> After all, your claim amounts to saying that the information doesn't exist unless it's on your favorite TV program.
Yes and No- If my favorite TV program had a report saying a scientist did something amazing and there's an easy, concrete way to show what this amazing thing is (such as giving an example of a couple of translated sentence fragments that were previously lost to history) I wish the public would expect them to do that.
> if you're now complaining that those journals are hard to read...
No- The existence of obscure science journals is both necessary and desirable. Sure, some of them probably could be written in less "scientificalese" and benefit from it, but that's beside the point.
> So they don't give an English translation because they don't have any
You don't think anyone involved in the project has translated a few sentences of this stuff into English?
> you can't explain a six year physics course in a series of TV programs.
No, but I suspect you could work in a couple of intriguing morsels from the Physics course and add depth and excitement to the program.
> but in this case you're just placing unfair demands on a fledgling project.
...perhaps... I guess I just find the general tenor of such press releases related to science topics by institutions that have an educational mission somewhat disappointing... Clearly, they have put enormous effort into this website that clearly took a lot of time and they could have shown some preliminary translations of fragments (with disclaimers) if they really wanted to...
I just worry if we don't expect such press releases to have some more substance behind them (that is made at least somewhat easy to understand) that it makes it too easy for institutions to manipulate people on other scientific issues.
> There's no conspiracy to keep information from you...
I am being a little hard on them, admittedly... I just think they created this nice public website for a purpose and giving some preliminary translations would further that purpose beautifully...
> No one is obligated to pour knowledge into your head...
The Walters Art Museum receives extensive government grants which stipulates that they offer educational resources to the public.
If there's one thing that drives me nuts about science these days is that there seems to be such an effort to maintain a hard line between the academics and the "public"...
...how can anyone really get a feel for the importance of this discovery if they don't post some of the translated texts? Oh, I forgot- We're supposed to accept the fact that it's important because they say so- We don't have to bother reading any of the actual text and evaluate its value for ourselves...
Admittedly, they could be buried deep in the website somewhere were I coudn't find them... or, maybe they are still working on official translations and don't want to put anything that's inaccurate on the site, but I doubt it- Instead, the passages the translated probably sound boring and so they'll publish it in obscure science journals- All the public will hear about (I fear) is "Look! We're so cool for recovering the pampliset!"
True, they are cool for translating this thing, I agree- But why not give the public a better pathway into understanding the meaning of this find by showing us the money? Would it really kill them? Maybe we, the public, can appreciate the inherent value of even some obscure, boring-sounding passages?
I have the same complaint about PBS and the recent special on "String Theory"- These science programs (which are admittedly better than nothing) work so hard to be accessible that they put a subconscious barrier between "average people" and "scientists" that I think becomes self defeating to the advancement of science- A PBS program on String Theory would be far more awesome if there was an attempt made to make the program a gateway into the science, giving a few basic formulas and some feeling for the real science. Sure, the formulas might seem a bit boring and basic and maybe some folks won't take the mental effort to try to follow along... but a small peek "under the hood" (even if you don't understand it) would still be far more interesting than a bunch of bland generalizations that just tells you they don't think people really care about the important details.
</rant>
Set up an RSS reader like reader.google.com or bloglines.com, then find a bunch of RSS feeds that cover that domain in some fashion. For Java, for instance, you can find some feeds here.
The key is that that it's really quantity and regularity that's most important- If you spend a little time each day immersing yourself in the terminology you'll start to get a feeling of who has the most credible opinions in that field and what those persons are excited about (so eventually you'll have quality covered as well).
There's a good chance that this will, of time, allow you to spot patterns and predict technology trends.
I was admittedly a bit harsh in my previous post... clearly, the argument "some access to google might be better than none" is a defensible position.
> My question was, why should the people suffer for whatever the govt is accused of?
I would argue that the Chinese people are affected only very little by the presence/absence of google: other companies are more than happy to fill voids left by google (see, for instance, http://academic.live.com/ for an alternative to google scholar)
Other companies can deliver facsimile products (by taking advantage of the previous innovations of Google and others) that are functionally similar to anything that Google makes. Are they as high in quality as the Google version of the product? Possibly not, but then any web service used from the Chinese mainland is going to be diminished in quality due to interference by the government of the entire Chinese internet, anyway.
The main entities hurt by having Google refuse to censor or otherwise operate inside of China, I would argue, would be Google (by the clear loss of business opportunity) and the Chinese government (in a small way, by being unable to present a face of being a modern, tech friendly environment to foreigners and their own populance)
Uhm... yes, there are shades of grey......some shades are more grey......other shades are less grey......censoring the truth to make money by kow-towing to totalitarian regimes is more evil......refusing to do so on moral grounds is less evil...
Dismissing things that are right in front of your face on the stance of moral relativism and just saying "the world isn't black and white" doesn't help anybody.
The China censorship issue was a very difficult decision and, no matter how you look at it, they chose the less moral option... If they truly follow up and reverse their policy on China I will have to cease my usual cynicism and admit that Google may truly be a _moral_ company!
yes and no- Video capsules are already pretty common and much simpler... Until this robot gets smart enough to snip a polyp or do something else that's interventional, sending a video capsule through a couple of times instead would still be preferable in most cases...
...why would anyone want a Transmeta in a pay-as-you-go PC? Transmeta chips like the Efficeon are optimized for low power usage, not price (as a value pay-as-you-go PC would require)...
Sure, if you're selling PCs in sub-saharan Africa where there isn't a good power net, something like this might make sense- But this story says these PCs are being sold in places like Mexico/Brazil/Russia- Last I checked, a power outlet isn't too hard to come by in these places...
The other possiblity is that they are embedding the cost metering of the PC directly into the Transmeta "Code Morphing" software that allows Transmeta chips to emulate other PCs... maybe this would allow the metering to be done at a low enough level inside the chip that it would be hard to hack the "metering" out of the final PC... If this was the case, however, they would have trumpeted this in the press release.
Here's what I suspect is really happening: AMD and Transmeta have probably struck an unannounced deal licensing some of the valuable Transmeta patents. However, since Transmeta has been hurting lately and probably is seeking extra funding to survive, AMD threw Transmeta a little PR nugget that allows them to forecast increasing chip sales in the near future to help secure additional capital- just my guess.
Das Keyboard contains a major conceptual flaw- What good is a keyboard with blank keys if you can't touch type on it? The Happy Hacking keyboard places ALL 101 KEYS within touch-typing range. I've been a happy customer of this keyboard for years- It has a fantastic key action, is very compact and allows for very fast programming if you learn to use it well.
Plus, if you're an emacs geek, it allows for perfect ctrl key placement that is perfect for emacs navigation.
Das Keyboard, on the other hand, looks like something a wussy vi user would type on!
I think you're being unfair- this article poses several tangible extensions to the "suspension of disbelief" concept:
1. Credibility can be treated as a quantifiable substance that can be codeified in a game
2. In interactive fiction, both the developer and player draw from a common pool of credibility, making it unique from other fiction
3. Players can destroy their own enjoyment of the game by using playing strategies that lead to wins but hurt the story telling element- Telling a story and beating a game are two separate ideas and interactive games struggle to accomplish both.
4. The developer can minimize this problem by stratifying the cost of player actions based on the storytelling arc, based on the rules of the law.
I think this is an incredibly interesting new idea!
This fuel cell system weighs as much and is as large as a 1 Liter bottle of water... and gives 10 hours of charge?!
Clearly you could have a Lithium ion battery that lasts many more (20? 30?) hours at the same size...
...and clearly there has not been any marked for a notebook with a clunky battery- The closest thing to a laptop ever released which emphasizes battery power over weight is the Electrovaya Scribbler- I have the 300 model and can get well over 10 hours out of it!
Maybe by the 3rd generation (and a decade from now) it will be able to compete with standerd batteries, assuming standard batteries haven't improved by then this technology might be worth a second look (which is unfortunately a possiblity, given the slow progress in battery technology)...
John C is highly opposed to procedural textures. His thinking is that it requires that programmers act as artists. MegaTexturing allows artists to use their favorite tools to create their textures without worrying about programming or whether a certain effect is supported by a specific procedural language.
1. It's easy to build hash tables in Ruby- At any level of a hierarchical structure like HTML you can have an arbitrary number of child elements or attributes, all identified by a type tag. This happens to map perfectly onto ruby's hash tables, so to create an HTML link you can say:
2. Lack of superfluous syntax It is very elegant how every programming idea in ruby seems to require only a single syntax concept at a single location to put it into practice- For instance, if you need a class member variable, you just create a name starting with "@" (like @firstname) without having to declare the variable in a separate location in the file. This is taken advantage of very cleanly by the ROR system, so that programming web pages has a very "WYSIWYG-ish" feel- Every concept in you web site has a clear, understandable equivalent embodiment in the Ruby code
3. Dynamically detects missing methods- I don't know exactly how it works, but ruby classes are able to know when a method on an object is called at runtime that doesn't exist- So you can essentially enhance the functions an object supports at runtime... this allows Ruby toolkits, such as Rails, to essentially shoehorn their own custom language ideas into ruby (not quite at the level of Lisp's "defmacro", of course)
4. It was scalable from day one- Right from the start, ROR was designed to scale- In fact, it was already part of a commercial app before it even existed as a stand-alone product. This means it already overcame the greatest hurdle of any web-development framework from day one- Most Scheme/Lisp frameworks, for instance, still haven't achieved the level of scalabilty that ROR had right from the start.
5. It has a whiff of that mystical Scandinavian software guru-ism in it that make for seriously powerful software Creating a comprehensive web development system is a messy undertaking- ROR is the product of an obsessive Northern European fanaticism that somehow manages to combine an incredible pragmaticism and also manages to handle all of the many ways that web frameworks fail with the utmost of effectiveness. It isn't brilliant because it makes it easier to do complex things, as other frameworks try to- It's brilliant because it makes things that are already easy so much easier that all the complexity, though still complex, floats to the surface of your code and isn't obscured by the many "easy" parts.
6. No pre-processor Many of the more advanced web-frameworks, as in JAVA, require pre-processing of HTML templates with embedded JAVA- The dynamicity of Ruby makes this step hidden- Explicit preprocessors are practically and cognitively difficult for programmers to deal with.
These, I think, are some of the non-obvious reasons that give ROR the edge over other web frameworks.
I think this have proven true in the past but is not guaranteed as a fact- It may be possible that no matter how ingenious humans are, there is simply no reasonable alternative for a portable fuel source (i.e. usable in vehicles) that can entirely replace the demand for gasoline, even at a higher price...
The supply/demand model always assumes that there is another supply "out there somewhere" just waiting to be tapped at a higher price- We have never had a case of a critical global, unreplaceable resource that simply becomes unsuppliable- That is the REAL danger of the peak oil crisis.
A law like "supply and demand" is great most of the time, but some knowledgeable people with good arguments seem to feel this may be the first exception that proves the rule...
Hot-linking sheets to a CSV file
First of all, you can link a sheet to a CSV file (a comma-delimited format that is very easy to generate from the computer language of your choice) It will auto-update the data and hence any charts linked to it from other sheets automagically when you reenter the spreadsheet file. To do the linking, right-click on a tabsheet tab, choose "new tab", then create it from the CSV file via the option in the appearing dialog and make sure the "Link" checkbox is checked.
Scatter XY charts versus line charts
Never ever use the line charts (the first option in the chart glyph selector) the XY scatter plot has the same abilities, plus can do trend lines and has much better auto-scaling abilities. Obviously, you will need to have a column of the X values (easily created) to make this work.
Creating a trend line
Click furiously/erratically on the physical data line in the graph and when it has little boxes all over it go right click->properties. The UI here is attrocious- I think you need to single click, then double click, then single click again to get the little boxes that allow you to set the trend line:)
Symbol Technologies (SBL) is the most straightforward company to invest in- They also bought Matrics recently, who has a lot of expertise in making tags (Note, Symbol had some serious "mini Enrons" in their past- So the stock price is low, but...)
Philips makes lots of RFID equipment but has the problem that they aren't (and I can't believe I am going to use shmarmy investor speak here...) a "pure play".
Alien Technologies is another name bandied about, but I think they're not on a US stock market.
(don't hold me to any of these details, as they are from slightly hesitant memory)
...but we are pretty obviously headed straight towards a new nuclear age. That doesn't mean I like nuclear, or that this is a good thing...
Ethanol and other biofuels don't seem to really hold up to cost-benefit analysis, as this article (and many others) suggests- Even if this article is exaggerated, the truth is still on the wall that it can't compare to nuclear.
Oil will run low pretty soon, coal, air and wind power can't take up the slack... BAMM! New nuclear age.
Does anyone really have reasonable prediction that doesn't include at least 80% of all power being nuclear in 50 years? I can't find one...
The only thing this toolbar does that Firefox doesn't already is give pagerank- But there's a great site that'll let you do all this anyway. Otherwise, I recommend looking at open source Firefox extensions and YubNub.com (which integrates beautifully into firefox) for your enhancement needs!
I can't imagine meeting someone in a coffee shop, then spending five minutes fiddling with the phone to program their info into a phone- That would be really annoying and rude...
I think if you get someone's phone number you're expected to write it on a strip of paper, stick it in your pocket, and not interrupt the conversation fiddling with your cell phone...
Slashdot Mirror
> After all, your claim amounts to saying that the information doesn't exist unless it's on your favorite TV program.
Yes and No- If my favorite TV program had a report saying a scientist did something amazing and there's an easy, concrete way to show what this amazing thing is (such as giving an example of a couple of translated sentence fragments that were previously lost to history) I wish the public would expect them to do that.
> if you're now complaining that those journals are hard to read...
No- The existence of obscure science journals is both necessary and desirable. Sure, some of them probably could be written in less "scientificalese" and benefit from it, but that's beside the point.
> So they don't give an English translation because they don't have any
You don't think anyone involved in the project has translated a few sentences of this stuff into English?
> you can't explain a six year physics course in a series of TV programs.
No, but I suspect you could work in a couple of intriguing morsels from the Physics course and add depth and excitement to the program.
> but in this case you're just placing unfair demands on a fledgling project.
...perhaps... I guess I just find the general tenor of such press releases related to science topics by institutions that have an educational mission somewhat disappointing... Clearly, they have put enormous effort into this website that clearly took a lot of time and they could have shown some preliminary translations of fragments (with disclaimers) if they really wanted to...
I just worry if we don't expect such press releases to have some more substance behind them (that is made at least somewhat easy to understand) that it makes it too easy for institutions to manipulate people on other scientific issues.
> There's no conspiracy to keep information from you...
I am being a little hard on them, admittedly... I just think they created this nice public website for a purpose and giving some preliminary translations would further that purpose beautifully...
> No one is obligated to pour knowledge into your head...
The Walters Art Museum receives extensive government grants which stipulates that they offer educational resources to the public.
If there's one thing that drives me nuts about science these days is that there seems to be such an effort to maintain a hard line between the academics and the "public"...
Admittedly, they could be buried deep in the website somewhere were I coudn't find them... or, maybe they are still working on official translations and don't want to put anything that's inaccurate on the site, but I doubt it- Instead, the passages the translated probably sound boring and so they'll publish it in obscure science journals- All the public will hear about (I fear) is "Look! We're so cool for recovering the pampliset!"
True, they are cool for translating this thing, I agree- But why not give the public a better pathway into understanding the meaning of this find by showing us the money? Would it really kill them? Maybe we, the public, can appreciate the inherent value of even some obscure, boring-sounding passages?
I have the same complaint about PBS and the recent special on "String Theory"- These science programs (which are admittedly better than nothing) work so hard to be accessible that they put a subconscious barrier between "average people" and "scientists" that I think becomes self defeating to the advancement of science- A PBS program on String Theory would be far more awesome if there was an attempt made to make the program a gateway into the science, giving a few basic formulas and some feeling for the real science. Sure, the formulas might seem a bit boring and basic and maybe some folks won't take the mental effort to try to follow along... but a small peek "under the hood" (even if you don't understand it) would still be far more interesting than a bunch of bland generalizations that just tells you they don't think people really care about the important details. </rant>
Set up an RSS reader like reader.google.com or bloglines.com, then find a bunch of RSS feeds that cover that domain in some fashion. For Java, for instance, you can find some feeds here.
The key is that that it's really quantity and regularity that's most important- If you spend a little time each day immersing yourself in the terminology you'll start to get a feeling of who has the most credible opinions in that field and what those persons are excited about (so eventually you'll have quality covered as well).
There's a good chance that this will, of time, allow you to spot patterns and predict technology trends.
I was admittedly a bit harsh in my previous post... clearly, the argument "some access to google might be better than none" is a defensible position. > My question was, why should the people suffer for whatever the govt is accused of? I would argue that the Chinese people are affected only very little by the presence/absence of google: other companies are more than happy to fill voids left by google (see, for instance, http://academic.live.com/ for an alternative to google scholar) Other companies can deliver facsimile products (by taking advantage of the previous innovations of Google and others) that are functionally similar to anything that Google makes. Are they as high in quality as the Google version of the product? Possibly not, but then any web service used from the Chinese mainland is going to be diminished in quality due to interference by the government of the entire Chinese internet, anyway. The main entities hurt by having Google refuse to censor or otherwise operate inside of China, I would argue, would be Google (by the clear loss of business opportunity) and the Chinese government (in a small way, by being unable to present a face of being a modern, tech friendly environment to foreigners and their own populance)
> World [sic] is not black and white
...some shades are more grey... ...other shades are less grey... ...censoring the truth to make money by kow-towing to totalitarian regimes is more evil... ...refusing to do so on moral grounds is less evil...
Uhm... yes, there are shades of grey...
Dismissing things that are right in front of your face on the stance of moral relativism and just saying "the world isn't black and white" doesn't help anybody.
The China censorship issue was a very difficult decision and, no matter how you look at it, they chose the less moral option... If they truly follow up and reverse their policy on China I will have to cease my usual cynicism and admit that Google may truly be a _moral_ company!
Go Brin! Go Google!
yes and no- Video capsules are already pretty common and much simpler... Until this robot gets smart enough to snip a polyp or do something else that's interventional, sending a video capsule through a couple of times instead would still be preferable in most cases...
...why would anyone want a Transmeta in a pay-as-you-go PC? Transmeta chips like the Efficeon are optimized for low power usage, not price (as a value pay-as-you-go PC would require)...
Sure, if you're selling PCs in sub-saharan Africa where there isn't a good power net, something like this might make sense- But this story says these PCs are being sold in places like Mexico/Brazil/Russia- Last I checked, a power outlet isn't too hard to come by in these places...
The other possiblity is that they are embedding the cost metering of the PC directly into the Transmeta "Code Morphing" software that allows Transmeta chips to emulate other PCs... maybe this would allow the metering to be done at a low enough level inside the chip that it would be hard to hack the "metering" out of the final PC... If this was the case, however, they would have trumpeted this in the press release.
Here's what I suspect is really happening: AMD and Transmeta have probably struck an unannounced deal licensing some of the valuable Transmeta patents. However, since Transmeta has been hurting lately and probably is seeking extra funding to survive, AMD threw Transmeta a little PR nugget that allows them to forecast increasing chip sales in the near future to help secure additional capital- just my guess.
If you're buying a keyboard with blank keys do yourself a favor and get the Happy Hacking blank keytop model
Das Keyboard contains a major conceptual flaw- What good is a keyboard with blank keys if you can't touch type on it? The Happy Hacking keyboard places ALL 101 KEYS within touch-typing range. I've been a happy customer of this keyboard for years- It has a fantastic key action, is very compact and allows for very fast programming if you learn to use it well.
Plus, if you're an emacs geek, it allows for perfect ctrl key placement that is perfect for emacs navigation.
Das Keyboard, on the other hand, looks like something a wussy vi user would type on!
:)
I think you're being unfair- this article poses several tangible extensions to the "suspension of disbelief" concept:
1. Credibility can be treated as a quantifiable substance that can be codeified in a game
2. In interactive fiction, both the developer and player draw from a common pool of credibility, making it unique from other fiction
3. Players can destroy their own enjoyment of the game by using playing strategies that lead to wins but hurt the story telling element- Telling a story and beating a game are two separate ideas and interactive games struggle to accomplish both.
4. The developer can minimize this problem by stratifying the cost of player actions based on the storytelling arc, based on the rules of the law.
I think this is an incredibly interesting new idea!
This fuel cell system weighs as much and is as large as a 1 Liter bottle of water... and gives 10 hours of charge?!
...and clearly there has not been any marked for a notebook with a clunky battery- The closest thing to a laptop ever released which emphasizes battery power over weight is the Electrovaya Scribbler- I have the 300 model and can get well over 10 hours out of it!
Clearly you could have a Lithium ion battery that lasts many more (20? 30?) hours at the same size...
Maybe by the 3rd generation (and a decade from now) it will be able to compete with standerd batteries, assuming standard batteries haven't improved by then this technology might be worth a second look (which is unfortunately a possiblity, given the slow progress in battery technology)...
John C is highly opposed to procedural textures. His thinking is that it requires that programmers act as artists. MegaTexturing allows artists to use their favorite tools to create their textures without worrying about programming or whether a certain effect is supported by a specific procedural language.
I agree with him.
1. It's easy to build hash tables in Ruby- At any level of a hierarchical structure like HTML you can have an arbitrary number of child elements or attributes, all identified by a type tag. This happens to map perfectly onto ruby's hash tables, so to create an HTML link you can say:
:id => 'add user', :class => 'shiny button', :action => 'add_user'
link_to
2. Lack of superfluous syntax It is very elegant how every programming idea in ruby seems to require only a single syntax concept at a single location to put it into practice- For instance, if you need a class member variable, you just create a name starting with "@" (like @firstname) without having to declare the variable in a separate location in the file. This is taken advantage of very cleanly by the ROR system, so that programming web pages has a very "WYSIWYG-ish" feel- Every concept in you web site has a clear, understandable equivalent embodiment in the Ruby code
3. Dynamically detects missing methods- I don't know exactly how it works, but ruby classes are able to know when a method on an object is called at runtime that doesn't exist- So you can essentially enhance the functions an object supports at runtime... this allows Ruby toolkits, such as Rails, to essentially shoehorn their own custom language ideas into ruby (not quite at the level of Lisp's "defmacro", of course)
4. It was scalable from day one- Right from the start, ROR was designed to scale- In fact, it was already part of a commercial app before it even existed as a stand-alone product. This means it already overcame the greatest hurdle of any web-development framework from day one- Most Scheme/Lisp frameworks, for instance, still haven't achieved the level of scalabilty that ROR had right from the start.
5. It has a whiff of that mystical Scandinavian software guru-ism in it that make for seriously powerful software Creating a comprehensive web development system is a messy undertaking- ROR is the product of an obsessive Northern European fanaticism that somehow manages to combine an incredible pragmaticism and also manages to handle all of the many ways that web frameworks fail with the utmost of effectiveness. It isn't brilliant because it makes it easier to do complex things, as other frameworks try to- It's brilliant because it makes things that are already easy so much easier that all the complexity, though still complex, floats to the surface of your code and isn't obscured by the many "easy" parts.
6. No pre-processor Many of the more advanced web-frameworks, as in JAVA, require pre-processing of HTML templates with embedded JAVA- The dynamicity of Ruby makes this step hidden- Explicit preprocessors are practically and cognitively difficult for programmers to deal with.
These, I think, are some of the non-obvious reasons that give ROR the edge over other web frameworks.
> When the price gets high enough...
...let's hope this isn't the case...
I think this have proven true in the past but is not guaranteed as a fact- It may be possible that no matter how ingenious humans are, there is simply no reasonable alternative for a portable fuel source (i.e. usable in vehicles) that can entirely replace the demand for gasoline, even at a higher price...
The supply/demand model always assumes that there is another supply "out there somewhere" just waiting to be tapped at a higher price- We have never had a case of a critical global, unreplaceable resource that simply becomes unsuppliable- That is the REAL danger of the peak oil crisis.
A law like "supply and demand" is great most of the time, but some knowledgeable people with good arguments seem to feel this may be the first exception that proves the rule...
That means all we have to do is pirate Vista and we don't have to put up with the ugly, useless Microsoft angry fruitsalad UI disaster called Aero...
...Sign me up!
Hot-linking sheets to a CSV file First of all, you can link a sheet to a CSV file (a comma-delimited format that is very easy to generate from the computer language of your choice) It will auto-update the data and hence any charts linked to it from other sheets automagically when you reenter the spreadsheet file. To do the linking, right-click on a tabsheet tab, choose "new tab", then create it from the CSV file via the option in the appearing dialog and make sure the "Link" checkbox is checked. Scatter XY charts versus line charts Never ever use the line charts (the first option in the chart glyph selector) the XY scatter plot has the same abilities, plus can do trend lines and has much better auto-scaling abilities. Obviously, you will need to have a column of the X values (easily created) to make this work. Creating a trend line Click furiously/erratically on the physical data line in the graph and when it has little boxes all over it go right click->properties. The UI here is attrocious- I think you need to single click, then double click, then single click again to get the little boxes that allow you to set the trend line :)
oh- I should mention I own some SBL stock.
Symbol Technologies (SBL) is the most straightforward company to invest in- They also bought Matrics recently, who has a lot of expertise in making tags (Note, Symbol had some serious "mini Enrons" in their past- So the stock price is low, but...) Philips makes lots of RFID equipment but has the problem that they aren't (and I can't believe I am going to use shmarmy investor speak here...) a "pure play". Alien Technologies is another name bandied about, but I think they're not on a US stock market. (don't hold me to any of these details, as they are from slightly hesitant memory)
This is incredibly useful when you have generic types in a more complex scenario. Something like this is a better example:
, ArrayList<int>>> i=, ArrayList<int>>>();
Iterator<AdvancedHashMap<HashingClass56,NestedKey
new Iterator<AdvancedHashMap<HashingClass56,NestedKey
when definining a complex generic type, not having to declare the full type for "i" makes sense, no?
...but we are pretty obviously headed straight towards a new nuclear age. That doesn't mean I like nuclear, or that this is a good thing...
Ethanol and other biofuels don't seem to really hold up to cost-benefit analysis, as this article (and many others) suggests- Even if this article is exaggerated, the truth is still on the wall that it can't compare to nuclear.
Oil will run low pretty soon, coal, air and wind power can't take up the slack... BAMM! New nuclear age.
Does anyone really have reasonable prediction that doesn't include at least 80% of all power being nuclear in 50 years? I can't find one...
The only thing this toolbar does that Firefox doesn't already is give pagerank- But there's a great site that'll let you do all this anyway. Otherwise, I recommend looking at open source Firefox extensions and YubNub.com (which integrates beautifully into firefox) for your enhancement needs!
Hollywood has always dreamed of having Media that automatically expires...
Imagine if Hollywood could charge you for burning DVDs onto your finger nail- In 6 months, your copy of the movie would automatically expire!
*mind explodes*
I can't imagine meeting someone in a coffee shop, then spending five minutes fiddling with the phone to program their info into a phone- That would be really annoying and rude...
I think if you get someone's phone number you're expected to write it on a strip of paper, stick it in your pocket, and not interrupt the conversation fiddling with your cell phone...