The great opportunity for Linux on the desktop was a decade ago. Back when Windows 95 sucked, Windows XP was late, and Windows 2000 cost several hundred dollars. That's when it could have happened. It didn't.
There was a second chance when the netbooks came in. But that, too, was botched. For a moment, it looked like the future of computing was a $99 Linux netbook in a bubble pack at WalMart. This terrified the industry.
The EeePC Linux was badly broken, especially in the networking area. Microsoft frantically revived XP, and then, with the cooperation of the PC industry, tried to destroy the netbook industry. Companies which also produced PCs were told they'd lose their Microsoft volume discount if they sold a Linux netbook. Hence, the "Asus recommends Windows 7" branding. Similar pressure was applied to dealers. You can buy low cost Linux netbooks from suppliers in Shenzen right now, but try to find one at a US retailer. (The current ASUS EeePC 1001, at $200, which is a quite capable little computer. was supposed to be a Linux machine. It's only available with Windows 7.)
It's a great project, but I don't think it's really happening. The guy behind it is into PR, not cutting metal. "The project hopes to have a working machine before the 2030s."
There's a simulator for the Analytical Engine. It runs in a Java applet, and you can write and run programs. It's not that hard to program. The Analytical Engine is comparable to a low-end programmable calculator, without trig functions.
The machine itself isn't that complicated; just big. It's big because Babbage specified 1000 memory locations of 50 decimal digits each. So you need 50,000 memory wheels. That's all for data; programs are on cards. The "mill" part of the machine is roughly the complexity of a good mechanical desk calculator.
That's actually far too much memory for what the thing can do. Nobody seems to know why 50 digits, either. Babbage had figured out shifting, and understood scale factors, so it's not that he wanted to put the decimal point in some fixed place and work in fixed fractional mode.
If the thing were built with 100 memory locations of 10 digits each (a typical configuration for an 1980s programmable calculator), it would be equally capable, and 1/50th the size. That's enough capacity for navigational tables and astronomy. Built with full memory, it would be the size of a locomotive, and most of the memory would be idle.
The extra memory wouldn't make it useful for bookkeeping or business; the I/O isn't there for that.
I wrote in and asked how many part numbers (different parts) the machine has, which gives a sense of how much manufacturing effort is required. There probably aren't that many; all 50,000 memory wheels will be identical, and most of the "mill" is repeats of a 1 digit mechanical adder. I didn't get an answer.
Somebody should model the machine in SolidWorks or Autodesk Inventor. (Or upgrade the mechanism support in Minecraft and let that crowd do it.)
This is more of a loss of instrument data problem. The pilots (and the computers) did not have reliable altitude, airspeed, or vertical speed information. They were in a storm at night. Read the third interim report, which has the data from the flight recorders. See section 1.16.6, "Reconstruction of information available to the crew".
Bear in mind that this event started with loss of airspeed information: "The PF then said âoeWe haven't got good... We haven't got a good display...of speed"
and the PNF "We've lost the speeds"." This was due to pitot tube icing. From the voice recorder information, it appears that the pilots never again trusted the airspeed information presented. The speed data did come back for a while, but then was lost again.
The aircraft was then in a high altitude stall:
The airplane's parameters were then: altitude about 35,800 ft, vertical
speed -9,100 ft/min, computed speed 100 kt and falling, pitch attitude 12 deg. and engine N1 for
both engines at 102%. But one of the pilots said At 2 h 12 min 04, the PF said that he thought that they were in an overspeed situation,
perhaps because a strong aerodynamic noise dominated in the cockpit.
The report says "Despite several references to the altitude, which was falling, none of the three crew members seemed to be able to determine which information to rely on: for them, the pitch attitude, roll
and thrust values could seem inconsistent with the vertical speed and altitude values."
Again, this is in a storm, at night, over ocean. All the crew has is its instruments. The crew misjudged which data was correct and which was wrong. Still, they had several minutes, three pilots, and plenty of airspace and altitude to deal with the problem. There was a way out. If the initial events had happened over high mountains, there would have been far less time to deal with the situation.
There are fighters which are designed unstable for maneuverability and can't fly at all if they lose their air data inputs. They have ejection seats. Transport aircraft are more stable and can manually flown without air data inputs, but it's not easy. A technical argument here is that aircraft with computer-assisted flight controls should have much more redundancy in the basic air data inputs (altitude and airspeed). If the sensors had worked, the computers would have prevented this. The Airbus had three pitot probes, but they were all the same, and vulnerable to icing. It may be appropriate to require some completely different sensors, mounted on different parts of the aircraft, as a backup.
Much of the blame belongs to Thales, which built the pitot probes. There were known problems with those probes before this crash. Air France has since replaced all Thales probes with Goodrich probes.
All those blog and forum systems that recognize links will be unable to recognize single-world domain names. Or they're mis-recognize as a link every word that's also a TLD.
You have to put a dot at the end of a domain name for a rooted search, or it's looked up locally first. If you're on a stanford.edu machine, and look up "music" or "art", you'll get the site for that department. If you want the "music" TLD (I wonder who gets that. The RIAA? iTunes? Myspace?), you have to type "music.". Unless you're really into DNS semantics, you probably don't know that.
The child's grandmother, Lori Croft, told The Associated Press that Brademeyer and her daughter, Isabella, initially passed through security at the Wichita airport without incident. The girl then ran over to briefly hug Croft, who was awaiting a pat-down after tripping the alarm, and that's when TSA agents insisted the girl undergo a physical pat-down. Isabella had just learned about "stranger danger" at school, her grandmother said, adding that the girl was afraid and unsure about what was going on.
The TSA did the right thing. That looks like a handoff by someone who's trying to get something past a checkpoint. That's exactly when additional examination is required.
Using kids and old people to get bombs past checkpoints has been common in Israel for years. The Israelis check women and kids.
Back in 1999, there was freepc.com. They didn't just give away the OS - they gave you a whole computer. Applications could only use a 640 x 480 area of the screen, which was a common monitor size back then. But FreePC shipped with a bigger monitor and display card. The rest of the screen was devoted to ads.
Like most web sites today. And phones. And tablets...
If Google does not require that license to your content, then how in gods name will they do simple things like display thumbnail previews of documents, which by NECESSITY is a derrivitive work?
If anything, the fact that Microsoft and Dropbox *does not* have this in their agreement basically means they are violating their agreement constantly, just no one is calling them on it.
Hawaiian has a radial notion of location: makai, towards the sea, mauka, away from the sea. Rotational direction is expressed as toward one of a few key shore points.
Hence phrases like "leveraging the cloud and supercomputing capabilities", and "ultra intelligent electronic agents". If anything, the smarts behind Siri comes from Wolfram Alpha, which is a question-answering system for factual questions. Most of the rest of what Siri does is just vertical search.
Other remote file services aren't like that.
If you use, say, iDrive, not only do they not claim such rights, their server doesn't even have your encryption key.
Bitcoin mining is barely profitable now. Bitcoin "difficulty" self-adjusts so that the number of new Bitcoins created per unit time remains constant. Currently, that number is about 6*50*24*30 = 216K bitcoins per month, worth about $900K/month.
Every few years, the number of coins created per unit time drops, so that eventually there will be a fixed number of coins, 21 million. Around the end of 2012, half of all Bitcoins that will ever be created will have been created, and the production rate drops in half, according to a schedule built into all the programs that accept Bitcoins.
All Bitcoin "miners" are thus in competition for a fixed and declining amount of revenue. Many have already dropped out, as can be seen from the hash rate statistics. In areas with high electricity costs, even running existing hardware doesn't pay. Buying new hardware in bulk was popular in early 2011, but not any more.
Of course, if you can find some sucker to provide a GPU and pay for the power, the economics looks better. Hence the Bitcoin trojan. The concept of a VC-funded Bitcoin trojan is a bit much. Putting in $500K to suck money out of the system might pay off in the short term, but it's not something that can grow. If you put in $5M, you'd be competing with yourself for a finite revenue stream. Also, running a background GPU job on anything that isn't plugged in will produce some very angry users as their batteries die.
If you think mere rarity will make Bitcoins grow in value, go on eBay and see what collectable stuff from the Franklin Mint (once a big maker of "collectables") goes for.
Stanford has become more like that. Some of this comes from a big organizational change.
I went through Stanford in the 1980s. (MSCS, 1985). Stanford hadn't really started operating innovation as a profit center at that time. Their biggest revenue patent was the one for FM music synthesis, the technology used by electronic keyboards before sampling. There's been much financial progress since then.
In 1991, Stanford spun off the management of its endowment to the http://www.smc.stanford.edu/">Stanford Management Company. Many universities have an organization to manage their endowment, but Stanford's is more active than most. SMC isn't on campus. It's located on Sand Hill Road, next to the famous office park where all the major venture capitalists have offices. SMC invests in venture capital firms, and this has worked out very well. Stanford directly owns part of Google, part of Cisco, part of Sun, part of Facebook... Stanford has $27 billion in investment assets. (Harvard is still ahead, at $32 billion, but Stanford is catching up.)
Arguably, Stanford is a venture capital firm which runs a school on the side for the tax break.
These contracts couldn't ever really work if people were allowed talk salary
Of course you can talk salary. It's a legal right in the US. (29 U.S.C.157). Here's the NRLB workplace poster. Report employer violations to 1-866-667-NLRB (6572) .
Under the NLRA, you have the right to:
Organize a union to negotiate with your employer concerning your wages, hours, and other terms and conditions of employment.
Form, join or assist a union.
Bargain collectively through representatives of employeesâ(TM) own choosing for a contract with your employer setting your wages, benefits, hours, and other working conditions.
Discuss your wages and benefits and other terms and conditions of employment or union organizing with your co-workers or a union.
Take action with one or more co-workers to improve your working conditions by, among other means, raising work-related
complaints directly with your employer or with a government agency, and seeking help from a union.
Strike and picket, depending on the purpose or means of the strike or the picketing.
Choose not to do any of these activities, including joining or remaining a member of a union.
Illegal conduct will not be permitted. If you believe your rights or the rights of others have been violated, you should contact the
NLRB promptly to protect your rights, generally within six months of the unlawful activity. You may inquire about possible violations
without your employer or anyone else being informed of the inquiry. Charges may be filed by any person and need not be filed by
the employee directly affected by the violation. The NLRB may order an employer to rehire a worker fired in violation of the law and
to pay lost wages and benefits, and may order an employer or union to cease violating the law. Employees should seek assistance
from the nearest regional NLRB office, which can be found on the Agencyâ(TM)s Web site: http://www.nlrb.gov/
You can also contact the NLRB by calling toll-free: 1-866-667-NLRB (6572) or (TTY) 1-866-315-NLRB (1-866-315-6572)
for hearing impaired.
Google pays Apple $100 million a year to be the default search engine on the iPhone. Google pays Mozilla $125 million a year to be the default search engine on Firefox. Most Bing traffic comes from the default setting in Internet Explorer. Few people actually change their default search engine setting.
This has some strong implications for the search industry. First, most users don't care which search engine they're using. Second, search has negative value - search engines are an ad medium that has to pay to be seen.
The IOC should be granted their desire for control. News outlets should ignore the event and turn it over to the advertising department. Any publicity about the event should be billed at standard rates.
The Olympics are in London this year? I knew there was an Olympics in London coming up, because huge cost overruns have been in the news. But I thought it was years in the future.
I'm amazed Ceefax was still up. It wasn't even interactive, but it was "digital". There were other systems from that era, such as Prestel (UK, a flop), Minitel (France, a big success), and NAPLPS (North American Presentation Level Protocol Syntax), still used by some gambling terminals that need to send graphics over slow dedicated lines).
None of the pre-PC era stuff ever caught on in the US. France Telecom deployed dial-up Minitel service in the US, but it was used by few Americans. QUBE, a cable TV based system, was deployed in Columbus, OH. But that was about it until the PC era.
Once Facebook goes public, Zuckerberg is going to be in for a RUDE awakening. He won't be able to treat it like his little piggybank, he will have to consult the board (his bosses after it goes public) for anything he does and the board can fire him.
Depends on how the deal is structured. Google has two classes of stock; Paige and Brin's stock has 10x the voting rights of common shares. (At one time, the NYSE refused to list companies with more than one class of voting stock, but they caved on that years ago.) Facebook might try a similar offering.
The only question is whether Goldman Sachs will go along.
Note where they're testing it: Abu Dhabi, a coastal city at the edge of a desert. Current humidity in Abu Dhabi is 51%. The CIA Factbook says the UAE's water situation is a "lack of natural freshwater resources compensated by desalination plants; desertification". That's the ideal site, with both humidity and wind.
Think of this as a form of desalinization. Coastal, or even offshore, windmills producing both power and water.
It doesn't seem hard to do. You just need piano wires threaded up the rose stem, which are withdrawn to make parts of the rose fall off. Either some mechanism under the table or an assistant is pulling the wires.
This illusion puzzles people? It's an elegant performance piece, but easy to figure out.
The thing is a massive piece of furniture holding - what? Some tiny amount of electronics?
Even DVD and Blu-Ray players are bloated boxes. After all, they're basically PC drives with an additional interface board. Packaging a player in a box about 6x6x2" is quite possible. But most players have about 4x as much interior volume as they need.
Slashdot Mirror
The great opportunity for Linux on the desktop was a decade ago. Back when Windows 95 sucked, Windows XP was late, and Windows 2000 cost several hundred dollars. That's when it could have happened. It didn't.
There was a second chance when the netbooks came in. But that, too, was botched. For a moment, it looked like the future of computing was a $99 Linux netbook in a bubble pack at WalMart. This terrified the industry. The EeePC Linux was badly broken, especially in the networking area. Microsoft frantically revived XP, and then, with the cooperation of the PC industry, tried to destroy the netbook industry. Companies which also produced PCs were told they'd lose their Microsoft volume discount if they sold a Linux netbook. Hence, the "Asus recommends Windows 7" branding. Similar pressure was applied to dealers. You can buy low cost Linux netbooks from suppliers in Shenzen right now, but try to find one at a US retailer. (The current ASUS EeePC 1001, at $200, which is a quite capable little computer. was supposed to be a Linux machine. It's only available with Windows 7.)
It's a great project, but I don't think it's really happening. The guy behind it is into PR, not cutting metal. "The project hopes to have a working machine before the 2030s."
There's a simulator for the Analytical Engine. It runs in a Java applet, and you can write and run programs. It's not that hard to program. The Analytical Engine is comparable to a low-end programmable calculator, without trig functions.
The machine itself isn't that complicated; just big. It's big because Babbage specified 1000 memory locations of 50 decimal digits each. So you need 50,000 memory wheels. That's all for data; programs are on cards. The "mill" part of the machine is roughly the complexity of a good mechanical desk calculator.
That's actually far too much memory for what the thing can do. Nobody seems to know why 50 digits, either. Babbage had figured out shifting, and understood scale factors, so it's not that he wanted to put the decimal point in some fixed place and work in fixed fractional mode.
If the thing were built with 100 memory locations of 10 digits each (a typical configuration for an 1980s programmable calculator), it would be equally capable, and 1/50th the size. That's enough capacity for navigational tables and astronomy. Built with full memory, it would be the size of a locomotive, and most of the memory would be idle. The extra memory wouldn't make it useful for bookkeeping or business; the I/O isn't there for that.
I wrote in and asked how many part numbers (different parts) the machine has, which gives a sense of how much manufacturing effort is required. There probably aren't that many; all 50,000 memory wheels will be identical, and most of the "mill" is repeats of a 1 digit mechanical adder. I didn't get an answer.
Somebody should model the machine in SolidWorks or Autodesk Inventor. (Or upgrade the mechanism support in Minecraft and let that crowd do it.)
This is more of a loss of instrument data problem. The pilots (and the computers) did not have reliable altitude, airspeed, or vertical speed information. They were in a storm at night. Read the third interim report, which has the data from the flight recorders. See section 1.16.6, "Reconstruction of information available to the crew".
Bear in mind that this event started with loss of airspeed information: "The PF then said âoeWe haven't got good ... We haven't got a good display ...of speed"
and the PNF "We've lost the speeds"." This was due to pitot tube icing. From the voice recorder information, it appears that the pilots never again trusted the airspeed information presented. The speed data did come back for a while, but then was lost again.
The aircraft was then in a high altitude stall: The airplane's parameters were then: altitude about 35,800 ft, vertical speed -9,100 ft/min, computed speed 100 kt and falling, pitch attitude 12 deg. and engine N1 for both engines at 102%. But one of the pilots said At 2 h 12 min 04, the PF said that he thought that they were in an overspeed situation, perhaps because a strong aerodynamic noise dominated in the cockpit. The report says "Despite several references to the altitude, which was falling, none of the three crew members seemed to be able to determine which information to rely on: for them, the pitch attitude, roll and thrust values could seem inconsistent with the vertical speed and altitude values."
Again, this is in a storm, at night, over ocean. All the crew has is its instruments. The crew misjudged which data was correct and which was wrong. Still, they had several minutes, three pilots, and plenty of airspace and altitude to deal with the problem. There was a way out. If the initial events had happened over high mountains, there would have been far less time to deal with the situation.
There are fighters which are designed unstable for maneuverability and can't fly at all if they lose their air data inputs. They have ejection seats. Transport aircraft are more stable and can manually flown without air data inputs, but it's not easy. A technical argument here is that aircraft with computer-assisted flight controls should have much more redundancy in the basic air data inputs (altitude and airspeed). If the sensors had worked, the computers would have prevented this. The Airbus had three pitot probes, but they were all the same, and vulnerable to icing. It may be appropriate to require some completely different sensors, mounted on different parts of the aircraft, as a backup.
Much of the blame belongs to Thales, which built the pitot probes. There were known problems with those probes before this crash. Air France has since replaced all Thales probes with Goodrich probes.
The whole point of paying a large amount of money for a vanity TLD is to get a very short name.
All those blog and forum systems that recognize links will be unable to recognize single-world domain names. Or they're mis-recognize as a link every word that's also a TLD.
You have to put a dot at the end of a domain name for a rooted search, or it's looked up locally first. If you're on a stanford.edu machine, and look up "music" or "art", you'll get the site for that department. If you want the "music" TLD (I wonder who gets that. The RIAA? iTunes? Myspace?), you have to type "music.". Unless you're really into DNS semantics, you probably don't know that.
Remember AOL keywords?
The child's grandmother, Lori Croft, told The Associated Press that Brademeyer and her daughter, Isabella, initially passed through security at the Wichita airport without incident. The girl then ran over to briefly hug Croft, who was awaiting a pat-down after tripping the alarm, and that's when TSA agents insisted the girl undergo a physical pat-down. Isabella had just learned about "stranger danger" at school, her grandmother said, adding that the girl was afraid and unsure about what was going on.
The TSA did the right thing. That looks like a handoff by someone who's trying to get something past a checkpoint. That's exactly when additional examination is required.
Using kids and old people to get bombs past checkpoints has been common in Israel for years. The Israelis check women and kids.
This is Google concentrating on their core business area - ads. If it doesn't have ads on it, it's going.
What does Google have left that doesn't have ads, or collects data on users to support ads?
Back in 1999, there was freepc.com. They didn't just give away the OS - they gave you a whole computer. Applications could only use a 640 x 480 area of the screen, which was a common monitor size back then. But FreePC shipped with a bigger monitor and display card. The rest of the screen was devoted to ads.
Like most web sites today. And phones. And tablets...
They were just ahead of their time.
If Google does not require that license to your content, then how in gods name will they do simple things like display thumbnail previews of documents, which by NECESSITY is a derrivitive work? If anything, the fact that Microsoft and Dropbox *does not* have this in their agreement basically means they are violating their agreement constantly, just no one is calling them on it.
No. Thumbnails are not copyright infringement. That's been litigated and won. By Google. So they know better.
Hawaiian has a radial notion of location: makai, towards the sea, mauka, away from the sea. Rotational direction is expressed as toward one of a few key shore points.
Hence phrases like "leveraging the cloud and supercomputing capabilities", and "ultra intelligent electronic agents". If anything, the smarts behind Siri comes from Wolfram Alpha, which is a question-answering system for factual questions. Most of the rest of what Siri does is just vertical search.
4) brute force the password, knowing that only 3 bytes are unique to the device.
You don't have to guess. The password is computable from the MAC address using this short Perl program.
The factory password is, literally, "factory". It cannot be disabled and its password cannot be changed.
Someone should go to jail for this. It may fall under criminal negligence, sabotage, or even providing material aid to terrorists.
Mod parent up. That is way, way out of line.
Other remote file services aren't like that. If you use, say, iDrive, not only do they not claim such rights, their server doesn't even have your encryption key.
Bitcoin mining is barely profitable now. Bitcoin "difficulty" self-adjusts so that the number of new Bitcoins created per unit time remains constant. Currently, that number is about 6*50*24*30 = 216K bitcoins per month, worth about $900K/month. Every few years, the number of coins created per unit time drops, so that eventually there will be a fixed number of coins, 21 million. Around the end of 2012, half of all Bitcoins that will ever be created will have been created, and the production rate drops in half, according to a schedule built into all the programs that accept Bitcoins.
All Bitcoin "miners" are thus in competition for a fixed and declining amount of revenue. Many have already dropped out, as can be seen from the hash rate statistics. In areas with high electricity costs, even running existing hardware doesn't pay. Buying new hardware in bulk was popular in early 2011, but not any more.
Of course, if you can find some sucker to provide a GPU and pay for the power, the economics looks better. Hence the Bitcoin trojan. The concept of a VC-funded Bitcoin trojan is a bit much. Putting in $500K to suck money out of the system might pay off in the short term, but it's not something that can grow. If you put in $5M, you'd be competing with yourself for a finite revenue stream. Also, running a background GPU job on anything that isn't plugged in will produce some very angry users as their batteries die.
If you think mere rarity will make Bitcoins grow in value, go on eBay and see what collectable stuff from the Franklin Mint (once a big maker of "collectables") goes for.
Stanford has become more like that. Some of this comes from a big organizational change.
I went through Stanford in the 1980s. (MSCS, 1985). Stanford hadn't really started operating innovation as a profit center at that time. Their biggest revenue patent was the one for FM music synthesis, the technology used by electronic keyboards before sampling. There's been much financial progress since then.
In 1991, Stanford spun off the management of its endowment to the http://www.smc.stanford.edu/">Stanford Management Company. Many universities have an organization to manage their endowment, but Stanford's is more active than most. SMC isn't on campus. It's located on Sand Hill Road, next to the famous office park where all the major venture capitalists have offices. SMC invests in venture capital firms, and this has worked out very well. Stanford directly owns part of Google, part of Cisco, part of Sun, part of Facebook... Stanford has $27 billion in investment assets. (Harvard is still ahead, at $32 billion, but Stanford is catching up.)
Arguably, Stanford is a venture capital firm which runs a school on the side for the tax break.
This could be useful for programmers. It may be possible to detect some programming errors while programming.
These contracts couldn't ever really work if people were allowed talk salary
Of course you can talk salary. It's a legal right in the US. (29 U.S.C.157). Here's the NRLB workplace poster. Report employer violations to 1-866-667-NLRB (6572) .
Under the NLRA, you have the right to:
Illegal conduct will not be permitted. If you believe your rights or the rights of others have been violated, you should contact the NLRB promptly to protect your rights, generally within six months of the unlawful activity. You may inquire about possible violations without your employer or anyone else being informed of the inquiry. Charges may be filed by any person and need not be filed by the employee directly affected by the violation. The NLRB may order an employer to rehire a worker fired in violation of the law and to pay lost wages and benefits, and may order an employer or union to cease violating the law. Employees should seek assistance from the nearest regional NLRB office, which can be found on the Agencyâ(TM)s Web site: http://www.nlrb.gov/ You can also contact the NLRB by calling toll-free: 1-866-667-NLRB (6572) or (TTY) 1-866-315-NLRB (1-866-315-6572) for hearing impaired.
NRLB enforcement was weak under the Bush Administration. Now they're back. Here's a case where an employer fired someone for posting about working conditions on Facebook. The NLRB forced the employer to rehire them with back pay.
Google pays Apple $100 million a year to be the default search engine on the iPhone. Google pays Mozilla $125 million a year to be the default search engine on Firefox. Most Bing traffic comes from the default setting in Internet Explorer. Few people actually change their default search engine setting.
This has some strong implications for the search industry. First, most users don't care which search engine they're using. Second, search has negative value - search engines are an ad medium that has to pay to be seen.
The IOC should be granted their desire for control. News outlets should ignore the event and turn it over to the advertising department. Any publicity about the event should be billed at standard rates.
The Olympics are in London this year? I knew there was an Olympics in London coming up, because huge cost overruns have been in the news. But I thought it was years in the future.
I'm amazed Ceefax was still up. It wasn't even interactive, but it was "digital". There were other systems from that era, such as Prestel (UK, a flop), Minitel (France, a big success), and NAPLPS (North American Presentation Level Protocol Syntax), still used by some gambling terminals that need to send graphics over slow dedicated lines).
None of the pre-PC era stuff ever caught on in the US. France Telecom deployed dial-up Minitel service in the US, but it was used by few Americans. QUBE, a cable TV based system, was deployed in Columbus, OH. But that was about it until the PC era.
Once Facebook goes public, Zuckerberg is going to be in for a RUDE awakening. He won't be able to treat it like his little piggybank, he will have to consult the board (his bosses after it goes public) for anything he does and the board can fire him.
Depends on how the deal is structured. Google has two classes of stock; Paige and Brin's stock has 10x the voting rights of common shares. (At one time, the NYSE refused to list companies with more than one class of voting stock, but they caved on that years ago.) Facebook might try a similar offering.
The only question is whether Goldman Sachs will go along.
Note where they're testing it: Abu Dhabi, a coastal city at the edge of a desert. Current humidity in Abu Dhabi is 51%. The CIA Factbook says the UAE's water situation is a "lack of natural freshwater resources compensated by desalination plants; desertification". That's the ideal site, with both humidity and wind.
Think of this as a form of desalinization. Coastal, or even offshore, windmills producing both power and water.
It doesn't seem hard to do. You just need piano wires threaded up the rose stem, which are withdrawn to make parts of the rose fall off. Either some mechanism under the table or an assistant is pulling the wires.
This illusion puzzles people? It's an elegant performance piece, but easy to figure out.
The thing is a massive piece of furniture holding - what? Some tiny amount of electronics?
Even DVD and Blu-Ray players are bloated boxes. After all, they're basically PC drives with an additional interface board. Packaging a player in a box about 6x6x2" is quite possible. But most players have about 4x as much interior volume as they need.