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Libraries in the US are getting closer to censorship than ever. Take for example this new Alabama Bill targeting Gay Authors from an elected Republican representative in the state legislature, Gerald "book-burying " Allen. Consider other minor incidents like the New Mexico Book burning party . Can you spot a trend?

Google already succumbed to China censorship pressures. Would they resist censorship pressures from the Christian right, inside the US? Yea, right, just like Microsoft did .

Don't fool yourself, folks. US companies are no longer a reliable for such a task. If Google is allow t create another de facto monopoly in Library Search, we risk gay books, Evolution volumes or the freaking Harry Potter adventures disappearing anytime now.
Let me ask you, who's going to preserve Western Culture heritage if the US completes it's path towards fascism bushflash.com/14.html? India!? The Chinese!!? Well, apparently it's going to be the French. Good for them.

Libraries in the US are getting closer to censorship than ever. Take for example this new Alabama Bill targeting Gay Authors http://gay.com/gay http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2005/04/26/eveningn ews/main691106.shtml from an elected Republican representative in the state legislature, Gerald "book-burying " Allen http://www.guardian.co.uk/arts/features/story/0,11 710,1369643,00.html Consider some 'minor incidents' like New Mexico Book burning party http://books.guardian.co.uk/harrypotter/story/0,10 761,626418,00.html Google is a US company, who already succumbed to China censorship pressures http://www.rfa.org/english/news/technology/2004/08 /01/142626/. Would they resist censorship pressures from the Christian right? Yea, right, just like Microsoft did http://politics.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/04/ 21/162247. Don't fool yourself, folks. US companies are no longer a reliable for such a task. If Google is allow t create another de facto monopoly in Library Search, we risk gay books, Evolution volumes or the freaking Harry Potter adventures disappearing anytime now. Let me ask you, who's going to preserve Western Culture heritage if the US completes it's path towards fascism bushflash.com/14.html? India!? The Chinese!!? Well, apparently it's going to be the French. Good for them.

Libraries in the US are getting closer to censorship than ever. Take for example this new Alabama Bill targeting Gay Authors http://gay.com/gay http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2005/04/26/eveningn ews/main691106.shtml from an elected Republican representative in the state legislature, Gerald "book-burying " Allen http://www.guardian.co.uk/arts/features/story/0,11 710,1369643,00.html Consider some 'minor incidents' like New Mexico Book burning party http://books.guardian.co.uk/harrypotter/story/0,10 761,626418,00.html Google is a US company, who already succumbed to China censorship pressures http://www.rfa.org/english/news/technology/2004/08 /01/142626/. Would they resist censorship pressures from the Christian right? Yea, right, just like Microsoft did http://politics.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/04/ 21/162247. Don't fool yourself, folks. US companies are no longer a reliable for such a task. If Google is allow t create another de facto monopoly in Library Search, we risk gay books, Evolution volumes or the freaking Harry Potter adventures disappearing anytime now. Let me ask you, who's going to preserve Western Culture heritage if the US completes it's path towards fascism bushflash.com/14.html? India!? The Chinese!!? Well, apparently it's going to be the French. Good for them.

And the real problem isn't that we can't live after the peak oil but what it does to the economy. Recession isn't out of the question.

BTW, The Guardian recently had a nice article about the issues: The end of oil is closer than you think.

It will be interesting to see whether the media will pick up on Chernobyl's anniversary tomorrow. There is an article in the Guardian and some interesting things on the BBC for UK minded folks.

That's not ironic at all. It's hypocritical.

So that's why this is news over a year later. The TFA is dated "11 April 04". Slashdot: all the old news, dupes and hoaxes fit to print.

Anyway, it doesn't matter how the information was presented. Bush DOESN'T READ these reports. He has his staff read them to him and summarise; even the one page format, which seemed like a dumbing down when Reagan did it, is too much detail for him.

They probably hate them for the same reason I dislike them - most blogs are a waste of time. They're more fiction than news - and bad fiction at that. Blogs aren't a source of news - they're a natural extension of the `my first homepages` sites which once littered the web. You remember those. Photos of fat little nerds and their dumpy girlfriends, a photo of their cat and an cheesy animated `under construction` .gif that vanished along with their site when they were asked to pay their next months internet access. Sure, some of them are good, I guess, but the sort of people with something to say would have - indeed did - do so before the current trend for blogging took off.

How would blogs replace news? I check out 6 or so news related websites every day (for the record, they are http://news.bbc.co.uk/ http://www.guardian.co.uk/ http://news.independent.co.uk/ url:http://news.google.com/news> http://www.reuters.com/newsChannel.jhtml?type=worl dNews http://slashdot.org/) in addition to following links mentioned in those stories, links from emails etc. I also check out the papers from time to time.

How do I get close to that range and quality of information from looking at blog sites? Which bloggers have anything approaching the same reputation?

While your opinion on the Beta/VHS case is only implied, I would like to point out that VHS was technically superior to Beta (in the areas of interest to the consumer) and this was the reason for its success. Specifically, VHS had a 2-hour recording time whileas Beta had only 1. This difference made all the difference to the consumer who could then record an entire movie without having to change tapes in the middle.
There are other things to say about this particular story, of course. There is a nice summary towards the end of this article:
here

http://web.archive.org/web/19961226115028/http://w ww.urbanlegends.com/products/beta_vs_vhs.html linked to by http://www.guardian.co.uk/online/comment/story/0,1 2449,881780,00.html would beg to differ on your betamax point.

In the UK, it appears that, having had the government's draconian ID card plans rejected (for the time being), they're planning to start the biometric-isation process early, by adding compulsory fingerprints to our passports. However, it also appears that this doesn't need democratic consent - they can just do it whenever they feel like. Oh, and bury it halfway through a busy election campaign too.

These fingerprints will, you guessed it, be stored on a gigantic database that the police can consult whenever they feel like.

May I suggest that anyone in the UK who finds these plans... disturbing... lets someone know about it.

The weekly version is called, appropriately enough, The Weekly . It's mainly aimed at ex-pats, and is very good. I read it because it's an easier way to distill the world's news when you've got a real life to lead. (I'd spend the whole of my life reading the news if I could ;-).)

Denis MacShane, Britain's Europe minister, got into trouble for making a rude joke about "les neo-cons". Still, I don't think the joke was as rude as you suggest...

The Guardian recently published an article that claims Google has "jumped the shark." The author's contention is that Yahoo! has caught up to Google in nearly aspect, and have surpassed them in several areas.

Chikan

Grope-fest

Pervert Express

First off, I take offence to those who see Canada as a country that is full of corruption. I teach English here in Berlin and try and bring discussion topics to class which can cause some kind of discussion (ok, for my more advanced students who already speak quite good English) and I brought this topic up in class a few weeks ago the week that Chrétien gave his testimony. The general consensus was that this scandal isn't really that huge. As usual, I searched for a web page which ranked countries by corruption, and I found this http://www.infoplease.com/ipa/A0781359.html At the end of 2004, long after Sheila Fraser released her report and the inquiry started (it's actually mentioned in their "Country Report" somewhere) and lo-and-behold, Canada is ranked 12th, above such notables as Germany, France and the USA. In reality, perception hasn't really changed that much in Canada about what went on, but we just want the details.

Which comes to my next point: details. What the Gomery Inquiry will get is a lot of testimony from a lot of different people. As has been noted above, once a person is called to testify, they can't refuse, and they can't "take the 5th" as we have no such thing. There is no such thing as someone getting up in front of the stand and saying that they won't testify, it simply isn't allowed. In other words, we end up getting information from everyone (although sometimes it's useless) and a better picture of the truth comes out.

But there is a trade-off. In Canada, we believe the rights of the individual is more important that the rights of the whole in many ways (in other ways not), and one of those ways is the right to a fair trial. The concept is that when you have a jury, you want to have the best people on the jury, so they will have the intelligence to make a good decision based on the facts. The problem is, those people are usually also the best informed outside of courthouse, which means reading newspapers, watching the news, etc.

Now, I've seen arguments on here that suggest that an intelligent person won't be swayed by the news in the end, but we've seen in history, especially in the 20th C. and more recently in the 21st C. that well educated countries are completely sucked in by socialization and slanted news coverage. Owe, and if you think the media doesn't slant things these days, here is a little article posted last year about Fox News http://media.guardian.co.uk/site/story/0,14173,123 9094,00.html The most telling sentence from it is "Fox News could justifiably claim to have achieved a level of accuracy and impartiality that was appropriate to its audience in the US, where different rules apply."

Next, to those who think there will be a snap election called because of this don't really understand Canadian politics at the moment. Those who have saying that there might be a snap election are those who have the most to gain by creating a bit more FUD in Canada's political system - the opposition. There is no way, the the governing party would try and call an election right now. Any party worthy of being in Parliament (and I even include the NDP in this) would hammer them so hard and so fast on trying to cover up the testimony that the current leader wouldn't have a chance.

Talking about the current leader, although he was a member of cabinet during the years in question, there has been no linkage between him and the scandal. As far as I've read, there has been attempts, but not one witness so far has come out and said he was involved. He was the that set up the commission in the fist place and has to live with its results (most previous PM's might not have done that - for those who don't know, he had a majority government at the time and could ha

More proof of UN being a complete disaster:

http://observer.guardian.co.uk/international/story /0,6903,1451116,00.html

The problem is, random traffic are certain to affect a lot of people who are totally innocent of any crime.

I wonder how, exactly, an ID check could catch a serial killer, btw.

Russia has internal passports, and terrorists seem able to operate there just fine.

Internal passports used to be something that was done in Stalin's Russia (and before that, the Tsar's) and apartheid South Africa. (In the Tsar's Russia, btw, internal passports utterly failed to stop terrorism: one Tsar was killed by terorists, and one head of the Okhrana, the Tsarist Secret Police, was done in by a cell that included an Okhrana spy.)

We Americans have degenerated to the point where we are willing to accept a tool of tyranny in the name of (depending on which excuse is being used) a) fighting terror! of b)fighting crime.

This despite the fact that the evidence is that this intrusion into personal liberties gains us little in the way of crime prevention or does much to halt terrorists.

get a laptop http://www.guardian.co.uk/online/story/0,3605,1415 713,00.html

So, this is part of the fundamental problem of moving NASA's focus to entirely manned programs. Scientific projects like Hubble, and robotic exploration are getting shorted because the current administration want to put man on Mars.

Hmm.

I'm not sure if it's reasonable to yell "Arrogance!"

Nuclear power vs. fossil fuels is considered by many as a false dichotomy, including many who would agree with your suggestion that we should cut down on our need for energy.

Fossil fuels, unless one is of a radically unusual school of thought, are typically considered to be non-renewable. Thus, burning them at all is rather a waste, particularly with oil, which we could otherwise use for all those handy plastics. Additionally, fossil fuels mostly don't burn cleanly, producing all sorts of health hazards and whatnot. With this in mind, there is a case to be made for avoiding their use as far as possible. This is not about avoiding the fact that the West pollutes massively.

Now it is certainly the case that mindlessly promoting nuclear power is stupid, reckless and unacceptable. Although I'm not too sure about that link of yours, which seems a bit sensationalist to me: it's a bit old; american.edu, OK, but they seem to cite the Irish Times more than anything else, which is not quite authoritative; the 30kg is very probably a paper inequality and is, worryingly, in line with industry limits; Sellafield discharges have reduced recently due to improvements in the tech; it's actually the reprocessor, and not a reactor, that causes the discharges that have recently been considered most problematic (Tc-99 I believe)... so in this, Sellafield is not a typical example.

Sellafield has been around since 1952. In the 1950s UK, all sorts of things were considered fair game in government-funded science. Fortunately, things have changed. It is no longer considered acceptable to hide all sensitive information, partly a result of privatisation, one can essentially no longer get away with it (the Freedom of Information Act helped there, as you can see). Sure, in the 50s (all the way up to the 80s) you could get away with murder, particularly when it was classed as Defence. And I mean that literally. These days, there are incentives to check your ass on everything. Middle-management has hit hard and responsibility has become a worry.

Now I don't say that this necessarily means that nuclear reactors are safe. But we don't live in the 50s, either. If the Guardian can invoke the Freedom of Information act and investigate Sellafield, it is at least no longer valid to imagine that the public is kept in forced ignorance of their real danger.

It is entirely valid to concern ourselves with activities concerning nuclear power generation, and the various other methods too, and to use all the channels available to collect as much information as possible. There is, of course, no justification whatsoever to assume that the Chernobyl disaster was due to some fatal "sovietness" in its design and that no analogous accident could occur on a Western system. OTOH, there is no reason to assume that engineers are actually stupid or malicious enough to fail to build safeguards that they believe adequate. We may wish to see their numbers checked and rechecked, of course :-)

It is a little unfair to assume that all the pro-nuclear posters here are simply working from BNFL propaganda cheatsheets. Nuclear power isn't perfect; Britain has accumulated enough radioactive waste to fill five Albert Halls. But there is a lot of alarmist nonsense spoken about it. Many related engineering problems have been solved, though certain remain extant, and today's technology barely resembles historical attempts. So I'd think the posters to which you refer are "frustrated" rather than "arrogant".

Hmm.

I'm not sure if it's reasonable to yell "Arrogance!"

Nuclear power vs. fossil fuels is considered by many as a false dichotomy, including many who would agree with your suggestion that we should cut down on our need for energy.

Fossil fuels, unless one is of a radically unusual school of thought, are typically considered to be non-renewable. Thus, burning them at all is rather a waste, particularly with oil, which we could otherwise use for all those handy plastics. Additionally, fossil fuels mostly don't burn cleanly, producing all sorts of health hazards and whatnot. With this in mind, there is a case to be made for avoiding their use as far as possible. This is not about avoiding the fact that the West pollutes massively.

Now it is certainly the case that mindlessly promoting nuclear power is stupid, reckless and unacceptable. Although I'm not too sure about that link of yours, which seems a bit sensationalist to me: it's a bit old; american.edu, OK, but they seem to cite the Irish Times more than anything else, which is not quite authoritative; the 30kg is very probably a paper inequality and is, worryingly, in line with industry limits; Sellafield discharges have reduced recently due to improvements in the tech; it's actually the reprocessor, and not a reactor, that causes the discharges that have recently been considered most problematic (Tc-99 I believe)... so in this, Sellafield is not a typical example.

Sellafield has been around since 1952. In the 1950s UK, all sorts of things were considered fair game in government-funded science. Fortunately, things have changed. It is no longer considered acceptable to hide all sensitive information, partly a result of privatisation, one can essentially no longer get away with it (the Freedom of Information Act helped there, as you can see). Sure, in the 50s (all the way up to the 80s) you could get away with murder, particularly when it was classed as Defence. And I mean that literally. These days, there are incentives to check your ass on everything. Middle-management has hit hard and responsibility has become a worry.

Now I don't say that this necessarily means that nuclear reactors are safe. But we don't live in the 50s, either. If the Guardian can invoke the Freedom of Information act and investigate Sellafield, it is at least no longer valid to imagine that the public is kept in forced ignorance of their real danger.

It is entirely valid to concern ourselves with activities concerning nuclear power generation, and the various other methods too, and to use all the channels available to collect as much information as possible. There is, of course, no justification whatsoever to assume that the Chernobyl disaster was due to some fatal "sovietness" in its design and that no analogous accident could occur on a Western system. OTOH, there is no reason to assume that engineers are actually stupid or malicious enough to fail to build safeguards that they believe adequate. We may wish to see their numbers checked and rechecked, of course :-)

It is a little unfair to assume that all the pro-nuclear posters here are simply working from BNFL propaganda cheatsheets. Nuclear power isn't perfect; Britain has accumulated enough radioactive waste to fill five Albert Halls. But there is a lot of alarmist nonsense spoken about it. Many related engineering problems have been solved, though certain remain extant, and today's technology barely resembles historical attempts. So I'd think the posters to which you refer are "frustrated" rather than "arrogant".

Offers much more information, for example:

One much-repeated fallacy about the Librie is that power is used only for turning pages. While it is true that the "ink" particles stay in position without consuming power, the electronic innards do drain the juice, hence the inclusion of a standby mode. Nevertheless, the three AAA batteries used to power the Librie should stretch to an impressive 10,000 pages, enough for about 40 novels.

So sue me =P

"The average book in Japan weighs 309g; we designed the Librie to weigh 300g, including case and batteries."

just some funny trivia; and:

To keep a tight rein on the flow of ebooks, 15 major publishers and newspapers, including Kodansha, Asahi Shimbun and Yomiuri Shimbun, have teamed up with Sony to form a company called Publishing Link and to provide content through a website known as Timebook Town.

...

Readers can choose texts from seven sections, or clubs, ranging from business books to novels and may either pay ¥315 (£1.65) for a single title or join that club and gain access to up to five books a month for ¥210 (£1.10) each.

This is important. I don't have a problem with DRM itself, I have a problem with content that costs more than physical mediums (i.e. you pay more for online renting than if you do it in real life, until Steve Jobs beat some sense into the RIAA heads they offered 64kbps WMAs that didn't allow you to do anything with them for $3, etc), that is restricted like hell. Digital files are cheaper for the publishers so I want to benefit from that.

Jeez, learn to read. There's nothing in the article about saving money.


At the moment, British house prices are actually falling, at the rate of about 0.6% per month (around 1500 pounds/month for the amount he is spending on the vehicle). London house prices have traditionally gone through a boom and bust cycle, so he would be completely wasting his money buying a house now. Even a house in the country isn't a good investment either as it only takes a small group of travellers to set up camp and reduce the value by 75%. And UK banks don't exactly offer generous savings interest rates.

Pitch fees for a mobile home cost around 70-120 pounds/month, which is comparable to the "council tax" (property taxes) for a property of a similar price (Band G).

I wish we had the money

"Report Says Pentagon Spending on Weapons to Soar"

"The government is readying a plan to spend more than $2 billion on a routine 10-year overhaul to extend the life of the aging warheads. At the same time, some weapons scientists say the warheads have a fundamental design flaw...."

"The shift away from basic research is alarming many leading computer scientists and electrical engineers, who warn that there will be long-term consequences for the nation's economy."

"The voice of science is being stifled in the Bush administration"

"Led by twenty Nobel laureates, the scientists say Bush's government has systematically distorted and undermined scientific information in pursuit of political objectives."

"For Bush, science is a dirty word"

Good idea since KDE on SUSE 10 will be Mono based anyway (http://www.guardian.co.uk/online/story/0,,1448108 ,00.html). Miguel de Icaza got already a KDE CVS account for this (http://lists.kde.org/?l=kde-cvs&m=111233809718017 &w=2).

fools bit. Seem's the vatican isnt adverse to a giggle either:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/worldlatest/story/0,1280 ,-4907814,00.html

http://www.guardian.co.uk/guardianweekly/story/0,1 2674,1444795,00.html

Paralysed people can now control artificial limbs by thought alone. Ian Sample reports". It won't meet your immediate needs, but there might be something of interest in it.

> 1. So happy I live in Canada. It could be almost anywhere that isn't the US though.

Right -- while we're contending with anarchists and the FBI, you folks are merrily clubbing a million baby seals to death. Lots of fun, eh?
S

The UN is so full of hooey it is not funny. They have terrorist states leading the UN Human rights commision and are various departments of the UN are continually found to be corrupt and criminal.

To allow any such organization to control anything seems foolish and foolhardy. To allow a department head from such an organization that is representative of one of the most repressive governments in the world is even worse.

I was able to find nice galleries online for nominees John Picacio, Fred Gambino, Bob Eggleton, and Donato Giancola. They are definitely worth checking out. You'll probably even recognize some of their work.

Frank Kelly Freas, one of the other nominees, died in January. The Guardian has a nice obituary about his life and work here. It looks like his homepage is down now, but you may be able to find examples of his work elsewhere. He did some of the covers of those great old school scifi books you see in 2nd-hand book shops.

Cartoonist faces Greek jail for blasphemy

I think it's safe to say, though, there's probably as much manufactured "science" as there is manufactured "news".

In the UK, police can already take a DNA sample if you're arrested for any crime (even if you're not charged, let alone convicted). Samples are kept indefinitely and added to the national DNA database, which could be sold to private companies or cross-referenced with the National Identity Register to find out the subject's current name and address.

I think Ubuntu was in Brit news today.

I wonder if any of that is from creative accounting like on films where almost all the films lose money, but the production/distributors seem to always turn a healthy profit.

Although that's probably less likely in the game industry, as far as I know theres not as much profit participation to avoid paying to the talent - but I could be wrong on that.

They also don't have as much of a long tail of further distribution to add to their take through multiple releases through various distribution channels.

Isn't this old news? I've seen the gmail links on google search a while ago. It's not something new to me. They've been sneaking in gmail invites into their popular Blogger service for a while as a way to slowly increase their user base while they probably sit back and build the infrastructure to hold more users. Yeah, gmail's been boosting the amount of invites lately, but I still don't see a signu form on their gmail page. I think this is all just more invite leaking. It's not public until their signup page is public. Just look at the trail of evidence: techwhack guardian.co.uk Some other SEO news

I'm not sure about that, really. I can only speak for myself, of course, but what bugs me about this is not that he got busted and is now facing charges for what he did; what bugs me is that he's extradited.

I mean... why? Either what he did is illegal under Australian law, in which case he should be tried there (after all, he IS an Australian citizen), or it's not, in which case, well, he shouldn't be extradited.

Think about it: would you like the USA to send you to China because you said something that's against the law there, for example? I think it's pretty safe to say that you don't. Of course, that's entirely hypothetical since I can't imagine that he did NOT commit a crime under Australian law, but that still leaves the question: why not try him in Australia?

I am not sure at all about the reasons for that myself, so far, but it seems to me that there are two possible scenarios, and both of them seem to be designed to erode basic freedoms:

1. He's sentenced in the USA and sent to a prison in Australia. This would set a dangerous precedent - if you can be jailed in Australia without being sentenced there, then how or why can you be sure that the same thing will not happen to you when you're sentenced (in another country) for something that is not a crime under Australian law? To pick up the example from above, how can you be sure that you don't get sent to jail for something that you did that's illegal in, for example, China, Saudi Arabia or another dictatorship with enough economic power to be accepted by politicians in (western) democracies? And again, there's also the question why he isn't tried in Australia, under Australian law - it's not even like there is anything gained.

2. He's sentenced in the USA and sent to a prison in the USA. Same thing, really - possibly worse, in fact, as this would also mean that there is no control over what happens to him while in prison. Remember, he's still an Australian citizen, and as such has rights; it is not at all clear that those rights would be respected in a US-american prison. To give two examples, from what I understand, it's common for inmates in the USA to a) be forced to work and b) lose their right to vote; this may or may not seem acceptable to any US-american, but the fact remains that similar treatment would not be legal in other states. Of course, voting probably is a non-issue, since it most likely only applies to the ability to vote in US elections, which he most likely couldn't, anyway, but still - I don't see how this is different from "exporting" people to other states like Afghanistan etc. where the US administration can hold/question/torture them without having to respect the rights they'd have in the USA. (And before you say that that ain't happening, look up information on Khamed El-Masri, for example).

In either case, it really seems that there is no actual valid reason why he SHOULD be extradited, and several good reasons why he should NOT. Considering that not extraditing him would be the "natural" thing to do, anyway, that very much leaves the question why it's being done, and I think it's a valid question to ask and be concerned about.

Yeah, he's a criminal, and if he gets sent to prison, he most likely will have gotten what he deserves. But that doesn't mean that he doesn't still have rights, that he doesn't still reserve to be respected as a human being, and that he (or anyone else) does not have the right to ask questions or demand his rights.

I have found numerous errors when reading articles.

Well, naturally - there will be errors in any reference source, nobody's reached perfection yet. Have you tried looking something up in the new edition of Oxford University Press' Dictionary of National Biography? http://observer.guardian.co.uk/uk_news/story/0,690 3,1431473,00.html At £7,500 for the set, you'd think they'd get their facts right.

He also worked on the Manhattan Project, as head of the Theoretical Physics Division.

... in Japan, China, and possibly openings soon in the European Union and India...

Judging from some of the replies the campaign was counterproductive.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/uselections2004/story/0, 13918,1329858,00.html

Nope, it was The Guardian. IIRC it did increase the turnout for that county, but whether it made people vote against Bush or not is unknown.

Psychopath's are usually considered evil:

Portrait of a corporate psychopath

You mean this one?

The pilot wasn't a terrorist; he was suicidal. He just happened to take 216 others with him. At least, that is according to US investigators.

No amount of screening is going to fix those sorts of problems. Some people are just insane, either permanently, or temporarily (like this guy).

But considering that:

• Raskin attacked the Mac in an October 2004 interview in The Guardian.
• He wasn't a current employee
• Corporate death notices sting corporations stock prices
• There's further suspected but unpublicized animosity between Apple and Raskin

He also thought that "Microsoft Bob" represented the future of computing, that 640KB of RAM should be enough for everyone, etc.

Nope.

Microsoft didn't even set a 640 K limit, which that blog entry summarizes well.

I can't find a detailed account of the case online, but the essence of it was that Groom had a deal with Paramount for a percentage of the gross profits of the movie, only to be told that the film didn't make a profit and that he was therefore entitled to nothing. When he went to court to contest the claim that one of the most successful movies of all time hadn't made a profit, the studio argued that they had had to pay out millions of dollars for marketing - to (something like) Paramount Marketing Inc.; millions more for contract services - to (something like) - Paramount Contract Services Inc.; millions more for etc. etc.; and all of it to companies which were themselves owned by Paramount. These costs were so huge that the movie did not, technically, make a profit.

There's an interesting article about the practice of "Martian Accounting" here.

looks to me like people are saying:

1) they don't want it
2) tech isn't there yet to make it small enough

as for (1), i'm personally convinced that plenty of people will be using it once they see how convenient it makes things. everyone claims their
PDA is good enough, but i bet they don't dispense with their home computer and use their PDA full-time like we'll be able to when "full-power" wearables are eventually available. and i bet they don't constantly check the GPS on their PDA. or IM strangers in Times Square. (see http://www.headmap.org/book/manifesto/hm-blank.htm and http://www.guardian.co.uk/online/story/0,3...,9223 37,00.html)

but, besides all these "new" applications, computing will be nicer when you don't have to sit in front of the computer to do it.

however, that's a long way away; what I'd like today is just a $3000 low-resolution, slow, B&W sunglasses-embedded HMD and "virtual keyboard" (finger tracker). I do see people's point here; a PDA can do much of what this would be used for, and it would be cheaper, and color, and not feel weird. Personally, I'd shell out for the low-resolution sunglasses-enabled model and finger-tracker because the extra bandwidth (large display area (assuming the display changed when you moved your head) and large "virtual" keyboard) would allow me to do a lot of stuff "on the road" (waiting in line at the supermarket, etc) that I can't do efficiently on a tiny
PDA interface.

as for (2), i'm a little confused because, as some posters noted, corps started using cell phones before they were small. my feeling is that none by the nerdiest even think about wearable, much less realize the convenience and efficiency gains that wearables could bring. if corporations had it on their radar, I think they would buy them even now.

-- bayle