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Using OmniRemote together with the TV-Uni Remote and VCR-Uni Remote you can reach the same goal for even more brands - ok initially setup might not be as comfortable...
BTW have you read about this guy, which was haking his furby using OmniRemote ?

The claim was that there are self-sharpening razor blades and that the technology is being held down by Gillette. I don't think I'm going too far out on a limb by saying that if this was true there should be information out on the net that will shed some light on the issue.

When was the last time you saw a report on a product which is specifically not going to market? That sort of thing doesn't get reported, does it? Even if it did, would it be reported in an American paper, or a Brazilian one? (And can you read Portuguese?)

Sorry, but I still think you put too much trust in the 'net (and probably the English-language part of the 'net, at that). The original claim was that Gillette bought a Brazilian company over a decade ago, including all their patents, and then shut them down. So what? Companies buy out other companies all the time. As for the self-sharpening razors, Gillette may even now be improving the product for eventual release (or they may have released it already -- see below). They're not supporting the old products anymore (that's a reasonable interpretation of "shut them down"). This would be consistent with the original poster's claim, and yet so commonplace that nobody would bother to report it, except in passing. Heard anything about what nVidia is doing with 3dfx's video card technology lately?

This is not to say that the original poster's claim is true, by the way. In fact, I consider it uninteresting. Self-sharpening razors have existed for decades (one was patented in 1917), razor manufacturers offer them today, and corporate buyouts (with patents) happen all the time. Again, so what?

Owen Rubin- creator of Atari coinops Major Havoc, Space Duel, and others.

Howard Delman- coinop hardware and software engineer. Designed the vector graphics hardware for Asteroids and Lunar Lander.

Mike Albaugh- coinop hardware and software engineer.

Ed Rotberg- programmer of Battlezone, Atari Baseball, and other coinops. Only a family page, I'm afraid.

Jed Margolin- hardware engineer, designed TONS of coinop hardware. LOTS of techie stuff on his page :)

And for the hell of it, Carol Shaw- programmer of early 2600 games (3D Tic Tac Toe) as well as River Raid for Activision.

I'm sure there are others, but those are the only ones I can think of at the moment.

Brian Deuel
Webmaster
http://www.orubin.com

While the sentiments were probably circulating in fandom circles for a long time, Brodie's question was preceded by Larry Niven's classic short story/essay, Man of Steel, Woman of Kleenex which appeared in his collection All The Myriad Ways over thirty years ago (1971). (That link points to what is probably a flagrant copyright violation.) Brodie's question is Niven's point four and six.

Sigh, some people just lack an education in the classics ;-)

This list -- minus nanotechnology and other modernities -- reads almost exactly like a synopsis of Isaac Asimov's 1979 book "A Choice of Catastrophes", found here or here. It's an excellent read. The good doctor especially emphasized the importance of trying to deal with "domestic" problems (environmental issues, society, economy, overpopulation, allocation of resources) first, since there's really not that much we can do about straying black holes and stuff anyway, except colonize more planets -- which we can't do well unless we become a more organized species first. Well, we can keep an eye open for doomsday meteorites, as described in Clarke's "Rendezvous with Rama" and "The Hammer of God" (or a certain, really disgusting Hollywood film I won't mention), so let's do that too.

By the way, I read this book first when I was 15, and I remember being amazed by how well his explanation of black holes worked for me. I thought the ones in charge should put some of Asimov's writing into school textbooks, instead of the stuff they fed us back then :-).

Hmmm... am I the only 'geek' who thought Ringworld was a piece of crap?

I'd still recommend some Niven, but not Ringworld; check out the Flatlander and Crashlander anthologies (about Gil the Arm and Beowulf Shaeffer, respectively), and if you can find them, his Teleportation series (a classic exploration of the social effects of technological change, and one of these stories described what we now know as The Slashdot Effect) and his time travel series (The Flight of the Horse).

And since you discussed fantasy, note that Niven's Warlock series (The Magic Goes Away) is fantasy written to appeal to SF readers, with a logical reason for why magic used to work but doesn't anymore.

Oh, and most important of all: Man of Steel, Woman of Kleenex.

Similarly, I'd recommend some Spider Robinson, but not Stardance; start with the "Callahan's Bar" series, and also Deathkiller (which combines Mindkiller and Time Pressure).