Boom!

There is always one problem with batteries and cars - exploding. Batteries have the full chemical reaction ready to go all the time. Crush a battery and all of it's power can be released at once. Leaking fuel releases energy only as quickly as it can mix with air. Hydrogen creates an impressive fireball and gasoline melts bridges, but there's still a lot of slow heat dissipation into the air and there's always an option to smother the fire. Imagine that same energy being constrained to a small battery pack. There'd be a crater to fix after a bad crash.

I suspect that we'll continue using fuels for a very long time. Probably something more friendly to fuel cells than gasoline, but definitely an oxygen consuming fuel.

Awaiting "fix the hardware February"

Will 15% bribe me to buy a premium laptop that can't hold its lid on anything but an office table? Or maybe an iPhone that's crippled by poor AT&T service? So close, but no.

And next...

A list of physics violations in an old Warner Bros. cartoon.

Star Trek: The Fast and the Furious

The trailers show the ship being put together with antiquated arc welders and Kirk's fingers providing better traction than four skidding car tires. Then the ships smash together over and over like a child playing with toys. Did Vin Diesel turn down the role of Kirk?

The other end is broken too

At the other end of things, I noticed that Hotmail is not accepting abuse complaints for spam again. Why? Because the spam complaint contains spam, of course. Back into my blacklist they go. You'd think MS would want to know if spammers were using MS Hotmail's servers to sell cracked MS products.

Pics?

This story absolutely must be illustrated with your Lego kits.

What do you want to kill today?

Investors calling for Jerry's head on a platter might have a tough time getting past the locals. Microsoft would have given $47 billion to investors, raided the customer databases, fired everybody, and stripped the office bare. Employee severance would have early vesting worth $6K to $25K. Having that happen in Silicon Valley during a recession means you abandon your home and leave. You can't get a new job here in a recession before the $3K/month rent or $5K/month house drains your bank account.

Workarounds

Aim lower. Use insulated penetrating points. Put a mini Marx generator in a single-point dart so the other electric pole is capacitive coupling out the wires. Use three penetrating points with one being the output of a low impedance transformer to destroy foils and conductive fibers.

Not 9?

I went to Adobe's online store to look at purchasing some upgrades. I was greeted with a 100% Flash web page having a MacOS 9 look & feel. It was slow, mouse scrolling didn't work, and... nevermind. I don't feel like buying anymore.

Who will suck more?

New "fiber" services in the US usually go along these lines:

Telco - 7Mbps, one dynamic IP address, 5 free webmail accounts, free Yahoo or Google account, PPoE, incoming traffic prohibited, filesharing prohibited, 1.5GB/mo bandwidth cap, bundled premium content SDTV, bundled phone and long-distance, bundled DRM music service, no QoS, web content may be monitored or altered for advertising, $195/month.

Local Government - Hiring more consultants to cope with project delays and budget overruns.

Bad simulated images

Because of the tiny chip size, laser diodes don't make a beam. The light diverges in an oval-like shape at about 10 degrees by 20 degrees. This is a good thing for reading layered discs because the corrective optics focuses the light at exactly one point.

Wasted motor?

I don't understand why one motor would drive the car and the other manage the suspension. It sounds like a waste of a motor and a LOT of power, especially on a car body that offers little room for wheel travel. Why not gear them so that both motors drive the wheel and the phase difference between them controls the wheel height? Much simpler and efficient.

Squish

Google HQ is along side the San Francisco Bay in an area of wetlands converted into golf courses, dumps, salt ponds, a decommissioned yet highly active military airfield, defense contractor offices and test facilities, combat training facilities, giant antennas, a movie theater complex, an amphitheater, multi-use trails, and office space.

Sympathy

I can have a little sympathy for the guy. Many times I've ripped out code that clearly could not work, has no references in the main codebase, and was commented everywhere with "Doesn't work." Of course the next day is catastrophic. Some obscure system that used to spit out errors all day now crashes. The obscure system is still listed as a health check for the hardware that replaced it two years ago. The health check failures cascade and everything is dead. Now comes 100 "WTF happened" e-mails, followed by a dozen meetings on the same topic, followed by a new set of rules so specific that they have no general value for future events whatsoever.

Teli@Home

It should be easy enough to detect any TV device whether it's digital or analog. There will be some emissions and, regardless of what they are, they will have some component that is perfectly synchronized to the refresh rate. It's nothing that a laptop computer couldn't analyze. A few seconds of listening for refresh synchronization should reveal exactly which station is being watched.

I hope you have good TV over there. I can hardly believe that people pay $60 to $100 a MONTH for TV hookups in the US. I spent $200 on a rooftop antenna. If that investment doesn't last for at least 10 years I'm going to feel like I wasted my money.

Pick up the engine

So you can lift the engine out of this car and drop in a new one with your hands? Screw the milage. THAT is the revolutionary design. You could drop in an electric set for your daily commute or put in the gasoline motor for a long weekend trip. If another new kind of engine is invented, you're ready for that too. Axon can make good money for themselves by selling upgrade kits.

I want my modular car!

Just require valid registrations

Registrars should NOT police content. They're not equipped for that. They just need to keep the registrations legitimate.

Providing accurate personal information or using a legitimate proxy manager is tough when you're a wanted criminal. ICANN has a process to deal with these fakes but it's operating a thousand times too slowly for an environment where everything is instant. ICANN needs to terminate registrars that will not put in place reasonable validation measures. You'd be surprised at how many domains are registered to a person named, "asdf, asdf." There's also a handful of crime-friendly domain proxy businesses that openly admit that they can't be contacted. Nuke 'em all and most of the spam goes away. What's left can be dealt with using proper legal procedures.

DRM Fail

Web music companies fail because they require cumbersome interaction through a custom client on a desktop computer. Even if I am sitting in front of my computer, I won't invest time in using a service that won't work elsewhere. Fuck Flash, DRM plugins, the popup ads, and logins. I can push a button on an Internet or FM radio to get instant music.

If I do happen to be at my computer, a few mouse clicks will buy the song at Amazon and drop it into my home music library. That last little bit is an awesome feature at Amazon. There's nothing more to do after clicking the purchase button. The music is in my HOME library and it works wherever I want it to on whatever player I want to use.

Ack...

Does no heartbeat map to a default key as a safety backup? I'm working on plans for my remote controlled zombie army.

Cyberghosts

They'll have to modernize it - Ghostbusters fighting ghosts in cyberspace that take control of machines and threaten to shut down the world. Maximum Overdrive meets Lain, Die Hard style, featuring Keanu Reeves and car chases with military hardware. Ow! Can't...close...eyes...tight...enough.

Slowly now, not too many things at once

"Chrome will use the idea of multiple concurrently executing processes where a process, a kind of mini-browser, runs its own app tab and a Chrome process manager. Halts in one process do not freeze the whole browser."

Does this mean that Google engineers never learned multi-threading? This sounds like a bad experience for those on 4-core and 8-core systems.

I trust Google less than Microsoft these days. I'll stick with my browser that wasn't built by a mega-corp looking to dominate the world.

And now...

802.11z - A new variation of the popular 802.11 protocol addressing concerns that the standard will soon run out of meaningless alphabetic version codes. The 'z' standard will never be complete, thus allowing infinite future expenses, I mean expansions, without the need to change protocols. New features will be added at random, nothing may be certified as compatible, and the killer feature set is always just around the corner.

Municipal WiFi will find the 802.11z "can" implementation especially economic. As allowed by the 'z' specs, the "can" supports an unlimited number customers in a 5 mile radius any throughput possible, including zero. Being literally a can of soup, the modules need no hard wiring, draw little power, and require no complicated routing to form a continuous mesh of tasty bandwidth.

Hardcore gamers will be interested in the 802.11z "fanboi." This version offers virtually unlimited throughput by sending multiple channels of ultra-broadband wireless signals over cheap Cat 6 cable. Problems with FCC certification and line-of-site obstructions are completely eliminated. Manufactures are encouraged to inject faults into their implementations to ensure a steady stream of "newer is better" upgrades. Carcinogenic emissions of Reality Distortion Fields are allowed and unsupported.

A forgotten technological advancement

Blu-Ray is barely more than a refresh of DRM crippling. I buy movie to watch a movie, not to see a brilliant application of DRM tell me that my HDTV or player is not authorized. This format could easily end up in the bit bucket with Circuit City's, Microsoft's, Apple's, and a dozen companies' media that's so tightly protected by DRM that it doesn't work anywhere.

Apple versus AT&T

I'm sure Steve is already screaming his head off at AT&T.

AT&T is the company that "raises the bar" by telling your phone to show three bars even when the signal is too weak to dial out. AT&T is the telco that gives you the choice of buying expensive Internet+DTV bundles or suffering with last decade's raw DSL plans. AT&T is the telco that sent out a draconian contract update for land-line users, giving you the option to agree or not have a phone. Such a friendly company.

Java

It looks like Java is being used as hardware middleware. Native code runs the devices while Java code tells them what to do. It's not a bad idea, actually. It lets developers build prototypes in an an unfamiliar environment using a language that's hard to beat when it comes to debugging and API exploration. It's Linux so you can always move to another language when you're an expert.

So last decade

The ability of bot armies to spam all permutations of e-mail addresses in parallel makes pre-validation unnecessary. Many spamming bots are also aware of misconfigured/broken mail servers that will route undeliverable mail to a second e-mail address to double the odds of delivery.

I doubt Apple's WebDAV is implemented in a way that allows harvesting of unknown accounts. WebDAV is a resource hog even when used correctly. Allowing deep traversal from the top level would wipe out their servers in no time.

If there's going to be WebDAV abuse, it will be for illegal file sharing. Will Apple play whack-a-mole with everybody using "12345" as their password or will they do like Google and let an algorithm badly guess what account is being abused?

Redlight

All Silverlight has to do is control a codec and it looks like a brilliant product. Nevermind that any number of H.264/AAC compatible video plugins could do the same. People see YouTube and assume that online video can't look good.

I'd bet that Microsoft won the deal by promising free video hosting and bulletproof DRM.

Stretching it

With the right alloy and zig-zagging traces (flat springs), you could produce traditional metal-clad circuit boards that stretch too.

The rubber is useful if it can be printed onto irregular surfaces that can't be coated with metal foil. Hmmm... Electric rubbers. I wonder if the sex industry pays more than the tech industry?

Are those from a cellphone?

The photos are very blurry and hazy even when they're reduced in size. Color purity is slightly worse than a 20 year old TV. Anything less that perfect shooting conditions wouldn't even give you 4x6 prints. Why does this get 70% for a rating? It's a waste of space in your hand and very expensive. Cheap pocket cameras do at least as well.

Nothing new

L+R, L-R encoding has been in use for a while. It allows the mono and stereo components of a signal to be compressed into limited bandwidth differently. FM stereo radio uses it. Some surround sound formats are based on manipulating the dynamic range of a L-R signal then playing it behind the listener. The old "Stereo Wide" trick removed midrange audio from the L+R component to make boom boxes sound bigger.

And why is a Bose a standard unit for comparison? Peaks in the mid-treble and mid-bass are used to mask an overall poor frequency response. It makes a decent first impression but it grows tiring, even headache inducing, after about half an hour. There's actually science behind the old saying, "No highs? No lows? Must be Bose." Want to see pictures of the premium Bose speakers in my car? They're cheap junk; worse than what you'd get from factory speakers.

@AC

All of my ISP's online services are converting to Google Apps. I'll be leaving them very shortly. They can "Google" me if they want to know where I've gone...

Sweet hack! Can I have my computer back now?

I read the JS code for that. Awesome!

I had to use the "Send feedback..." link in my browser to report this. Privacy or not, it has to be fixed because it's a resource intensive dictionary attack. It's already bad enough that I have to keep building new rules to exclude abusive Flash ads. Now advertisers are going to scan their list of 100000 most interesting URLs on every page load.

21 months?

$2.8 million (after IRS) costs only 21 months of no-security prison time? That's a damn good salary even if you consider prison to be a 150 hour work week. Hello life of crime!

In the US

US HDTV is nice but nothing to buy a new TV for. The biggest improvement is in color purity. Colors are rich, deep, and clean regardless of the texture. It's like the difference between a glossy silver-halide photo and a cheap color newspaper. Resolution gets better or worse, depending on condition. Analog is consistently blurry and very sensitive to imperfections. MPEG 2 can't handle constrained bandwidth. It's common for the DTV picture to totally disintegrate into fuzzy blocks when there's a lot of motion. Stations may also divide their bandwidth into multiple digital streams. The local PBS station crams 1 low quality HD stream and four very low quality SD streams into a single waste of a channel.

Turn that filter around, please

This is all funny because Google is the biggest origin of spam that I've ever seen. I have all of their mail servers blocked from my mail account to stop the junk flood. Their Usenet service spews thousands of CC phishing posts and spams a day. The infamous Nike shoe phisher has been using Google for years. Google doesn't care how much spam they send as long as it doesn't come back to them.

Twisting the Q-Tip in too far

I wish I had a bigger shower. One where my elbows don't bump. One where I can move. A shower so big that I can walk around in it. A shower that needs furniture! A shower so big that my friends can come over! I'll build an entire house that's one big oval rail with a giant shower curtain!

The aluminum foil coat is mine, just like in the model.

Will it blend?

Even if it doesn't fly it, that top-mounted intake shows great promise in making entertaining YouTube videos.

Or make us the punch-line of an international joke

Take a look at the current WiFi spectrum. Odds are you'll find several neighbors with wide-open Windows networks and a municipal WAP that's saturated with garbage traffic. Imagine increasing the coverage to multiply the number of computers in range by 500. Is that supposed to be a good thing?

abuse@google.com is an auto-ignore bot. abuse@microsoft.com says your mail is rejected because you mentioned a topic of abuse. How can either one of these clowns manage a massive public network? The airwaves will be flooded with botnet traffic and hash from broken transceivers. Giving these two companies any RF bandwidth is a total waste of precious resources.

Mouse brain benchmark?

I am Holly, the ship's computer, with an IQ of 6000. The same IQ as 6000 P.E. teachers.

Catch 22

Things that MacOS 7 did just fine on 30Mhz 16MB computers puts up a spinning beachball on 1.5GHz PPC systems burdened with MacOS 10.5. A cleaned up version of OS X would sell very well with PPC owners, possibly delaying a purchase of an x86 system. Meanwhile, 10.5's bloat isn't entirely embarrassing on the latest x86 systems so few of those people will upgrade.

The question is: Where's the better profit?

Rate the movie?

The only rating a theater needs is the money.

I'd throw candy at the screens when the ads are too long but the candy costs as much as the tardy movie. It's easier to watch it at home.