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Tax credits vary depending on where you live. Regardless, for US customers there's a federal tax credit of $7,500 for personal use EVs. State incentives can bump that up to $15,000. Base cost is $69,000.

You could try looking for articles about beta blockers in PLOS ONE.

(Or if you meant that beta, try this link.)

You can't control network access outright per-app, that would be nice.

AFWall+ does a great job of that on Android, but it requires root. Using it, I say which apps can use cellular, which can use wifi, and which are isolated completely.

I'd like to define some per-app sandboxes so, for instance, only selected apps can see my "real" contacts... the others would see my "fake" contacts and not know the difference. Ditto for GPS location and countless other things...

StackExchange has great content, but problematic UI, and it's got a really bad UI on mobile web. I'd love a more capable app version.

What do you think of Stack Exchange for Android 4?

On the contrary, slums are bad locations by definition. This means that your father's friend's city-core house was not, in fact, in a slum.

For example: This house is in a slum. This house is not in a slum. The houses are similar in age and style, but the latter house is probably worth [much] more than $250K, while the former is probably worth less than $25K. (They're also only 2 or 3 miles apart and about the same distance from downtown, but the former is literally "on the wrong side of the tracks.")

On the contrary, slums are bad locations by definition. This means that your father's friend's city-core house was not, in fact, in a slum.

For example: This house is in a slum. This house is not in a slum. The houses are similar in age and style, but the latter house is probably worth [much] more than $250K, while the former is probably worth less than $25K. (They're also only 2 or 3 miles apart and about the same distance from downtown, but the former is literally "on the wrong side of the tracks.")

I love H.264. I do not love that its proprietary, nor do I believe it should be. x.264? I hope someone can create a free codec equivalent to or superior to H.264 so I give props to Google for giving it a go with VP8 and VP9.

The founders of Oblong Industries, Inc. were responsible for the visuals in the 2002 movie the Minority Report. Their company started shortly after that movie and has been in the black for more than 10 years.

These images show the technology as conveyed in the movie. The video in the next paragraph showcases it at oblong and is very much worth a watch, enjoy.

No I do not work for Oblong Industries, not that fortunate.

Oblong Industries, Inc. g-speak uses their internally developed software SDK, optical cameras (a bit more expensive right now, but cheaper every year and multiple optical inputs produce less interference than multiple infrared inputs when generating 3-D images and manipulating those images in real time. Thanks to optical, the quality is much better. Imagine 20+ optical cameras, mulitple screens and you can since the data requirements and why they had to develop it internally. They use data pools in memory in order to move massive amounts of data over the network from say your database to your tablet, to your laptop, to a desktop (some at the same time) without stutters, pausing or visible buffering...I am sure you get the idea.

Too bad their current video does not show the gloves as the input device instead of the wand, suppose they are a work in progress.

I wonder if a codec like VP9 could use the concept of data pools to not only compress more efficiently, but to play back using less bandwidth, memory and CPU more efficiently.

Regardless the end goal of an open source, proprietary free, video/audio codec is exactly what ffmpeg is all about. Smart and powerful, if it does not get there today, who knows about tomorrow! You guys rock.

All the carriers have to do is to ban the IMEI number of the phone when it is reported stolen and the phone can't be activated on the network.

I realize people can't be bothered to do a Google search, but the USA has had a national IMEI blacklist since October 31st, 2012. See this CTIA press release. It's also not difficult to check if a phone is blacklisted, this site is one place that does ESN/IMEI checks for free.

We've lived with this situation long enough to know what the outcome has been. People still steal phones because they have value as parts. Also, they're bought up by scammers that re-sell them to people on Craigslist who don't know any better. It's also worth mentioning not all of these phones are stolen, it's generally a mix of phones that were lost, traded in without disabling the phone's lock, insurance fraud and some that are blocked by the carrier for a defaulted payment plan or wireless contract.

There's absolutely nothing stopping a criminal from forcing the person they're mugging to sign out/disable a phone's locking feature. Apple even has a helpful guide (ostensibly for people looking to give away, trade-in or resell their old iDevice) explaining the process. Are you really going to tell a criminal "no" when they've got a gun pointed at you? If your city has a mugging problem, then something needs to be done about the crime. If it's not cell phones, it will be good, old fashioned wallets, purses and jewelry.

NADA 2012 per dealership average profits: http://www.google.com/url?sa=t...

New vehicle sales net profit: $60,000
Service and parts department net profit: $310,000

Actually, there's a caveat here... it's based on where the ISP claims to offer services, as well as their cliamed speeds of those services. (ADSL rarely meets the 1M up mark) Also, it's counted by zip code; so a single 4/1 connection in a zip counts the whole damned thing.

(which explains why there's a uverse vrad here)

In my experience if you want something that google classified as spam to not be considered spam, just
mark it as not spam, and future emailing seem to follow it into your inbox. They seem to have some
form of an exception system for each user.

Worst case, you add the sender to your contacts, (although I only do that as a last resort).

It doesn't seem affect anyone else's rating or the community rating. (I sometimes get the same (spammy looking, but not actually spam) emails in more than one of my Google accounts. In one I clicked not spam, in the other I left it laying in the spam folder. Sure enough I get all their newsletters in the account I clicked Not Spam. The other doesn't see it.

(By the way, this kind of filtering is also available with Spamassassin, where one mans spam is another mans treasures. I can't imagine google did any less of a job than Spamassassin).

As for which kind of things pass you along from one to the next, I've found this with mail order places. I've ordered the odd part off the internet, get on their mailing list, un-subscribe, and get mail from similar providers shortly there after, having never heard from them before.

I use plus-addressing for many of these one-off purchases: See: https://support.google.com/mai... and that way I know when these addresses are being shopped around. The idiots sell address forward, plus-address and all.
(Yeah, I know these places have dodgy reputations, and I shouldn't shop there, but once in a while they also have cool things).

"Intrinsic: in it self. Intrinsic value: having a value in it self."

I know what the definitions are. And I admit that the name "intrinsic value" is unfortunate, because what it describes is not a "value", per se, and what it describes is not "intrinsic" to the product either, but depends on outside factors.

But I did not make the name up; it's right here in my economics book. I'm just using it.

That is the cause of much confusion here. I've spent more time explaining that "intrinsic value" is not intrinsic and not a value, for a good part of the past 2 days.

It's just an abstract economic concept. As an example, but somewhat less abstract, is "bull market". Do you think it literally has anything to do with bulls? Probably not; it's just a name. Same here.

"Referring to 'books about macro economics' is quite rude, if you not even mention one author/book - preferable with either chapter or page, and it implies you never have read one. Sorry, you are simply to easy to defeat, smart, but uneducated, nice ideas, but no clue."

If I'm so easy to defeat, why have you never done it?

I learned about "intrinsic value" in college. I still have my textbooks. However, of course I have no easy way to show you my economics textbooks, nor for that matter do I particularly want to dig them out of the box they're in. You can say that "implies" I'm making it all up, but your argument carries no weight. Here is an example of how "intrinsic value" is defined. But that is an old reference so it mentions "cost" mostly in terms of labor. Nevertheless, it's still cost, exactly as I described.

So now that I've proved it's not bullshit, will you stop your own bullshitting and leave me be? You are a pain in the ass.

Since when is Provo, Utah a major metro area?

I use a few different messaging apps, more then I'd like to use to but not everyone all uses the same one so I have to be diverse. WhatsApp is the only messaging app I have, outside of text messages (MMS), that allows me to send a video directly to someone. I don't need this feature often but when I do, WhatsApp has it.

if I had to pick a favorite it would either be Hangouts or Facebook Messenger due to the fluid nature that I can roam from my phone to PC to tablet, etc, during an active conversation and still be involved with the conversation without being bound to one device or being explicitly bound to just that app.

Both Hangouts and Facebook Messenger can be used via the Pidgin application on my Linux desktop, as well as other applications and OS's, though I have recently switched to the Hangouts extension for Chrome which auto starts when my window manager launches with a systray icron.

If you RTFS: Yes they do. Secondly, the unsubscribe button is following the unsubscribe link in the List-Unsubscribe- header so one can see that as a poor mans FBL.

If you RTFS: Yes they do. Secondly, the unsubscribe button is following the unsubscribe link in the List-Unsubscribe- header so one can see that as a poor mans FBL.

I think that the problem here is that there's no differentiation between the fiber itself and the service carried by it.

If a town lies down dark fiber and then lets the end customer choose operator using that fiber, then it wouldn't be a big problem.

As for putting fibers on utility poles - that's stupid for several reasons - risk of damage is high, complex arrangements on poles means high risk of conflicting wiring and it really destroys the general view of a small town having the air filled with wires crossing all over the place.

Compare Westford, MA, USA with Kållered, Sweden.

It may be more expensive to bury the wires, but it will lower the costs in the long run.

I think that the problem here is that there's no differentiation between the fiber itself and the service carried by it.

If a town lies down dark fiber and then lets the end customer choose operator using that fiber, then it wouldn't be a big problem.

As for putting fibers on utility poles - that's stupid for several reasons - risk of damage is high, complex arrangements on poles means high risk of conflicting wiring and it really destroys the general view of a small town having the air filled with wires crossing all over the place.

Compare Westford, MA, USA with Kållered, Sweden.

It may be more expensive to bury the wires, but it will lower the costs in the long run.

Shimizu Corporation intersects with Dr. Criswell in another way that I just discovered today after searching for his more recent patents.

We've got to attract technological civilization's population away from natural ecosystems into idealized artificial environments such as Shimizu Corporation's design for what it calls the "Green Float". You can house the entire population of civilization in beach-front property on the boundary of a tropical rain forest where people can swim, fish, hunt and gather recreationally, as well as access the height of urban lifestyle. From there space habitats are likely to emerge so that the natural propensity of these "cells" to replicate endlessly needn't destroy Earth's biosphere. Interestingly, I came up with a geometry that looks very similar to that years ago, with the Solar Updraft Tower Algae Biosphere proforma and, over the subsequent years, I found a floating photobioreactor technology that requires little more than 2 layers of polyfilm that has demonstrated production per cost figures far in excess of what I projected in that proforma. Before I ran across Shimizu Corp's Green Float I had further refined the idea based on the Atmospheric Vortex Engine, which, like Shimizu's "Green Float", is ideally sited in the equatorial doldrums and could make use of the central tower of the Green Float. I posted some preliminary thoughts over at the Seastead Institute's blog.

A key problem I attempted to address in my preliminary thoughts was the early market for energy from the Atmospheric Vortex Engines that would form the nuclei for Shimizu's Green Floats. A big problem was the fact that the electric power markets are thousands of miles away from the floating AVEs even if you could build on the order of a terawatt of oceanic power transmission lines thousands of miles long. Early markets are critical for attracting capital -- the lack of which renders such grandiose ideas "non-starters".

I had thought it would be very nice to have a microwave transmission technology that could dynamically switch the power distribution to achieve the holy grail of "dispatchable" power generation for peak loads, but wasn't aware, until just now, that Dr. Criswell's recent revision of his patent serves precisely that purpose.

Shimizu Corporation intersects with Dr. Criswell in another way that I just discovered today after searching for his more recent patents.

We've got to attract technological civilization's population away from natural ecosystems into idealized artificial environments such as Shimizu Corporation's design for what it calls the "Green Float". You can house the entire population of civilization in beach-front property on the boundary of a tropical rain forest where people can swim, fish, hunt and gather recreationally, as well as access the height of urban lifestyle. From there space habitats are likely to emerge so that the natural propensity of these "cells" to replicate endlessly needn't destroy Earth's biosphere. Interestingly, I came up with a geometry that looks very similar to that years ago, with the Solar Updraft Tower Algae Biosphere proforma and, over the subsequent years, I found a floating photobioreactor technology that requires little more than 2 layers of polyfilm that has demonstrated production per cost figures far in excess of what I projected in that proforma. Before I ran across Shimizu Corp's Green Float I had further refined the idea based on the Atmospheric Vortex Engine, which, like Shimizu's "Green Float", is ideally sited in the equatorial doldrums and could make use of the central tower of the Green Float. I posted some preliminary thoughts over at the Seastead Institute's blog.

A key problem I attempted to address in my preliminary thoughts was the early market for energy from the Atmospheric Vortex Engines that would form the nuclei for Shimizu's Green Floats. A big problem was the fact that the electric power markets are thousands of miles away from the floating AVEs even if you could build on the order of a terawatt of oceanic power transmission lines thousands of miles long. Early markets are critical for attracting capital -- the lack of which renders such grandiose ideas "non-starters".

I had thought it would be very nice to have a microwave transmission technology that could dynamically switch the power distribution to achieve the holy grail of "dispatchable" power generation for peak loads, but wasn't aware, until just now, that Dr. Criswell's recent revision of his patent serves precisely that purpose.

In the vast majority of cases, when you are using an encrypted connection it is because the information you are exchanging is a private matter between you and the other endpoint.

Even if the only private piece of information is the session cookie identifying the logged-in user to the site, that's still "a private matter between" the user and the site. Since the Firesheep tech demo became public, it has become common for some web sites to go all HTTPS all the time to prevent intruders from snooping and replaying session cookies. Facebook and Twitter do this, and Wikipedia turned it at the end of August of last year. The biggest historical obstacle to HTTPS implementation for any site on a VPS or bigger has been mixed content introduced by ad networks, but in September of last year, Google finally enabled HTTPS for AdSense.

...

The ability to use a phone other than an iPhone. Currently, Apple has a monopoly on phones compatible with Amazon video.

Even on Apple TV, you can play Amazon Video content if streamed via AirPlay from an iPhone/iPad.

But then you have to buy an iPhone/iPad first.

Then what is this doing in Play?
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.amazon.avod&hl=en

A laser printer does a much nicer job. Look for Laser Engraving services in your area.

Google link to some very nice jobs on laptops https://www.google.com/search?...

Google link which bypasses paywall: http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=a%20kennedy%20shills%20for%20maduro&source=web&cd=1&ved=0CCkQqQIwAA&url=http%3A%2F%2Fonline.wsj.com%2Fnews%2Farticles%2FSB10001424052702304914204579395060754684406&ei=Jh0KU4WSLcTCywHqnYHgAw&usg=AFQjCNFqJefQeJ8KAi3py6jWTsfLwqICWA&bvm=bv.61725948,d.aWc

How is it that Maduro and his allies can continue to persist with economic policies so patently stupid that even an undergraduate student of economics at any American or European university can predict and explain their inevitable failures?

Stupid or genius? Depends on the goal.
If its to improve the economy and life quality, plain stupid. If its to stay in power forever, genius!

1. Ruin the economy, make people poor and easy to manipulate
2. Create many social programs to "help" the poor, the poor depend on the state
3. Confiscate and nationalize everything, the state must run as much as possible, have everyone working for the state
4. Make it clear that they have to support and vote for you, or they lose their job and "hard earned" state benefits
...
6. Profit! You get all the votes from the poor, and most people are poor now :)

This strategy worked well for Chavez, and now his golem, Maduro.

Read this enlightening interview with the ex CEO of PDVSA (the oil company):
http://globovision.com/articul...
For the Spanish-impaired, a google translation is quite decent:
http://translate.google.com/tr...

Here is an interesting bit of this interview, just in case the page is removed (because Globovision is now controlled by the government):

"Look General, you still don't understand the revolution! Let me explain: This revolution aims to make a cultural change in the country, change the way of thinking and living, and those changes can only done being in power [in office]. So the most important thing is staying in power to make the change. We get the political floor from the poor: they are the ones who vote for us, that is the reason for our speech of defending the poor.
So, THE POOR MUST CONTINUE TO BE POOR, WE NEED THEM LIKE THAT, until we can achieve a cultural transformation. Later, we can talk about economy of production and wealth distribution. Meanwhile, we must keep them poor and with hope."

Thumbnails of the websites you visit frequently appear under the search box. Simply click a thumbnail to visit the site. To remove a most visited site, hover your mouse over the thumbnail, and click the X icon in the upper right corner of the thumbnail. https://support.google.com/chr... I removed mine, opened a new tab and it was blank. I haven't restarted Chrome, so I don't know how long this effect lasts. HTH.

New Tab Redirect! Remove Google Redirects

New Tab Redirect! Remove Google Redirects

Johnny Carson? Every one of his jokes was original? He mined Vaudeville humor and brought it to TV. He didn't even start the Tonight Show.

Elvis Presley? All of his hits were written by others. Let's face it: He made his money and fame bringing black music to white people.

James Brown? Definitely an original, whose life unfortunately went off the rails at some point.

Ok, that's enough rant. Every one of those folks earned their place on a stamp. I just wanted to point out your double standard. It's easy to dismiss one person or another with cherry picked criteria.

If you walked up to a random 20 or 30 something on the street today and asked them if they knew who Carson, Bergman, Presley, Brown or Jobs was, I imagine Steve would beat out most of them.

I'm no Steve Jobs fanboy. (I've never owned an iPhone or iPod, and I'm posting this from a Linux box.) But even I can recognize the reality of the situation.

They do. If you look here, Google states that:

If a sender continues to send you email after you tried to unsubscribe from their messages, new messages from this sender will go directly to Spam.

True, but that is exactly what happens when you mark it as spam. So for the user, there is no difference.

So all this does, is affirm to the sender that this is a real and in-use email address. And that is a valuable commodity. Many will simply take you off of their list, and sell your email to the next spammer on their list. This is why you end up getting more and more offers form different spammers after you successfully get off of someone's list.

So unless google also keeps a list of known address-reseller chains, this can play into the hands of the worst offenders, while not helping the user at all.

You mean like https://programmers.stackexcha... ?

They close out "good" questions there too (examples)... came across one the other day (while programming), in fact. It's like the wikipedia notability police all over again. :O

"Retarded"?

Like some nut job from Springfield, Oregon who thinks the NSA beans signals into his head that make him masturbate in public parks ? Hows the court case going? Been arrested again recently ?

That kind of "retarded"?

If a sender continues to send you email after you tried to unsubscribe from their messages, new messages from this sender will go directly to Spam.

Google has their shit together when it comes to filtering spam

I didn't know about that one, but a friend of mine made something very similar a long time ago. It's called MasterPassword.

It has a few advantages based on what you wrote. It can save a list of sites you've registered with, so you don't have to input them, and you can customize each one (charset of the password, length...), or generate sequencial passwords for the same place (if it forces you to change it periodically, or want more than one account there). This info can be exported to a HTM version that acts as both a backup and a standalone version of the service. If you lose it, no big deal: just configure it the same as the previous time.
And for enhaced security, it can use a salt if you want, and allows you to choose any hash type you prefer.

Worth a look, I think.

Personally, I use a password protected secure not in an OSX keychain. Fine, rail me for that, but if someone gets into my keychain, I already lose anyway.

For work, I've been trying WebPasswordSafe for the last several months. This is to get away from the melange of different un-sync'd password lists in various password managers people in the IT department had. So far it works well, it offers group policies, so theoretically it could be rolled out company wide and each user and group could have their separate password lists.

I'd been guided to look at SecretServer, but the features I need are in WPS, and it's easier to sell Free in my company than Several Hundred or Thousand dollars, for many things at least.

Real Freedom is economic security. That's why the 1% have been relentlessly attacking your economic security for 30 years. Declining wages, relentless attacks on Unions, starve the beast politics and boom/busts where they buy up property on the cheap because they're the only ones with any money left after the bust. They're all tools to make you poor so you'll do what they say.

Here, let This guy explain it. He's much better than I am.

just don't drink the water while you're doing it.

I have not seen any data, but my gut feeling is that the number is a fraction of a percentage of people who have high speed connections.

Look at it this way:

* Netflix has over 30 Million subscribers .

* According to the US Census data, 75% of US households have internet.

* 115 Million Households in the US

Some math:

115 Million households * .75 = 86.2 Million households with internet.
31 million Netflix Subscribers / 86.2 Million Internet users = 36% of households with internet in the US use Netflix. Yes, over a third.

Now add the fact that cable companies are losing cable TV customers in the hundreds of thousands *each quarter* and you can see how more and more people are depending on Netflix (and other services) to fill their video entertainment needs. The name for the trend is cord-cutting .

So based on that I would surmise that a substandard Netflix experience would be a dealbreaker for 1/3rd of all internet customers and a larger proportion of *high speed* internet customers (since people who don't need to stream video opt for the cheaper services).

It has been a while since I was in the peering game - that was back when UUNet meant something and please get off my lawn - but here's the general idea:

To provide access to the Internet - either as a content host or a content consumer - you need a full view of routes to get to all other ISPs where your sources or destinations are. To get the routes, you need "peering" with the other ISPs or you need to buy "transit" from some other ISP that gets their routes via peering or transit.

Some ISPs are, frankly, more important than others because they provide access to more subscribers or more content than others - they used to be called "Tier 1" ISPs. Peering is valuable because it's traffic you're exchanging for free that you could otherwise be charging a lot of money for. Tier 1 ISPs generally agree to peer with each other because they all need each other, and it makes economic sense for them to say they're all on an equal footing - they were "peers." The economic rationale was because Tier 1 ISPs had to pay for large national or global networks, while Tier 2 or 3 ISPs had small or regional networks and that the Tier 1 ISP was bearing most of the cost of delivery. Traffic ratios were preferred to be equal (content vs. users) for peering, because if you're a content host with one datacenter and some outbound circuits, your cost is far less than having a big national network to serve end users - so web hosting/colo provider ISPs had a harder time getting peering with the big consumer/business access providers. The Tier 2 or Tier 3 ISPs would peer with each other freely because they had equivalent footprints, etc., but the big guys knew that access to their network was extremely valuable and it would be foolish to give it away for free.

So if you're a smaller ISP, and *you* need the Tier 1 more than *they* need you, don't expect to get peering. The ISP will tell you to buy transit from them, or at least buy transit from someone else who does (and the fewer "hops" to get from you to them, the better for your customers). Cogent may host much of Netflix, but they are by no means a Tier 1. This may no longer be the case - like I said, I have been out of the Tier 1 ISP world for years - but at least historically Cogent was known as a bottom feeder of the industry. They charged dirt-cheap rates but ran a crappy network and skimped on their upstream connections to cut costs.

So what's happening here most likely is that Cogent has either bought transit from Verizon and doesn't want to buy more and says "peer with us, we won't buy more." Or Cogent does have peering with Verizon but VZ has said, in effect, "you are not our 'peer'" and beyond a certain amount of peering bandwidth, you should start buying." Cogent is using Netflix to try to argue that "our content is more important to Verizon customers than the other way around," and Verizon is saying, "Um, nope." I won't say who I think is right or wrong here, but this is not the first time Cogent has had peering fights with other large ISPs and I think you can see a pattern here.

Amen to that. If you look at the Google Fiber Cities plan at https://fiber.google.com/newci... , you can more or less see that Google Fiber is trying to avoid population centers where the internet is already well developed (DC-NYC-BOS corridor, LA, Chicago, Seattle, Houston) and primarily concentrating in "up-n-coming" low-cost southern tech centers, which already typically get lower marks for education.

So if anything, Google Fiber appears to be trying to bring the poors up rather than help the richers widen the gap.

That site appears to have it backwards. Davy settled on "aluminum" by the time he published Elements of Chemical Philosophy in 1812 (the year your link claims was when he settled on an ending of -ium. Wikipedia includes a quote from the book.

"This substance appears to contain a peculiar metal, but as yet Aluminum has not been obtained in a perfectly free state, though alloys of it with other metalline substances have been procured sufficiently distinct to indicate the probable nature of alumina."

The quote is visible from a scanned copy at this link

If I may play Devil's advocate.. isn't aluminum foil one of two ingredients in a simple, household-items explosive? I'm not sure why you would need to carry it on a plane with you, either.

Flour is an explosive ingredient, (create a fine mist of flour then ignite it) while it's not going to take out the side of your ride, it would cause a very decent devision. It was a science project of mine in Junior High school, as I'm sure many have seen.

I could mention a very easy to transport, freely available and a very destructive combo as I'm sure many here can do the same, and you know were not the only ones who know.

Something else nobody hasn't brought up (all have been explosive potentials) are the toxic gases, that are so much easier to do.

One reason I like reading /. is when something questionable is posted everybody downloads it (call it safety in numbers) long ago there was a post to a file that's worth a read "Massive Chemistry and explosives book collection" https://www.google.com/#q=%22M...
I can't find the org link on /. but I'm searching by the file name. I mention it as it's been out for many years (2008 at least), I can't imagine it being on a watch list.

Apple's products are affordable to a family making an average middle class budget. The fact that anyone considers Apple to be a high-end manufacturer with products that are a status symbol is just clever marketing. It's not uncommon to go to Walmart (yeah, those of us who didn't make a fortune on Bitcoins still need to eat), and see someone paying with EBT while texting/yapping away on an iPhone. On the other hand, a Tesla model S is 1/3rd to 1/4th the cost of the average American home and about equally as expensive as a low-end manufactured home.

Tesla's cars actually are just a status symbol. They're truly only affordable to people who otherwise would have no trouble buying gasoline and want the warm fuzzy feeling (or the arrogant smugness) that comes from knowing your car is running on 32% less fossil fuel than everyone else's 100% dinosaur burners.

Also, per percentage of fires per number of units sold, Apple's products are significantly less likely to spontaneously catch fire. Hey don't flame me, it's actually true.

Didn't Gender Genie already attempt to do this? https://www.google.com/search?...
(I say "attempt" because I found that even in cases where I wasn't trying to fool it, it would often come up with the wrong gender.)

You are probably right. :-)

You want to look into the GDK API.

It's relatively new; at least, it didn't exist to my knowledge a few months ago (when I first looked at what is now the Mirror API).

I wonder how many pairs of sunglasses are sold each year - with their terrible form-factor and all.

I wear glasses by choice. I have contacts, wear them some days, but I find glasses suit me better. Google Glass will be available with prescription lenses both direct from Google and from a number of third parties.

http://www.google.com/glass/he...

Wearing Glass (or the devices that come after it) will have a lot to do with how they feel on my face.

Glasses feel foreign for a while, and then you sort of forget they're on your face. I'm curious if other Glass wearers who normally wore eyeglasses had similar experiences.

A while ago I was also accepted to the glass explorers program. I was pretty excited at the time, and was planning to go ahead and get one. I'll admit to being a bit of a Google fanboy, though recently they've lost some of their shine in my eyes.

At the time, there were a few compelling reasons why I decided to wait, which I summarized here: Why I'll Wait on Glass

One thing to consider, is that along with the $1,500 price tag, unless you live close to one of the fitting centers, you'll also have to book airfare and hotel, which can be as much as the Glass itself, so that really raises the price a lot. At least, this was the case when I was invited to the program, it may have changed.

For those who don't like clicking G+ links, here's my full original post:

Why I'll Wait on Glass

So, I received my invitation to purchase #googleglass and become a #glassexplorers . Google notified me that I had 14 days to make my purchase and schedule a pickup date.

I've put a lot of thought into this, and decided not to move forward with the purchase. I'm outlining my reasons below, and I hope that the amazing folks on the Glass team can take this post with the spirit that it's intended: as constructive, objective feedback from a developer who is a huge Google fan.

When I first heard about Glass, I was gobsmacked. The notion of having a powerful, wearable computing device with an array of sensors, camera and floating UI always available to the user, with speech recognition and integration with wireless services - well frankly, I had trouble containing my excitement.

At the local bar, I waxed on (to annoying lengths, I'm sure) about how this was a revolution in technology. How it would change the world and the way we interact with it.

I shared my excitement with my family, and when I was selected as a #glassexplorers they had to pull me down out of the clouds.

I was busy planning apps that I was going to develop, I had visions of an app where I could say "ok glass, find my car" and a floating 3d compass arrow would appear and guide me.

I had visions of walking into my house and saying "ok, glass turn on the lights, lock the doors, arm security", and seeing an interactive display of all my devices. I would be able to say "ok, glass show front camera" and I would be able to look out of the security camera on my front porch.

I had ideas for interactive augmented reality games, where the user could scan the sky for alien UFO's and see 3d spaceships through the Glass display window.

I eagerly refreshed myself on OpenCV, preparing for all the computer vision awesomeness I would be able to develop (I'd already done some of this work on android tablets, using the native sdk).

With all of these visions in my head, I set out to begin development. Finally the new api was released. I sat down at my main development box, pulling up the docs, expecting to see all of the richness of the Android API plus Glass specific enhancements.

What I got was: Cards. A completely non-interactive API where I had to broker every request through a complex chain of servers where eventually, at some point, some static text or images may or may not popup on the user's screen.

I was actually in disbelief. I was sure I was missing some documentation somewhere. I poured through the docs, trying to understand what I was looking at. I felt that I must be missing something really obvious. From what I could tell, the amazing awesomness that was Glass, was limited by the API to being essentially nothing more than a SMS messaging system, similar to text messages on my cell.

None of my applications were possible. I couldn't talk to the accelerometer or other sensors. All I could do was go through a strange "add my app as a contact" process so that I could post text messages with some limited media to the user's timeline. That's it. Interactivity was limited to glorified hyperlinks that would post a me

I'll tell you what, show up here (that's an old photo, a new one would have fifty Harleys in the lot; it's the HQ of the Outlaws MC, a biker gang who once tried to murder a friend of mine) wearing asshole glasses and see how long it takes for the ambulance to arrive. Actually the fire truck will show up first, luckily for you the paramedics are only a few blocks away.

In Felber's, the redneck bar caddy corner to the OMC, you'ld probably be laughed out of the place if not thrown out by the bartender (And I'd take Joe on before I tangled with Ruthe, and Joe was an Army ranger).

Has nobody else noticed the site is fake? The url is https://sites.google.com/site/.... Google proper wouldn't use something that was sites.google.com. The proper glass site is glass.google.com or http://www.google.com/glass. So no google didn't use the term glasshole some random person who stole their theme/style and is trying to pass themself off as google did. This just all seems sketchy as hell and bothers me that two major sites are passing this off as "real"