Quite an interesting device. I might even want one myself, but only if it gets support for YouTube. I didn't see any mention of how much storage it comes with, but I would hope that it at least comes with a couple of USB ports and an SD card slot -- and isn't hampered by the limitations of built-in storage like the G1. I would also hope that it would support PDF (which might make it a reasonable e-book reader).
The demo showed the virtual keyboard, which I thought was a bit of a waste, especially since it was not clear that the display was touch-sensitive.
As for the hope that a company like WalMart would pick this up and sell it for $100 or less, I don't think that will happen. Most of the folks that shop at WalMart are not techies, and in its present form, this is a netbook only a techie would put up with. It's certainly not the iPad-killer, even though I personally would not buy an iPad (or Kindle, or any other platform that allows the vendor to "repossess" content).
I suppose there are ways to hide the transaction, but if somebody wanted to catch these thieves, couldn't they just follow the money?
I do hope they are caught. I have a Tmo account.
The only thing worse than lie detector technology that doesn't work reliably, is lie detector technology that *does* work reliably. The only reason societies don't outlaw certain types of thought is that they are not detectable -- yet.
I would have copied the 9-track stuff if I could have... But I didn't have access to a 9-track when I needed it. And the 5.25-in HD floppies, well, I thought I had save a drive that would read them, but when I tried to install it in my system last year, it wasn't recognized. So yes, I know that the answer is to copy stuff to the new formats. It just isn't always that easy.
And how long before we can't read it anymore because the technology has crumbled to dust? I have 9-track tapes in my attic which I am reasonably certain are unreadable -- even if I could find a 9-track drive. Not to mention the HD 5.25-in floppies. Even my collection of 3.5-in disks is now gathering dust, and the last bunch of laptops I looked at don't even have those drives any more. You have to buy them as an add-on, and it's only a matter of time before they go the way of the 9-track.
There are plenty of superstitions to go around, starting with the one that causes the most misery -- the belief in a sky-spook(s). I am only slightly amused when god-believers look down their noses at UFO-believers, astrologers, graphologists, fortune-tellers/seers, and other such that have no grounding in reality. Superstition appears to me to be the basic state of humanity.
Don't thing that was the point. It' been a while since I watched any TV, but it seemed even back then that there was less than 4 minutes of actual content in a 30-minute segment, so compressing it to that point would not be all that remarkable.
You believe we should force everyone across the country to throw away their old cars and trucks, buy new ones with diesel engines, so that we can provide just slightly more fuel?
When gasoline is $8/gal, and algae biodiesel is $3-4/gal, nobody will be 'forced' to throw away old cars and trucks. The changeover will happen without any coercion at all.
That said, I'm hoping for the development of really good solar cells, and inexpensive and durable battery storage. Then OPEC can eat sand.
Pretty much anything fired from a rifle, including a.22LR, can penetrate most body armor. Body armor is generally only effective against handgun rounds (and a 9mm is a relatively anemic round, BTW;.357sig or.45 is generally better).
My first actual paying job was as a violinist. I played in a professional symphony during my senior year in high school.
Now, after nearly 30 years as a programmer, I'm getting to be pretty much "overqualified", so I'm returning to my original love of music. I've now got 19 students for private violin lessons, and I am selling violins and related accessories on the internet. When the inevitable layoff/H1-B replacement/outsourcing occurs, that's what I'll be doing full time.
When I tried to access my Orkut account on the morning of April 16th, I got an "Unable to Connect" message. I just assumed that they were having some temporary problems. When I couldn't login on Tuesday, I thought maybe the company had tightened down the firewall, so I tried later that evening from home with the same result. So I did a Google search to see if anything had been reported, and found a Wikipedia entry. Other than that, it seems very few people noticed this security problem.
From Wikipedia: "On and around April 17, 2007 secure (https) access to the orkut login server was no longer available. This may lead to compromise of orkut accounts and by extension google accounts as well as gmail accounts since the password for login is transmitted via cleartext."
Sure enough, the http login comes up (I had been using a shortcut to the secure login site). Note that the password used by Orkut is tied to your gmail account, so sending your login password via plaintext may compromise your other Google accounts. If you use Orkut, and you have signed in since April 16th, you should immediately change your gmail password, and avoid Orkut until they fix the secure login.
In The Sovereign Individual, James Dale Davidson and William Rees-Mogg make the case that governments as we currently know them are already obsolete, and the 'empire' known as the United States is in the process of dying.
While that seems a bit premature (plus, Davidson and Rees-Mogg have made prior predictions that have, at least not yet, come about), it can be argued that the inhabitants of the Roman Empire were not aware of its collapse until over a century after it ceased to have any effective control over most of its 'jurisdiction'. No one event can be pointed out as the pivot of the collapse, but we are seeing some parallels here and now -- including the modern equivalent of "bread and circuses" while trying to maintain military dominance of a crumbling empire.
Party squabbling and petty vendettas are merely symptomatic of the death throes of a government. I suspect the process is more or less inevitable (democracy is only possible until the citizens discover that they can vote themselves the proceeds of the treasury, and that has already happened here), but that doesn't mean that the powers that be will die quietly. The process is likely to be very painful for most of us.
1/ Find a country with lots of uranium.
2/ Invade in the name of freedom.
3/ Profit!
Obvious Leftist reference to Iraq/"Cheap Oil". Never seems to occur to Liberals that if all we wanted out of Iraq was the oil, it would have been more than an order of magnitude cheaper to just BUY it from them.
Looks like this article needs some proofreading (Russion?), in addition to a reasonableness check. I have never piloted an aircraft in which you could see to the rear. The only aircraft that I know of in which you can see to the rear are military fighters, and even then, the view is limited, and the pilot has rare occasion to look back. Well, actually, I take that back -- I've seen pictures of general aviation aircraft with 'bubble' canopies, but I've never actually seen one in person.
why do you assume that a hydrogen ICEs aren't feasible?
Depends on what you mean by 'feasible'. Sure, it can be done. However,
ICE's are less efficient than fool-cells, which magnifies the cost disadvantage. Converting electricity to hydrogen and back is already a way to more than double its cost. Converting electricity to hydrogen and then burning it is much worse.
Hydrogen easily diffuses through and rots most metals, meaning that a hydrogen ICE will need either materials that haven't been invented yet, or will have very high long-term maintenance costs.
Hydrogen, which is impossible to contain 100%, is one of the most potent ozone-destroying agents ever produced by man. If using hydrogen to power cars ever became widespread, you could just kiss the ozone layer goodbye. Hydrogen ICEs will leak even more than fool cells.
NOx production in any ICE will not be zero (unless you want to increase the cost even more by using pure O2 instead of air), so a catalytic converter will still be needed, so the requirement for platinum won't go away.
There is no scenario for the use of hydrogen to power a car that can't be replaced with something cheaper, safer, and greener.
Hydrogen makes wonderfully good rocket fuel, because the energy/weight is the most important factor in rocket fuel, outweighing other factors such as cost and safety.
Using hydrogen to power a car is insanely stupid.
There is no scenario for the use of hydrogen in a terrestrial vehicle that would not be rendered safer, cheaper, and less polluting by taking whatever source of energy used to manufacture hydrogen and directly applying it to move the car -- skipping the extremely wasteful hydrogen conversion/transport/storage processes. Electrons are much easier to produce, ship, store, and use than hydrogen. There are already LiON battery technologies that promise very rapid charge/discharge cycles with no thermal runaway, and over 9000 complete charge/discharge cycles. NiMH and Ni-Zn, while not quite as good in some ways as LiON, are still more viable than using hydrogen, whether by burning in an ICE, or in a fool-cell. And last time I checked, we are much closer to being able to build 50,000,000 EVs than we are to being able to build 50,000 fool-cell vehicles, because lithium (and nickel, and zinc) is far cheaper and more plentiful than platinum, which so far, is the only reasonably (?) effective catalyst for a fool-cell.
Hydrogen will only be the fuel of choice for two groups: Those who have more money than sense, and those who can freely spend other people's money. Those of us that have to spend our own money, and don't have enough to burn, will go for more efficient technologies, such as EV and bio-diesel. Unless we are coerced by the government.
Political Correctness makes lousy science, lousy economics, and even worse public policy.
Interesting canned response letter; although I've seen similar posted on the usenet email abuse lists.
However, the assertion that sending email should be free is questionable. First of all, email is NOT free anyway -- it ALWAYS arrives postage-due, i.e., the recipient pays the majority of all cost either directly or indirectly for all email. That is the ONLY reason that spam exists in the first place. The marginal cost of sending spam is very nearly zero, so even a four-sigma sucker rate is profitable. And recent headlines indicate that 419 "advance fee" scams are still lucrative. As are "pump-and-dump" scams.
As unpopular as the idea of email postage is, it is the only effective way to stop spam. (Hunting down and killing spammers is not considered Politically Correct in most countries.) Another thing that might help some is an email system that does not allow forged addresses (which I would definitely like to see, especially since one of my business email addresses was joe-jobbed into uselessness).
I can't remember where I read it, but someone once said that the best evidence that time travel into the past isn't possible is the sheer lack of tourists from the future.
If time travel were possible, causality would still have inherent massive negative feedback (i.e., self-healing) in the loop. IOW, if you made a change in the past that altered the future, you might not even exist in the altered future, rendering that change undone (or un-doable?). This might render time-tourists undetectable, because they would not be able to make any detectable changes.
You do not have a 'duty' to vote. It is a *privilege*. If you don't know who you want to vote for, you should stay home and let me run your government for you.
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Quite an interesting device. I might even want one myself, but only if it gets support for YouTube. I didn't see any mention of how much storage it comes with, but I would hope that it at least comes with a couple of USB ports and an SD card slot -- and isn't hampered by the limitations of built-in storage like the G1. I would also hope that it would support PDF (which might make it a reasonable e-book reader).
The demo showed the virtual keyboard, which I thought was a bit of a waste, especially since it was not clear that the display was touch-sensitive.
As for the hope that a company like WalMart would pick this up and sell it for $100 or less, I don't think that will happen. Most of the folks that shop at WalMart are not techies, and in its present form, this is a netbook only a techie would put up with. It's certainly not the iPad-killer, even though I personally would not buy an iPad (or Kindle, or any other platform that allows the vendor to "repossess" content).
I had an epiphany about the cost of healthcare about 20 years ago, which I wrote about here
I suppose there are ways to hide the transaction, but if somebody wanted to catch these thieves, couldn't they just follow the money? I do hope they are caught. I have a Tmo account.
"Are you as awesome as your resume paints you to be?" Oh, much more so :)
The only thing worse than lie detector technology that doesn't work reliably, is lie detector technology that *does* work reliably. The only reason societies don't outlaw certain types of thought is that they are not detectable -- yet.
I would have copied the 9-track stuff if I could have... But I didn't have access to a 9-track when I needed it. And the 5.25-in HD floppies, well, I thought I had save a drive that would read them, but when I tried to install it in my system last year, it wasn't recognized. So yes, I know that the answer is to copy stuff to the new formats. It just isn't always that easy.
How permanent is this storage?
And how long before we can't read it anymore because the technology has crumbled to dust? I have 9-track tapes in my attic which I am reasonably certain are unreadable -- even if I could find a 9-track drive. Not to mention the HD 5.25-in floppies. Even my collection of 3.5-in disks is now gathering dust, and the last bunch of laptops I looked at don't even have those drives any more. You have to buy them as an add-on, and it's only a matter of time before they go the way of the 9-track.
Forgot to mention -- I was born in Roswell, NM ;)
There are plenty of superstitions to go around, starting with the one that causes the most misery -- the belief in a sky-spook(s). I am only slightly amused when god-believers look down their noses at UFO-believers, astrologers, graphologists, fortune-tellers/seers, and other such that have no grounding in reality. Superstition appears to me to be the basic state of humanity.
Don't thing that was the point. It' been a while since I watched any TV, but it seemed even back then that there was less than 4 minutes of actual content in a 30-minute segment, so compressing it to that point would not be all that remarkable.
You believe we should force everyone across the country to throw away their old cars and trucks, buy new ones with diesel engines, so that we can provide just slightly more fuel?
When gasoline is $8/gal, and algae biodiesel is $3-4/gal, nobody will be 'forced' to throw away old cars and trucks. The changeover will happen without any coercion at all.
That said, I'm hoping for the development of really good solar cells, and inexpensive and durable battery storage. Then OPEC can eat sand.
If your religion requires the use of force, then its message must not be very compelling.
Pretty much anything fired from a rifle, including a .22LR, can penetrate most body armor. Body armor is generally only effective against handgun rounds (and a 9mm is a relatively anemic round, BTW; .357sig or .45 is generally better).
My first actual paying job was as a violinist. I played in a professional symphony during my senior year in high school.
Now, after nearly 30 years as a programmer, I'm getting to be pretty much "overqualified", so I'm returning to my original love of music. I've now got 19 students for private violin lessons, and I am selling violins and related accessories on the internet. When the inevitable layoff/H1-B replacement/outsourcing occurs, that's what I'll be doing full time.
When I tried to access my Orkut account on the morning of April 16th, I got an "Unable to Connect" message. I just assumed that they were having some temporary problems. When I couldn't login on Tuesday, I thought maybe the company had tightened down the firewall, so I tried later that evening from home with the same result. So I did a Google search to see if anything had been reported, and found a Wikipedia entry. Other than that, it seems very few people noticed this security problem.
From Wikipedia: "On and around April 17, 2007 secure (https) access to the orkut login server was no longer available. This may lead to compromise of orkut accounts and by extension google accounts as well as gmail accounts since the password for login is transmitted via cleartext."
Sure enough, the http login comes up (I had been using a shortcut to the secure login site). Note that the password used by Orkut is tied to your gmail account, so sending your login password via plaintext may compromise your other Google accounts. If you use Orkut, and you have signed in since April 16th, you should immediately change your gmail password, and avoid Orkut until they fix the secure login.
In The Sovereign Individual, James Dale Davidson and William Rees-Mogg make the case that governments as we currently know them are already obsolete, and the 'empire' known as the United States is in the process of dying.
While that seems a bit premature (plus, Davidson and Rees-Mogg have made prior predictions that have, at least not yet, come about), it can be argued that the inhabitants of the Roman Empire were not aware of its collapse until over a century after it ceased to have any effective control over most of its 'jurisdiction'. No one event can be pointed out as the pivot of the collapse, but we are seeing some parallels here and now -- including the modern equivalent of "bread and circuses" while trying to maintain military dominance of a crumbling empire.
Party squabbling and petty vendettas are merely symptomatic of the death throes of a government. I suspect the process is more or less inevitable (democracy is only possible until the citizens discover that they can vote themselves the proceeds of the treasury, and that has already happened here), but that doesn't mean that the powers that be will die quietly. The process is likely to be very painful for most of us.
2/ Invade in the name of freedom.
3/ Profit!
Obvious Leftist reference to Iraq/"Cheap Oil". Never seems to occur to Liberals that if all we wanted out of Iraq was the oil, it would have been more than an order of magnitude cheaper to just BUY it from them.
Looks like this article needs some proofreading (Russion?), in addition to a reasonableness check. I have never piloted an aircraft in which you could see to the rear. The only aircraft that I know of in which you can see to the rear are military fighters, and even then, the view is limited, and the pilot has rare occasion to look back. Well, actually, I take that back -- I've seen pictures of general aviation aircraft with 'bubble' canopies, but I've never actually seen one in person.
Depends on what you mean by 'feasible'. Sure, it can be done. However,
- ICE's are less efficient than fool-cells, which magnifies the cost disadvantage. Converting electricity to hydrogen and back is already a way to more than double its cost. Converting electricity to hydrogen and then burning it is much worse.
- Hydrogen easily diffuses through and rots most metals, meaning that a hydrogen ICE will need either materials that haven't been invented yet, or will have very high long-term maintenance costs.
- Hydrogen, which is impossible to contain 100%, is one of the most potent ozone-destroying agents ever produced by man. If using hydrogen to power cars ever became widespread, you could just kiss the ozone layer goodbye. Hydrogen ICEs will leak even more than fool cells.
- NOx production in any ICE will not be zero (unless you want to increase the cost even more by using pure O2 instead of air), so a catalytic converter will still be needed, so the requirement for platinum won't go away.
There is no scenario for the use of hydrogen to power a car that can't be replaced with something cheaper, safer, and greener.Using hydrogen to power a car is insanely stupid.
There is no scenario for the use of hydrogen in a terrestrial vehicle that would not be rendered safer, cheaper, and less polluting by taking whatever source of energy used to manufacture hydrogen and directly applying it to move the car -- skipping the extremely wasteful hydrogen conversion/transport/storage processes. Electrons are much easier to produce, ship, store, and use than hydrogen. There are already LiON battery technologies that promise very rapid charge/discharge cycles with no thermal runaway, and over 9000 complete charge/discharge cycles. NiMH and Ni-Zn, while not quite as good in some ways as LiON, are still more viable than using hydrogen, whether by burning in an ICE, or in a fool-cell. And last time I checked, we are much closer to being able to build 50,000,000 EVs than we are to being able to build 50,000 fool-cell vehicles, because lithium (and nickel, and zinc) is far cheaper and more plentiful than platinum, which so far, is the only reasonably (?) effective catalyst for a fool-cell.
Hydrogen will only be the fuel of choice for two groups: Those who have more money than sense, and those who can freely spend other people's money. Those of us that have to spend our own money, and don't have enough to burn, will go for more efficient technologies, such as EV and bio-diesel. Unless we are coerced by the government.
Political Correctness makes lousy science, lousy economics, and even worse public policy.
Interesting canned response letter; although I've seen similar posted on the usenet email abuse lists.
However, the assertion that sending email should be free is questionable. First of all, email is NOT free anyway -- it ALWAYS arrives postage-due, i.e., the recipient pays the majority of all cost either directly or indirectly for all email. That is the ONLY reason that spam exists in the first place. The marginal cost of sending spam is very nearly zero, so even a four-sigma sucker rate is profitable. And recent headlines indicate that 419 "advance fee" scams are still lucrative. As are "pump-and-dump" scams.
As unpopular as the idea of email postage is, it is the only effective way to stop spam. (Hunting down and killing spammers is not considered Politically Correct in most countries.) Another thing that might help some is an email system that does not allow forged addresses (which I would definitely like to see, especially since one of my business email addresses was joe-jobbed into uselessness).
I can't remember where I read it, but someone once said that the best evidence that time travel into the past isn't possible is the sheer lack of tourists from the future.
If time travel were possible, causality would still have inherent massive negative feedback (i.e., self-healing) in the loop. IOW, if you made a change in the past that altered the future, you might not even exist in the altered future, rendering that change undone (or un-doable?). This might render time-tourists undetectable, because they would not be able to make any detectable changes.
Ouch, that made my brain hurt.
You do not have a 'duty' to vote. It is a *privilege*. If you don't know who you want to vote for, you should stay home and let me run your government for you.
I'm a Texas Certified Concealed Handgun License instructor.
You don't think click fraud is a problem? Check out http://www.clickmonkeys.com/
:)
They have a variety of interesting 'services', including one where you can "Google Bomb Your Competition!"
This sort of thing has successfully prevented me from even considering adwords or adsense. I get enough traffic from posting on blogs and slashdot