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Its the annual meeting apparently. A chance for Ballmer to high-five the devs who did such a great job bringing the experience of Vista service pack 3 to the masses, and helping to firm up their revenues.

Some of the comments from 'softies in that blog are interesting. They certainly don't like Zune, think Search has spent a bit too much money, and there are a few too many project managers at MS.

However, it is still a question of priorities. And the OLPC organization has made it clear that not only is sugar not a priority, but that Negroponte thinks it's a mistake, and wants to see a plain old Windows OS on those laptops anyway.

They failed to make sales, and ended up with limited resources. The sad fact was that the 1.0 I got from the first G1G1 was nearly unusable, partly due to the software not being honed to the limited hardware, partly due to features not being complete. At that time you couldn't even suspend the laptop reliably (much less micro-sleep). Mesh didn't work. Handwriting wasn't implemented. Everything was painfully slow. The journal thing was hard to use and still has problems. In terms of delivering a usable product, they did not succeed.

I happen to think they could have engaged the FOSS community much more effectively, and they seemed to have ineffective relations with Fedora back then. Kristic has recently blamed the hardware for some problems. But clearly the project already suffered from limited resources and its project management wasn't quite up to the task.

I think Negroponte was forced to own up to the fact that they failed to deliver. Not for lack of great ideas, not for lack of innovative hardware. It came down to managing the software development, always a hard problem.

Also, in Negroponte's statement backing away from Sugar, he didn't distinguish between the OS, Desktop environment, and applications, all of which are referred to as "Sugar". If WinXP let them get a solidly working laptop out the door with Sugar apps running on top, that would have been a success for "an education project", despite the pain to us FOSS aficionados.

Could things have turned out better than XP using linux? Absolutely. But did they actually? Anyone would have to say no.

All that said, OLPC is still delivering laptops today, and AFAIK, the vast vast majority of them are not running Windows.

the 1.0 hardware had some bugs that kept it from living up to its potential. In particular, the battery-saving micro-sleep thing has never worked well,

Does the hardware refresh address this? In particular, how does the battery life compare to the original?

I do recall seeing a developer comment that switching to the VIA cpu and replacing the microcontroller was going enable them to address this. Whether they've gotten to it yet I don't know. But that was a major disappointment with 1.0 hardware.

• Is it just me, or are 80% of the faces in the "people you may know" feature on Facebook, people that I do know, but I deliberately choose not to be friends with?
• Whenever I'm Facebook stalking someone and I find out that their profile is public I feel like a kid on Christmas morning who just got the Red Ryder BB gun that I always wanted. 546 pictures? Don't mind if I do!
• Snippets of work. Email, Facebook, Twitter. Sporadic bursts of exercise. Passing off pretty much anything edible as food (glorious food!)

For those who don't know about Seacom yet, look here for a quick intro video.

This is however still no silver bullet, as the local Telkom exchanges (where our 4MB lines plug in) can not yet handle higher speeds. Apparently they tested 8MB ADSL earlier and found some issues (I'm too lazy to goole it now...)

A finished system's structure tends to mimic the structure of the group that produced it. Read about the Windows Shutdown Crapfest and think about the implications for their website.

Actually I am thinking about the implications about the product... if you check out this comment on that article which explains the reason behind the source control structure, they are controlling a symptom of the problem not the problem. No wonder MS products are so unstable and vulnerable, with wild dependencies going all over the place, only found out months after things are broken, I'm with other commenters and I wonder how they ever released a product at all!

A finished system's structure tends to mimic the structure of the group that produced it. Read about the Windows Shutdown Crapfest and think about the implications for their website.

Actually I am thinking about the implications about the product... if you check out this comment on that article which explains the reason behind the source control structure, they are controlling a symptom of the problem not the problem. No wonder MS products are so unstable and vulnerable, with wild dependencies going all over the place, only found out months after things are broken, I'm with other commenters and I wonder how they ever released a product at all!

Apple's detractors consider the company to be a bunch of control freaks, which is true, but that's exactly why their user interfaces are so consistent and usability is so high. Their mania for controlling every aspect of the user's experience has an upside and a downside. That the company that's so driven for consistency on the App Store also has a consistent website should hardly be astonishing.

As for Microsoft's website, the company's main product has a number of different interfaces for different things, when there's no sensible reason for it to be different (Office uses the Ribbon, but Internet Explorer doesn't, to take one example). That the company whose main product has a number of different and confusing elements has a similar website is also not astonishing. A finished system's structure tends to mimic the structure of the group that produced it. Read about the Windows Shutdown Crapfest and think about the implications for their website.

http://patriotboy.blogspot.com/2005/05/is-that-bugle-in-your-pants.html

Wow, the propaganda machine is on overdrive today

Projecting much? Your response is disingenuous scaremongering. You guys are like Intelligent Design advocates, constantly shifting from one justification to another as each is debunked, each one flimsier than the last, with the only constant being the judicious abuse of scientific language to instill fear and doubt in ordinary people. Yes, you are exactly like Intelligent Design advocates.

It produces CFC114 emissions in the enrichment process.

Enrichment consists of passing vaporized uranium through membranes to separate out the heavier isotopes. It doesn't emit CFFs or anything else as a matter of course. That one older plant does is an artifact of that plant and not the process itself. The USEC plans to replace that plant.

Also, the one primary source I found for the CFC114 information mentions 800,000 pounds per year for two plants, which means that it's around 400,000 pounds now, equivalent (using your numbers) to 1.5e9 kg of CO2. That refined uranium generates 8e8 megawatt-hours. Coal generates 1,970 pounds of CO2 per megawatt-hour. So had the electricity supplied by nuclear been produced by coal, we would instead have emitted 7.1e11kg on CO2. That's approximately five hundred times less CO2, and starting to get into negligible territory. And that's 1) using a relatively inefficient enrichment process, and 2) not recycling the enriched fuel in any way. Do you want to compare that to the CO2 used to manufacture and maintain wind turbines (don't forget transportation), or the quite toxic chemical soup used to manufacture photovoltaic cells?

The rest of your post is similarly misleading, and not worthwhile to debunk in detail. In brief, the noble (I don't know why you capitalized it) gas fission products are managed and harvested (as we've known how to do for 50 years --- read the date on that paper), not simply emitted into the atmosphere. Even if they were emitted, they have very short half-lives, and would contribute insignificantly the background radiation level. Remember, noble gases are insert and don't bioaccumulate. But since they're not simply vented, it's a moot point anyway.

Your phytoplankton reference is the worst kind of scientific pandering. It's not CFCs that are the primary danger, but rather the acidification of the oceans caused by their absorption of CO2. We've already established that coal emits quite a bit more CO2.

As for Yucca mountain: a granite facility with no groundwater permeation probably would be better, sure. Let's use or make one.

Nevertheless, Yucca isn't bad. Even a 5.5 "aftershock" is hardly enough to damage a secure facility. (If these shocks even exist: a source would be nice here.) Long-term corrosion information, because it's a gradual process, can be extrapolated from short-term experiments. Corrosion doesn't suddenly accelerate three hundred years out, as you imply. And remember: by the time nuclear waste even gets to a storage facility, it's already radioactively decayed into longer-lived isotopes that simply aren't that dangerous. As for groundwater permeation: first of all, the waste is put in containers specifically designed to avoid water contact. Second, even if water were to erode these containers, the radioactive waste within is highly insoluble and vitrified, so contamination would be low. And even if contamination were something

On their way...

http://cube1986.blogspot.com/2008/11/airport-security-dont-bother-asking.html

such gems as :

'are you seeking to engage in immoral activity'
  -well, what if I plan to cheat on my wife with my pa? does that mean I can't come in

'are you involved in espionage'
-doh; what did they tell me to answer to this one in spy school? er...

'do you have a mental disorder'
-Gary McKinnon claims asbergers syndrome. Does that mean he can't come in?

Seems like the games included in the emulator, was cracked versions from a group called "Remember". Found a blog with some screenshots of it at this blog.

Blog link about the covers here:

http://igallo.blogspot.com/2009/09/wheel-of-time-ebook-repackaging-or-wo0t.html

William

I always thought this was insightful, but never could test that belief: Top Ten Geek Business Myths:

Myth #1: A brilliant idea will make you rich.
Myth #2: If you build it they will come.
Myth #3: Someone will steal your idea if you don't protect it.
Myth #4: What you think matters.
Myth #5: Financial models are bogus.
Myth #6: What you know matters more than who you know.
Myth #7: A Ph.D. means something.
Myth #8: I need $5 million to start my business
Myth #9: The idea is the most important part of my business plan.
Myth #10: Having no competition is a good thing.
The actual blog has much more in-depth explanations of the myths. And, it has a special Bonus Myth!

Yet you're perfectly ok with people being able to allow knives, which are infinitely more dangerous? Glad I don't like in the U.K.

As a matter of fact, Britain is in fact enacting 'knife control'.

British Medical Experts Campaign for Long, Pointy Knife Control

Britain Cracks Down on Knives After 11th Teen Is Slain in London

War on Knives

Statistics on Knife Crime in Britain

Just try googling for "knife control in britain" and you'll find lots of stories on the subject.

4.0 version is in the dev channel.

We have been. If you look at this graph, you will see defense spending has been dropping regularly since the 50s. Wartime has tended to push it up, but other than that it's gone down. That's a large part of how Clinton managed to balance the budget (notice defense spending went down during his term despite fighting a war in the Balkans at the same time).

Defense spending has been largely replaced with entitlement spending, mainly medicare/medicaid and social security (as you can see in (this chart; I couldn't find one that goes back to the 50s. Also the huge projected jump after 2030 is not realistic since it is mostly interest payments, and it will be difficult to find someone to loan us money at that point, making cuts a necessity). Right now defense spending is only about 21% of the US budget, as opposed to the major entitlements which make up about 44% of the budget.

All the same US defense spending probably is excessive, considering it about matches the spending of the entire rest of the world combined. but on the other hand some of those toys are really fun. However they are not the biggest expense, the biggest expenses are operating/maintaining bases, and paying our soldiers. If we are serious about cutting expenses we will have to close bases and reduce the number of soldiers.

When push comes to shove, you could pretty much any I/O port conceivable.

It's easy to get Linux to stop completely dead when something is writing heavily to disk. I wrote a blog entry on one such example where the server became completely unresponsive to anything for several seconds at a time, even though only a little over 40% of the RAM was being used. That I was able to improve using a tunable that's now the default in current kernels, but the root problem is still there, and as system RAM capacities go up it gets worse rather than better.

Funny, I thought I just replied. Well, once again...

You're in the category of people who think a secretive organization like ELF has offices to burn. I googled and this is about all I found:

The Elf Office Alliance

Okay, this: The North American ELF Press Office but it's probably just a laptop in a Starbucks.

• Snow Leopard in Afghanistan
• Snow Leopard Diary
• LEOPARD PICTURES: Rare Snow Cats Caught by Camera Traps
• Terich Valley: Snow Leopard Survival Issues
• Central Park Zoo visitors go wild for new snow leopards

To anyone who wants to try it out on Ubuntu. I'm sure it will work for other platforms too :) http://kagashe.blogspot.com/2009/06/uzbl-new-usable-browser-on-ubuntu-904.html

Why do I say that? Because you don't see BMW giving free training videos to car salesmen comparing their cars to say GM or Chrysler or Ford, do you?

You won't see the BMW training video unless you are a BMW salesman.

But BMW does "educate" their sales force.

That is instinctive in any business that has a sales force - and the automobile manufacturers have been masters of the game since 1896.

New BMW Adds Put The Competition In Their Place

What you actually need is one of these. They go faster, last more than 1000 uses and cost less.

10 years? No crime on the Internet? And this is coming from one of the industry leaders in Internet security? Makes me laugh. For one, as long as there are people clicking on ads, clicking on spam, and opening unknown attachments, there will be crime on the web. As long as there is money to be had, someone will try and take it. This strategy is kind of like saying if your house gets broken into, the police will give you a gun if you want. Yes, burglaries may drop, but that doesn't mean crime will go away. And most people don't know what to do with a gun when they get one. Enlisting the common user in the fight against cybercrime is a nice idea, but realistically unfeasible. http://ruleroftheinterwebs.blogspot.com/

There's a BIG PARTY at this address: 835 73rd Ave NE, Medina, WA 98039

No, the REAL question is... why?

A Netbook is cheaper, faster, and designed to run it. Why pay Amazon for an overpriced specialty item then make it do something it was never intended to do? I can't imagine the thing can still access the 3G network for free (the author replied "YES BUT DON'T DO THAT" to someone who asked)...

And, yes, I know... "because we can". And I congratulate the person who managed this. It's an impressive technical achievement.

Still doesn't make it something I see a lot of people wanting to do. Why would anyone really want to take a one-trick pony and change the trick...?

My question is... doesn't it ALREADY run linux?

YES!! One of these days clear thinking will prevail. It may not be The Final Solution, but it'd certainly put a big dent in the problem. I actually wrote a blog post somewhat frighteningly similar to your post back in July: http://rootproblem.blogspot.com/2009/07/stranger-than-fiction.html Of course I couldn't begin to accuse you of plagiarizing my writing because, well, nobody reads my blog except for me :P

This is true, but replacing steel, concrete and wood use with a substance mined from the carbon in the air only covers a few per cent of our emissions so we need another larger home for the carbon. http://mdsolar.blogspot.com/2008/01/anaximenes-way.html

I don't just work there, I get paid by Google to promote them, hence the positive overtones in my post. Okay seriously...

Firstly, I think my use of the word 'polarize' was a feeling coming across from your initial post that you used to think that companies (such as Google) were fundamentally good in some way and others generally evil, with nothing in between. And because you found that not to be true, you swing *completely* the other way and say they must all be as good as each other. I think that's what annoyed me the most, just the fact that you're saying they're all as good as each other with no room for contrast.

I'm curious what basis you have to believe that "the people in charge at Google have more 'moral' business ethics than most'

Er, it's not a very strong statement anyway being in the top 50% or even 80%. My evidence? Well, in general, us Slashdot peeps tend to praise them more than most, or at least not criticize them as harshly as many other companies. More concrete points include:

1: Their attitude towards open source / Chrome (and I'm not really a fan of open source yet).
2: How they're not doing evil things the way companies like Microsoft or Apple (yes that is a good thing for a company whose main purpose is to make money).
3: Also their relatively unobtrusive ads with their stance on popups
4: Their creativity for projects such as Google Wave and GMail. There's real dedication and a love for what they're doing, which goes beyond the short-sighted goals of short-term profit.
5: Their stance on freeing the airwaves.
6: Their efforts to store all books/information online, whilst trying to please both publishers and the public at the same.

I read your previous post again, and I'm sorry to hear that their support for certain Google app APIs is not exceptional, but one still has to look at the wider picture, especially considering the size of the company.

Uber die Schelde die Maas und den Rhein,

stiessen die Panzer nach Frankreich hinein,

Husaren des Fuhrers im schwarzen Gewand

so haben sie Frankreich im Sturm überrannt

Es rasseln die Ketten, es drÃhnt der Motor

Panzer rollen in Afrika Korps,

Panzer rollen in Afrika vor!

Heiss uber Afrikas Boden die Sonne glüht

Unsere Panzermotoren singen ihr Lied

Deutsche Panzer im Sonnenbrand

stehen im Kampf gegen Engeland

Es rasseln die Ketten, es drÃhnt der Motor

Panzer rollen in Afrika vor

Panzer des Führers ihr Britten habt acht

Die sind zu eurer Vernichtung erdacht

Sie furchten vor Tod und

vor Teufel sich nicht

an ihnen der britische Hochmut zerbricht

Es rasseln die Ketten, es drohnt der Motor

Panzer rollen in Afrika korps,

Panzer rollen in Afrika vor!

I see your points but I think you should read Parallel Computing: Why the Future is Compositional... and hierarchical... and non-algorithmic... and deterministic... etc.

And while you're at it, you might as well read How to Solve the Parallel Programming Crisis. Without multithreading, of course, since multithreading is the biggest and most hideous abomination of them all.

Parallel programming is a concept I can stand behind - I haven't done anything with it yet but I've learned a bit about Erlang and it seems like a good thing.

One of the things that bugs me about the way you apply parallel programming to your concept is that you appear to apply it to every level of the language design. Even the most trivial operations are parallel by default... That seems like a bad idea to me for any number of reasons. First off, the sequentiality of operations is useful for the programmer to develop a clear idea of what the program does: parallelism doesn't help people understand a program when you're dealing with a small unit of code, and I would even argue that it hinders understanding. Second, on anything remotely similar to today's hardware, execution is more efficient when dealing with either a single sequence of operations, or multiple sequences of operations running in parallel (and not interacting too much). The former is the strength of traditional imperative programming, and the latter is the model being advanced by parallel languages like Erlang: write a fairly self-contained module that does a job, and have it communicate with other modules via a system of message queues.

One point that I didn't really get was how synchronization was supposed to work between those program nodes. If this were a digital electronic circuit one would expect a clock pulse to go to all the nodes to tell them when to update themselves... I'm not entirely sure what your solution was in this thing...

The whole visual programming stuff just seems very, very cryptic. Everywhere you had a mass of nodes and the "equivalent" traditional imperative code, it seemed like the plain old code was both clearer in what it did and more informative about the details... But, then, guess which of the two I spend most of my time dealing with? Perhaps if I took more time to understand the node graphs it it might be less so, I'm not sure. Have you taken a crack at actually writing this thing yet? It's important to remember that all the brainstorming in the world doesn't really get you anywhere... The project doesn't really exist until there's working code of some kind. This is something I'm currently dealing with myself - something I've been brainstorming for a while now but haven't yet coded...

I see your points but I think you should read Parallel Computing: Why the Future is Compositional... and hierarchical... and non-algorithmic... and deterministic... etc.

And while you're at it, you might as well read How to Solve the Parallel Programming Crisis. Without multithreading, of course, since multithreading is the biggest and most hideous abomination of them all.

Parallel programming is a concept I can stand behind - I haven't done anything with it yet but I've learned a bit about Erlang and it seems like a good thing.

One of the things that bugs me about the way you apply parallel programming to your concept is that you appear to apply it to every level of the language design. Even the most trivial operations are parallel by default... That seems like a bad idea to me for any number of reasons. First off, the sequentiality of operations is useful for the programmer to develop a clear idea of what the program does: parallelism doesn't help people understand a program when you're dealing with a small unit of code, and I would even argue that it hinders understanding. Second, on anything remotely similar to today's hardware, execution is more efficient when dealing with either a single sequence of operations, or multiple sequences of operations running in parallel (and not interacting too much). The former is the strength of traditional imperative programming, and the latter is the model being advanced by parallel languages like Erlang: write a fairly self-contained module that does a job, and have it communicate with other modules via a system of message queues.

One point that I didn't really get was how synchronization was supposed to work between those program nodes. If this were a digital electronic circuit one would expect a clock pulse to go to all the nodes to tell them when to update themselves... I'm not entirely sure what your solution was in this thing...

The whole visual programming stuff just seems very, very cryptic. Everywhere you had a mass of nodes and the "equivalent" traditional imperative code, it seemed like the plain old code was both clearer in what it did and more informative about the details... But, then, guess which of the two I spend most of my time dealing with? Perhaps if I took more time to understand the node graphs it it might be less so, I'm not sure. Have you taken a crack at actually writing this thing yet? It's important to remember that all the brainstorming in the world doesn't really get you anywhere... The project doesn't really exist until there's working code of some kind. This is something I'm currently dealing with myself - something I've been brainstorming for a while now but haven't yet coded...

I first saw it on http://cdtdoug.blogspot.com/2009/05/wascana-is-over.html. I don't have the links I found later but that post and its comments all say the same thing.

I see your points but I think you should read Parallel Computing: Why the Future is Compositional... and hierarchical... and non-algorithmic... and deterministic... etc.

And while you're at it, you might as well read How to Solve the Parallel Programming Crisis. Without multithreading, of course, since multithreading is the biggest and most hideous abomination of them all.

I see your points but I think you should read Parallel Computing: Why the Future is Compositional... and hierarchical... and non-algorithmic... and deterministic... etc.

And while you're at it, you might as well read How to Solve the Parallel Programming Crisis. Without multithreading, of course, since multithreading is the biggest and most hideous abomination of them all.

Perl is an abomination as a language

LOL. From my perspective, all computer programming languages are abominations. They are ancient primitive relics of what I call the Babbage and Lovelace era. They should all be placed in the Smithsonian right next to the buggy whip and the slide rule. I live for the day when a constitutional amendment is passed to ban them all. :-D

So your solution is a concurrent language using diagrams in place of syntax?

I'm not about to tell you the COSA approach is a bad idea, and I'd hate to discourage someone who's obviously got a lot of interest in making a system that really is better... But I have my doubts about visual programming languages in general. Mainly because it bypasses the established mechanisms humans have developed for conveying complex ideas (i.e. writing) in favor of visual diagrams - you lose the capability to convey a large volume of information effectively in a reasonably small space - or at least it seems you would. At any rate I can't figure out how those node graphs work...

And your statements about reliability? In what sense can a logic circuit be "guaranteed" free of defects? Did Intel know about this method of quality assurance back when they were designing the Pentium? It seems to me that simple logic circuits can be guaranteed free of defects because the human mind can readily model the whole system and intuitively decide it is correct. When the system is complex, that is no longer true.

I donâ(TM)t want to know about how to implement loops, tree structures, search algorithms and all that other jazz. If I want my program to save an audio recording to a file, I donâ(TM)t want to learn about frequency ranges, formats, fidelity, file library interface, audio library interface and so forth. This stuff really gets in the way.

It seems as though you've just said you want someone else to solve your problems for you.

To a certain extent this is quite reasonable. If you want to save an audio recording, it's reasonable to expect someone else to have come up with a program that will make it easy for you. This is why we have "sound recorder" applications and the like.

But what if you're the first person to write such a program? Or what if, for whatever reason (i.e. licensing issues, etc.) you can't use the work that's already been done? Then it seems to me that there's no way around it: you simply must understand about audio formats and deal with them on their own terms.

Likewise, suppose you want a program that can calculate a route to drive from Baltimore to Chicago. Of course it's been done: you can go ask Google for the route... But what if you want your own program that does this? Like if you wanted to compete with Google and get in the computer-map business? Then you'd need one of those pesky algorithms to turn that big pile of data into a usable route. The problem's not practically solvable unless you approach it with the right kind of strategy, that's exactly what an algorithm is. It's not practical to expect that all the problems in the world have already been solved by whoever created your language toolkit - if it were, then I'd be out of a job.

Perl is an abomination as a language

LOL. From my perspective, all computer programming languages are abominations. They are ancient primitive relics of what I call the Babbage and Lovelace era. They should all be placed in the Smithsonian right next to the buggy whip and the slide rule. I live for the day when a constitutional amendment is passed to ban them all. :-D

The effect noted is an illusion due to category error (selection of mismatched items to compare).

The data regarding older advances are taken, as stated, from revolutionary changes, whereas the newer are taken from predictable and incremental advances.

The former are primarily advances in basic science. They do lend themselves to, and are made obvious by, later advances in applied technology, but the major discoveries themselves are of a more fundamental nature. Such things are highly visible now due to the large body of applied technology they made possible. Back tracking the technological advances leads to those discoveries. Without that large body converging on the major discoveries common to them, the discoveries themselves are not that prominent.

They were not so prominent at the time due to the lack of applied technology as an indicator. Likewise, most major discoveries in the recent past have not had time to mature and bear applied fruit. We cannot know for certain as yet just which or how many of those advances are the Next Big Thing(s). However, basic research continues apace, as evidenced by grants awarded, articles published and patents obtained, as well as the natural offshoot of basic research, those far more numerous discoveries that are developed, announced and then come to naught.

The authors note the details that they believe lead them to their conclusion, but fail to recognize that in examining those facts they are creating their conclusion through selection bias and category error. It is precisely the recent incremental technological advances that stem from the more distant major discoveries that make them visible. Their data originate in a cause and effect relationship, but they attempt to compare them as effects, recent and distant, and without the benefit of data regarding widespread effects of any recent major advances (effects which obviously have not occurred yet) they assume none have occurred due to an absence of evidence.

As Thomas Kuhn posits, revolutionary changes are inevitable and their origins are in the constantly ongoing basic research. He also notes that those already established in a field are less likely than the new generation to recognize (in terms of both becoming aware of the nature of, as well as accepting and admitting the importance or even existence of) the phenomenon.

To summarize with an illustration of the extreme view presented above: major discoveries in the past have resulted in entire fields that did not exist previously. The lack of of previously unknown but conceivable fields suddenly appearing today is obviously not evidence that they are somewhere simmering beneath the surface, waiting to erupt. But the lack of such conceivable revelations can be taken to indicate that there is room for such fields to blossom, and the lack of sudden occurrence evidence of the protracted nature of their development.

Finally, historical data provides many examples of people making the same mistake, assuming that the lack of major advances in the present with the visibility of such advances in the past indicates that there are no such advances forthcoming. For just one example, from http://quotesjournal.blogspot.com/2003/07/everything-that-can-be-invented-has.html "Everything that can be invented - has already been invented". Attributed to Charles Duell, Commissioner of the United States Patent Office, 1899. Cf.Henry Ellsworth, a patent commissioner in 1843 who said something similar in a report to Congress: "The advancement of the arts, from year to year, taxes our credulity and seems to presage the arrival of that period when human improvement must end." The most extreme example of this is, in my opinion, Stephen Hawking's oft quoted suggestion of the finality inherent in a 'theory of everything' which would be akin to knowing "the mind of God." To this I would reply that this may be so, but there have been an awful lot of gods throughout history that have been credited with ultimacy, only to be superseded by The Next Big God.

probably someone's opinion. MS may lose money hand over fist for a lot of their products, but they have plenty to use to subsidise the loss-makers. (did I hear someone shout 'anti-competitive' at the back?)

Look at Bing - spent billions of dollars, tied-up with Yahoo... got a massive 10% market share in return.

Look at Xbox, lose billions of dollar (not spent, lost), and still come second place to Sony playstation (PS2 admittedly, PS3 seems to be too expensive and a little before its time with the blu-ray player)

Look at Zune, just a joke even to Microsoft employees (read the comments)

Look at WinMo, currently in 4th place in the mobile phone marketplace, behind Symbian at #1 with 50%, Blackberry with 20%, iPhone with 15%. If Google could get some handsets out I reckon it'd be at 5th place before you could blink. I mean, there are more Linux based phones out there than WinMobile! More Linux! Yes, more... I think I need to go lie down.

If only Japan could somehow magically create more open, unfarmable, and uninhabited land where the turbines could be placed without taking away already scarce farm land or slowly deafen anyone within a kilometer!

Unlike nuclear power land for wind turbines can be used for food farming as well. Here in Minnesota many corn farmers site wind turbines on their farms. Platforms for towers don't take much space. And wind turbines aren't as loud as some make them out to be. All those who say they take too much land or are too loud are doing is spreading FUD and lies. And saying they kill a of birds is also FUD. Buildings, cars, and cats kill many birds. If you're worries about birds being killed by wind turbines then complain about birds being killed at airports. Here is a list of "9 Human Activities That Threaten Birds".

Falcon

I see that someone tagged this story "fried". Well, no.

The microwave beam from a solar power satellite is not strong enough to fry things. It's stronger than sunlight but not scary strong. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space-based_solar_power#Safety

The land used for a power-receiving rectenna can still be used for raising cattle, without the cattle becoming super-powered mutants or getting cooked. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space-based_solar_power#Earth-based_infrastructure

It remains to be seen when this will prove to be economical. It's not economical today, but if they start working on it today, maybe we will have many profitable powersats orbiting Earth within, say, 30 years. (Just in time for nuclear fusion, right?)

The good thing about this is that it doesn't require any new technology. We can do this with just some engineering. The biggest problem with this is that launch costs are currently astronomical to send anything to orbit; but I think that we are going to see a renaissance in space launch systems. Surely one of the private space companies (Armadillo Aerospace, SpaceX, Scaled Composites, etc.) will get a practical reusable launch system to work; and that will completely change the game for launch costs.

steveha

while India had its own opinions and a democracy which meant they didn't roll over when the US asked

No, the problem was not with India's Democracy per se, the problem was with their Democracy being penetrated throughout by KGB. It began in the 1950-ies and was complete over subsequent decades. The rest of the world got the chance to learn about it (and other KGB secrets) in the 1990-ies, when Mitrokhin archive became public, but the US government, no doubt, knew all along and could not trust the Indian, despite all the sympathy for their Democracy and culture...

It was not that long ago — in all likelihood, there still remain busy politicians and government workers in India, who either never got off Russian payroll, or could be blackmailed by Russia into new cooperation...

..by this universal glorification of suicide?

I can't judge this man, but I can't imagine that the "good job dying already" attitude I've seen in the article and EVERY post here helping people like the members of "Not Dead Yet": http://notdeadyetnewscommentary.blogspot.com/

What the plasmodium robot needs is an AI Mind. Then it will be an artificially intelligent Cyborg (cybernetic organism).

http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_4OYGjUrdllo/SKZDW56FpYI/AAAAAAAAGLA/zHFGEjuqpPk/s400/WolvieMickey.jpg

Wow. It's like rule 34, but for fan fiction.

...posted for a while.

Here's a link...
http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_4OYGjUrdllo/SKZDW56FpYI/AAAAAAAAGLA/zHFGEjuqpPk/s400/WolvieMickey.jpg

If you're astonished at the cost of developing a new drug you'll be doubly (or triply) astonished at the cost of marketing a new drug

over the last three decades, companies spent about 3 times as much on marketing/administration as R&D (36% vs. 12% of revenues).

(administrative costs are a small portion of that spending, as the next quote illustrates)

It's not all bad news though:

The news, however, is that recently, R&D spending has been increasing more rapidly than marketing-- since about 2000, R&D has gone up from about 10% to 17%, while marketing has been just about flat near 39%.

(-source - a blog that gets it's info from a paper in Nature - which is behind a paywall.)

Whoops. Maybe I posted to soon. Another google hit gave me a stealthy looking aircraft:
http://flareout.blogspot.com/2009/05/fifth-generation-fighter-aircraft-fgfa.html

I don't see any pylons here for missiles, or other radar bouncing structures. Definitely not what was shown in the earlier photos.

These are not gay at all either.

Yep, Mac users are as straight as Richard Simmons.