It'll only last until the first person dies from one of these sensors. Someone will have a heart attack in a rural area where ambulance service is at least 30 minutes away. Their spouse/friend will carry them to the car, and try to start the car. The sensor will malfunction, and refuse to start. By the time the ambulance gets there, the person with the heart attack will be dead. Instant lawsuit against the car manufacturer and the government. And I'd support it 100%. It's one thing to mandate sensors for people who lost the right. It's another thing to mandate it for everyone.

Last week Google took a page from Apple's book and pulled the Arcade by Kongregate app from the Android Market for violating its terms of service.

Except that on my Droid I'm still allowed to download the app from Kongregate's website and install it, no matter what Google thinks. They can even update their app automatically, or, even distribute more than one app. I have apps like that on my phone. Of course, they don't get the exposure of Google's app store, but there's nothing inherently wrong with Google saying "We don't want that in our app store". As opposed to Apple, I choose what can and cannot be installed on my phone, not Google/Apple.

Please e-mail the people in charge of the Planet Hunters people with everything you just wrote. I'm not involved with this project, but I am in the collaboration that supplies the data for the Supernova Zoo. I don't work much with that part of the project (I use the same data for stellar work), but for them SN Zoo is a crucial part of the discovery pipeline. Anything we can do to help people help us is something that would definitely be considered (and probably implemented if we have the resources), and I'm sure the Planet people are the same way.

There seems to be two general categories of Internet communications when it comes to trials. One is making comments about the process or trial. This I think has always happened to some extent, but was never made public (i.e. telling your spouse about your jury service). The addition of the Internet has made this more of a problem, because in the end, it is supposed to be the juror's decision about guilt, not him/her and the readers of his/her blog.

On the other hand, looking up terms or information about the trial, I think, only makes for a more informed jury. Otherwise, your only piece of information is from the prosecutor and defense lawyer, which are both extremely biased opinions. Granted, jurors have to be careful to judge information on the web carefully, but we're asking them to do the same thing in the courtroom as well.

"You and I" must be a very selective group. I use my Droid a lot, but in the last 10 months of owning it, I've gone over 500 MB/month once, and hit 400 MB/month 2 months. The rest of the time I haven't gone over 300 MB, and mostly at the 200 MB level. Why?

A good chunk of the time my droid is using wifi (at home). I used to be able to do it at my office as well, but then froyo broke WPA/Enterprise compatibility with cisco access points (well, actually wpa_supplicant broke, but froyo has an older version with this bug). Although android does have many issues with wifi compatibility. Plus, I don't stream music and even with 3G youtube takes a long time to load. And I don't tether my laptop (which is generally prohibited anyway).

On the other hand, I use it as, essentially, a PDA, navigation/gps system, and light browsing (the web browser is good, but I can only deal with so much browsing on a 4" screen. Great for looking something up. Useless for browsing a long time. VoIP may change things, but for the time being I only use VoIP when I'm in locations with wifi but not cell signal.

Personally, I'd be very glad to have a plan like Walmart's. I currently pay $30/month for unlimited data, and use on average, say 400 MB. Over the last 10 months I've paid Verizon $300. With Walmart's plan, I would've paid $160. Even adding on VoIP with a 64 kbit codec (the highest quality SIPDroid offers) for 450 minutes/month adds 216 MB of data usage. (or does it need to be doubled for both ways?)

You're right that the carriers are scared...because it won't be long before real VoIP apps appear for android that anyone can use, and the carriers are reduced to data carriers, not phone providers. Unfortunately, T-Mobile's network is nowhere as good as Verizon's, so I won't even consider it.

Just please don't follow the CA scheme. In NY, where I lived before Los Angeles, every grocery store had a few machines and you could bring down the bag of bottles you had whenever you wanted to. There was never a line, and everything just worked.

In CA, it's horrible. First, a lot more stuff has deposits on it. Second, most stores don't have any machines - they're only at special stores that have a separate booth on their property that handles recyclables (and not the ones I shop at for the most part). There's two automated machines per booth + one person who handles people who bring in huge amounts of stuff. Whenever I go, it takes me about a half-hour to wait in line while the professional bottle collectors in front of me off-load 5 huge garbage bags full of bottles. Half the time, the machines simply aren't working. And the booths operate from 9 AM to 4:30 pm. Oh, and there's usually a few homeless people pan-handling for money.

When I first moved here a few years ago, I'd store bottles on my apartment balcony for half a year, and then bring them down to get my $5-10 in deposits back. A few months ago I just gave up and decided I'd just recycle those bottles along with the rest of my recyclables. $20/year is not worth all the aggravation.

Multi-touch on my Macbook is great. Two finger scrolling, three finger flipping from page to page makes life significantly easier. Yes, I can do everything with a mouse, but usually don't have mine out if I just have my laptop. And of course I can always use the keyboard, but why when I can do the same thing 10 times faster with a few finger movements.

If you're going to go the VPS route, I suggest RimuHosting. The have absolutely amazing tech support (I've never waited more than a half-hour or so for support, without using the emergency option), great performance, actively monitor their servers, and do a great job keeping the hardware and networking running. They're willing to compile custom kernels for you (mine has ipsec and tun/tap support for openvpn), provide a nice admin panel for dns/mx/general server statistics, and apparently will help you with software installation and configuration without (in general) charging you.

I've been with them for a few years now, and have absolutely nothing negative to say.

The lack of voice over LTE is because it will use the same data channel for voice (i.e. VoIP). So it's not like any of the hardware has to be change. The reason it's not being deployed now is that there's no consensus over how voice should be done on LTE. I'm thrilled that VZW is waiting. LTE will be the global standard, and it will be good if they maintain full compatibility with global networks. Unfortunately, VZW is one of the first companies to deploy it - it appears the rest of the world is lagging behind.

As for it needing to retain CDMA on phones, that's also good. IT will be a while before VZW deploys LTE with the same coverage as CDMA. This is needed for backwards compatibility.

While I understand it's a slow process, consider that VZW, unlike most of their competitors, is actively pushing forward with LTE.

There are very few times when off-line maps are useful in a car. For those times, there are real GPS units (ones that have batteries that last for 16 hours instead of 2 hours and can survive a fall or water or the like). The thing that makes Google maps navigation so useful to me (on my Droid) are the live traffic updates. Plus, I don't have to worry about downloading maps onto my cell phone. Everything is updated all the time, and I can have my phone re-route me on alternate routes based on current traffic.

Actually, the carriers aren't particularly happy about this. Being in the hardware business is a very expensive pain in the neck for carriers. Verizon, for example, essentially provides free tech support and replaces phones for free in their stores while the phone is in warranty. Verizon would love to have a way of getting away from this and telling people "Go buy a phone somewhere else and call us for service".

The problem is that the American public now expects not to pay for a phone, which means the companies don't have much of an option. If anything, VZW is moving away from this since their LTE deployment will be fully standards compliant (at least as of right now). What their future pricing structure will be, though, is hard to say.

Actually, it's primarily lack of funding to build archives and, therefore, lack of access to the data. I think most astronomers have no problem sharing data, as long as they're properly credited and the data is used for something other than the original use (i.e. detecting exoplanets instead of dark energy). There are, of course, differences in the optimum observing strategy and obviously you can't figure everything out from the same instrument/observation, but additional observations are always good and there are usually ways to use the data.

What most people probably don't know is that the majority of data from ground telescopes (except for a few roboticized telescopes) is kept only by the observer. Observations often yield something "weird", in which case the "standard" procedure is to ask colleagues if they know what the "weird" thing is. If no one has any clue, the data is often put aside for later analysis, and typically forgotten about. Everyone is guilty of it, but it is entirely possible that what is one person's trash is another's gold mine.

Amusingly enough, at the last AAS (American Astronomical Society) meeting, there was a grad student discussion session with some of the higher ups in AAS. One of the things we grad students were very much in favor of was an observation archive with exclusivity for the PI for 12-18 months (this is the standard for NASA space missions). The reason we were given that this would never happen is funding.

First problem is that most newspapers are useless except for very local news. It used to be that you actually needed to subscribe to the local newspaper to know what was going on. With the web (blogs and the like)...that's simply not the case anymore. Which means that (at least for me) there are very few newspapers that actually provide anything of value...and that's primarily the investigative reporting. Sadly, this also seems to be one of the things that is being eliminated first.

The newspapers' only chance to survive is to differentiate themselves from the cable networks and actually write their own interesting articles, rather than just use articles from Reuters/AP. They should also adapt to the growing number of smartphones and realize that this is the delivery method of choice going forward. If they offer a low price ($10-20/month?) service and restrict free articles to one or two per day per person, they can open a new revenue source, and I think many people would have no problems paying for this for good newspapers (the NY Times comes to mind), especially if they were able to get articles delivered in a good format for smartphones.

The point of Bluetooth is not to transfer gigabytes of data. The point of bluetooth is to be able to connect a headset to a cell phone while barely lowering the battery life. The point of bluetooth is to be able to have wireless headphones that can run on a small battery. Wifi direct will be great for printers and the like, but Bluetooth is not going anywhere.