Submitted without comment.

Is this real?

Okay, scratch the QuadCopter. I'll take these at what will probably be a $5M auction. (Thanks to Nick for the link!)

It's this:

Sony Nex7 Test on the Cinestar 6 from Quadrocopter on Vimeo.

Christopher Hitchens died. His essay on North Korea was forwarded around following the death of Kim Jong-Il. It's classic Hitchens.

The Patek 5013 Repeater showed up on one of my watch blogs. At over 500 parts it's a incredible masterpiece. The 5059 is more handsome, but the complexity of the 5013 is stunning.

Blanco showed me a link to Louis CK's Reddit session which was very cool. His internet comedy special made real money. Not sure if this is a game changer yet for the industry, but I'm thrilled it worked for him.

Bill Keller's thoughtful essay on Pakistan is a well balanced approach to understanding the problem we face in a realistic manner.

The drone fiasco continues, and there are some new and interesting analyses of the event.

Finally, a group of people that make me look like way less of a fashion whore: The Ainsworth.

I've been watching with great interest how Iranian claims of hacking the US drone went from impossible to improbable to verified--and now, apparently, explained by clever but simple attack on the GPS system. Basically, the hackers allegedly jammed the control signal (which was encrypted and nearly impossible to crack) and then broadcast fake GPS signals. This caused the drone to panic and "fly home" to a location that wasn't actually home.

Here's something that we Americans really need to internalize: our military is very good at building weapons. They are really bad at software, and horrible at security. It's the biggest weakness in our defense systems, and an area in which we continue to lose ground to nations with which we are fighting or will probably fight. If the reports of the drone hacking are correct, it's a glaring reminder of this fact.

I've been behind on a lot of things lately, so here's a big linkdump of tidbits that have crossed my mind (or rocked my world).

In case you missed the 60 Minutes show on Steve Jobs, here's the video in its entirety with some additional scenes.

The rehabilitation of the Google founders' images continues in the NYTimes, this time with a story about Sergey's Google X which houses many of the far-reaching products under development at the search giant. I wonder what the reaction was at Google to this story?

XKCD published a fascinating money map that illustrates the relative cost of various things from objects to government programs. Thanks to Prof. Kahle for the link.

ABlogToRead has a nice visual history of the wristwatch from 1485 to present.

With the dramatic success of NASA's Kepler mission last week, we have high hopes for Curiostiy's trip to Mars which began at the end of last month. There are a lot of secrets on our red neighbor yet to be discovered.

From Bruce Schneier's thought-provoking blog I found and article on violence and self-defense that presented a very distilled set of guidelines on how to think about confrontation and male dominance games.

Privacy-minded techies are working on another darknet attempt which I applaud and hope will actually take off.

The FIA has released the 2012 F1 Rules which are generally good except: "drivers will not be allowed to move back onto the racing line after having moved off it to defend their position." I predict this will not increase passing, but will lead to more crashes and penalties as leading drivers will move inside and be forced to stay inside (on the marbles). If the chasing car tries the outside line, they will get hit. If they take a classic line, the slower car will hog the apex and block on exit (as the rule says nothing about what the cars can do once they enter the turn.) I thought the overtaking was awesome and Monza was a real treat. Neither Alonso nor Hamilton complained post-race...FIA, just let it be.

Meanwhile, China continues to ruthlessly trample intellectual property and use the state to pick winners in just about every industry.

Finally, the availability of inexpensive Swiss mechanical watch movements is about to change dramatically as Swatch (who own ETA/Unitas) will soon stop selling them to other watch companies. However, I think this will lead to two things: a lawsuit to allow "Swiss Made" to be used on watches that do not have Swiss movements, and the continued rise of Asian movement production that already offer similar quality base movements at about 1/5th the cost.

Sounds great, but actually creating jobs isn't that simple, or even possible from a policy standpoint. From the article:

The second area of agreement is the most important: an economy is truly healthy only when its people know how to make and do things that others will pay them a decent amount for. Jobs, in other words, are not the cause of a healthy economy; they’re the byproduct. And that’s another thing most national politicians know but will never say.

So perhaps instead of (or, at least, in addition to) arguing over plans that aren’t going to happen, we should focus on what almost certainly will come true. The economy that emerges from this recession is going to be different. Without the distortion of a credit bubble, it is clear that far too many Americans don’t know how to do anything that the world is willing to pay them a living wage for. No economic theory offers them easy salvation.

All the more reason to focus on training our workforce to build new things that the world wants. Food for thought for this Thanksgiving.

It's nice to see some in the VC community talk about sustainability. I'm skeptical that the greater early-stage investment market will ever get behind this idea unless the fund durations go well beyond the typical 5-10 year window. Sustainability takes time, and is inherently less risky than a more grow-or-die approach that many start-ups adopt. If you have to make returns quick, you're back to a strategy that is at odds with sustainability.

And now for another installment in my series of Google's Struggles Trying To Be A Product Company: the bitter wasteland that is Android orphans. And when you talk to the device manufacturers (Google's "customers") this is just the tip of the iceberg.

Interested in the federal budget? Want to debate how to change things? You should probably start by looking at the budget and understand what each area or agency actually does. The interactive graphic from the NYTimes is a great tool for doing just that.

It's easy to get excited when research suggests concrete methods to fight aging. I remember when my high school biology teacher (Hi, Mr. Lundberg!) declared that science would find a way to stop aging in my lifetime. Of course, early lab results should not be overestimated...to say nothing of the ethical implications of treatments based on these techniques. But it's thrilling nonetheless.

Just hit my watch RSS feed and found a few gems. Here they are:

Hublot, whose watches I generally detest, performed and really fascinating recreation of an ancient timekeeping machine from the first century BCE. It's called the Antikythera after the small island where the ship that was carrying the artifact sunk. A video on the device explains its secrets which amazingly told lunar and solar phases as well as eclipses for a 19 year period.

It's good to see Panerai getting back to their roots. The modern style models bore the hell out of me and clutter what is one of the most well balanced designs.

Speaking of perfection, the 6263 Daytona is one of two Rolex watches I would ever put on my wrist. Here's a Tropic that's particularly beautiful. (The other is the Day-Date, AKA the President for which Jake's Rolex World has a fantasic history.)

But I'll save the best for last. MB&F, with whom I have a love/hate relationship, started a new line of watches called "Legacy". Below is their first model. I think it's gorgeous. I'm a sucker for curved crystals, but the floating balance wheel is brilliant and the vertical reserve is really unique. Very bauble, very steampunk, very elegant. I can't wait to see where this goes.

LIVE EXPLANATION: The MB&F Legacy Machine One from HODINKEE on Vimeo.

When people came to visit me in the late 90's I used to love to drive them by Job's house in Palo Alto. I'd ride by the house every day on my commute to IDEO. You can read a lot about the house online...but my favorite part was the silver Mercedes that was parked in the driveway. It never had a license plate. Since at least 1997! I figured Jobs had paid off the cops or something, but the actual answer turns out to be even more simple and clever.

There's been a ton of things that have fallen off my plate. I don't have the time to do them justice, but I want to put them down here lest I forget about them forever.

Ken Nims, who I have never met, sent me an email noting the death of Ed Healy. Ed was a US-born professional driver of road and rally car who moved to Europe in the late 80s. Among his distinctions was owning the fastest Renault Williams Clio I've ever seen (and rode shotgun in) on the Nurburgring. He was an immensely nice guy who helped people like me learn the track. He will be missed.

I'd like to say a big "thank you!" to Abu Bakar Bin Haji Jaafar, proprietor of ABJ Taxi in Kuantan, Malaysia. If you are ever in the area and need a reliable and reasonably-priced driver, Abu Bakar is your man. His mobile is +60 139344030. Getting off the bus at night in Kuantan can be a bit disorienting, but we totally lucked out that Abu was there looking for lost souls like us. A really sweet man.

Faisal sent me a cartoon of my dog's twin sister, separated at birth.

I learned that a recent Windows update breaks ATI drivers. I learned this after ulocking my graphics card and thinking I had done something wrong. With the MS stuff rolled back the card is pretty quick. I also overclocked my old Core 2 Duo E6600 and learned how to make sure it's stable. Can't wait to do this with the new Ivy Bridge machine I'm building next year.

Finally, a video given to Steve Jobs by Apple employees on his thirtieth birthday: