I want robot cars because I am pretty sure that one will not pull out backwards from an angled-in spot WITHOUT LOOKING BACK or start forward at a red light BEFORE MAKING SURE THE CAR IN FRONT OF YOU IS MOVING or sideswipe a parked car in Brooklyn at 3 am going 80 MILES AN HOUR ON A TINY ONE WAY STREET.
Thanks for listening to these true stories. I have to go call the body shop to see if my car is ready.
The REAL evidence of the singularity will be when I hear cars street racing at 1 in the morning... and there are no (human) drivers.
I have to say, an AI that can watch all crosswalks AND all lanes feeding into an intersection and doesn't text, listen to music, or get distracted by the people in the back seat seems a lot preferable to the single point of failures I normally see driving around today. As an added bonus, the AI would always pull out of the way to let emergency vehicles through.
Individuals do not necessarily exhibit fully rational behavior
To an individual, his own behavior is always rational. The concept of "rational behavior" is relativistic, making your absolutist claims absurd.
Really? I know a lot of people who are even proud of "thinking with their heart" that reject rational behaviour as it doesn't "feel right".
Of course, calling "not necessarily" absolutist is rather irrational, so you DO prove that SOME people think irrational behaviour is rational.
So, if I decide that what is better for me is to take away what you have
Firstly, that's not capitalism (as explained below), and secondly, that is not even what was being discussed. We were discussing what's good for each individual. As you point out, having resources forcibly taken is not good for one of the individuals, namely me; ergo, your example is pointless.
I think we need a venn diagram here -- when you say "each" do you mean each individual in a group, each individual in the world, each non-group entity, or something else? I don't quite get how your response lines up with his statement, which WAS a direct response to what was being discussed.
and once it's all gone, we're all fucked.
Clearly people will act out of self-interest to avoid that.
Capitalism just tries to take the things which are shared resources, and make sure someone gets to it first and claims ownership of it.
No, it's not. The question is indeed how to define ownership. Capitalism defines owernship as gaining control of a resource through voluntary interaction; all of your examples involve gaining resources through involuntary interaction, and therefore all of your examples are not of capitalism.
By your definition of capitalism, there has never been a correct implementation of capitalism in the world (kind of like communism). Through self-interest, I want to gain control of as many resources as I can. Unfortunately, so do others, and this setup turns into a glorified pyramid scheme, with each tier voluntarily interacting inside the tier, but subject to the tier above, and abusing the tier below. Such systems always depend on there being a tier below to exploit -- and the bottom tier never gets to fully take advantage of capitalism. The problem is, when the bottom tier is our environment, short-sightedness on the part of those further up the pyramid can mean that while they're voluntarily giving up one really good thing for one somewhat good thing, they (and their entire tier) may be totally aware of what they've really given up. In fact, this is how wealth and power passes between tiers in a capitalist system.
Lots of silk roads have opened up since the original one was raided. Some have taken orders, collected the money and done a runner with it. Some presumably are still operating. Some will be fronts and honeytraps set up by various law enforcement bodies around the world. Some will be real genuine marketplaces. Nobody knows for sure which ones are the genuine ones.
They should have called the new one(s) "Project Spartacus"....
No need to charge them with anything... publicizing their real names and locations would do as much damage as charging them with anything would. Of course, there lies the lynch mob....
...unless they 'borrowed' their neighbor's wifi and used their neighbor's name.
TL;DR: One would hope there was at least some due process involved.
...which is why policing agencies would prefer this kind of thing be left to specialized police task forces. This is one of those issues where public opinion tends to be binary, but the truth tends to lie in shades of grey.
I don't think you know what entrapment means in a legal capacity.
Not Entrapment: An undercover cop selling cocaine, then busting people that buy it. Entrapment: Cops busting into your house and destroying stuff until you agree to buy cocaine, then arresting you for it.
Not Entrapment: An undercover cop challenging you to a drag race and then ticketing you for speeding and reckless driving. Entrapment: An acknowledged officer telling you it's OK to drag race on a street and then ticketing you when you do it.
What happens if I write a bot that interacts with, and propositions another bot?
Actually, this raises a good point... what happens if you write a bot designed to interact with and proposition other bots... and one of those "bots" turns out to be a human minor? Do YOU get the pedophile laws slapped on you? Is it suddenly OK for you to possess those images because they were acquired by your bot, and not by you?
What about any adult who monitors the activity between two bots programmed to behave like children? What if the first person to discover the images is the officer sent to investigate? Is (s)he the pedophile?
I know in most cases the courts are intelligent enough to sort this stuff out -- but I also know of people who were sacrificed on the alter of public opinion to prove a point and "make an example".
What are they charged with? "Molesting under age pixels"?
No need to charge them with anything... publicizing their real names and locations would do as much damage as charging them with anything would. Of course, there lies the lynch mob....
Until it is either illegal for "shoot first, as questions maybe later, probably never" policy - OR - it's legal for non-cops to use the same policy when being approached by a police officer, then anything they say that doesn't involve admitting rape and murder is an out-right lie anyway.
Not to mention you can't slander a reputation when that reputation is already to murder and rape people. If they didn't want that image, I'd imagine they would put a tiny bit more effort into not murdering and raping people. Seems perfectly legit to me.
I didn't think politicians were allowed on slashdot? An AC politician is an oxy moron....
The requests that go unanswered are either badly written (you know what I mean: smiley faces, horrible grammer, bad spelling, etc.) or would involve the department turning over information that would be questionable or even criminal in nature.
I think you misunderstand -- it's not that 1/3 don't get the information they're asking for... it's that they're unanswered. In other words, no "thank you for submitting your request X - it has tracking item Y" or "Your request has been examined by Officer X and has been deemed to be improperly submitted. Please follow the guidelines as made available here:" or "Thank you for your request. It has been examined, and we have determined that the information requested is not of a type made available by this department through FOIA requests." It doesn't take much of a tracking system to handle this; there are many out there that could do the job.
More likely it's a case of the department not being structured to actually handle FOIA requests, which means the ones that ARE answered are ones where the person who handles the inbox actually knows who to hand the request off to -- and no item tracking system is in place at all. Should be pretty easy to fix, if tehre's any incentive to do so (aside from it being illegal not to).
Nothing here makes sense. If they were developing the plane, they would do it in secret and fly it in secret, just like the U2 and the SR71. Is this some kind of distraction for the real plane? Or some PR for a money grab? Whatever it is, this is NOT the military's new spy plane.
It's sleight of hand -- this is indeed a spy plane; one that would be expensive to reproduce.
Meanwhile, the robotic fly and cockroach spy swarm is completed and deployed.
It's a meeting. You're supposedly discussing something which requires the attention and input of everyone there.
Keyword: "Supposedly."
I've been in many, many meetings in which my contribution to the meeting was less than 5 minutes out of an hour long slog that focused on 2-3 other developers doing work with next to no connection to my own. In bad meetings like that, I think it's acceptable to otherwise occupy yourself -- preferably with actual work, though.
Those are the meetings where you "get a call" and, being polite, you excuse yourself from the meeting to take said call. This call should end up with you back at your desk doing work, having found the acceptable way to excuse yourself from a meeting at which you are no longer needed.
Now if the meeting agenda is set with your contribution coming near the end, ask someone (quietly) to come and get you when that topic comes up, or let them know that you'll be available to text (so someone can still ask you questions even though you're not there).
But physically staying in the meeting while mentally or verbally going elsewhere is rude. Common, maybe -- but still rude. It's part of what makes meetings such a pain that you don't want to be there in the first place.
"China" is just a western corruption of "Zhonghua" anyway The "Zh" is pronounched more like a "Ch" or "Jh" sound.
I did once upset an American friend by referring to "European Americans", in an attempt make the distinction from "African Americans" and "Native Americans". He didn't like that!
No it's not. "Province" in the context of China has a similar meaning to Canada; it's an integral part of the country. When China calls Taiwan a province, they don't mean they're a colony, they mean they're the same as Beijing and Guangzhou.
It's more like if Yorkshire had its own currency and government.
...and the monarchy moved there.
Maybe it's more like the situation between Italy and the Vatican?
It gets more complicated than this. Both the PRC and the ROC lay claim to ALL of China -- Taiwan, Hong Kong, Mainland China, etc.
PRC is located on the mainland and has the bigger army. ROC is located on Taiwan, and has the earlier historical claim. Neither government "officially" recognizes the other. It's basically an extremely protracted civil dispute with lots of posturing but minimal military action.
Of course, in reality, ROC policy controls Taiwan and PRC policy controls everywhere else.
If you want a parallel, think US Civil War, except the PRC is the south, and they won, but Rhode Island held out for the North and the South left them alone (for the most part). Not a perfect parallel, but it gets the point across (including why it's a hot topic for some in China).
41% to 44% of U.S. adults in the lowest level on the literacy scale (literacy rate of 35 or below) were living in poverty.
If you didn't know it, 50% of the US population performs above average in all nationwide studies.
What the above stats really say is that 56-59% of US adults in the lowest level on the literacy scale AREN'T living in poverty. Think about that for a moment.
Of course, this is meaningless without the stat of what % of US adults are living in poverty. Put those two stats together, and we begin to get useful information.
Let's take 2010's stat of 15.1% of US adults living in poverty. I'll let someone else crunch the numbers for population representation.
First of all, by "internet" they mean social networks like Facebook and Twitter and the interpersonal communication between people. Second, they have created a simulation, but it's not clear how it actually correlates to the real world. The key thing is they have the concept of "exhausting" sources, so once a person has communicated something, they won't receive or communicate that information again. Obviously that's not the case in the real world, because some people are more interested in certain pieces of information and will continue propagating them much longer than others, potentially seeding enough to compensate for the "exhaustion" of other average users.
Further, social networks all have a backlog where previous posts can be viewed (particularly true with FB), thus a person still "transmits" a given piece of information indefinitely as other people view their wall going back far in time. Thus it is always possible for a "dark corner" of the "internet" to always catch up by seeing a piece of information in that way instead of only real-time.
I like your theory better than theirs... use Bittorrent as a model for social networks. This will reflect reality much better, including "information decay" and "not getting the whole story" as well as information poisoning and all the rest.
The hubris that designed and implemented such a disaster of a law could only come from an Obama administration that is so arrogant and self-righteous they don't listen to anyone except yes-men and lackeys. Just read the comments from the insane head of the DNC, Debbie Wasserman Schultz. Even Anderson Cooper thinks she's not part of this universe.
I'm not sure if this gets filed under rhetoric, hubris, or hyperbole -- or all three. The Obama administration hasn't cornered the market on arrogance and self-righteousness; that's part of what makes politics politics, and has been going on since before the Roman Empire. Obama's administration isn't unique; he just focuses on fewer "big things" and does it without a safety net (which is ironic, considering this is about insurance).
We built the original infrastructure. The original trade routes were developed here, and nearly all the funding came from British sources. Everything else is an extension of that, and built on that framework.
Don't like it? Build your own, like China or Iran, and see how well corporations and people flock to use your "Trade Routes".
If I read the article correctly, this would allow supercap batteries to be placed on the chip die. This doesn't sound like much, but it would be useful in keeping DRAM refreshed if there is a power outage for a brief bit, or enough juice to dump the DRAM to permanent storage (a small SSD.) If the processor state can be saved as well, this would allow a computer to start right back up almost exactly where it was before.
Of course, this wouldn't be enough power to keep a modern day CPU like a POWER7 running at full tilt for any significant length of time, but it might be enough to get the machine's components to save its state and shut down cleanly.
Then, there are the obvious uses for supercap batteries. A buffer for solar cells that can charge the regular batteries at exactly the power they need is one example, especially if combined with a MPPT controller. If the supercap cells are good enough with energy density, they could even be the primary batteries, although there was a patent application with working prototypes I read mentioned a bit ago [1] about high temperature batteries with a large energy density, and these would be a great candidate as primaries, while the supercaps would be additional storage, a buffer for optimal charging, and giving the ability to continue charging for a little bit of time once the solar panels stop receiving usable light.
The paper doesn't suggest you could fit these on the same slab as an IC; I'm not sure we'd want to either -- there are times when it's useful to be able to pull the plug; letting chips have control over their own power sounds like the beginning of the singularity.
Numerous motorists following bad GPS directions have driven their vehicles into bodies of water. Three Japanese tourists in Australia were persuaded by their GPS that they could drive to North Stradbroke Island at low tide (it’s actually accessible to cars only by ferry) and got stuck in the mud flats of Moreton Bay. They abandoned the car before the returning tide submerged it. A Senegalese man driving through Spain wasn’t so lucky. He was following GPS directions at night when the road just ended, his passenger said later. He drove into a lake and drowned.
Of course, GPS doesn't work under water, so the directions would cause real havoc for those who actually COULD drive under water... and then got lost. Maybe a requirement would be a floatable buoy with a built-in antenna? Useful for finding the hapless drivers before/after they run out of air, too.
...and back to the original pedantry... I use the English gender-neutral "his" unless there is some reason not to online... at which point I use either "his" or "her". Maybe someday English will shift enough that we'll have a true gender neutral term. But in my opinion, his/her or randomly alternating them is as bigoted as continually saying "African American people" instead of "people" whenever the person happens to have that specific genetic/social history.
JQP: try not to let him get to you too much; while he likely does reside in the US where he could face lawsuits/fines/jailtime/ostracization/severely limited job pool for the stuff he's written (if it is indeed the same guy), he could be from anywhere American English is spoken, and not all countries have such strict stalking laws (although some have harsher ones).
Slashdot Mirror
I want robot cars because I am pretty sure that one will not pull out backwards from an angled-in spot WITHOUT LOOKING BACK or start forward at a red light BEFORE MAKING SURE THE CAR IN FRONT OF YOU IS MOVING or sideswipe a parked car in Brooklyn at 3 am going 80 MILES AN HOUR ON A TINY ONE WAY STREET.
Thanks for listening to these true stories. I have to go call the body shop to see if my car is ready.
The REAL evidence of the singularity will be when I hear cars street racing at 1 in the morning... and there are no (human) drivers.
I have to say, an AI that can watch all crosswalks AND all lanes feeding into an intersection and doesn't text, listen to music, or get distracted by the people in the back seat seems a lot preferable to the single point of failures I normally see driving around today. As an added bonus, the AI would always pull out of the way to let emergency vehicles through.
Individuals do not necessarily exhibit fully rational behavior
To an individual, his own behavior is always rational. The concept of "rational behavior" is relativistic, making your absolutist claims absurd.
Really? I know a lot of people who are even proud of "thinking with their heart" that reject rational behaviour as it doesn't "feel right".
Of course, calling "not necessarily" absolutist is rather irrational, so you DO prove that SOME people think irrational behaviour is rational.
So, if I decide that what is better for me is to take away what you have
Firstly, that's not capitalism (as explained below), and secondly, that is not even what was being discussed. We were discussing what's good for each individual. As you point out, having resources forcibly taken is not good for one of the individuals, namely me; ergo, your example is pointless.
I think we need a venn diagram here -- when you say "each" do you mean each individual in a group, each individual in the world, each non-group entity, or something else? I don't quite get how your response lines up with his statement, which WAS a direct response to what was being discussed.
and once it's all gone, we're all fucked.
Clearly people will act out of self-interest to avoid that.
Capitalism just tries to take the things which are shared resources, and make sure someone gets to it first and claims ownership of it.
No, it's not. The question is indeed how to define ownership. Capitalism defines owernship as gaining control of a resource through voluntary interaction; all of your examples involve gaining resources through involuntary interaction, and therefore all of your examples are not of capitalism.
By your definition of capitalism, there has never been a correct implementation of capitalism in the world (kind of like communism). Through self-interest, I want to gain control of as many resources as I can. Unfortunately, so do others, and this setup turns into a glorified pyramid scheme, with each tier voluntarily interacting inside the tier, but subject to the tier above, and abusing the tier below. Such systems always depend on there being a tier below to exploit -- and the bottom tier never gets to fully take advantage of capitalism. The problem is, when the bottom tier is our environment, short-sightedness on the part of those further up the pyramid can mean that while they're voluntarily giving up one really good thing for one somewhat good thing, they (and their entire tier) may be totally aware of what they've really given up. In fact, this is how wealth and power passes between tiers in a capitalist system.
Lots of silk roads have opened up since the original one was raided. Some have taken orders, collected the money and done a runner with it. Some presumably are still operating. Some will be fronts and honeytraps set up by various law enforcement bodies around the world. Some will be real genuine marketplaces. Nobody knows for sure which ones are the genuine ones.
They should have called the new one(s) "Project Spartacus"....
No need to charge them with anything... publicizing their real names and locations would do as much damage as charging them with anything would. Of course, there lies the lynch mob....
...unless they 'borrowed' their neighbor's wifi and used their neighbor's name.
TL;DR: One would hope there was at least some due process involved.
...which is why policing agencies would prefer this kind of thing be left to specialized police task forces. This is one of those issues where public opinion tends to be binary, but the truth tends to lie in shades of grey.
I don't think you know what entrapment means in a legal capacity.
Not Entrapment: An undercover cop selling cocaine, then busting people that buy it.
Entrapment: Cops busting into your house and destroying stuff until you agree to buy cocaine, then arresting you for it.
Not Entrapment: An undercover cop challenging you to a drag race and then ticketing you for speeding and reckless driving.
Entrapment: An acknowledged officer telling you it's OK to drag race on a street and then ticketing you when you do it.
What happens if I write a bot that interacts with, and propositions another bot?
Actually, this raises a good point... what happens if you write a bot designed to interact with and proposition other bots... and one of those "bots" turns out to be a human minor? Do YOU get the pedophile laws slapped on you? Is it suddenly OK for you to possess those images because they were acquired by your bot, and not by you?
What about any adult who monitors the activity between two bots programmed to behave like children? What if the first person to discover the images is the officer sent to investigate? Is (s)he the pedophile?
I know in most cases the courts are intelligent enough to sort this stuff out -- but I also know of people who were sacrificed on the alter of public opinion to prove a point and "make an example".
What are they charged with? "Molesting under age pixels"?
No need to charge them with anything... publicizing their real names and locations would do as much damage as charging them with anything would. Of course, there lies the lynch mob....
416 horse power and it can only do 132 mph is nothing to brag about.
My car can do 140 mph....eventually
FTFY
Oh, I thought you said cat... considering they have a terminal velocity of 60mph, that would be impressive....
(note: the cheetah's land speed is also around 60mph -- getting a cat going faster for any length of time would be difficult)
Until it is either illegal for "shoot first, as questions maybe later, probably never" policy - OR - it's legal for non-cops to use the same policy when being approached by a police officer, then anything they say that doesn't involve admitting rape and murder is an out-right lie anyway.
Not to mention you can't slander a reputation when that reputation is already to murder and rape people.
If they didn't want that image, I'd imagine they would put a tiny bit more effort into not murdering and raping people. Seems perfectly legit to me.
I didn't think politicians were allowed on slashdot? An AC politician is an oxy moron....
The requests that go unanswered are either badly written (you know what I mean: smiley faces, horrible grammer, bad spelling, etc.) or would involve the department turning over information that would be questionable or even criminal in nature.
I think you misunderstand -- it's not that 1/3 don't get the information they're asking for... it's that they're unanswered. In other words, no "thank you for submitting your request X - it has tracking item Y" or "Your request has been examined by Officer X and has been deemed to be improperly submitted. Please follow the guidelines as made available here:" or "Thank you for your request. It has been examined, and we have determined that the information requested is not of a type made available by this department through FOIA requests." It doesn't take much of a tracking system to handle this; there are many out there that could do the job.
More likely it's a case of the department not being structured to actually handle FOIA requests, which means the ones that ARE answered are ones where the person who handles the inbox actually knows who to hand the request off to -- and no item tracking system is in place at all. Should be pretty easy to fix, if tehre's any incentive to do so (aside from it being illegal not to).
Nothing here makes sense. If they were developing the plane, they would do it in secret and fly it in secret, just like the U2 and the SR71. Is this some kind of distraction for the real plane? Or some PR for a money grab? Whatever it is, this is NOT the military's new spy plane.
It's sleight of hand -- this is indeed a spy plane; one that would be expensive to reproduce.
Meanwhile, the robotic fly and cockroach spy swarm is completed and deployed.
It's a meeting. You're supposedly discussing something which requires the attention and input of everyone there.
Keyword: "Supposedly."
I've been in many, many meetings in which my contribution to the meeting was less than 5 minutes out of an hour long slog that focused on 2-3 other developers doing work with next to no connection to my own. In bad meetings like that, I think it's acceptable to otherwise occupy yourself -- preferably with actual work, though.
Those are the meetings where you "get a call" and, being polite, you excuse yourself from the meeting to take said call. This call should end up with you back at your desk doing work, having found the acceptable way to excuse yourself from a meeting at which you are no longer needed.
Now if the meeting agenda is set with your contribution coming near the end, ask someone (quietly) to come and get you when that topic comes up, or let them know that you'll be available to text (so someone can still ask you questions even though you're not there).
But physically staying in the meeting while mentally or verbally going elsewhere is rude. Common, maybe -- but still rude. It's part of what makes meetings such a pain that you don't want to be there in the first place.
"China" is just a western corruption of "Zhonghua" anyway The "Zh" is pronounched more like a "Ch" or "Jh" sound.
I did once upset an American friend by referring to "European Americans", in an attempt make the distinction from "African Americans" and "Native Americans". He didn't like that!
Was he an Arabic American or an Asian American?
No it's not. "Province" in the context of China has a similar meaning to Canada; it's an integral part of the country. When China calls Taiwan a province, they don't mean they're a colony, they mean they're the same as Beijing and Guangzhou.
It's more like if Yorkshire had its own currency and government.
...and the monarchy moved there.
Maybe it's more like the situation between Italy and the Vatican?
It gets more complicated than this. Both the PRC and the ROC lay claim to ALL of China -- Taiwan, Hong Kong, Mainland China, etc.
PRC is located on the mainland and has the bigger army. ROC is located on Taiwan, and has the earlier historical claim. Neither government "officially" recognizes the other. It's basically an extremely protracted civil dispute with lots of posturing but minimal military action.
Of course, in reality, ROC policy controls Taiwan and PRC policy controls everywhere else.
If you want a parallel, think US Civil War, except the PRC is the south, and they won, but Rhode Island held out for the North and the South left them alone (for the most part). Not a perfect parallel, but it gets the point across (including why it's a hot topic for some in China).
Government by the lawyers for the lawyers.
That's what the US really has...
Not really... some of the lawyers are more equal than others. I think you left out the word Corporate.
And thirdly, More's law is more what you'd call "guidelines" than actual rules.
Yeah; but that's what got Sir Thomas into trouble in the first place....
If you didn't know it, 50% of the US population performs above average in all nationwide studies.
What the above stats really say is that 56-59% of US adults in the lowest level on the literacy scale AREN'T living in poverty. Think about that for a moment.
Of course, this is meaningless without the stat of what % of US adults are living in poverty. Put those two stats together, and we begin to get useful information.
Let's take 2010's stat of 15.1% of US adults living in poverty. I'll let someone else crunch the numbers for population representation.
First of all, by "internet" they mean social networks like Facebook and Twitter and the interpersonal communication between people. Second, they have created a simulation, but it's not clear how it actually correlates to the real world. The key thing is they have the concept of "exhausting" sources, so once a person has communicated something, they won't receive or communicate that information again. Obviously that's not the case in the real world, because some people are more interested in certain pieces of information and will continue propagating them much longer than others, potentially seeding enough to compensate for the "exhaustion" of other average users.
Further, social networks all have a backlog where previous posts can be viewed (particularly true with FB), thus a person still "transmits" a given piece of information indefinitely as other people view their wall going back far in time. Thus it is always possible for a "dark corner" of the "internet" to always catch up by seeing a piece of information in that way instead of only real-time.
I like your theory better than theirs... use Bittorrent as a model for social networks. This will reflect reality much better, including "information decay" and "not getting the whole story" as well as information poisoning and all the rest.
I like it!
The hubris that designed and implemented such a disaster of a law could only come from an Obama administration that is so arrogant and self-righteous they don't listen to anyone except yes-men and lackeys. Just read the comments from the insane head of the DNC, Debbie Wasserman Schultz. Even Anderson Cooper thinks she's not part of this universe.
I'm not sure if this gets filed under rhetoric, hubris, or hyperbole -- or all three. The Obama administration hasn't cornered the market on arrogance and self-righteousness; that's part of what makes politics politics, and has been going on since before the Roman Empire. Obama's administration isn't unique; he just focuses on fewer "big things" and does it without a safety net (which is ironic, considering this is about insurance).
We built the original infrastructure. The original trade routes were developed here, and nearly all the funding came from British sources. Everything else is an extension of that, and built on that framework.
Don't like it? Build your own, like China or Iran, and see how well corporations and people flock to use your "Trade Routes".
Boston Tea Party anyone?
If I read the article correctly, this would allow supercap batteries to be placed on the chip die. This doesn't sound like much, but it would be useful in keeping DRAM refreshed if there is a power outage for a brief bit, or enough juice to dump the DRAM to permanent storage (a small SSD.) If the processor state can be saved as well, this would allow a computer to start right back up almost exactly where it was before.
Of course, this wouldn't be enough power to keep a modern day CPU like a POWER7 running at full tilt for any significant length of time, but it might be enough to get the machine's components to save its state and shut down cleanly.
Then, there are the obvious uses for supercap batteries. A buffer for solar cells that can charge the regular batteries at exactly the power they need is one example, especially if combined with a MPPT controller. If the supercap cells are good enough with energy density, they could even be the primary batteries, although there was a patent application with working prototypes I read mentioned a bit ago [1] about high temperature batteries with a large energy density, and these would be a great candidate as primaries, while the supercaps would be additional storage, a buffer for optimal charging, and giving the ability to continue charging for a little bit of time once the solar panels stop receiving usable light.
[1]: http://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/1307/1307.1305.pdf
The paper doesn't suggest you could fit these on the same slab as an IC; I'm not sure we'd want to either -- there are times when it's useful to be able to pull the plug; letting chips have control over their own power sounds like the beginning of the singularity.
I've still got my replica Lotus Esprit (submersible mode) -- of course, mine's only 4" long....
Already there:
Of course, GPS doesn't work under water, so the directions would cause real havoc for those who actually COULD drive under water... and then got lost. Maybe a requirement would be a floatable buoy with a built-in antenna? Useful for finding the hapless drivers before/after they run out of air, too.
...and back to the original pedantry... I use the English gender-neutral "his" unless there is some reason not to online... at which point I use either "his" or "her". Maybe someday English will shift enough that we'll have a true gender neutral term. But in my opinion, his/her or randomly alternating them is as bigoted as continually saying "African American people" instead of "people" whenever the person happens to have that specific genetic/social history.
JQP: try not to let him get to you too much; while he likely does reside in the US where he could face lawsuits/fines/jailtime/ostracization/severely limited job pool for the stuff he's written (if it is indeed the same guy), he could be from anywhere American English is spoken, and not all countries have such strict stalking laws (although some have harsher ones).