He's never had success outside of California - he can't hold any Federal office (maybe I should have said "trouble in Federal politics"). California may be big, but it's not mainstream.
He's run for two federal office: he's run for Senator from CA once (1982, where he won the Democratic primary but lost the general election) -- which has the exact same set of eligible voters as running for Governor of CA -- and he's run for President (in 1976, in 1980 -- challenging an incumbent of his own party, and 1992). In each of his Presidential runs he failed to win the nomination.
Lots of politicians who would generally be characterized as "successful" have tried to run for President and failed to win the nomination of their party -- many not making as strong a showing as Brown in 1992 or even 1976. But that's seems to be the only basis of the claim that he has had "trouble" in "mainstream" politics.
And, btw, if California is not "mainstream", what state in the Union is, and on what basis do you assess that?
Actually, it can't happen, even in theory, for exactly one reason: while there is a provision of federal bankruptcy code that applies to bankruptcy of municipalities (Chapter 9, which was adopted during the Great Depression, prior to which creditors only recourse were proceedings to compel the municipality to raise taxes to pay off the debt) there is no legal provision in the US under which a State can declare bankruptcy.
The US bankruptcy code (Title 11 of the United States Code) specifically excludes coverage of governmental units other than "municipalities" (which include agencies and instrumentalities of states, but note states as such.)
Now, conceivably, every individual State agency could enter into Chapter 9 bankruptcy simultaneously, but in addition to the administrative nightmare that would create, its not clear that even that could acheive the effect you are looking for given the Section 903 limits on the power of the court as relates to State law in Chapter 9 proceedings.
List out the state workers "on a road trip" all the time? I can think of CalTrans, but they have a radio network to use, with the ability to call through it, if need be.
Quite a lot of state agencies have staff whose job is to monitor performance of facilities that are licensed or certified by the agency and/or that receive funding from the agency. These staff, necessarily, spend a substantial fraction of their work time in the field rather than at headquarters.
That's why he's fixing the $27B budget deficit by cutting $20M worth of cell phone bills.
Ah, so you've missed the budget that he proposed which has much bigger changes than the cell phone takeback. The cellphone takeback is one of those small changes in the executive branch (there are lots of others) that can be done by the Governor by fiat rather than requiring legislative action and/or special approval of the voters.
A libertarian would have the state declare bankruptcy and nullify the state employee union's contract and pensions.
I'm not sure how placing the entire State government under the supervision of a federal bankruptcy court would be "libertarian".
That would fix the budget problem in one fell swoop
No, it wouldn't. Someone -- whether its the State government or the bankruptcy receiver -- still has to determine the actual specific cuts and/or the specific revenue generating measures to adopt. Bankruptcy might loosen some obligations and create more freedom to take certain choices among those options, but it wouldn't automatically choose among them (and it would instantly produce an enormous storm of litigation.)
Except meanwhile, nothing is being said about Calif's runaway pension obligations.
That can't generally be done for represented employees except via labor agreements; one of the last things the previous governor did was negotiate labor agreements with many bargaining units that both reduced pensions for new workers and increased pension contributions for all workers in those bargaining units. It seems likely (given that his proposed budget includes cuts for those units that have not yet reached new agreements that mirror those under the agreements reached by the previous governor) that Brown will seek similar provisions for in contracts for the remaining bargaining units.
Look at AT&T for an example. iPhone buries their Android phone subscribers by a factor of 10 or more.
Sure, but that's because of exclusivity: if you want an iPhone, you have to be an AT&T subscriber. If you aren't committed to an iPhone, then while the specific names may be different for different networks, you can go with whatever cellular network you prefer -- and AT&T hasn't promoted their non-iOS smartphones the way other carriers (particularly Verizon) have. So, yeah, iPhone is dominant on AT&T, but there are pretty clear reasons for that that don't apply to other carriers once AT&T isn't the exclusive carrier. Sure, you'll expect that some people who would prefer the iPhone but also have a stronger concern for Verizon's network over AT&T's, and thus who currently use a different phone on Verizon's network, would switch to the iPhone. And you'd expect people that would prefer Verizon's network but have stayed with AT&T because they have a stronger iPhone preference than their network preference to switch to Verizon from AT&T. But I think it would go farther than is rationally justified to expect that with exclusivity gone from AT&T, the iPhone will be as dominant as it currently is on AT&T on Verizon's network or, even, after a couple of years to even be as dominant on AT&T's network now that people who want an iPhone have a choice of networks.
In addition to supporting H.264, Chrome currently bundles an embedded version of Adobe’s closed source and proprietary Flash Player plugin. If H.264 support is being removed to “enable open innovation”, will Flash Player support be dropped as well?
Probably, just not today.
Most places that provide H.264 provide a Flash-container fallback for H.264 encoded video. Moving H.264 support out of the core browsers video tag support and bundling Flash means that, as long as H.264 is relevant, Chrome users have support via Flash -- which while bundled by Google is maintained by Adobe -- but maintaining H.264 support is no longer a cost Google has to bear, and once HTML5-based video and web-apps have reached critical mass, Google can strip down the Chrome distribution by dumping bundled-in Flash.
Android currently supports H.264. Will this support be removed from Android? If not, why not?
Probably eventually (perhaps after the merger with Chrome OS that Google has announced is in the cards for Android in the future), but the balancing for Android is different than that for Chrome.
YouTube uses H.264 to encode video. Presumably, YouTube will be re-encoding its entire library using WebM. When this happens, will YouTube’s support for H.264 be dropped, to “enable open innovation”?
I wouldn't be at all surprised if, like Chrome, YouTube eventually went to WebM via HTML5 video + H.264 via Flash wrapper, and then later to WEbM only.
Do you expect companies like Netflix, Amazon, Vimeo, Major League Baseball, and anyone else who currently streams H.264 to dual-encode all of their video using WebM?
AFAIK, those all use plugin-based players (Silverlight, specifically, for all of them, I think) rather than HTML5 video for DRM reasons, and therefore changes in browser support for codecs in the HTML5 video tag have no effect on those services.
Its not a huge limit with tethering (of course, tethering costs extra without increasing the limit.)
Although Verizon's "unlimited" plan might be a nice marketing feature, will it cost more?
The whole thing is that Verizon won't cancel their existing unlimited plan or prevent iPhone users from getting it. The existing plan is $30/month. This is $5/month more than AT&T's 2GB plan and exactly the same as AT&T's unlimited plan (which you can't sign up for anymore, though people who had it at the time of the changeover and haven't dropped down still do.)
Verizon certainly does not want a bunch of data-sucking iPhones on their network unless they can make money off of them. So, yes, I could believe that Verizon my offer an unlimited plan for $20 more than what their 2MB/month plan costs. But I tend to doubt they're going to be offering unlimited for the same cost as AT&T 2MB/month plan.
AT&T's plans are 200MB/month and 2GB/month, there is no 2MB/month plan, which would be silly. AT&T's 2GB/month plan is $5/month less than their unlimited plan (which you can't get new, but some people still have.) Since Verizon currently has an unlimited smartphone data plan, and its the same $30/month that AT&T's is -- $5 more than AT&T's 2GB/month plan and $15 more than AT&T's 200MB/month plan -- I'd expect that if they offer the iPhone and keep the unlimited plan available the price will stay right there at $30/month.
Maybe Facebook sers will migrate to The Real Internet too? Facebook chat and picture hosting seem to be the two killer features that people (at least, people I talk to) seem to want. Facebook chat is just a non-federated Jabber server with a web interface. Google and others provide a federated Jabber server with a web interface for free.
Picture hosting is just a special-purpose web server; when Internet connections get slightly faster I can imagine this being a built-in feature in consumer routers.
And there are plenty of people that already supply picture hosting (Google, for instance, via Picasa). What Facebook has that gives it an edge some simple social features for picture hosting (tagging people, mostly.)
So if the Facebook hype is fading and FB already cashing in, what is the competitor and why did their user base just go from 500 million people to 600 million people?
If you are smart, you start cashing in as you approach the peak -- when the buyers can still be lulled into thinking that the climb will go on for much longer. If you wait till you've passed the peak and are on a long plateau or into terminal decline, its harder to cash in.
WinMTR previously was GPL'ed and the source was available. Part of its licensing was the licensing of the mtr code. This constitutes prima facie evidence that at some point in time, at least, there was mtr code in WinMTR.
"At some point in time" isn't enough. In order for Appnor to have any burden to meet, anyone accusing them of violating copyright based on not following the GPL with WinMTR would need to provide prima facie evidence that WinMTR -- now, not in the past, if it is based on the behavior with regard to the version they are now distributing -- either uses GPL code or is a derivative work of GPL code.
Absent that, Appnor wouldn't have to prove anything.
No. It's a concept borrowed from real property. You know, that thing that idiots like you continue to try to conflate software with.
I've never seen anyone conflate software with real property. The accusations that other people are trying to do so usually require either falsely conflating real property with all legal property or conflating "treating something as an entirely different class of thing with some similar features" with "conflating".
People will finally grasp what the rest of us grasped ages ago. That is, I have nothing worth saying that hundreds or thousands of people need to know about and none of them have anything worth saying that I give a damn about.
If you had grasped that yourself, you wouldn't be posting on Slashdot.
Android has never 'eaten Apple's lunch' on iPhone sales.
Google (Android), per comScore, passed Apple (iOS) as #2 in total active smartphone subscribers. (Still trails Blackberry, though if Android climbs and Blackberry falls in the next quarter at the same rate, Android will be #1 and Blackberry and iOS will be number #2.)
Now, comScore may overstate Google's position (Nielsen, for instance, has Apple ahead of Google -- and RIM -- with Google predicted to take the number 1 slot in Q1 2011), but pretty much all sources have Android growing fast, and on the verge of passing Apple in the smartphone market if not actually ahead.
It's sales also leveled off a few months ago.
Well, no. The Apple Insider forum post you link to interprets an 8% increase in the daily activation rate between August and October as a sign that the activation rate has reached a "plateau", but increasing by 8% in two months is not a plateau. It might be a reduction in the previous rate of increase, but an 8% increase in two months is a 58% annualized rate of increase, which is pretty far from flat.
Its not surprising that Apple Insider distorts things in that direction, of course, but it is a distortion, and not a particularly subtle one.
If false positives aren't an issue, its simpler, easier, and less distracting for yourself (and therefore, safer) than having a separate detector to just use the same device you use to detect vehicles normally (that is, your eyes, aided by mirrors to expand the field of view) to detect vehicles whose drivers might be distracted (whether by electronics, conversations, attractive pedestrians, or something else), assuming that any vehicle detected is also a vehicle that might have a distracted driver.
If you choose to listen to Pandora on your iPhone, so be it. It would still be better to know that maybe you need an extra couple feet while I pass you, rather than know nothing at all.
Uh, why would I need that. What is magical about radio waves being translated into sound by a device hooked into the cars sound system that happens to also have the capacity to be used as a phone vs. by the in-dash radio that results in this need?
Same thing for a dash mounted phone being used as a talking GPS navigator (accessing map data via the internet) vs. a dash mounted dedicated talking GPS navigator with map data in local memory?
The fact is, that "has an electronic device that is currently in use connected to a wireless data network" (whether you restrict it to voice/text cell use or include data use) doesn't meaningfully relate to "is more distracted than someone without such a device".
You'd be safer if you just assume that everyone else on the road is distracted, whether or not wireless data or an electronic device is involved.
The detector suggested in GGP would just be a source of distraction for the driver using it that wouldn't provide meaningful information about who else on the road is distracted.
I want to see the sources of all mobile phone use within 100 ft of my car. Of course, ideally I would want a head's up type projection on the windows, showing all the morons using their phone (texting or voice - hands free or regular), in red.
Does this include data use? If not, why is using email or VoIP different than texting or regular voice calling. If, on the other hand, it does, why do you care that I'm listening to Pandora through my iPhone rather than listening to my radio?
It seems to me that however you do this its not a good way to get at what you are interested in. You either end up with lots of false positives or lots of false negatives -- or both.
Keyboard away from the screen and horizontal, no problem. But then, what's the point in virtualizing it?
Star Trek (TNG and later)-style dynamically reconfigurable panels where the size, shape, and function of the inputs configures for specific users and applications. Done right -- which involves a lot more than just making a virtual keyboard on a touch screen -- and with good haptics it might be pretty useful general purpose control device, and with a curved surface of an appropriate shape, could default to a fairly comfortable "keyboard" (though with no travel, which isn't ideal, so you need to have good application-specific adaptability to make up for it.)
Your primary display would (for desktop applications) still be separate, this would replace the keyboard and mouse.
This still doesn't really work. I work for an IT services company that does just this. Companies that don't want to run their own email servers, firewalls, or whatever will turn them over to us to run. However, it's very rare that they will pay as part of the contract for us to actually keep hardware and software up-to-date.
With "cloud" vendors providing packaged solutions, usually part of what you get is updates (this isn't the same as someone turning over existing servers to an outside firm.)
But, yeah, its possible to outsource without addressing deferred maintenance, too.
Atcually, that's something socially awkward nerds sometimes mistake for humor. Really, it's not.
Humor is subjective, so positing what purports on its face to be a factual, objective statement that someone else is wrong about what is and is not humorous is kind of pointless.
in many species the female is heterozygous for the sex chromosome not the male- the ZW system in some insects is a prominent example Time Lords may be one of these species so that a clone of a male could be female
Um, for a clone (well "clone-ish thing", if you are changing chromosomes its not quite what people normally mean by a clone) of a male to be female (without requiring the kind of engineering that gives you, e.g., functional XX males by placing a male sex-determining region on an X chromosome) you need the male to be heterozygous for the sex chromosome (as in the XY system) since then you take the female sex chromosome from the male (X) and make two copies of it, discarding the other sex chromosome from the male (the Y), giving a female.
So, this works if males are heterozygous, as in the XY system used in, among other things, humans.
If the female is heterozygous and the male is not, then you can't get all the chromosomes you need for a functional female from a male.
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He's never had success outside of California - he can't hold any Federal office (maybe I should have said "trouble in Federal politics"). California may be big, but it's not mainstream.
He's run for two federal office: he's run for Senator from CA once (1982, where he won the Democratic primary but lost the general election) -- which has the exact same set of eligible voters as running for Governor of CA -- and he's run for President (in 1976, in 1980 -- challenging an incumbent of his own party, and 1992). In each of his Presidential runs he failed to win the nomination.
Lots of politicians who would generally be characterized as "successful" have tried to run for President and failed to win the nomination of their party -- many not making as strong a showing as Brown in 1992 or even 1976. But that's seems to be the only basis of the claim that he has had "trouble" in "mainstream" politics.
And, btw, if California is not "mainstream", what state in the Union is, and on what basis do you assess that?
In practice, this can't happen for a few reasons.
Actually, it can't happen, even in theory, for exactly one reason: while there is a provision of federal bankruptcy code that applies to bankruptcy of municipalities (Chapter 9, which was adopted during the Great Depression, prior to which creditors only recourse were proceedings to compel the municipality to raise taxes to pay off the debt) there is no legal provision in the US under which a State can declare bankruptcy.
The US bankruptcy code (Title 11 of the United States Code) specifically excludes coverage of governmental units other than "municipalities" (which include agencies and instrumentalities of states, but note states as such.)
Now, conceivably, every individual State agency could enter into Chapter 9 bankruptcy simultaneously, but in addition to the administrative nightmare that would create, its not clear that even that could acheive the effect you are looking for given the Section 903 limits on the power of the court as relates to State law in Chapter 9 proceedings.
List out the state workers "on a road trip" all the time? I can think of CalTrans, but they have a radio network to use, with the ability to call through it, if need be.
Quite a lot of state agencies have staff whose job is to monitor performance of facilities that are licensed or certified by the agency and/or that receive funding from the agency. These staff, necessarily, spend a substantial fraction of their work time in the field rather than at headquarters.
[Some state workers are on the road all the time] What about them?
I would presume that's the reason that, while a large share of the state-issued cellphones are being taken back, it isn't all of them.
That's why he's fixing the $27B budget deficit by cutting $20M worth of cell phone bills.
Ah, so you've missed the budget that he proposed which has much bigger changes than the cell phone takeback. The cellphone takeback is one of those small changes in the executive branch (there are lots of others) that can be done by the Governor by fiat rather than requiring legislative action and/or special approval of the voters.
A libertarian would have the state declare bankruptcy and nullify the state employee union's contract and pensions.
I'm not sure how placing the entire State government under the supervision of a federal bankruptcy court would be "libertarian".
That would fix the budget problem in one fell swoop
No, it wouldn't. Someone -- whether its the State government or the bankruptcy receiver -- still has to determine the actual specific cuts and/or the specific revenue generating measures to adopt. Bankruptcy might loosen some obligations and create more freedom to take certain choices among those options, but it wouldn't automatically choose among them (and it would instantly produce an enormous storm of litigation.)
There aren't magic bullets.
Except meanwhile, nothing is being said about Calif's runaway pension obligations.
That can't generally be done for represented employees except via labor agreements; one of the last things the previous governor did was negotiate labor agreements with many bargaining units that both reduced pensions for new workers and increased pension contributions for all workers in those bargaining units. It seems likely (given that his proposed budget includes cuts for those units that have not yet reached new agreements that mirror those under the agreements reached by the previous governor) that Brown will seek similar provisions for in contracts for the remaining bargaining units.
Look at AT&T for an example. iPhone buries their Android phone subscribers by a factor of 10 or more.
Sure, but that's because of exclusivity: if you want an iPhone, you have to be an AT&T subscriber. If you aren't committed to an iPhone, then while the specific names may be different for different networks, you can go with whatever cellular network you prefer -- and AT&T hasn't promoted their non-iOS smartphones the way other carriers (particularly Verizon) have. So, yeah, iPhone is dominant on AT&T, but there are pretty clear reasons for that that don't apply to other carriers once AT&T isn't the exclusive carrier. Sure, you'll expect that some people who would prefer the iPhone but also have a stronger concern for Verizon's network over AT&T's, and thus who currently use a different phone on Verizon's network, would switch to the iPhone. And you'd expect people that would prefer Verizon's network but have stayed with AT&T because they have a stronger iPhone preference than their network preference to switch to Verizon from AT&T. But I think it would go farther than is rationally justified to expect that with exclusivity gone from AT&T, the iPhone will be as dominant as it currently is on AT&T on Verizon's network or, even, after a couple of years to even be as dominant on AT&T's network now that people who want an iPhone have a choice of networks.
In addition to supporting H.264, Chrome currently bundles an embedded version of Adobe’s closed source and proprietary Flash Player plugin. If H.264 support is being removed to “enable open innovation”, will Flash Player support be dropped as well?
Probably, just not today.
Most places that provide H.264 provide a Flash-container fallback for H.264 encoded video. Moving H.264 support out of the core browsers video tag support and bundling Flash means that, as long as H.264 is relevant, Chrome users have support via Flash -- which while bundled by Google is maintained by Adobe -- but maintaining H.264 support is no longer a cost Google has to bear, and once HTML5-based video and web-apps have reached critical mass, Google can strip down the Chrome distribution by dumping bundled-in Flash.
Android currently supports H.264. Will this support be removed from Android? If not, why not?
Probably eventually (perhaps after the merger with Chrome OS that Google has announced is in the cards for Android in the future), but the balancing for Android is different than that for Chrome.
YouTube uses H.264 to encode video. Presumably, YouTube will be re-encoding its entire library using WebM. When this happens, will YouTube’s support for H.264 be dropped, to “enable open innovation”?
I wouldn't be at all surprised if, like Chrome, YouTube eventually went to WebM via HTML5 video + H.264 via Flash wrapper, and then later to WEbM only.
Do you expect companies like Netflix, Amazon, Vimeo, Major League Baseball, and anyone else who currently streams H.264 to dual-encode all of their video using WebM?
AFAIK, those all use plugin-based players (Silverlight, specifically, for all of them, I think) rather than HTML5 video for DRM reasons, and therefore changes in browser support for codecs in the HTML5 video tag have no effect on those services.
real Unlimited or Unlimited with a big slow down at 5gb?
Unlimited with a big slowdown at 5GB for $5 more than AT&T's 2GB plan would still be worth it.
2GB is actually a huge limit
Its not a huge limit with tethering (of course, tethering costs extra without increasing the limit.)
Although Verizon's "unlimited" plan might be a nice marketing feature, will it cost more?
The whole thing is that Verizon won't cancel their existing unlimited plan or prevent iPhone users from getting it. The existing plan is $30/month. This is $5/month more than AT&T's 2GB plan and exactly the same as AT&T's unlimited plan (which you can't sign up for anymore, though people who had it at the time of the changeover and haven't dropped down still do.)
Verizon certainly does not want a bunch of data-sucking iPhones on their network unless they can make money off of them. So, yes, I could believe that Verizon my offer an unlimited plan for $20 more than what their 2MB/month plan costs. But I tend to doubt they're going to be offering unlimited for the same cost as AT&T 2MB/month plan.
AT&T's plans are 200MB/month and 2GB/month, there is no 2MB/month plan, which would be silly. AT&T's 2GB/month plan is $5/month less than their unlimited plan (which you can't get new, but some people still have.) Since Verizon currently has an unlimited smartphone data plan, and its the same $30/month that AT&T's is -- $5 more than AT&T's 2GB/month plan and $15 more than AT&T's 200MB/month plan -- I'd expect that if they offer the iPhone and keep the unlimited plan available the price will stay right there at $30/month.
That may be what they say they want, but the real killer feature that Facebook has is a critical mass of users with which to chat and share pictures.
That was the real killer feature that MySpace had, too. Popularity as the "real killer feature" is pretty much the definition of a transient fad.
Maybe Facebook sers will migrate to The Real Internet too? Facebook chat and picture hosting seem to be the two killer features that people (at least, people I talk to) seem to want. Facebook chat is just a non-federated Jabber server with a web interface. Google and others provide a federated Jabber server with a web interface for free.
Picture hosting is just a special-purpose web server; when Internet connections get slightly faster I can imagine this being a built-in feature in consumer routers.
And there are plenty of people that already supply picture hosting (Google, for instance, via Picasa). What Facebook has that gives it an edge some simple social features for picture hosting (tagging people, mostly.)
So if the Facebook hype is fading and FB already cashing in, what is the competitor and why did their user base just go from 500 million people to 600 million people?
If you are smart, you start cashing in as you approach the peak -- when the buyers can still be lulled into thinking that the climb will go on for much longer. If you wait till you've passed the peak and are on a long plateau or into terminal decline, its harder to cash in.
WinMTR previously was GPL'ed and the source was available. Part of its licensing was the licensing of the mtr code. This constitutes prima facie evidence that at some point in time, at least, there was mtr code in WinMTR.
"At some point in time" isn't enough. In order for Appnor to have any burden to meet, anyone accusing them of violating copyright based on not following the GPL with WinMTR would need to provide prima facie evidence that WinMTR -- now, not in the past, if it is based on the behavior with regard to the version they are now distributing -- either uses GPL code or is a derivative work of GPL code.
Absent that, Appnor wouldn't have to prove anything.
No. It's a concept borrowed from real property. You know, that thing that idiots like you continue to try to conflate software with.
I've never seen anyone conflate software with real property. The accusations that other people are trying to do so usually require either falsely conflating real property with all legal property or conflating "treating something as an entirely different class of thing with some similar features" with "conflating".
People will finally grasp what the rest of us grasped ages ago. That is, I have nothing worth saying that hundreds or thousands of people need to know about and none of them have anything worth saying that I give a damn about.
If you had grasped that yourself, you wouldn't be posting on Slashdot.
Android has never 'eaten Apple's lunch' on iPhone sales.
Google (Android), per comScore, passed Apple (iOS) as #2 in total active smartphone subscribers. (Still trails Blackberry, though if Android climbs and Blackberry falls in the next quarter at the same rate, Android will be #1 and Blackberry and iOS will be number #2.)
Now, comScore may overstate Google's position (Nielsen, for instance, has Apple ahead of Google -- and RIM -- with Google predicted to take the number 1 slot in Q1 2011), but pretty much all sources have Android growing fast, and on the verge of passing Apple in the smartphone market if not actually ahead.
It's sales also leveled off a few months ago.
Well, no. The Apple Insider forum post you link to interprets an 8% increase in the daily activation rate between August and October as a sign that the activation rate has reached a "plateau", but increasing by 8% in two months is not a plateau. It might be a reduction in the previous rate of increase, but an 8% increase in two months is a 58% annualized rate of increase, which is pretty far from flat.
Its not surprising that Apple Insider distorts things in that direction, of course, but it is a distortion, and not a particularly subtle one.
Why would he mind false positives?
If false positives aren't an issue, its simpler, easier, and less distracting for yourself (and therefore, safer) than having a separate detector to just use the same device you use to detect vehicles normally (that is, your eyes, aided by mirrors to expand the field of view) to detect vehicles whose drivers might be distracted (whether by electronics, conversations, attractive pedestrians, or something else), assuming that any vehicle detected is also a vehicle that might have a distracted driver.
If you choose to listen to Pandora on your iPhone, so be it. It would still be better to know that maybe you need an extra couple feet while I pass you, rather than know nothing at all.
Uh, why would I need that. What is magical about radio waves being translated into sound by a device hooked into the cars sound system that happens to also have the capacity to be used as a phone vs. by the in-dash radio that results in this need?
Same thing for a dash mounted phone being used as a talking GPS navigator (accessing map data via the internet) vs. a dash mounted dedicated talking GPS navigator with map data in local memory?
The fact is, that "has an electronic device that is currently in use connected to a wireless data network" (whether you restrict it to voice/text cell use or include data use) doesn't meaningfully relate to "is more distracted than someone without such a device".
You'd be safer if you just assume that everyone else on the road is distracted, whether or not wireless data or an electronic device is involved.
The detector suggested in GGP would just be a source of distraction for the driver using it that wouldn't provide meaningful information about who else on the road is distracted.
I want to see the sources of all mobile phone use within 100 ft of my car. Of course, ideally I would want a head's up type projection on the windows, showing all the morons using their phone (texting or voice - hands free or regular), in red.
Does this include data use? If not, why is using email or VoIP different than texting or regular voice calling. If, on the other hand, it does, why do you care that I'm listening to Pandora through my iPhone rather than listening to my radio?
It seems to me that however you do this its not a good way to get at what you are interested in. You either end up with lots of false positives or lots of false negatives -- or both.
Keyboard away from the screen and horizontal, no problem. But then, what's the point in virtualizing it?
Star Trek (TNG and later)-style dynamically reconfigurable panels where the size, shape, and function of the inputs configures for specific users and applications. Done right -- which involves a lot more than just making a virtual keyboard on a touch screen -- and with good haptics it might be pretty useful general purpose control device, and with a curved surface of an appropriate shape, could default to a fairly comfortable "keyboard" (though with no travel, which isn't ideal, so you need to have good application-specific adaptability to make up for it.)
Your primary display would (for desktop applications) still be separate, this would replace the keyboard and mouse.
This still doesn't really work. I work for an IT services company that does just this. Companies that don't want to run their own email servers, firewalls, or whatever will turn them over to us to run. However, it's very rare that they will pay as part of the contract for us to actually keep hardware and software up-to-date.
With "cloud" vendors providing packaged solutions, usually part of what you get is updates (this isn't the same as someone turning over existing servers to an outside firm.)
But, yeah, its possible to outsource without addressing deferred maintenance, too.
Atcually, that's something socially awkward nerds sometimes mistake for humor. Really, it's not.
Humor is subjective, so positing what purports on its face to be a factual, objective statement that someone else is wrong about what is and is not humorous is kind of pointless.
in many species the female is heterozygous for the sex chromosome not the male- the ZW system in some insects is a prominent example Time Lords may be one of these species so that a clone of a male could be female
Um, for a clone (well "clone-ish thing", if you are changing chromosomes its not quite what people normally mean by a clone) of a male to be female (without requiring the kind of engineering that gives you, e.g., functional XX males by placing a male sex-determining region on an X chromosome) you need the male to be heterozygous for the sex chromosome (as in the XY system) since then you take the female sex chromosome from the male (X) and make two copies of it, discarding the other sex chromosome from the male (the Y), giving a female.
So, this works if males are heterozygous, as in the XY system used in, among other things, humans.
If the female is heterozygous and the male is not, then you can't get all the chromosomes you need for a functional female from a male.