Mister President: What did you forget and when did you forget it?
It's just a little hypocritical to sneer at the rest of the world because they can't keep their population down. Our own high-energy lifestyle wouldn't be possible without all that cheap labor. And when I talk about "overruning our resources" I do not mean overpopulation! Or not just OP. Yeah, 2 or 3 billion peasants use up a lot of resources. But not as much as the 1 billion or so SUV-loving steak-munching superconsumers in the developed world! In fact, I believe the depredation ratio is about 10 to 1.
It's not worth the money, but it's not a total waste either. This would be a little more obvious if anybody had seen the Segway's predecessor, the IBot Wheelchair. This was actually introduced years before the Segway, but has been stuck in FDA hell ever since.
An IBot has four modes: "Normal" (basically a conventional wheelchair), 4-wheel (all wheels powered) stair-climbing (really!) and Balance. Take an IBot, remove all the modes except Balance, remove the ability to reposition the chair vertically, replace the chair with a foot-level platform, and replace the joystick with a fancy system for guiding the vehicle with instinctive body movements. Result: a Segway.
Eventually, you're going to see physically disabled people cruising around town in IBots. Balance seems to be the most popular and useful mode, so a lot of people are going to mistake them for Segways. Undoubtedly, some asshole will come up and say, "You stupid Yuppie! Why don't you use the legs God gave you!?"
You're not allowed to write informative posts! If you're going to spoil our flamebaiting and trolling, you can at least accept responsibility for your actions!
OK, we're better at manipulating our environment than chimps. But that's just one evolutionary adaptation among many. All our non-slackerness has bought us is a few thousand years of population runnup (practically an eyeblink, on the evolutionary time scale), which will probably be followed by an even faster dieback, as we overrun our resource base and saturate our environment. Not the most impressive evolutionary accomplishment!
A standards document should never use the word SHOULD.
Don't you mean, "A standards document must never use the word SHOULD?;)
Strictly speaking, RFCs are not standards -- only government-sanctioned bodies can issue standards. Of course, that's a distinction only of interest to compulsive nit-pickers (aka Tech Writers).
In practical terms, I think a good RFC plays the role both of a standards document (MUST) and a best practices document (SHOULD). Given the ad hoc nature of the Internet, it makes a lot of sense to combine the two. It's the sort of informal process and documentation that has allowed the net to grow so quickly.
And (the bring us back to the real topic) that's a good reason to not waste money on a book if there's a good RFC at hand.
You're picking up on one little parallel (both sell x86 boxes) and inflating it into a grand paradigm. The differences are more to the point:
Sun sneers at x86 workstations. SGI would like to sell x86 workstations, but waited too long to enter the market.
Sun used to talk about doing Itanium boxes, but lost interest. SGI's put a lot of effort into its Altix servers.
Sun has an x86 rackmount business, SGI does not. Though I often wonder how serious Sun is about this business. I've noticed that people who were customers when it was a separate company called Cobalt are not happy with the new management. And you'll notice that Sun has two or three Sparc rackmount models for every one x86 model.
Sun still has a huge Sparc development operation, and still uses Sparc exclusively in most of its products. SGI has spun off MIPS, and supposedly plans to give "commodity" systems equal priority -- though MIPS-based systems still dominate their product line.
I rather think we're moving towards the day when every moment of a suspect's interaction with police is recorded and placed beyond tampering. The law enforcement establishment will probably resist this, since a lot of dubious "interview" techniques would come under courtroom scrutiny, with the resulting evidence disallowed. But I think that street cops will come around when they realize that the camera is an ally against accusations that they misuse their authority.
I'm an unemployed tech writer, with nothing better to do. I know Perl, but not PHP, and I know jack about "best practices". Send me email if you wanna collaborate.
Here's a short random rant on trademarks, based on casual reading and personal experience. YMMV.
Trademark registration doesn't establish your ownership of the mark. It just records the fact that you were using the mark at a certain time. Makes your legal hassles a little more straightforward, but doesn't lock in your ownership of the mark at all. What does lock in your mark is actually using it. Which is the answer to your question: to find out if anybody's using a trademark, you check all the places where it might be used: newspapers, magazines, technical literature. More here.
Did you know that cartoon syndicates send out secret agents who order Snoopy and Beetle Bailey birthday cakes? Any bakery that accepts the order gets a C&D letter from the syndicate's lawyers.
When I worked at Sun, we were told to use the TM symbol for both registered and unregistered trademarks. Which was actually a pain, because the current version of HTML had a (R) entity, but no TM entity.
Why do companies register some trademarks and not others? No idea. Why don't all companies work this way? Because they don't all hire the same lawyers.
If you have a restaurant with "Mac" or "Mc" in its name, you will get a C&D letter from McDonalds. Sometimes it makes sense (used to be a vegetarian fast food join around here called "McDharma's"), sometimes it doesn't (you get the letter even if you're just using the family name or if you used the name before Ray Krok bought out the MacDonald brothers). Doesn't matter: nobody can afford to fight a multinational over something like this.
Which reminds me of a legal joke: "Sir, I've examined all your documents carefully, and I believe you have a very good case. There's only one question: How much justice can you afford?"
...rather than going into a long diatribe describing every design decision that led us to "ethernet hard drive", I figured it would be best to keep it simple.
Who was it that said that a system should be as simple as possible, but no simpler?;)
I'm not sure RS-232 can make it to 1Mbps, though these guys sell interfaces that go half that fast. Perhaps you could shotgun? You should talk to them in any case -- they seem to know a lot about data collection.
RS-422 can go up to 2Mbps. I know this because I used to work at Convergent Technologies, which had a proprietary network based on this protocol. At about the same time, Mac people were beginning to use AppleTalk, also based on RS-422. Ethernet and Token Ring swept this all away, of course.
One last stab before I admit I'm out of my depth: instead of an ethernet-powered hard disk, get one of those shoebox computers. Pull out the power supply, and replace it with a storage battery that recharges off of solar cells. If you've got enough sunlight to power your collection device, you should have enough for the computer, assuming its got a low-drain CPU and one of those clever hard disks.
Connecting these two boxes 25 feet apart is the big problem. Wouldn't Ethernet draw more power than you could spare? But now I'm definitely out of my depth.
No, silly me, I went by the pictures that were actually available.
Re:Go to a pedestrian-friendly city
on
Rent a Segway
·
· Score: 1
Well, you guys seem to have a relatively sane attitude towards transit issues. Here in the U.S. there's a serious prejudice against anything resembling mass transit. We even built our biggest bridge in such a way that it could not be retrofitted to support trains!
This prejudice has turned American cities into congested, smoggy messes, where thousands of people are unemployed simply because they can't find a job that will cover the cost of buying a car. Perhaps Dean Kamen thought he could get people of their cars if he could provide them with an alternative to public transit. I mean, we're talking about people who own $50,000 SUVs! What's a $5,000 scooter?
Actually, there's only one reason the Segway exists. It's just a variation of Kamen's revolutionary IBot Wheel Chair, which has been stuck in the FDA approval process for years. The IBot certainly has a future (imagine a wheel chair that climbs stairs and allows the user to talk without any neck craning!), but the Segway is probably just an idea looking for an application.
In the U.S., we have bicycle paths that are supposed to give bicyclists an escape for our psychotic motorists. (Well, not all American motorists are crazy, but most of the ones in Silicon Valley are!) Problem is, they're always in some pleason area that attracts strollers, and there's no room for bicylists!
One of the hazards of being a pedestrian around here is bicyclists who just ignore crosswalks, stop signs, and traffic signals.
One last irony: SF actually has more fatal pedestrian accidents per capita than any place in the U.S. The main culprit is that strange group of people who don't understand that a red light means "stop right now" not "stop, unless you think you can make it accross the intersection before the cross traffic appears." The obvious cure is red-light cameras (intersections that have them in SF have drastically fewer accidents) but such cameras are widely considered to be tools of an evil fascist conspiracy.
Re:Go to a pedestrian-friendly city
on
Rent a Segway
·
· Score: 1
OK, I admit it, it'd be stupid to use a Segway in a situation like that. But should it be illegal? And what about the rest of the day?
In San Francisco, you have a similar situation in subway stations, streetcar stops, etc. I think I might actually go along with a ban on segways at such locations, and perhaps a certain distance away.
But it's a moot point. Nobody's gonna spend US$5K for something like this. Segway's big hope was that entities like the post office and warehouse operators would buy huge numbers of them, and that would drive the price down. But it's not happening. I'm just carping because the anti-Segway activists in SF are behaving with the usual self-righteous stupidity.
Re:Go to a pedestrian-friendly city
on
Rent a Segway
·
· Score: 1
I think I'd go crazy if I went out for a stroll, and couldn't go faster than 2 MPH!
When you talk about busy streets filled with idlers, merchannts, and buskers (we call them "street musicians") the issue isn't speed, but control. That's why rollerbladers are such a nuisance -- it isn't hard to go slow on blades, it's hard to stop, at any speed! That's not true of the Segway, since it's controlled by instinctive body postures. You see somebody in front of you, you instinctively lean back, and the thing stops. Check out these videos.
The real concern on a crowded sidewalk isn't careless or poorly trained Segway riders. The real concern is malicious riders. I would think there'd be a way to handle this without completely banning the product.
I'm not sure I understand the issues here. If your sensor gadget has an ethernet port, can't you just run a TP cable to some place where there is power? Or are you looking to have a complete, self-contained system?
If that's the case, you've made the usual "Ask Slashdot" mistake of phrasing the question in terms of specific and non-essential technology. Instead of an Ethernet port, your device should have an old-fashioned RS-232 port. If your serial hardware meets the spec it will reach 25 feet. (Most RS-232 hardware drastically exceeds the spec and will reach at leat 100 feet.) At the other end of the cable, put some computer system that's low-powered enough to run off its own solar panel. If you scan EBay, you'll find a gazillion laptops and PDAs that fill the bill.
Re:Go to a pedestrian-friendly city
on
Rent a Segway
·
· Score: 1
I certainly agree that any vehicle that goes 12 MPH is too fast for the sidewalk. And typically bicyclists travel at least twice that fast. Indeed, bicyclists often seem to have trouble obeying street speed limits.
Same goes for skateboards and rollerbladers, which also have safety issues that don't relate to speed. Although I have to confess, I hate seeing skateboards banned -- I enjoy watching them, even though I'd never get on one!
But a Segway can only go 12 MPH if you operate it with an "open country" key. Of course that should be illegal on a sidewalk. But there is also a "sidewalk" key (8 mph) and a "beginner" key (6 mph).
I don't want to sound like I feel very put out that I can't operate a Segway in SF. I don't own one, and won't until the price comes down. That won't happen until there's a lot of history with the vehicle in other cities. By then, I think, people in SF will realize how silly the ban is.
Re:Go to a pedestrian-friendly city
on
Rent a Segway
·
· Score: 1, Troll
The maximum speed of a Segway is twelve miles an hour. If riding it on a busy street isn't illegal, it should be.
Grow up. Not everybody has the "legs God gave him". There's older people, people with respiratory problems, etc. Even a healthy person has a limited range on in a hilly city like SF.
You apparently resent the prosperity of potential Segway users. You're within your rights to be prejudiced (even if it is a little childish). But that's not an excuse to avoid addressing the issues. Do you have actual evidence that a Segway operated with the Beginner's Key is a threat to pedestrians? Come back when you do. And spare me your bigotry.
Hm, if I remember my history, Christianity used to preach much the same idea. The world is full of illusion and sin. A good Christian worries about avoiding Satan's snares and getting into heaven -- making the world a better place is not your job.
This was the dominant attitude in Europe from the fall of Rome (5th century) to the economic revival 7 centuries later. Needless to say, not a lot of scientific or social advancement occured during this period.
I'd be disturbed by the way The Matrix parrots this concept, except for two things. First, it seems to celebrate the illusion. Neo spends most of his time in the Matrix/Mayajaal/Satan's realm, fighting illusory enemies. Hardly an enlightened approach!
Second, this is all just plain stupid. A massive VR that can't be distinguished from reality? All for the sole purpose of stealling humanity's body heat? Except for the pseudo-mysticism, this is Tom Clancy territory! Anybody who takes it seriously spends too much time on the couch.
Go to a pedestrian-friendly city
on
Rent a Segway
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Maybe if enough people had Segways, more cities would be pedestrian friendly. Unfortunately, at these prices, few people will have Segways. The main appeal seems to be the clever engineering rather than the cost-benefit.
One notable PF city (San Francisco) has gone and banned the Segway. I blame this on kneejerk anti-business attitudes. Now, "kneejerk" is not a word I use lightly -- it's too popular with right-wingers who are too lazy to properly rebut the arguments of left-wingers. (Indeed, you could say that using the word is itself usually a kneejerk reaction.) I say "kneejerk" in this case because the main anti-Segway group loves to make comparisons with SUVs and other corporate stupidities. But they themselves admit that there's only been one Segway-related injury so far.
The big concern seems to be that Segways will be misused by irresponsible riders who will speed down sidewalks, scattering senior citizens right and left. But the Segway designers seem to have anticipated precisely this issue: how fast your Segway can go is determined by which key you use to turn it on. The keys are conspicuously colored, so it would be easy to require Segwayers to use the "beginner" key in heavily trafficed areas. That limits the scooter to 6mph, which is about how fast most people walk.
Forget size. To me, a PDA is something you can operate standing up, with the gadget itself in one hand, and a stylus in the other. Once you start making it difficult to use the stylus, you're moving into subnotebook territory, because you're probably going to have to sit down and cradle the device in your lap.
(That's why I dislike PDAs with keyboards. They force you to continually switch between finger and stylus. Maybe some people are dextrous enough to multiplex their keyboard/stylus hand. I'm not.
Not that I'm any good at Graffiti or Jot. For me, the ideal is a stylus-compatible keyboard.)
The new Zauruses may be as small as "other" PDAs. But the keyboard and the L-shaped design make them too much like subnotebooks for my taste. A good slate-style tablet PC is actually closer to the PDA concept than the Zaurus. A slate-tablet may cost 4 times as much, and be way to big for your pocket. But at least it preserves the strolling user concept.
the biggest cost of running Oracle are license fees and maintenance
Many large companies have site licenses for enterprise software, including whatever DBMS is standard. Maybe they could negotiate smaller fees by saying, "we use MySQL for the small stuff!" but I doubt it!
I do a lot of "select enum from table except (select enum from table2)" kinda stuff, and mysql just can't do it.
Except that you can fake it on the client site by doing multiple queries and merging the data. Yeah, that's painfully inefficient. But I suspect that a lot of people use MySQL for this kind of thing because they just don't have the training to design complex queries.
MySQL doesnt' really need a whole lot of maintenance, since it's more or less self maintaining...
"More or less" self-maintaining? It'd have to be totally, absolutely self-maintaining to satisfy the IS and production web people I've talked to. Suppose you need to upgrade the OS, or move the app to a new server? This might mean that you have to upgrade the DBMS engine too. If the original application designer is not available (busy with something else, left the company) the maintenance-mode owner needs to have technology s/he is familiar with.
Anyway, I'm willing to accept that Oracle or PostgreSQL can't run as fast as MySQL for very simple queries. But I still want to see some serious comparison of MySQL with Interbase and Berkeley DB!
Slashdot Mirror
It's just a little hypocritical to sneer at the rest of the world because they can't keep their population down. Our own high-energy lifestyle wouldn't be possible without all that cheap labor. And when I talk about "overruning our resources" I do not mean overpopulation! Or not just OP. Yeah, 2 or 3 billion peasants use up a lot of resources. But not as much as the 1 billion or so SUV-loving steak-munching superconsumers in the developed world! In fact, I believe the depredation ratio is about 10 to 1.
An IBot has four modes: "Normal" (basically a conventional wheelchair), 4-wheel (all wheels powered) stair-climbing (really!) and Balance. Take an IBot, remove all the modes except Balance, remove the ability to reposition the chair vertically, replace the chair with a foot-level platform, and replace the joystick with a fancy system for guiding the vehicle with instinctive body movements. Result: a Segway.
Eventually, you're going to see physically disabled people cruising around town in IBots. Balance seems to be the most popular and useful mode, so a lot of people are going to mistake them for Segways. Undoubtedly, some asshole will come up and say, "You stupid Yuppie! Why don't you use the legs God gave you!?"
You're not allowed to write informative posts! If you're going to spoil our flamebaiting and trolling, you can at least accept responsibility for your actions!
OK, we're better at manipulating our environment than chimps. But that's just one evolutionary adaptation among many. All our non-slackerness has bought us is a few thousand years of population runnup (practically an eyeblink, on the evolutionary time scale), which will probably be followed by an even faster dieback, as we overrun our resource base and saturate our environment. Not the most impressive evolutionary accomplishment!
Strictly speaking, RFCs are not standards -- only government-sanctioned bodies can issue standards. Of course, that's a distinction only of interest to compulsive nit-pickers (aka Tech Writers).
In practical terms, I think a good RFC plays the role both of a standards document (MUST) and a best practices document (SHOULD). Given the ad hoc nature of the Internet, it makes a lot of sense to combine the two. It's the sort of informal process and documentation that has allowed the net to grow so quickly.
And (the bring us back to the real topic) that's a good reason to not waste money on a book if there's a good RFC at hand.
I rather think we're moving towards the day when every moment of a suspect's interaction with police is recorded and placed beyond tampering. The law enforcement establishment will probably resist this, since a lot of dubious "interview" techniques would come under courtroom scrutiny, with the resulting evidence disallowed. But I think that street cops will come around when they realize that the camera is an ally against accusations that they misuse their authority.
I'm an unemployed tech writer, with nothing better to do. I know Perl, but not PHP, and I know jack about "best practices". Send me email if you wanna collaborate.
Trademark registration doesn't establish your ownership of the mark. It just records the fact that you were using the mark at a certain time. Makes your legal hassles a little more straightforward, but doesn't lock in your ownership of the mark at all. What does lock in your mark is actually using it. Which is the answer to your question: to find out if anybody's using a trademark, you check all the places where it might be used: newspapers, magazines, technical literature. More here.
Did you know that cartoon syndicates send out secret agents who order Snoopy and Beetle Bailey birthday cakes? Any bakery that accepts the order gets a C&D letter from the syndicate's lawyers.
When I worked at Sun, we were told to use the TM symbol for both registered and unregistered trademarks. Which was actually a pain, because the current version of HTML had a (R) entity, but no TM entity.
Why do companies register some trademarks and not others? No idea. Why don't all companies work this way? Because they don't all hire the same lawyers.
If you have a restaurant with "Mac" or "Mc" in its name, you will get a C&D letter from McDonalds. Sometimes it makes sense (used to be a vegetarian fast food join around here called "McDharma's"), sometimes it doesn't (you get the letter even if you're just using the family name or if you used the name before Ray Krok bought out the MacDonald brothers). Doesn't matter: nobody can afford to fight a multinational over something like this.
Which reminds me of a legal joke: "Sir, I've examined all your documents carefully, and I believe you have a very good case. There's only one question: How much justice can you afford?"
I'm not sure RS-232 can make it to 1Mbps, though these guys sell interfaces that go half that fast. Perhaps you could shotgun? You should talk to them in any case -- they seem to know a lot about data collection.
RS-422 can go up to 2Mbps. I know this because I used to work at Convergent Technologies, which had a proprietary network based on this protocol. At about the same time, Mac people were beginning to use AppleTalk, also based on RS-422. Ethernet and Token Ring swept this all away, of course.
One last stab before I admit I'm out of my depth: instead of an ethernet-powered hard disk, get one of those shoebox computers. Pull out the power supply, and replace it with a storage battery that recharges off of solar cells. If you've got enough sunlight to power your collection device, you should have enough for the computer, assuming its got a low-drain CPU and one of those clever hard disks.
Connecting these two boxes 25 feet apart is the big problem. Wouldn't Ethernet draw more power than you could spare? But now I'm definitely out of my depth.
...that the difference between "legal" and "illegal" is often a matter of who you know!
You've just described Judaism. Yeah, Chritianity has a lot of the same symbols, but all the ones you describe are "borrowed".
No, silly me, I went by the pictures that were actually available.
This prejudice has turned American cities into congested, smoggy messes, where thousands of people are unemployed simply because they can't find a job that will cover the cost of buying a car. Perhaps Dean Kamen thought he could get people of their cars if he could provide them with an alternative to public transit. I mean, we're talking about people who own $50,000 SUVs! What's a $5,000 scooter?
Actually, there's only one reason the Segway exists. It's just a variation of Kamen's revolutionary IBot Wheel Chair, which has been stuck in the FDA approval process for years. The IBot certainly has a future (imagine a wheel chair that climbs stairs and allows the user to talk without any neck craning!), but the Segway is probably just an idea looking for an application.
One of the hazards of being a pedestrian around here is bicyclists who just ignore crosswalks, stop signs, and traffic signals.
One last irony: SF actually has more fatal pedestrian accidents per capita than any place in the U.S. The main culprit is that strange group of people who don't understand that a red light means "stop right now" not "stop, unless you think you can make it accross the intersection before the cross traffic appears." The obvious cure is red-light cameras (intersections that have them in SF have drastically fewer accidents) but such cameras are widely considered to be tools of an evil fascist conspiracy.
The personal server is not an actual product. Just an interesting concept.
In San Francisco, you have a similar situation in subway stations, streetcar stops, etc. I think I might actually go along with a ban on segways at such locations, and perhaps a certain distance away.
But it's a moot point. Nobody's gonna spend US$5K for something like this. Segway's big hope was that entities like the post office and warehouse operators would buy huge numbers of them, and that would drive the price down. But it's not happening. I'm just carping because the anti-Segway activists in SF are behaving with the usual self-righteous stupidity.
When you talk about busy streets filled with idlers, merchannts, and buskers (we call them "street musicians") the issue isn't speed, but control. That's why rollerbladers are such a nuisance -- it isn't hard to go slow on blades, it's hard to stop, at any speed! That's not true of the Segway, since it's controlled by instinctive body postures. You see somebody in front of you, you instinctively lean back, and the thing stops. Check out these videos.
The real concern on a crowded sidewalk isn't careless or poorly trained Segway riders. The real concern is malicious riders. I would think there'd be a way to handle this without completely banning the product.
If that's the case, you've made the usual "Ask Slashdot" mistake of phrasing the question in terms of specific and non-essential technology. Instead of an Ethernet port, your device should have an old-fashioned RS-232 port. If your serial hardware meets the spec it will reach 25 feet. (Most RS-232 hardware drastically exceeds the spec and will reach at leat 100 feet.) At the other end of the cable, put some computer system that's low-powered enough to run off its own solar panel. If you scan EBay, you'll find a gazillion laptops and PDAs that fill the bill.
Same goes for skateboards and rollerbladers, which also have safety issues that don't relate to speed. Although I have to confess, I hate seeing skateboards banned -- I enjoy watching them, even though I'd never get on one!
But a Segway can only go 12 MPH if you operate it with an "open country" key. Of course that should be illegal on a sidewalk. But there is also a "sidewalk" key (8 mph) and a "beginner" key (6 mph).
I don't want to sound like I feel very put out that I can't operate a Segway in SF. I don't own one, and won't until the price comes down. That won't happen until there's a lot of history with the vehicle in other cities. By then, I think, people in SF will realize how silly the ban is.
Grow up. Not everybody has the "legs God gave him". There's older people, people with respiratory problems, etc. Even a healthy person has a limited range on in a hilly city like SF.
You apparently resent the prosperity of potential Segway users. You're within your rights to be prejudiced (even if it is a little childish). But that's not an excuse to avoid addressing the issues. Do you have actual evidence that a Segway operated with the Beginner's Key is a threat to pedestrians? Come back when you do. And spare me your bigotry.
This was the dominant attitude in Europe from the fall of Rome (5th century) to the economic revival 7 centuries later. Needless to say, not a lot of scientific or social advancement occured during this period.
I'd be disturbed by the way The Matrix parrots this concept, except for two things. First, it seems to celebrate the illusion. Neo spends most of his time in the Matrix/Mayajaal/Satan's realm, fighting illusory enemies. Hardly an enlightened approach!
Second, this is all just plain stupid. A massive VR that can't be distinguished from reality? All for the sole purpose of stealling humanity's body heat? Except for the pseudo-mysticism, this is Tom Clancy territory! Anybody who takes it seriously spends too much time on the couch.
One notable PF city (San Francisco) has gone and banned the Segway. I blame this on kneejerk anti-business attitudes. Now, "kneejerk" is not a word I use lightly -- it's too popular with right-wingers who are too lazy to properly rebut the arguments of left-wingers. (Indeed, you could say that using the word is itself usually a kneejerk reaction.) I say "kneejerk" in this case because the main anti-Segway group loves to make comparisons with SUVs and other corporate stupidities. But they themselves admit that there's only been one Segway-related injury so far.
The big concern seems to be that Segways will be misused by irresponsible riders who will speed down sidewalks, scattering senior citizens right and left. But the Segway designers seem to have anticipated precisely this issue: how fast your Segway can go is determined by which key you use to turn it on. The keys are conspicuously colored, so it would be easy to require Segwayers to use the "beginner" key in heavily trafficed areas. That limits the scooter to 6mph, which is about how fast most people walk.
(That's why I dislike PDAs with keyboards. They force you to continually switch between finger and stylus. Maybe some people are dextrous enough to multiplex their keyboard/stylus hand. I'm not. Not that I'm any good at Graffiti or Jot. For me, the ideal is a stylus-compatible keyboard.)
The new Zauruses may be as small as "other" PDAs. But the keyboard and the L-shaped design make them too much like subnotebooks for my taste. A good slate-style tablet PC is actually closer to the PDA concept than the Zaurus. A slate-tablet may cost 4 times as much, and be way to big for your pocket. But at least it preserves the strolling user concept.
Anyway, I'm willing to accept that Oracle or PostgreSQL can't run as fast as MySQL for very simple queries. But I still want to see some serious comparison of MySQL with Interbase and Berkeley DB!