to court records, the FBI said in court records.