While shaving this morning, half-listening to National Public Radio, I heard a scary story about a guy nearly severing his thumb on a table saw. Yipes! What's this? Turned out to be a report by Chris Arnold on SawStop, an electronic technology meant to prevent such accidents. The audio will be on NPR's site soon. But apparently Arnold has reported on SawStop before, since a Web search leads to this 2004 report. Anyway, it seems that SawStop is the brainchild of inventor Steven Gass, who is frustrated that power-tool companies won't license it from him--and has gone to the Consumer Products Safety Commission to try and force them to do so. Kind of a nifty twist on the patent-troll gambit, don't you think?

While the report did note some industry objections, the impression it probably left on some listeners was that table saws are dangerous and that power-tool companies are too damn weasely to do anything about it. However the impression it left on me (and, I would speculate, whoever fielded an initial licensing pitch at Black & Decker and then watched the story take this turn) is that Arnold doesn't know much about real-life business issues and maybe just plain real-life issues. Like: manufacturability, reliability (and related liability suits) and cost-benefit analysis, not to mention the intriguing question of what kind of royalty Gass might be able to claim. Could Gass be a really altruistic innovator with a foolproof technology? I suppose. But even then it would be nice to hear NPR, which does a lot of things well, frame the story a little more even-handedly. They could have still worked that whiny saw noise in. — Kenneth Klee

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