I can give you 38,588 reasons why safety is the most important thing. That's the number of people killed in traffic accidents in 2006 (latest year available). That's about one 9/11 per month. And that's been the case for decades!
We lose about as many people per year as died in Vietnam over ten years (U.S. military fatalities, that is). We get so worked up about 4000 U.S. fatalities in Iraq, while approximately that many people die every five or six weeks from car accidents--preventable fatalities--and no one seems to be even interested in talking about it.
If you offered me a free car that gets 50 miles per gallon or a $50,000 car that would save my wife and daughter from being killed--I don't even have to think about that choice. I'll gladly go into debt to protect my loved ones and myself from harm. Gasoline is just a frucking liquid in the ground. My family is priceless.
Now having said that, I believe the choice you presented is not mutually exclusive. We can definitely ditch fossil fuels eventually, in fact rather soon, if we move to more electric vehicles, solar/wind/nuclear to power them, plus use some handy inventions like sidewalks and bicycles as a supplement to the car. And the added value of walking or biking is that you are less likely to die, assuming you can mostly use bike lanes.
Absolutely correct; it's not like the elderly are the only people who have accidents. In fact, teens have about as high a death rate as the elderly from traffic accidents, probably because teens' recklessness is comparable to seniors' physiological limitations, mediated by seniors' tendency to drive less as they age (see this link for some statistics).
We have enough technology now to really reduce motor vehicle fatalities, yet we haven't implemented many of them. Today, every car should have a collision avoidance system that kicks in when a collision is likely. For example, lots of crashes happen on high speed roads when people change lanes without looking. So why not have the car warn you--for a few hundred dollars you could have these little laser thingies that would detect approaching vehicles from several angles, and squawk at you when you're about to do something stupid.
Another feature might be a slow-down signal that your car sends out to cars behind you in the event that you suddenly stop, like to avoid a deer or another accident. This might reduce pile-ups on the highway.
When some idiot is running a red light and is about to cream you side-on, you are not going to have an engine in front of you to absorb much of the impact, just some reinforced side panels and maybe a side airbag or two. That's not going to be of much help if they're going 60 or more. But if you had some explosive collision absorbers in the side of the car, it might bounce some of the force away. Also, the drunk who is coming at you should have an emergency braking system that kicks in to prevent him killing you (and maybe himself). Lots of people hit trees and this would help with that problem as well.
This is just the tip of the iceberg. I'm no automotive engineer and surely the big brains in Detroit, Berlin, and Tokyo can come up with even better and more practical ideas to make traffic fatalities history. GM's windscreen concept is a great start and at the very least it will stimulate some discussion as Joe Public begins to dimly perceive how technology could save lives.
Palm management has not been innovative since Jeff Hawkins and Donna Dubinsky left to form Handspring. The bean counters they left behind just milked the cash cow until they figured out that Handspring was about to eclipse them. So they bought Handspring from the obliging Jeff and Donna and brought them back on board (hundreds of millions of dollars richer).
Jeff, apparently having exhausted his innovative ideas after perfecting the Treo, went and wasted millions of dollars developing a questionable gadget that no one asked for--the Foleo, a laptop-like appendage that helps augment the abilities of a smartphone.
That brings us up to the present. We have a company with one product. It's pretty much milked that product dry. They have failed to update the operating system in any significant way, and the battery life of their handhelds has shrunk from the legendary Palm III era when disposables kept it running for 6-8 weeks. Now you're lucky to get through an 8 hour day without needing to recharge.
I still use my Tungsten T3. I have many useful apps on it--Oxford English dictionary, medical dictionaries, medical atlas, guitar tuner, image display, voice memo recorder, large LCD. Nothing else on the market provides the same functionality except maybe an iPaq or its ilk, which involves repurchasing all the apps and losing some apps forever. Why bother? The thing works.
When this one dies, I'll buy another T3 or perhaps a Tx on ebay. It would be nice if Palm continued to be innovative, but that's too much to ask. Jeff had a great idea 15 years ago, and it's helped change the world. But innovation marches on. I suppose eventually I'll get a nice new 80 gig iPhone or an 80 gig gPhone running linux. But for now, my trusty Palm just keeps on running, and will probably continue long after the company is gone.
The U.S. makes a lot of money off doing business with China, something like $386 billion in 2007. Retailers like Walmart and Target, manufacturers of every description, and shippers all have a huge stake in U.S.-China trade, even though China enjoys a growing surplus with the U.S.
Under these circumstances, it's not surprising that some mischievous hacking of Congressional computers is overlooked by the people who are supposed to care about such things. Where it gets more serious is the hacking of Pentagon systems that seems to be originating from sites in China.
China's government today is trying to juggle a growing nationalism among younger Chinese, a nationalism that is not friendly toward the West and the U.S. in particular, despite our close economic ties. They have fostered a hostile attitude toward the U.S. through years of propaganda, and this, too, the Americans have ignored in the interests of making money.
It will be interesting to see what happens come the day that China's huge internal market is affluent enough and their technology level high enough that they no longer need the U.S. as either a customer or investor. But in the meantime, it would be advisable for these Congressmen and other officials like Carlos Gutierrez (whose laptop was compromised during a trip to Beijing) to switch away from easily hacked systems like Microsoft Windows, and maybe keep their systems offline or only on a secured and firewalled intranet.
I also think that the U.S. government should not be using home computers like Dells running Windows. The hardware components are largely manufactured in China these days and who knows what evil back doors might be implanted in ROMs, akin to the compromised printers that were shipped to Iraq from the U.S. in the pre-Gulf War days.
Good point, but what do the train riders do once they get there? LA and Vegas are car cities with scant public transportation. It's not enough just to have the inter-city leg. You need to have feeder buses or trolleys at each end, or short term car rentals, or... I don't know.
Anyway, hopefully they'll get this thing off the ground and generate some me-too reactions from some of the other busy routes around the country. Boston-to-New York comes to mind, and Chicago-to-anywhere (St. Louis, Detroit, Des Moines).
Eventually there should be a national high speed rail alternative to air travel, and we will see less airport congestion and, perhaps, a more humble attitude on the part of the airlines when they have some real competition for a change.
But "should" does not translate into "will", unfortunately. The money and the political initiative just aren't there at this time.
You can already import and export to OpenOffice from Google Docs. What more do we really need? Furthermore, I doubt that Google would gain much from taking sides. They are the premier provider of web services and that is where they should stay. Desktop applications are the past, web services are the future. Microsoft Office as a desktop application will eventually fade, too.
Now, if Google wanted to give OOo a nice grant, that would be most welcome:)
Criminals probably aren't such a good idea, since if they're on death row already, they're probably not the kind of people you can trust.
I've often thought that offering the chance of a "one way trip" to suitably qualified people would still bring in a lot of volunteers. Some might be perfectly healthy and fine, but I expect a lot of the volunteers would be people who don't really expect to be alive much longer anyway.
Right now, personally, I wouldn't take it... but if, for example, I found out tomorrow that I have a terminal disease with only 5 years to live TOPS (but sufficiently close to 100% chance of survival within 3 years), I'd happily take a research job on Mars to live out the end of my days doing research in the most amazingly DIFFERENT place that I can imagine.
The contract could even say that when someone is too sick to work, you simply chuck them out the airlock (what's the point in prolonging their life at that point anyway)
That's a noble sacrifice, but suppose that they develop a cure within five years, and you're stuck up there on a frozen dustball with no way to come back and recover?
Not unnecessarily. We can assume that a candidate will chose subordinates who are in tune with his or her ideals. They might not understand the specifics of tech policy, but a democrat is likely to choose someone who is pro civil-liberties, while a republican is likely to go more pragmatic. They won't drive the policy, but the tone of their administration will show through in technology issues. Interesting point. However, note that it was a Democratic president who signed the DMCA into law in 1998. Clinton was fairly tech savvy as presidents go, yet his staff clearly did not evaluate the DMCA deeply and critically enough.
I suspect that Obama's people might be more internet savvy than McCain's, but both parties have finally recognized the power of the internet and probably the tech people they hire will be up to speed.
Ironically, it was probably Republican policy that drove the tech boom of the 1980s and 1990s. Reagan's military buildup really boosted the tech sector. Although, under Carter the microcomputers took off, so it's a mixed bag I suppose.
Libraries are good. Also, used bookstores, the kind where they can afford to stuff the stacks with old books, not just the selective boutiques that need to pay high rents and wages and can't afford to have lots of stuff. I found about 20 old Clifford Simak novels in the basement of this wonderful old (and now closed) used bookstore in Arlington, Mass. Classic and great stuff, cheap, and out of print.
Also, join forces with a fellow science fiction lover. Reviews and fancy cover art are no substitute for the impressions you can get from a trusted friend. A buddy and I used to trade books and it was so wonderful to discuss the stories, their strengths and weaknesses, the author's visions and values.
I think what the OP wants is something along the lines of the Quality Paperback Book Club, which I used to belong to many years ago. They attempted to live up to their name by vetting the books and providing sophisticated reviews, and the books were pretty good, but after a while it got tedious sending the stupid form back every two weeks. New bookstores that have decent sci-fi collections are pretty good, too; you can browse the books before buying.
One problem is that books are becoming a niche item in the U.S. (don't know about Europe). People read on the Web, or watch multimedia/video/TV, and the reading of old fashioned books is getting to be almost a lost art form. Bookstores are dropping away, and browsing at Amazon.com is just not the same. Anyway, I'm glad when someone asks this kind of question because occasionally you can get some useful information. Not that I have enough time to read...:(
No, they just used the same sort of fraud you're perpetrating right now.
Christ, man, take a deep breath. You're elevating the use of a numbering base to a crime. Hardly a credible basis for a lawsuit in a sane society. We're going to sue you for representing the size of your hard disk as a power of 2 rather than a base 10 quantity--seriously? What part of gigabyte do you not understand? This brings to mind that lawsuit against Apple a few years ago over, what, the number of color bits in their display, because they used interpolation or something?
This kind of lawsuit has nothing to do with the consumers, who generally neither know nor care about such trivia, and everything to do with some crafty lawyers who sense an opportunity to make a quick buck. Your attempt at a rationalization of the plaintiff's point of view merely demonstrates that you are not an impartial observer and that you have little regard for the impact of such frivolous suits on the industry and on society.
In a lawsuit-happy nation, where every little thing becomes an actionable offense against someone out there, we are quickly devolving into an overly cautious, fearful, politically correct stodginess that will melt down in the face of less litigious groups like the Chinese and Japanese. You can take that to the bank, and if you don't like it, sue me!
precisely. They did NOT misrepresent the storage size; in fact, they represented it very precisely.
Presumably the trial will take place in West Texas, where similar litigation almost always takes place and goes in favor of the plaintiff, like that bogus lawsuit against Toshiba a few years back.
I don't understand why the RIAA is still at it. Their mission should be to increase the market for their members' goods and services, not to litigate against thousands of customers over a period of many years.
If I were them I would be promoting sub-$10 DVDs and sub-$6 CDs and items that add value to movie packages--pictures, 2nd disks packed with extras, subscriptions, etc. In fact they should be sending free promos to the young people who are prominent bloggers and promoters of the music.
Surely they realize that most college students aren't about to spend $18-$25 on new DVD movies, so why not cater to this market with a reduced cost product rather than sue the hell out of them for sharing media?
When I was in college it was all about sharing music--our roommates had a record we liked, so we taped it--we didn't run out to the store and spend $8 that I didn't have in order to possess a legal copy. We taped albums off the radio, too. I don't think for a minute that this hurt the music industry; it spread the music around and generated more enthusiasm for the artists. We went to the concerts and we got excited when new records came out. The music was being played, people were singing it, what more could they ask?
These days it's like this dark, evil robotic machine floating overhead, waiting to zap anyone who gets out of line. So foolish. I miss the old days.
God, is this Darl McBride still alive and kicking? You'd think he would have found another job by now. I can't believe that after having essentially bankrupted his company with these ruinous lawsuits, he continues to attract naive investors who keep propping him up. It's like that guy who's running Zimbabwe into the ground--just go already.
Linux is NOT Unix, there's never been shown to be any shared code, and SCO lost the battle years ago. It seems that once the lawyers took over SCO, it became just a litigation machine and lost whatever technological brainpower it once had. This illustrates why most lawyers should NOT be involved in running companies because their natural orientation is not toward creating products but rather toward, well, practicing law, which usually translates into litigation.
One man's nonsense is another man's dream. Why dismiss something that's considered technically feasible? NASA scientists are
taking it seriously, too.
Once this structure has been built, and a few satellites loaded into orbit, it will begin to make sense even to the extreme skeptics. It would be nearly silent in operation, safer than riding a missile into orbit, and much cheaper once the initial construction cost is covered.
The materials are almost there; as I understand it, what is lacking at present is a way to mass manufacture the carbon nanotube ribbons that will be needed. Once this is accomplished, and the initial elevator flung up and its value proven, larger and more powerful elevators will follow as every major nation rushes to get in on the action. The dream of cheap Earth-to-orbit transport will have been achieved and robotic mining equipment will be sent to the Moon and the asteroids.
Probably this new age will take several decades to dawn (and it may well be other countries than the U.S. that dominate) but someone will do it.
OT, but I was gonna vote for Obama... until all that stuff about him being in cahoots with that pastor for 20 years came out. Looks like I'm gonna *shudder* vote for Hillary.:-( I want McCain. He's the only one who's proven his courage and loyalty under fire. The others are just talking heads. Also, I didn't like the way Obama deflected the pastor criticism by playing the race card. I wish he had just come clean and apologized for associating with that idiot. If McCain had associated with a minister who was a white supremacist and KKK supporter, he would have been kicked out, just like that. But since O is mixed race, he gets to be all pious and defensive about it; makes me sick.
Let the flame wars begin!
I love violence. I love free speech. Pretty much everything that's 'dangerous to the mental health of out youth' kicks ass. But if the film, say, encourages people to go out and punch a muslim, then yes, it should be banned.
Surely you can appreciate that some stuff should be banned. (Kiddie porn?)
If you can get your head around that, then you must realise that in some, limited instances, the right to offend is superseded by the right not to be harmed. How can I decide whether it's right to ban the film if I'm not allowed to see it? I am an adult and I reserve the right to self-censor. I don't need you or anyone else telling me what is good for me to watch, or what may cause me to "go out and punch a muslim [sic]".
This is not the "right not to be harmed". This is pure and arbitrary censorship. In some Muslim countries, the most vicious anti-Semitic and anti-Christian propaganda is freely broadcast for all to enjoy. See MEMRI for translations of this charming material that would have made Hitler's propagandists proud (for its viciousness if not its sophistication).
Muslims pretend to be offended by the slightest denigration of their culture and religion while they reserve the right to totally trash talk all other religions and cultures. Then weak-kneed liberals in the West come along to support them in their outrage.
I say, let the movie be shown and judged on its own merits, and ban internet censorship before it gets out of hand.
Precisely. This is non-news. Wifi can be offered for free. Cell phone broadband costs money, by definition, and cannot be offered in a coffeehouse (that I know of). Every few months this kind of story comes along and I am starting to wonder whether they are planted by the mobile phone carriers to prepare us for the demise of wireless networking and the inevitable domination of costly per-minute or per-month broadband plans on cell phones.
Contradictory to TFA, T-Mobile has been offering phones that can switch to wifi VOIP service seamlessly. When you enter an open hotspot, your phone automatically switches to the wifi carrier and you thus save on daytime minutes. This is much more the direction we should be going. Let the customer have more freedom of choice and maximize the use of appropriate networking resources instead of forcing us to always hew to some particular system.
In various places of work, my phone has not worked well, but with wifi it would have been fine. This is the wave of the future and not cell phone broadband, in my opinion.
Shame, it sounds like he was making a valuable contribution to the discussion on patent reform. I read his blog but I still don't understand why he outed himself. What could this anonymous person have done to him that could possibly be "unpleasant"?
Someone please explain:(
I hope we can get rid of patent trolls soon, they really annoy me!
We have got to put an end to the practice of patenting "business process" before it chokes the economy to death. I think the vast 90% majority of the populace agrees that it's idiotic to grant patents for simple, stupid things like this. So let's write our congress critters and demand a change to the law.
It's not just that patent trolls can now extort exorbitant amounts of money from innocent companies going about what used to be called "doing things" and now is called "violating patents". It has also put a damper on innovation, and we are seeing American industrialists becoming timid and reluctant to market incrementally improved products, just as our Asian competitors are becoming predominant in nearly every sector through incremental improvement to design and function.
At this rate, we're going to become like the Europeans, muddling along and watching the world pass them by technologically while they debate the latest politically correct labor laws such as whether to go to a 34 hour work week.
If this sounds overly negative, try coming up with an original invention and trying to sift through the existing process patents. It's next to impossible to avoid violating some process patent or other, usually something stupid like "A method for pushing a button that causes a light bulb to flash..." To compound the problem we now have companies practicing defensive patenting (I wonder how long it will be before someone patents defensive patenting) simply to keep these trolls off their back.
I wonder that none of the presidential candidates have addressed this issue. Obama's website pays some lip service:
Reform the Patent System: A system that produces timely, high-quality patents is essential for global competitiveness in the 21st century. By improving predictability and clarity in our patent system, we will help foster an environment that encourages innovation. Giving the Patent and Trademark Office (PTO) the resources to improve patent quality and opening up the patent process to citizen review will reduce the uncertainty and wasteful litigation that is currently a significant drag on innovation. With better informational resources, the Patent and Trademark Office could offer patent applicants who know they have significant inventions the option of a rigorous and public peer review that would produce a "gold-plated" patent much less vulnerable to court challenge. Where dubious patents are being asserted, the PTO could conduct low-cost, timely administrative proceedings to determine patent validity. As president, Barack Obama will ensure that our patent laws protect legitimate rights while not stifling innovation and collaboration.
Unfortunately, Obama does not address the real problem, which is that business process and methods have been made too easily patentable. Hillary's website does not even mention patents as far as I can tell, though to her credit she does talk a lot about increasing basic science research. The word "patent" is not found on John McCain's website. As for Ron Paul, apparently he doesn't know about the issue.
The air car may herald a whole new era in energy currency. Far from being a specialized and refined product extracted from the ground at great cost, air is freely available, and the stored potential energy of the vehicle is created by a pump. We will start to look at stored energy as the currency rather than a high energy liquid like gasoline.
Imagine a barter system in the future where we might have to get on an exercycle type of machine to pump up an engine. The local diner might charge either $10 for a meal or one hour on the pump. Homeless and working poor could thus eat for the cost of an hour's exercise.
If you run out of gas in the middle of nowhere, just get out the pump from the accessory compartment in the trunk, hook it up, and start pedalling. After 3-4 hours of fat burning cardiovascular workout, you will have enough stored energy to move your car 20 miles down the road to the service station. And as an added bonus, you'll be in fantastic shape!
Buildings could hook up pumps to revolving doors as a way to "steal" energy to power their lighting systems, etc. Even the floors might consist of pistons hidden under the carpet that are compressed as you walk on them. Walking down a hall would feel like climbing a stair, something the health newsletters advise us to do more often anyway.
Of course, people in windy areas would probably want to use windmills to directly pump up our cars overnight.
The title of my post: "It's nice to see good news from Virginia Tech"
All I was trying to say is that for those of us out here in the rest of the country, the thing that put VT on the map was the mass killings. It's a sad association, just as the name Columbine has come to be associated with a similar unfortunate event. I'm sorry if you feel that's condescending because it certainly was not meant that way.
Your sensitivity actually implies that for you, the massacre is very much at the top of your agenda and you are on some sort of mission to erase it from people's consciousness and replace it with a recognition of the school's academic achievements. Well guess what, that's precisely my point.
I'm sure VT is a fine school and that's my basic point--look at this brilliant idea this student came up with (its practicality has been questioned by others in this forum, but I would definitely buy one). Anyway... have a nice day.:)
After the massacre last year, Virginia Tech became just another descriptor for massacre, like Columbine or Kent State. Now along comes this beautiful, brilliant invention that captures the imagination. It made my day to read this report, and like probably 90% of the people who read it, I want one! Maybe the student can set up a company, become rich, and perhaps he'll dedicate some fraction of the proceeds to the families of those slain. I'd pay a few dollars extra for that, no problem.
Along these lines, maybe someone can invent a way to power the porch light from opening and closing the door. There's probably a hundred ways we can harness excess energy in our homes--opening and closing cabinets, exercising on a treadmill or elliptical, etc. Hook a gizmo up to the TV so that you have to lift 25 pounds to pay for 30 minutes of viewing--earn your right to be a couch potato:)
I've spend thousands of dollars at Amazon over the past eleven years. One time I received a faulty Brother printer which Amazon promptly replaced, no questions asked, the new one sent in advance, trusting me to return the old one once I received the prepaid shipping sticker. (Brother's customer support was completely useless, which is why I'll never buy Brother again, but that's another story.)
Not once have I ever experienced a pricing problem or other anomaly that might mar my buying experience. I have also taken advantage of Amo's easy approach to selling my stuff back to others and have unloaded many textbooks and DVDs over the years.
In short, Amazon for me represents the most successful of the new online retailers; they have won my trust and admiration, no easy feat, and so I find this Slashdot story to be questionable at best. I am willing to believe that such a mistake occurred, but without any links or independent confirmation of the accusations it really sounds more like a disgruntled customer out to hurt them as much as possible. Given my own experience and that of many friends and associates over the years I would be surprised if this were anything more than a blip.
So what's your point? Most companies start by buying some existing work; very few invent something completely new. Dell didn't invent the PC, nor did Compaq, nor did HP. Apple didn't invent the windowing GUI.
Microsoft is smart. They did not get where they are by being idiots. If they think Yahoo is worth $46B to them, I'm inclined to believe it. On the other hand, it might be that Google has been mulling an investment in Yahoo and Mr Softy just wanted to prevent that scary thing from happening.
It makes me sad that YHOO might cease to exist. To me, Yahoo represents the internet revolution. For ten years I have been using Yahoo's email, stock quotes, news, weather, sports, shopping, maps, and directories on a daily basis. I have bought and sold Yahoo stock when it was in the $300's and more recently when it was in the teens. I used to post on Yahoo's news comment boards before they shut them down, mainly to counter the many idiots I saw there. To me, Yahoo has always been a safe port in a storm.
When Microsoft takes over Yahoo, assuming the antitrust authorities let this happen (doubtful, actually), it will be a sad day for the internet. The old guard will have won out over the pure internet players. It will be Google against MS at that point. I guess I'll just spend even more time on Google from then on.
Slashdot Mirror
I can give you 38,588 reasons why safety is the most important thing. That's the number of people killed in traffic accidents in 2006 (latest year available). That's about one 9/11 per month. And that's been the case for decades!
We lose about as many people per year as died in Vietnam over ten years (U.S. military fatalities, that is). We get so worked up about 4000 U.S. fatalities in Iraq, while approximately that many people die every five or six weeks from car accidents--preventable fatalities--and no one seems to be even interested in talking about it.
If you offered me a free car that gets 50 miles per gallon or a $50,000 car that would save my wife and daughter from being killed--I don't even have to think about that choice. I'll gladly go into debt to protect my loved ones and myself from harm. Gasoline is just a frucking liquid in the ground. My family is priceless.
Now having said that, I believe the choice you presented is not mutually exclusive. We can definitely ditch fossil fuels eventually, in fact rather soon, if we move to more electric vehicles, solar/wind/nuclear to power them, plus use some handy inventions like sidewalks and bicycles as a supplement to the car. And the added value of walking or biking is that you are less likely to die, assuming you can mostly use bike lanes.
Absolutely correct; it's not like the elderly are the only people who have accidents. In fact, teens have about as high a death rate as the elderly from traffic accidents, probably because teens' recklessness is comparable to seniors' physiological limitations, mediated by seniors' tendency to drive less as they age (see this link for some statistics).
We have enough technology now to really reduce motor vehicle fatalities, yet we haven't implemented many of them. Today, every car should have a collision avoidance system that kicks in when a collision is likely. For example, lots of crashes happen on high speed roads when people change lanes without looking. So why not have the car warn you--for a few hundred dollars you could have these little laser thingies that would detect approaching vehicles from several angles, and squawk at you when you're about to do something stupid.
Another feature might be a slow-down signal that your car sends out to cars behind you in the event that you suddenly stop, like to avoid a deer or another accident. This might reduce pile-ups on the highway.
When some idiot is running a red light and is about to cream you side-on, you are not going to have an engine in front of you to absorb much of the impact, just some reinforced side panels and maybe a side airbag or two. That's not going to be of much help if they're going 60 or more. But if you had some explosive collision absorbers in the side of the car, it might bounce some of the force away. Also, the drunk who is coming at you should have an emergency braking system that kicks in to prevent him killing you (and maybe himself). Lots of people hit trees and this would help with that problem as well.
This is just the tip of the iceberg. I'm no automotive engineer and surely the big brains in Detroit, Berlin, and Tokyo can come up with even better and more practical ideas to make traffic fatalities history. GM's windscreen concept is a great start and at the very least it will stimulate some discussion as Joe Public begins to dimly perceive how technology could save lives.
Palm management has not been innovative since Jeff Hawkins and Donna Dubinsky left to form Handspring. The bean counters they left behind just milked the cash cow until they figured out that Handspring was about to eclipse them. So they bought Handspring from the obliging Jeff and Donna and brought them back on board (hundreds of millions of dollars richer).
Jeff, apparently having exhausted his innovative ideas after perfecting the Treo, went and wasted millions of dollars developing a questionable gadget that no one asked for--the Foleo, a laptop-like appendage that helps augment the abilities of a smartphone.
That brings us up to the present. We have a company with one product. It's pretty much milked that product dry. They have failed to update the operating system in any significant way, and the battery life of their handhelds has shrunk from the legendary Palm III era when disposables kept it running for 6-8 weeks. Now you're lucky to get through an 8 hour day without needing to recharge.
I still use my Tungsten T3. I have many useful apps on it--Oxford English dictionary, medical dictionaries, medical atlas, guitar tuner, image display, voice memo recorder, large LCD. Nothing else on the market provides the same functionality except maybe an iPaq or its ilk, which involves repurchasing all the apps and losing some apps forever. Why bother? The thing works.
When this one dies, I'll buy another T3 or perhaps a Tx on ebay. It would be nice if Palm continued to be innovative, but that's too much to ask. Jeff had a great idea 15 years ago, and it's helped change the world. But innovation marches on. I suppose eventually I'll get a nice new 80 gig iPhone or an 80 gig gPhone running linux. But for now, my trusty Palm just keeps on running, and will probably continue long after the company is gone.
The U.S. makes a lot of money off doing business with China, something like $386 billion in 2007. Retailers like Walmart and Target, manufacturers of every description, and shippers all have a huge stake in U.S.-China trade, even though China enjoys a growing surplus with the U.S.
Under these circumstances, it's not surprising that some mischievous hacking of Congressional computers is overlooked by the people who are supposed to care about such things. Where it gets more serious is the hacking of Pentagon systems that seems to be originating from sites in China.
China's government today is trying to juggle a growing nationalism among younger Chinese, a nationalism that is not friendly toward the West and the U.S. in particular, despite our close economic ties. They have fostered a hostile attitude toward the U.S. through years of propaganda, and this, too, the Americans have ignored in the interests of making money.
It will be interesting to see what happens come the day that China's huge internal market is affluent enough and their technology level high enough that they no longer need the U.S. as either a customer or investor. But in the meantime, it would be advisable for these Congressmen and other officials like Carlos Gutierrez (whose laptop was compromised during a trip to Beijing) to switch away from easily hacked systems like Microsoft Windows, and maybe keep their systems offline or only on a secured and firewalled intranet.
I also think that the U.S. government should not be using home computers like Dells running Windows. The hardware components are largely manufactured in China these days and who knows what evil back doors might be implanted in ROMs, akin to the compromised printers that were shipped to Iraq from the U.S. in the pre-Gulf War days.
Good point, but what do the train riders do once they get there? LA and Vegas are car cities with scant public transportation. It's not enough just to have the inter-city leg. You need to have feeder buses or trolleys at each end, or short term car rentals, or... I don't know.
Anyway, hopefully they'll get this thing off the ground and generate some me-too reactions from some of the other busy routes around the country. Boston-to-New York comes to mind, and Chicago-to-anywhere (St. Louis, Detroit, Des Moines).
Eventually there should be a national high speed rail alternative to air travel, and we will see less airport congestion and, perhaps, a more humble attitude on the part of the airlines when they have some real competition for a change.
But "should" does not translate into "will", unfortunately. The money and the political initiative just aren't there at this time.
You can already import and export to OpenOffice from Google Docs. What more do we really need? Furthermore, I doubt that Google would gain much from taking sides. They are the premier provider of web services and that is where they should stay. Desktop applications are the past, web services are the future. Microsoft Office as a desktop application will eventually fade, too.
:)
Now, if Google wanted to give OOo a nice grant, that would be most welcome
Criminals probably aren't such a good idea, since if they're on death row already, they're probably not the kind of people you can trust.
I've often thought that offering the chance of a "one way trip" to suitably qualified people would still bring in a lot of volunteers. Some might be perfectly healthy and fine, but I expect a lot of the volunteers would be people who don't really expect to be alive much longer anyway.
Right now, personally, I wouldn't take it... but if, for example, I found out tomorrow that I have a terminal disease with only 5 years to live TOPS (but sufficiently close to 100% chance of survival within 3 years), I'd happily take a research job on Mars to live out the end of my days doing research in the most amazingly DIFFERENT place that I can imagine.
The contract could even say that when someone is too sick to work, you simply chuck them out the airlock (what's the point in prolonging their life at that point anyway)
That's a noble sacrifice, but suppose that they develop a cure within five years, and you're stuck up there on a frozen dustball with no way to come back and recover?I suspect that Obama's people might be more internet savvy than McCain's, but both parties have finally recognized the power of the internet and probably the tech people they hire will be up to speed.
Ironically, it was probably Republican policy that drove the tech boom of the 1980s and 1990s. Reagan's military buildup really boosted the tech sector. Although, under Carter the microcomputers took off, so it's a mixed bag I suppose.
Libraries are good. Also, used bookstores, the kind where they can afford to stuff the stacks with old books, not just the selective boutiques that need to pay high rents and wages and can't afford to have lots of stuff. I found about 20 old Clifford Simak novels in the basement of this wonderful old (and now closed) used bookstore in Arlington, Mass. Classic and great stuff, cheap, and out of print.
:(
Also, join forces with a fellow science fiction lover. Reviews and fancy cover art are no substitute for the impressions you can get from a trusted friend. A buddy and I used to trade books and it was so wonderful to discuss the stories, their strengths and weaknesses, the author's visions and values.
I think what the OP wants is something along the lines of the Quality Paperback Book Club, which I used to belong to many years ago. They attempted to live up to their name by vetting the books and providing sophisticated reviews, and the books were pretty good, but after a while it got tedious sending the stupid form back every two weeks. New bookstores that have decent sci-fi collections are pretty good, too; you can browse the books before buying.
One problem is that books are becoming a niche item in the U.S. (don't know about Europe). People read on the Web, or watch multimedia/video/TV, and the reading of old fashioned books is getting to be almost a lost art form. Bookstores are dropping away, and browsing at Amazon.com is just not the same. Anyway, I'm glad when someone asks this kind of question because occasionally you can get some useful information. Not that I have enough time to read...
No, they just used the same sort of fraud you're perpetrating right now.
Christ, man, take a deep breath. You're elevating the use of a numbering base to a crime. Hardly a credible basis for a lawsuit in a sane society. We're going to sue you for representing the size of your hard disk as a power of 2 rather than a base 10 quantity--seriously? What part of gigabyte do you not understand? This brings to mind that lawsuit against Apple a few years ago over, what, the number of color bits in their display, because they used interpolation or something?
This kind of lawsuit has nothing to do with the consumers, who generally neither know nor care about such trivia, and everything to do with some crafty lawyers who sense an opportunity to make a quick buck. Your attempt at a rationalization of the plaintiff's point of view merely demonstrates that you are not an impartial observer and that you have little regard for the impact of such frivolous suits on the industry and on society.
In a lawsuit-happy nation, where every little thing becomes an actionable offense against someone out there, we are quickly devolving into an overly cautious, fearful, politically correct stodginess that will melt down in the face of less litigious groups like the Chinese and Japanese. You can take that to the bank, and if you don't like it, sue me!
precisely. They did NOT misrepresent the storage size; in fact, they represented it very precisely.
Presumably the trial will take place in West Texas, where similar litigation almost always takes place and goes in favor of the plaintiff, like that bogus lawsuit against Toshiba a few years back.
I don't understand why the RIAA is still at it. Their mission should be to increase the market for their members' goods and services, not to litigate against thousands of customers over a period of many years.
If I were them I would be promoting sub-$10 DVDs and sub-$6 CDs and items that add value to movie packages--pictures, 2nd disks packed with extras, subscriptions, etc. In fact they should be sending free promos to the young people who are prominent bloggers and promoters of the music.
Surely they realize that most college students aren't about to spend $18-$25 on new DVD movies, so why not cater to this market with a reduced cost product rather than sue the hell out of them for sharing media?
When I was in college it was all about sharing music--our roommates had a record we liked, so we taped it--we didn't run out to the store and spend $8 that I didn't have in order to possess a legal copy. We taped albums off the radio, too. I don't think for a minute that this hurt the music industry; it spread the music around and generated more enthusiasm for the artists. We went to the concerts and we got excited when new records came out. The music was being played, people were singing it, what more could they ask?
These days it's like this dark, evil robotic machine floating overhead, waiting to zap anyone who gets out of line. So foolish. I miss the old days.
God, is this Darl McBride still alive and kicking? You'd think he would have found another job by now. I can't believe that after having essentially bankrupted his company with these ruinous lawsuits, he continues to attract naive investors who keep propping him up. It's like that guy who's running Zimbabwe into the ground--just go already.
Linux is NOT Unix, there's never been shown to be any shared code, and SCO lost the battle years ago. It seems that once the lawyers took over SCO, it became just a litigation machine and lost whatever technological brainpower it once had. This illustrates why most lawyers should NOT be involved in running companies because their natural orientation is not toward creating products but rather toward, well, practicing law, which usually translates into litigation.
If men were meant to fly, they'd have wings.
One man's nonsense is another man's dream. Why dismiss something that's considered technically feasible? NASA scientists are taking it seriously, too.
Once this structure has been built, and a few satellites loaded into orbit, it will begin to make sense even to the extreme skeptics. It would be nearly silent in operation, safer than riding a missile into orbit, and much cheaper once the initial construction cost is covered.
The materials are almost there; as I understand it, what is lacking at present is a way to mass manufacture the carbon nanotube ribbons that will be needed. Once this is accomplished, and the initial elevator flung up and its value proven, larger and more powerful elevators will follow as every major nation rushes to get in on the action. The dream of cheap Earth-to-orbit transport will have been achieved and robotic mining equipment will be sent to the Moon and the asteroids.
Probably this new age will take several decades to dawn (and it may well be other countries than the U.S. that dominate) but someone will do it.
This is not the "right not to be harmed". This is pure and arbitrary censorship. In some Muslim countries, the most vicious anti-Semitic and anti-Christian propaganda is freely broadcast for all to enjoy. See MEMRI for translations of this charming material that would have made Hitler's propagandists proud (for its viciousness if not its sophistication).
Muslims pretend to be offended by the slightest denigration of their culture and religion while they reserve the right to totally trash talk all other religions and cultures. Then weak-kneed liberals in the West come along to support them in their outrage.
I say, let the movie be shown and judged on its own merits, and ban internet censorship before it gets out of hand.
Precisely. This is non-news. Wifi can be offered for free. Cell phone broadband costs money, by definition, and cannot be offered in a coffeehouse (that I know of). Every few months this kind of story comes along and I am starting to wonder whether they are planted by the mobile phone carriers to prepare us for the demise of wireless networking and the inevitable domination of costly per-minute or per-month broadband plans on cell phones.
Contradictory to TFA, T-Mobile has been offering phones that can switch to wifi VOIP service seamlessly. When you enter an open hotspot, your phone automatically switches to the wifi carrier and you thus save on daytime minutes. This is much more the direction we should be going. Let the customer have more freedom of choice and maximize the use of appropriate networking resources instead of forcing us to always hew to some particular system.
In various places of work, my phone has not worked well, but with wifi it would have been fine. This is the wave of the future and not cell phone broadband, in my opinion.
Shame, it sounds like he was making a valuable contribution to the discussion on patent reform. I read his blog but I still don't understand why he outed himself. What could this anonymous person have done to him that could possibly be "unpleasant"?
:(
Someone please explain
I hope we can get rid of patent trolls soon, they really annoy me!
Flamebait, eh? I wonder what this particular moderator's views on patent reform are.
It's not just that patent trolls can now extort exorbitant amounts of money from innocent companies going about what used to be called "doing things" and now is called "violating patents". It has also put a damper on innovation, and we are seeing American industrialists becoming timid and reluctant to market incrementally improved products, just as our Asian competitors are becoming predominant in nearly every sector through incremental improvement to design and function.
At this rate, we're going to become like the Europeans, muddling along and watching the world pass them by technologically while they debate the latest politically correct labor laws such as whether to go to a 34 hour work week.
If this sounds overly negative, try coming up with an original invention and trying to sift through the existing process patents. It's next to impossible to avoid violating some process patent or other, usually something stupid like "A method for pushing a button that causes a light bulb to flash..." To compound the problem we now have companies practicing defensive patenting (I wonder how long it will be before someone patents defensive patenting) simply to keep these trolls off their back.
I wonder that none of the presidential candidates have addressed this issue. Obama's website pays some lip service:
Unfortunately, Obama does not address the real problem, which is that business process and methods have been made too easily patentable. Hillary's website does not even mention patents as far as I can tell, though to her credit she does talk a lot about increasing basic science research. The word "patent" is not found on John McCain's website. As for Ron Paul, apparently he doesn't know about the issue.
The air car may herald a whole new era in energy currency. Far from being a specialized and refined product extracted from the ground at great cost, air is freely available, and the stored potential energy of the vehicle is created by a pump. We will start to look at stored energy as the currency rather than a high energy liquid like gasoline.
Imagine a barter system in the future where we might have to get on an exercycle type of machine to pump up an engine. The local diner might charge either $10 for a meal or one hour on the pump. Homeless and working poor could thus eat for the cost of an hour's exercise.
If you run out of gas in the middle of nowhere, just get out the pump from the accessory compartment in the trunk, hook it up, and start pedalling. After 3-4 hours of fat burning cardiovascular workout, you will have enough stored energy to move your car 20 miles down the road to the service station. And as an added bonus, you'll be in fantastic shape!
Buildings could hook up pumps to revolving doors as a way to "steal" energy to power their lighting systems, etc. Even the floors might consist of pistons hidden under the carpet that are compressed as you walk on them. Walking down a hall would feel like climbing a stair, something the health newsletters advise us to do more often anyway.
Of course, people in windy areas would probably want to use windmills to directly pump up our cars overnight.
It's interesting stuff to think about.
The title of my post: "It's nice to see good news from Virginia Tech"
:)
All I was trying to say is that for those of us out here in the rest of the country, the thing that put VT on the map was the mass killings. It's a sad association, just as the name Columbine has come to be associated with a similar unfortunate event. I'm sorry if you feel that's condescending because it certainly was not meant that way.
Your sensitivity actually implies that for you, the massacre is very much at the top of your agenda and you are on some sort of mission to erase it from people's consciousness and replace it with a recognition of the school's academic achievements. Well guess what, that's precisely my point.
I'm sure VT is a fine school and that's my basic point--look at this brilliant idea this student came up with (its practicality has been questioned by others in this forum, but I would definitely buy one). Anyway... have a nice day.
After the massacre last year, Virginia Tech became just another descriptor for massacre, like Columbine or Kent State. Now along comes this beautiful, brilliant invention that captures the imagination. It made my day to read this report, and like probably 90% of the people who read it, I want one! Maybe the student can set up a company, become rich, and perhaps he'll dedicate some fraction of the proceeds to the families of those slain. I'd pay a few dollars extra for that, no problem.
:)
Along these lines, maybe someone can invent a way to power the porch light from opening and closing the door. There's probably a hundred ways we can harness excess energy in our homes--opening and closing cabinets, exercising on a treadmill or elliptical, etc. Hook a gizmo up to the TV so that you have to lift 25 pounds to pay for 30 minutes of viewing--earn your right to be a couch potato
I've spend thousands of dollars at Amazon over the past eleven years. One time I received a faulty Brother printer which Amazon promptly replaced, no questions asked, the new one sent in advance, trusting me to return the old one once I received the prepaid shipping sticker. (Brother's customer support was completely useless, which is why I'll never buy Brother again, but that's another story.)
Not once have I ever experienced a pricing problem or other anomaly that might mar my buying experience. I have also taken advantage of Amo's easy approach to selling my stuff back to others and have unloaded many textbooks and DVDs over the years.
In short, Amazon for me represents the most successful of the new online retailers; they have won my trust and admiration, no easy feat, and so I find this Slashdot story to be questionable at best. I am willing to believe that such a mistake occurred, but without any links or independent confirmation of the accusations it really sounds more like a disgruntled customer out to hurt them as much as possible. Given my own experience and that of many friends and associates over the years I would be surprised if this were anything more than a blip.
So what's your point? Most companies start by buying some existing work; very few invent something completely new. Dell didn't invent the PC, nor did Compaq, nor did HP. Apple didn't invent the windowing GUI.
Microsoft is smart. They did not get where they are by being idiots. If they think Yahoo is worth $46B to them, I'm inclined to believe it. On the other hand, it might be that Google has been mulling an investment in Yahoo and Mr Softy just wanted to prevent that scary thing from happening.
It makes me sad that YHOO might cease to exist. To me, Yahoo represents the internet revolution. For ten years I have been using Yahoo's email, stock quotes, news, weather, sports, shopping, maps, and directories on a daily basis. I have bought and sold Yahoo stock when it was in the $300's and more recently when it was in the teens. I used to post on Yahoo's news comment boards before they shut them down, mainly to counter the many idiots I saw there. To me, Yahoo has always been a safe port in a storm.
When Microsoft takes over Yahoo, assuming the antitrust authorities let this happen (doubtful, actually), it will be a sad day for the internet. The old guard will have won out over the pure internet players. It will be Google against MS at that point. I guess I'll just spend even more time on Google from then on.