Dean says that fatalities are down because of battlefield tech and triage methods. But that many soldiers are coming back missing limbs. He wanted to make an arm to replace their missing ones. He wants it sensitive enough to pick up a grape or allow soldiers to use a razor to shave, but be self-contained in terms of power. And a two- year deadline.

He say that a year later, they built an 8.9-pound arm using titanium, custom motors, and so on. There's 18 degrees of freedom, and they're now seeing a demo of a man who is scratching his nose. Dean says he did this in one year.

The control techniques are revolutionary. He's playing a video of a guy who didn't have both his arms for 18 years, and learned how to use the arms effectively in less than two dozen hours of training. He's showing a video that shows a guy who knows how to punch, pass a Ping Pong ball to his friend and pour a drink for another man who is holding a cup with the same type of arm. Then the video shows Chuck, the man with no arms, for the first time in 13 years, feeding himself cereal.

Holy shit, now he's showing a video of a guy using the arm using only his MIND. He learned this technique in two days, but Dean says it was more like the system learned how to interface with the human.

Looking at what he's doing, the guy drinks and people applaud. It's been two days. But the amazing thing is that he's put the cup down so it's become a lower brain stem function in two hours of doing cup functions.

Attaching the arm directly to nerves required a lot of surgery.

But there are limited arm functions, even if it's very complicated. Learning how to control a back hoe, with four controls, takes years. And the arm has 18 degrees of freedom. But people don't learn how by using each degree. In fact, it's more efficient, Dean says. There are three degrees of freedom, so they did macros. With this, a man learned how to pick up bottles, nails and other items.

Attaching the arm was a challenge, day to day. Nine pounds on an arm is heavy over a few minutes, let alone a day. So they knew that no one would wear them because of that. So Dean designed air bladders that shift the weight on the body when passive (like fidgeting in a chair) and inflate to be hard when the servos in the arm detect load.

When they did a demo for the secretary of the Army, they showed a man picking up 12 grapes and eating them without breaking or dropping any.

You can literally use infrared light, reading signals going through the skull without any invasive insertion. That's what we're working on next as a controller.

Dean is taking five minutes to explain the plight of the modern world and the responsibility of the smart, rich people in the world to help change that. I'm not sure I have the words to express his thoughts, so I'll wait for the official D video and embed it here later.

Vid from All Things D:

[All Things D]

8:19 Jeff is on stage.

8:20 Mossberg: Why sell hardware like the Kindle?
Bezos: How we get there is by putting our customer's needs as a priority instead of what we're already good at. You need to renew yourself with new skills. When we looked at ebooks, you needed a microscope to find the sales. What we thought is that what people needed was a frictionless way to buy ebooks. And that required us to build a whole new skill set that would take us like 10 years.

8:22 Mossberg: We're in an time where you need to have factories to make hardware.
Bezos: We hired people who knew what they were doing but it still took them time to work as a team. Books needed to be cheaper, too. And we have a competency that is making the experience easy to use.

8:25 Mossberg: I liked the seamlessness of buying books, even though I had hardware reservations. How many have you sold?
Bezos: We haven't shared this number before so maybe it qualifies as news for you...Kindle sales are 6% of books on the 125k titles available on Kindle.

8:27 Mossberg: Why did you sell out?
Bezos: We underestimated. And we're dropping the price to $359 from $399. Mossberg: Clearing stock for a new model?
Bezos: No.
Mossberg: How many versions? Bezos says many more.

8:28 Mossberg: Kindle is the best ebook reader and I've seen them all. It's the best because of the back-end service, like the iPod and iTunes. But what about the whole idea of people reading on a screen with navigation controls? Are you convinced that books will be shifting to digital formats, as newspapers are?
Bezos: Yes, but books won't go away much like horses won't go away. (Crowd laughs.) It's hard to find a tech that's stayed in its original form for 500 years. And anything around that long is going to be hard to improve. But that's what we see with Kindle, even though the book has stayed the same for 500 years. And Kindle is good, because it disappears as you get into the flow of the story.
Mossberg: Unless the leather case falls off.
Bezos: Right! There are things about old books, like loud pages turning when your spouse is sleeping, or the book gets too heavy over time; Kindle is 10.3 ounces. It can't beep at you, like this microwave I had that at 30-second intervals would beep over and over again after my food was done. I call those self-important devices! I'll get my food when I'm ready! But you can't outbook the book, so you have to improve on it, doing things like dictionary lookup. And changing the font size, very simple thing but much appreciated. But there are big whoppers like delivery of a book in 60 seconds. Mossberg: To me, that's the thing. You guys should have made a better case, but that is the brilliant stroke.

8:33 Mossberg: Could you separate Kindle's whispernet from Sprint?
Bezos: We have to think globally, so yes.

8:34 Mossberg: Are you going to have handwriting recognition?
Bezos: There are issues with using a stylus on an e-ink display, and putting something like a digitizer causes visibility reductions.

8:35 Mossberg: People love books and the tactile feel of them.
Bezos: Yes, people love horses but aren't going to ride them to work. We're trying to improve on books.

8:38 Mossberg: This is your first hardware device. How do you limit feature creep and define the product?
Bezos: This is purpose-built for reading. If people want features and they don't detract from that, then we'll consider them.
Mossberg: What about web browsing?
Bezos: E-ink is not great for that without color and bad refresh, etc. But e-ink is unsurpassed for reading.

8:41 Bezos: You might consider the web the ultimate book that you'd choose over everything else.
Mossberg: You might want to go to Amazon.com and order the Kindle Shoe Edition.

8:43 Bezos: When we talk about making products, we talk as missionaries, because missionaries make better products. Someone asked me how much we would spend on making Kindle and I said, how much do we have? We wanted to do this right. Now that 3g and e-ink are coming together, Kindle has a place in the world. The server side too. There are a lot of pieces being pulled together.

8:45 Mossberg is talking about downloads. How serious is Amazon?
Bezos: Very serious. There are a lot of competitors. And music and movies have that glamour element, which is unfortunate, because it attracts people (competition).

8:47 Bezos just announced a web streaming video download service. The system would be pay based.

8:48 Bezos: We've got 5.2 million tracks in MP3 format.

8:49 Mossberg: Are the studios right to be fighting with Steve Jobs?
Bezos; I'd frame it differently and say it's in their best interest to have a multitude of partners and distributors.
Mossberg: I think you're the best positioned to challenge them, even if your marketshare is low.
Bezos: If you're a content owner, you want to get it out there in as many ways as possible. That's why you make chocolate and vanilla.
Mossberg: So iTunes is going down?
Bezos: Laughs, "That's not what I said."

8:51 Mossberg: Can you talk about your cloud storage and computing product, S3? Bezos: These are our infrastructure web services. They allow you to build services in the cloud without owning any hardware. We live in a weird era now, and people build their own data centers. I went on a tour for a 300-year-old brewery, and 100 years ago, they had to make their own generator to make their own power. It didn't make their beer any better to make their own electricity, so they went on the grid as soon as possible. This is just like that. You can scale up and importantly, scale down.

8:53 We had a client who went from five users to 5000 users in three days, and then back down a bit, and you can't scale that if you own your servers.

8:54 Mossberg: Why are you doing this? Will Walt think of Amazon as the people who made elastic computing huge instead of the retail giant in a few years?
Bezos: If you're a programmer, maybe. It could be a meaningful thing for us over time, especially if you are an engineer.

8:57 Mossberg: The economy, are you worried about it?
Bezos: Our business is doing well and there are some things that help us in this economy, as we've been obsessed with low prices for a decade, and as gas gets expensive, driving a 2,000 pound car to pick up five pounds of stuff.
Mossberg: But your packages come in a truck, too.
Bezos: But a route by a postal worker or other is more efficient.

8:59 Questions by the crowd: What about Kindle's DRM? Why, when Amazon does MP3s without drm. The default on Kindle is DRM free, but publishers get to choose. You can't loose things on the Kindle, because we store your books on the cloud. Without thinking about it, you can delete anything on a Kindle and not worry about it. We have the rights from the publishers to let you redownload it again. With music, we had to work with the IP owners over three years to get to the DRM free solution. My own view is that DRM free would not slow down sales.
Man in Crowd: But if you go to another reader, you lose your copies.
Bezos: At the end of the day, it's their decision.

9:02 Another little question: Amazon.com keeps recommending the Kindle to me, even though I own it. That pisses me off.
Walt: That's because you only own one.
Man in Crowd: How good are you at personal recommendations, and are you going to get better?
Bezos: We've been working on it for 12 years and we still make dumb recommendations, but we're pretty good at it. We're trying to create serendipity. Say you're coming to the website and 1-in-100 times a person says "I really like that!" [The challenge is for us] to take that 1% chance and take it to 2% and then 3%. (He's making the numbers up but that's the philosophy.)

9:05 Question: Why should we have different boxes for movies and music?
Bezos: I believe it's intermediate; one day, this stuff will be built into TVs.

[All Things D]

Guys like us avoid monopolies. We like to compete.

UPDATE: Walt Writes..

Just FYI, I haven't been in a Ruth's Chris steakhouse for ten years.

Walt

Walt-spotting rumor smashed?

I need a vacation. –Brian Lam
Thus Spake iPhoneathustra [Via Kara S. And thanks for the Walt Spotting, tipster. Don't get too close, he's much quicker than he looks!]

What we thought might be a Showdown at Carlsbad was, in reality, a love-in at the Four Seasons. Steve and Bill had good times, reminiscing and talking about the future. There was Beatles music to harmonize to (though Yoko was mercifully nowhere to be found). Jobs even revealed that he and Gates had been secretly married for years. (Wait, he was kidding?) Enjoy the video. – Wilson Rothman

D: Notebook [WSJ]
Live Rumble: Bill Gates vs. Steve Jobs vs. Swisher vs. Mossberg [Gizmodo]

Stay tuned for more All Things D coverage as our main man Brian Lam tackles All Things Mossberg. Not literally. We hope. – Wilson Rothman

"Exclusive" D5 Party Photos [All Things D]

It's going to be a big day for the tech world, news wise, and It'll be nice to see friendly faces while I report it. Yes, lots of news, and more importantly, it'll be a very high signal to noise ratio. Why? Because unlike CES and many other shows, the speakers are invite only, per Walt and Kara, with no input by the sponsors. And lots of them are holding news just for that day. I can feeeeel it.

And of course, there's the main event: The Steve and Bill show, which promises to be at least stimulating conversation between the proud geeks. Or something of a schoolyard tussle. Or extremely awkward and silent. I hope Mossy and Swisher force them to writhe under the pressure of 20,000 leagues of hard questioning. Like a squid assaulting an iron submarine. It would be a shame to have them up there together just for friendly chatter. But even that should be riveting.

Anyhow, if you're going, email me. Let's grab a drink and toast the Godfather for getting the two geek titans together on stage, or at least shake hands. – Brian Lam

On the blog:

We want to be first, and sassy, but also well sourced and accurate. We will offer lots of opinion and analysis, but plenty of fact as well.

My favorite piece so far is the message to shareholders, analysts and other bloggers who are giving Apple a hard time about being late on Leopard. His take is exactly my take: It's better to be late than early and shitty. Maybe that analysis applies to the arrival of his blog as well.

[Note: The website says "occasional musings from Walt", so there's no intent to be a minute by minute tech blogger, but I'd still welcome more content.] Either way he's got to start posting more often, and more quickly as news breaks if he wants the blog to be more than an electronic weekly column. As anyone who has made the move from standard journalism to the fast world of blogging knows, it's very difficult to be both first while keeping the polish that longer lead mediums afford with copy editors, fact checkers, and extra minutes for reporting. That is, unless you're powerful enough to delay product launches til you have time to review. Either way, more posts, please.

Kara, who writes things more in tune with Valleywag, has no problem letting her energy run around on the site.

John is a fresh face here. I mean that in more ways than one. He's been writing for the Mercury News since 1997, and by appearances here, that means he's been a columnist since the age of 8. He's the site's young gun, possibly here to provide the stereotypical blog snark while everyone else keeps their hands clean. Check out his post on the Digg meltdown, complete with Photoshop doodle of Kevin Rose. His posts come fast, hard, and with wit to spare. (I'll be stealing jokes liberally, Johny.)

It looks like a force to be reckoned with, as Calacanis and Valleywag have noted. I have a question, though: Where's Katie B's blog?

Walt and Company, we welcome you to the trenches. Mind your step. – Brian Lam

Mossblog [All Things Digital]