The Islamic terrorism example is an adjustment for contemporary context, since I've often heard the people claim that the IRA terrorism wasn't as [insert adjective here] as today's terrorism. Nonsense, of course. Bombs are bombs. When I lived overseas as a kid I had a middle school teacher who was burned all down her left side from an IRA bomb.
I wasn't clear enough in my original post, and I didn't give the context for the Chomsky quote. Policy and culture are two different things. Yes, it may be true that the government response to terror is not commensurate with the actual level of fear that Americans feel. But the actual level of fear Americans feel is vastly higher than that felt by people of any other culture. That is what Chomsky was talking about, and if you've ever spent any appreciable amount of time immersed in foreign cultures it is as plainly true as the sky is blue. Again, I don't know exactly why it is so - but it is, indeed, so. This is not meant to be an offense or a sleight or an insult; it is simply a fact.
A good example was the American reaction to 9/11. If planes had destroyed Big Ben or the Eifel Tower or any other European monument, the people of those countries would not have reacted by canceling their travel plans (you'll note that airlines in America got clobbered by a lack of people flying after 9/11 - an insane response) or stopped going to the supermarket or avoided crowded public places. The IRA bombed London for 25 years, and no one stopped riding the tube. Even when Islamic terrorists bombed the tube, no one stopped riding it.
This is just the latest insanity. The fear level in American culture is, as Noam Chomsky puts it, "off the scale." There is nothing comparable to it in any other culture in the world, developed or developing. Being fearful of flying, while irrational, is fairly understandable - like being fearful of riding in a submarine - even though riding in cars and on bicycles is vastly more dangerous. But being afraid of terrorists blowing up malls and municpal airports in Iowa and Kansas is sheer madness.
I'm not completely sure why the fear level is so high in American culture, but I'd hazard to guess that it's the result of a combination of being too used to being too comfortable and too safe too much of the time - similar to tyrant's paranoia - and the fact that the media and the current administration both cultivate fear (for different reasons).
Back in the stone age of internet video, about 15 years ago, streaming-only video was rationalized as a form of copy protection: if people could download videos, the quality would be higher (and compete with broadcast quality) and they would be able to fast-forward through commercials. The advent of Tivo and later DVR incarnations quickly rendered that logic bunk. But we're stupidly and annoyingly left with the outmoded architecture of that logic.
Streaming video is simply retarded. It burns more bandwidth than simply letting people download clips because they end up stopping and starting, re-downloading packets into the buffer after connection losses or if you want to see the same footage more than once, and so on. And streaming video just doesn't work very well unless you have real broadband, which is actually quite rare in the United States. With most services, it's pixelated and you're lucky to get through a clip without it stopping or stuttering a few times. You certainly can't stream multiple videos at once, you can't enjoy a latency-free switching experience between clips, you can't watch full-screen video, and the lack of quality means genuinely live video doesn't hold up - basically, it has no redeeming qualities when compared either to downloading clips or to traditional broadcast. And in an era where any clip can be captured and piped right into youtube or a bit torrent, the copy protection angle is moot too.
Google video's proprietary format (not available on every clip they host, I notice) is an example of hybrid-streaming, where you can start a clip anywhere in the timeline as if you were streaming, but any portion downloaded stays on your local machine and doesn't have to be downloaded again.
Streaming video sucks in every conceivable way that video could possibly suck, and the sooner the idiots at the networks figure it out the better.
it's basically a fancy way to mathematically calculate that if you like The Hobbit, you might also like The Lord Of The Rings
I agree with everything in your post, and would further add regarding the above quote that I'll believe it when I see it. Unless there has been some astonishing breakthrough in AI that I'm unaware of, this recommendation system will be based only upon the occurance of certain words. My guess is that this might work for a few specific genres of fiction (sci-fi searches for frequency, distribution and local context of the words "gravity" and "star"; fantasy searches for the words "sword" and "spell", etc), but is unlikely to work very well on general fiction or prose. If I like travel fiction or international mystery and intrigue, one book may be low-tech and set in Madagascar and another may be high-tech and set in Tokyo. My guess is that any system too dumb to understand plot, narrative and pacing (i.e. any current non-human system) is going to end up recommending other books about Madagascar or Tokyo instead of other travel fiction or internatioanl mystery novels.
I'm open to being surprised, but my guess is that it's going to be tough to beat the good old fashioned method for recommending books: look for other stuff by the same author, other stuff in the same genre, and award-winners.
Dude, sea ice is floating, man. That means it is taking up 100% of the volume it will take up when it melts because it is displacing exactly the same mass whether solid or liquid. Displacement is the same either way.
When the ice in your drink melts, the drink's level stays the same.
Your post is so disjointed as to be nearly schizophrenic, so I'm not sure why I'm bothering to reply, but it's a slow day at work...
In one sentence, you say: America has a much higher standard of living than the vast majority of the world's countries. Thus we also have the greatest range of economic conditions. Given the risk factors it is not surprising to have a higher crime rate in those terms. In another, you say, Switzerland requires you to be trained in an keep a gun. If you think that has no impact on crime you are sadly mistaken. Furthermore affecting the vanishingly small crime rate - the gun related crime rates are so low they don't bother tracking statistically, is a result of the cultural emphasis on self-policing and personal responsibility.
It's possible I have no idea what you mean by 'risk factors'. But the idea that the US has a high standard of living therefore it has a wide variety of 'economic conditions' just doesn't make any sense. It is true that the US has a wider variety of economic conditions than other developed countries; that means we have more people living in poverty in our society; that means we are not as developed as places like Switzerland.
As for my 'snide remark' about fat guys with tiny dicks, that was a joke, which is why I quoted The Big Labowski at the end of my post. It's called humor, my friend, and if you're not familiar with it, it's definitely worth looking into.
As it happens, I completely agree that Switzerland, with its many guns and few gun controls, has a vastly superior track record of gun-related crime. As I said in my post, this is attributable to cultural factors - not to gun-control laws.
I also agree that a potential solution would be manditory national service. If all people had to serve in the army instead of just those who like to blow shit up, we'd have armed forces that represented the whole country instead of just a mercenary cross-section of society.
Amazing that anyone smart enough to steal that much money could be dumb enough to get caught. My guess is they were just bagmen. Literally, in this case...
Yeah, yeah, mod me troll, whatever. Got a mountain of karma to burn, so you fat fucks with the tiny dicks and big compensatory trucks and guns can click your little retaliatory mod buttons all you like.
I'm about as liberal as they get, but the point of the people having guns is that it makes rounding them up for slaughter basically impossible. A person with any kind of gun at all can put up a fight against any solider or policeman - just ask our servicemen in Iraq. A person with a knife or a bat can't put up a fight at all. Guns really do an enormous amount to level the playing field. Since they change the game, they really do make it difficult (though, sadly, not impossible) for a tyranical government to simply round up millions of people and send them to the gas chambers.
people complain about Linux usability? apt-get install mplayer k3b, etc? It is not harder, just different.
Don't get me wrong here, I'm a Linux fan, but your statement is simply wrong for the vast majority of people. The reason GUI was so astonishingly successful compared to CLI is that most people find it vastly simpler, easier and more intuitive to manipulate images than text. This really is just a matter of brain function. There is a small subset of the population who find text representation of abstract schema just as intuitive as visual schema, but they are a tiny minority who just so happen to have an amazing correlation to the small subset of the population who have autism-spectrum disorders like Aspergers (several in my family, and I'm right on the borderline, so don't give me any shit).
The trouble - oh perfect, perfect irony! - is that it is this tiny minority who are responsible for designing and building the interfaces. It doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out why hundreds of millions of people around the world across all cultures complain loudly about user-unfriendliness. Bill's rant is a perfect example: "why is that here?" and "why should I have to do this before I do that?" It's because the world looks completely different to people who find text representation of abstract schema intuitive - and Billy Boy may even be a bit Bergered himself, so you can imagine the frustrations Joe Blow and Granny Smith have.
A wobble of less than 1 degrees can have serious climate impacts on Earth (the Sahara was once a jungle . ..), but we generally don't wobble much because of the moon anchoring us down. Other rocky planets like Mars or Venus wobble MUCH more, which would make climate conditions that would be difficult for life to spring up.
Depends on where in the timeline you're talking about. In the first 500 million years after the moon formed, it was so close to the Earth that the tides were 1 MILE high. Can you imagine a wall of water a mile high rolling tens or in some cases hundreds of kilometers inland several times a day? I think that probably had a signficant impact on the weather too, don't you? But who knows, maybe that was good for aiding the formation and establishment of simple life.
Guns are a sad and confusing issue in the US. There are plenty of other developed countries that have few gun control laws (Canada, Switzerland) and have virtually no gun crime compared to the US. There are also developed countries that have severe gun control laws (Singapore, New Zealand) and have virtually no gun crime compared to the US.
History does seem to show that an armed populous is safer from government subjugation and (in all too many cases) class/ethnic cleansing. But it is very difficult to avoid the conclusion that there is something significantly different about American culture that gives us a propensity toward violent gun-facilitated crime. It may well be a good thing that we've got guns, and that means the nutjobs in Washington couldn't as easily send the army or blackwater into Detroit to round up all the Arab Americans there as they could if there were no guns in private hands, but I think it's hard to escape the conclusion that - in some way - we suck compared to most other developed countries.
If I had to hazard a guess, I'd say it's because so many American men are obese - can't see their dick, let alone get laid, so they buy a gun and get a stupidly huge truck to compensate. But that's just, like, me opinion, man.
From the talk what most will get is a "Win7 Basic" and you'll have to whip out your CC for any "add ons" which from the sound of things will be stuff folks are used to getting for free,like support for "advanced gaming technologies"(DirectX) and "enhanced multimedia"(A DRM laden MCE shell).
I guess the SaaS model might make sense for enterprise clients, but from a consumer standpoint I honestly don't know how this is going to make any sense at all. Unless you get Windows (and Office) OEM or at a student rate, it is almost ludicrously expensive. Fast-forward to 2010, and if the basic version costs consumers $250 and unlocking DX12 and blueray playback or whetever costs another $200, I don't see very many people thinking that's a better option than a fully-featured free Ubuntu distro.
Well, it's great that Dodd is filibustering this insane bill, but quite frankly I lost all respect for the guy when he supported giving a $300 billion tax-payer funded corporate bail out to Country Wide (who owns 10% of the mortgages in the US) because he's pals with the CEO. At least with Dubya the game is up and everyone knows him and his cronies for the corporate whores and oil lobby monkeyboys they are. With guys like Dobb, who posture around with a BS charade of integrity it's somehow worse. If you're going to be a festering piece of shit, please don't insult me or waste my time trying to convince me you're a white rose.
I believe that pretty much every manufacturer does this.. Exactly. So what gives with this line in the article summary: one of the most heavily guarded secrets in Lego? Why would either the existence or the location of such a vault be a secret? That's like saying the vault at a major bank is a heavily guarded secret - it makes no sense, since you expect major banks to have vaults. Heavily guarded, yes. Secret? No.
I'm kind of surprised there's not been more talk about a distributed computing effort for wikipedia. Seems like it would be a good candidate. I'm more of an honorary geek than an actual hardcore tech-savvy person - does anyone know if a distributed computing effort could work? I don't really see any problem with data integrity, since it's not confidential and is open to editing by definition (except maybe user info?), so it'd basically be a big assymetric RAID, right? I would worry more about it having fast enough response times - but maybe even that isn't so much of an issue given the nature of wikipedia's content. I suppose syncing the data as it gets edited would be the biggest issue... But what do I know?
Rather than tax employers, the state should tax unhealthy food alternatives. The cost of the unhealthy diet will be passed to the directly to the consumer where it belongs.
B-b-b-b-b-but THAT would mean interfering with the magically perfect free market, and those paragons of competition and transparency: our wonderful All American Corporations! It would EVIL, you pinko commie bastard, if we were to regulate any industry with intentions as noble and honest as those of the food industry.
Why you gotta hate on the high-fructose cornsyrup and yellow dye #5, yo?
Speaking of alliteration, I think one reason why MySpace is doomed to play second fiddle is because it's simply harder to say to someone that you put your pictures "on my MySpace page" than "on my Facebook page."
Your joke reveals another truth: the limitations of remote instruments. Countless debates in slashdot threads have been had about human versus robotic space exploration. Many folks argue that robots are just as effective as people. Well, certainly they are more cost-effective, but as this Phoenix episode shows they are certainly NOT more effective in practical terms.
It took many days to determine that the white stuff Phoenix uncovered was ice (and not salt). An astronaut on Mars would have made that determination within seconds.
It's pleasant to see an insightful Microsoft comment that isn't drenched in jealousy and loathing. Kudos on a good post.
One thing that folks forget when condemning Microsoft as a Big Bad Monopoly is that technology industries - and PC hardware and software in particular - change constantly and by massive increments. What that implicitly means is that a great deal of innovation is required just to hold a fixed position in the market. In other industries where technology changes slowly, if at all, monopolies really do mean something quite different. De Beer's monopoly on diamonds or the Coke/Pepsi oligopoly on cola or a monopoly on pencils or whatever else are in fact a good deal more sinister than Microsoft's dominance of the OS and office productivity software markets.
If you're a soft drink manufacturer, you have absolutely no hope of kick Coke's ass in the next adoption cycle, no hope of snatching some market share as users upgrade to 512MB carbonation accelerator cards or anything like that. A real monopoly is also a company that genuinely stagnates, that stifles innovation and change, that rests completely on its laurels and whose only merit is size - a company that could literally change nothing for years and still beat everyone else financially. Like it or not, those characteristics just don't describe Microsoft.
The article may make this sound a bit too original, but it is nevertheless extremely cool. While it's certainly a fascinating combination of thought-recognition, object-recognition and Augmented Reality, it is not the first implementation of any of those things - but it IS really exciting to suppose that thought recognition could be used to help filter noise out of a detail-rich image field and improve AI object-recognition. How well the AR will work, well I guess we'll see - the military has had pretty good AR in their HUDs for a long time. But we're finally starting to see some cool AR in consumer tech too. In fact, there was just an article about an iPhone hard hack this morning implementing it over on digg. Definitely worth checking out.
The White Star is going to be a PHEV, not all-electric? Damn, that sucks... Either there are more serious energy-storage issues with the larger 4-door sedan than they originally thought, or they're buying into the big-auto hype about people not being willing to buy a car that they can't drive from Los Angeles to New York without stopping for more than 10 minutes at a time...
As far as I know, the adoption rates of previous all-electrics coupled showed this assumption to be false. I lived in LA when GM launched the EV1 and they put in all the free charge-stations throughout the county. There was a waiting list for that car bigger than the Tesla Roadster's, and it was no sports car. I think all-electrics would have a massive market, even with limited range.
There have been successful BEVs - the EV1 is the prime example. The reason there hasn't been a successful BEV that's stayed on the market is that it's expensive to design and produce one and make money without sinking hundreds of millions dollars into the venture. Thankfully, that's exactly what Elon Musk and pals at Tesla have had the stones to do.
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Best to read comments before posting replies. My comment said malls and municipal airports in Iowa and Kansas. Not Israel.
The Islamic terrorism example is an adjustment for contemporary context, since I've often heard the people claim that the IRA terrorism wasn't as [insert adjective here] as today's terrorism. Nonsense, of course. Bombs are bombs. When I lived overseas as a kid I had a middle school teacher who was burned all down her left side from an IRA bomb.
I wasn't clear enough in my original post, and I didn't give the context for the Chomsky quote. Policy and culture are two different things. Yes, it may be true that the government response to terror is not commensurate with the actual level of fear that Americans feel. But the actual level of fear Americans feel is vastly higher than that felt by people of any other culture. That is what Chomsky was talking about, and if you've ever spent any appreciable amount of time immersed in foreign cultures it is as plainly true as the sky is blue. Again, I don't know exactly why it is so - but it is, indeed, so. This is not meant to be an offense or a sleight or an insult; it is simply a fact.
A good example was the American reaction to 9/11. If planes had destroyed Big Ben or the Eifel Tower or any other European monument, the people of those countries would not have reacted by canceling their travel plans (you'll note that airlines in America got clobbered by a lack of people flying after 9/11 - an insane response) or stopped going to the supermarket or avoided crowded public places. The IRA bombed London for 25 years, and no one stopped riding the tube. Even when Islamic terrorists bombed the tube, no one stopped riding it.
Other examples abound.
I'm not completely sure why the fear level is so high in American culture, but I'd hazard to guess that it's the result of a combination of being too used to being too comfortable and too safe too much of the time - similar to tyrant's paranoia - and the fact that the media and the current administration both cultivate fear (for different reasons).
Streaming video is simply retarded. It burns more bandwidth than simply letting people download clips because they end up stopping and starting, re-downloading packets into the buffer after connection losses or if you want to see the same footage more than once, and so on. And streaming video just doesn't work very well unless you have real broadband, which is actually quite rare in the United States. With most services, it's pixelated and you're lucky to get through a clip without it stopping or stuttering a few times. You certainly can't stream multiple videos at once, you can't enjoy a latency-free switching experience between clips, you can't watch full-screen video, and the lack of quality means genuinely live video doesn't hold up - basically, it has no redeeming qualities when compared either to downloading clips or to traditional broadcast. And in an era where any clip can be captured and piped right into youtube or a bit torrent, the copy protection angle is moot too.
Google video's proprietary format (not available on every clip they host, I notice) is an example of hybrid-streaming, where you can start a clip anywhere in the timeline as if you were streaming, but any portion downloaded stays on your local machine and doesn't have to be downloaded again.
Streaming video sucks in every conceivable way that video could possibly suck, and the sooner the idiots at the networks figure it out the better.
I agree with everything in your post, and would further add regarding the above quote that I'll believe it when I see it. Unless there has been some astonishing breakthrough in AI that I'm unaware of, this recommendation system will be based only upon the occurance of certain words. My guess is that this might work for a few specific genres of fiction (sci-fi searches for frequency, distribution and local context of the words "gravity" and "star"; fantasy searches for the words "sword" and "spell", etc), but is unlikely to work very well on general fiction or prose. If I like travel fiction or international mystery and intrigue, one book may be low-tech and set in Madagascar and another may be high-tech and set in Tokyo. My guess is that any system too dumb to understand plot, narrative and pacing (i.e. any current non-human system) is going to end up recommending other books about Madagascar or Tokyo instead of other travel fiction or internatioanl mystery novels.
I'm open to being surprised, but my guess is that it's going to be tough to beat the good old fashioned method for recommending books: look for other stuff by the same author, other stuff in the same genre, and award-winners.
When the ice in your drink melts, the drink's level stays the same.
In one sentence, you say: America has a much higher standard of living than the vast majority of the world's countries. Thus we also have the greatest range of economic conditions. Given the risk factors it is not surprising to have a higher crime rate in those terms. In another, you say, Switzerland requires you to be trained in an keep a gun. If you think that has no impact on crime you are sadly mistaken. Furthermore affecting the vanishingly small crime rate - the gun related crime rates are so low they don't bother tracking statistically, is a result of the cultural emphasis on self-policing and personal responsibility.
It's possible I have no idea what you mean by 'risk factors'. But the idea that the US has a high standard of living therefore it has a wide variety of 'economic conditions' just doesn't make any sense. It is true that the US has a wider variety of economic conditions than other developed countries; that means we have more people living in poverty in our society; that means we are not as developed as places like Switzerland.
As for my 'snide remark' about fat guys with tiny dicks, that was a joke, which is why I quoted The Big Labowski at the end of my post. It's called humor, my friend, and if you're not familiar with it, it's definitely worth looking into.
As it happens, I completely agree that Switzerland, with its many guns and few gun controls, has a vastly superior track record of gun-related crime. As I said in my post, this is attributable to cultural factors - not to gun-control laws.
I also agree that a potential solution would be manditory national service. If all people had to serve in the army instead of just those who like to blow shit up, we'd have armed forces that represented the whole country instead of just a mercenary cross-section of society.
Amazing that anyone smart enough to steal that much money could be dumb enough to get caught. My guess is they were just bagmen. Literally, in this case...
Yeah, yeah, mod me troll, whatever. Got a mountain of karma to burn, so you fat fucks with the tiny dicks and big compensatory trucks and guns can click your little retaliatory mod buttons all you like.
I'm about as liberal as they get, but the point of the people having guns is that it makes rounding them up for slaughter basically impossible. A person with any kind of gun at all can put up a fight against any solider or policeman - just ask our servicemen in Iraq. A person with a knife or a bat can't put up a fight at all. Guns really do an enormous amount to level the playing field. Since they change the game, they really do make it difficult (though, sadly, not impossible) for a tyranical government to simply round up millions of people and send them to the gas chambers.
Don't get me wrong here, I'm a Linux fan, but your statement is simply wrong for the vast majority of people. The reason GUI was so astonishingly successful compared to CLI is that most people find it vastly simpler, easier and more intuitive to manipulate images than text. This really is just a matter of brain function. There is a small subset of the population who find text representation of abstract schema just as intuitive as visual schema, but they are a tiny minority who just so happen to have an amazing correlation to the small subset of the population who have autism-spectrum disorders like Aspergers (several in my family, and I'm right on the borderline, so don't give me any shit).
The trouble - oh perfect, perfect irony! - is that it is this tiny minority who are responsible for designing and building the interfaces. It doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out why hundreds of millions of people around the world across all cultures complain loudly about user-unfriendliness. Bill's rant is a perfect example: "why is that here?" and "why should I have to do this before I do that?" It's because the world looks completely different to people who find text representation of abstract schema intuitive - and Billy Boy may even be a bit Bergered himself, so you can imagine the frustrations Joe Blow and Granny Smith have.
Depends on where in the timeline you're talking about. In the first 500 million years after the moon formed, it was so close to the Earth that the tides were 1 MILE high. Can you imagine a wall of water a mile high rolling tens or in some cases hundreds of kilometers inland several times a day? I think that probably had a signficant impact on the weather too, don't you? But who knows, maybe that was good for aiding the formation and establishment of simple life.
History does seem to show that an armed populous is safer from government subjugation and (in all too many cases) class/ethnic cleansing. But it is very difficult to avoid the conclusion that there is something significantly different about American culture that gives us a propensity toward violent gun-facilitated crime. It may well be a good thing that we've got guns, and that means the nutjobs in Washington couldn't as easily send the army or blackwater into Detroit to round up all the Arab Americans there as they could if there were no guns in private hands, but I think it's hard to escape the conclusion that - in some way - we suck compared to most other developed countries.
If I had to hazard a guess, I'd say it's because so many American men are obese - can't see their dick, let alone get laid, so they buy a gun and get a stupidly huge truck to compensate. But that's just, like, me opinion, man.
I guess the SaaS model might make sense for enterprise clients, but from a consumer standpoint I honestly don't know how this is going to make any sense at all. Unless you get Windows (and Office) OEM or at a student rate, it is almost ludicrously expensive. Fast-forward to 2010, and if the basic version costs consumers $250 and unlocking DX12 and blueray playback or whetever costs another $200, I don't see very many people thinking that's a better option than a fully-featured free Ubuntu distro.
Well, it's great that Dodd is filibustering this insane bill, but quite frankly I lost all respect for the guy when he supported giving a $300 billion tax-payer funded corporate bail out to Country Wide (who owns 10% of the mortgages in the US) because he's pals with the CEO. At least with Dubya the game is up and everyone knows him and his cronies for the corporate whores and oil lobby monkeyboys they are. With guys like Dobb, who posture around with a BS charade of integrity it's somehow worse. If you're going to be a festering piece of shit, please don't insult me or waste my time trying to convince me you're a white rose.
I believe that pretty much every manufacturer does this.. Exactly. So what gives with this line in the article summary: one of the most heavily guarded secrets in Lego? Why would either the existence or the location of such a vault be a secret? That's like saying the vault at a major bank is a heavily guarded secret - it makes no sense, since you expect major banks to have vaults. Heavily guarded, yes. Secret? No.
Thoughts, everyone?
B-b-b-b-b-but THAT would mean interfering with the magically perfect free market, and those paragons of competition and transparency: our wonderful All American Corporations! It would EVIL, you pinko commie bastard, if we were to regulate any industry with intentions as noble and honest as those of the food industry.
Why you gotta hate on the high-fructose cornsyrup and yellow dye #5, yo?
Speaking of alliteration, I think one reason why MySpace is doomed to play second fiddle is because it's simply harder to say to someone that you put your pictures "on my MySpace page" than "on my Facebook page."
Or maybe I'm just being silly, who knows.
It took many days to determine that the white stuff Phoenix uncovered was ice (and not salt). An astronaut on Mars would have made that determination within seconds.
One thing that folks forget when condemning Microsoft as a Big Bad Monopoly is that technology industries - and PC hardware and software in particular - change constantly and by massive increments. What that implicitly means is that a great deal of innovation is required just to hold a fixed position in the market. In other industries where technology changes slowly, if at all, monopolies really do mean something quite different. De Beer's monopoly on diamonds or the Coke/Pepsi oligopoly on cola or a monopoly on pencils or whatever else are in fact a good deal more sinister than Microsoft's dominance of the OS and office productivity software markets.
If you're a soft drink manufacturer, you have absolutely no hope of kick Coke's ass in the next adoption cycle, no hope of snatching some market share as users upgrade to 512MB carbonation accelerator cards or anything like that. A real monopoly is also a company that genuinely stagnates, that stifles innovation and change, that rests completely on its laurels and whose only merit is size - a company that could literally change nothing for years and still beat everyone else financially. Like it or not, those characteristics just don't describe Microsoft.
The article may make this sound a bit too original, but it is nevertheless extremely cool. While it's certainly a fascinating combination of thought-recognition, object-recognition and Augmented Reality, it is not the first implementation of any of those things - but it IS really exciting to suppose that thought recognition could be used to help filter noise out of a detail-rich image field and improve AI object-recognition. How well the AR will work, well I guess we'll see - the military has had pretty good AR in their HUDs for a long time. But we're finally starting to see some cool AR in consumer tech too. In fact, there was just an article about an iPhone hard hack this morning implementing it over on digg. Definitely worth checking out.
A 5-year-old notebook is worth $350? I don't think so. Hard for me to pay much attention to the rest of any article that begins that far off base...
As far as I know, the adoption rates of previous all-electrics coupled showed this assumption to be false. I lived in LA when GM launched the EV1 and they put in all the free charge-stations throughout the county. There was a waiting list for that car bigger than the Tesla Roadster's, and it was no sports car. I think all-electrics would have a massive market, even with limited range.
There have been successful BEVs - the EV1 is the prime example. The reason there hasn't been a successful BEV that's stayed on the market is that it's expensive to design and produce one and make money without sinking hundreds of millions dollars into the venture. Thankfully, that's exactly what Elon Musk and pals at Tesla have had the stones to do.