I'm a single parent, and even though I work from home I still take my child to daycare so I can work during work hours. While it's nice to have the easy flexibility working from home affords when daycare is unavailable or my child is sick, it really makes a difference being able to have a quiet place to work. The irony of having to leave the house to work from home wasn't lost on me either. :)

Interesting. I'm not disagreeing with you, though based on the definitions I'm familiar with it would seem to violate the interstate commerce rules. Definitely intrastate would apply, but interstate gets interesting.

However if I am in California and someone from Mass comes to my online service and buys from me, I do not have a presence in Mass. Likewise if I were a mail order business. I am not familiar with any precedents that define businesses in different states as having a presence in other states simply because they have a web site that *might* be visited by someone in another state. Of course, I've not been following it as close as I probably should, and IANA, so it's quite likely I missed that when (if) it happened.

Can you point to those? I'd like to get caught up.

Otherwise, it would seem problematic for a business on one side of the country having to follow business rules on the other side of the country. Take the internet out of the equation. A brick and morter business in California (say a used book store) has a telephone. Someone in Mass. calls that book store and asks if they have a specific book. They do, a transaction is made over the telephone and the book sent to the purchaser. Based on the theory you put forth, this brick and morter store in California would now have to jump through the special regulatory and financial hoops being passed in Mass. If other states do the same thing, then these businesses could find themselves having to comply with a myriad of laws, regulations, and other restrictions, potentially just because of the random, one-off transaction of a diligent customer looking for a special book.

I don't think that's likely to go very far, and were it challenged in court I seriously believe it would be thrown out as violating interstate commerce laws.

Obviously this would only be for businesses not maintaining a physical presence of some form in the state. If they have an office, a store, etc. then they would need to comply. Of course, that then begs the question of whether they have to make their nationwide operations comply or just those operations and transactions that originate within the state of Mass.

One things for sure, the lawyers will have fun.

This will ultimately probably only end up affect Mass businesses or people with presence in Mass directly. Otherwise this kind of requirement has the potential to impact interstate commerce which states expressly do not have the authority to legislate.

I'm all for requirements to protect data, however it is usually not a good idea to legislate how to accomplish that. When that happens then the industry's ability to innovate is legislated away.

I'm unsure myself - personally I want to know exactly what traits are being changed. There are times where using both pedals at the same time can be useful. Admittedly in a passenger car on the road it's a lot less frequent than going off road or rock crawling in a 4x4.

Specifically, I want to know what criteria need to be met for it to trigger. Does the change cause the engine shutdown (or return to idle? presumably return to idle) at any point when both the brake and gas are pushed at any speed, or only if the vehicle is traveling over 10-20 mph, or only if the accelerator pedal is pressed more then X%?

Odds are I'll end up getting it regardless, just for overall safety in general. Though i'll be pretty annoyed if it is a simple if gas and brake then stall.

I had to think long and hard before buying the Camry Hybrid because of all the drive-by-wire. Finally I decided to give it a go and I am glad I did. I get plenty of room in the cabin (not so much in the trunk though), and consistently get 30+ mpg around town and up to 40+ on highway trips (averaging 36-38 across West Texas at 80 mpg).

Some observations of mine:
- I have a "gear lever" to shift, but I'm pretty sure it's just there for "feel" and it's all electronic; if an electrical problem prevented the car from going into neutral then it wouldn't matter if it were "push button" or the gear lever like I have, it's still electronic.
- the emergency brake is mechanical - and that's your best bet if all else fails (assuming you aren't already going so fast as to make the car uncontrollable by locking the rear wheels
- It is not unusual for me to pull into a parking place, put the car into park, be totally stopped, release the brake, and (while totally still) push the button to turn off the car and have the car jump forward slightly; i suspect it has to do with getting a mechanical "break" in the transmission to engage and by slightly moving the car something akin to a tooth is able to engage the appropriate gear. I'm not able to reproduce on demand so I've not taken the car in for this.
- I have floor mats that are supposed to be held in place by hooks but the hooks keep coming out and floor mat moves all around. This is the factor carpeted floor, not the all season one, and i've never had it cause problems with the accelerator.
- i've not been able to reproduce the launching triggered by the cruise control as reported by SteveWoz, but that may be prius specific and/or speed related (i haven't been anywhere to try at 85 mph yet, speed limits around here stop at 75).

Depending on whether or not square allows its service to be used by websites in addition to the physical swipe of the card, then Square could be going right for PayPal's jugular. Of course there are other variables too - sign up process, fees, etc.

Friend of mine and I were talking about this earlier in the week. My guess is that there will be something of a tablet and that it will be in the macbook air family. Something like a keyboardless mac book air, but able to use the bluetooth keyboard/mouse they already offer (or a new smaller version possibly for the purpose). This would let the air become even thinner.

Wildly off-the-wall speculation - verizon data card built in or optional.

You know, if I were the paranoid type, I might be prone to think there were some high level shenanigans going on.

Remember the Apple patent enforcing ad viewing or the Apple patent on OS advertising?

Google is known for its advertising business, and has been putting ads everywhere. Eric Schmidt was on Apple's board from 2006 to 2009, when he resigned (or was forced out?) due to Google's entering "more of Apple's core business" with Chrome and Android. The new, unlocked, Google phone has plenty of speculation surrounding it, but one of the more interesting bits was that it could show up in two forms: (1) expensive, not subsidized, and (2) cheap, with advertising subsidizing it somehow, perhaps forced ad viewing or something?

Given Schmidt's time on the board, I wonder if he deliberately or inadvertently revealed any of these plans, or if Apple found itself aware of these plans through some other means. Regardless, if Apple has a patent on OS-level ad displays and/or forced ad viewing on a device, it would seem that they would be in a position to try and extract money from Google if they go forward with an ad-subsidized phone.

So now this begs the questions: Was Apple's patents on these concepts the result of information about Google's upcoming plans (either acquired legitimately or otherwise), or were they plans they had for a device of their own? Tough to say.

Personally I'm all for the carriers to be reduced to a conduit provider only. It's about time too. If they all had to compete as nearly identical providers of bandwidth instead of a myriad of services, then perhaps we'd see some improvements in the network quality. In fact, they'd have a lot more network capacity if they'd deliver one type of service instead of fragmenting it between different technologies. A friend and I often lament the poor audio quality people have come to expect from wrieless phones now that we are 100% digital. Sure there's no more "static" - but audio quality has suffered to get there.

I'm hopeful LTE will improve things - though I'm not holding my breath for it. It's going to be an expensive network upgrade that won't happen overnight. Sprint is banking on wimax and outsourcing their network, Verizon is claiming latter half 2010 for LTE. And along the way comes Google's Android and the exclusivity of the iPhone on AT&T nearing expiration (was it renewed? last I read it was all talk but I didn't see anything come from it), perhaps we'll finally have some heavy hitters that can break the carrier strangleholds. Should be interesting if they can.

Consider Solaris + ZFS too. Especially now that Solaris 10 u6(?) now can install to ZFS root partition (HINT: Use Text installer - options 3 or 4 if memory serves).

Solaris is free as in beer, even if it isn't open source. Plus you get the benefit of some of the proprietary drives if you have older hardware. Plus, Solaris proper won't leave you in a lurch when things change in OpenSolaris and you can't do updates or run some programs. [Admittedly this problem seems to be mostly resolved, but for mostly production environment I'd suggest Solaris over OpenSolaris unless you need some particular bleeding edge feature not yet migrated from OpenSolaris into Solaris.]

I did just this a while back when looking for a storage solution for backups. The SOHO options did not have the bandwidth, even with gigabit nic ports. In the end, moving to PC hardware with SATA drives worked much better.

Due to SATA controller issues with port multipliers when I set this up a year or two ago I ended up having to switch to Linux with md. Regardless, the performance difference was dramatic and the PC based system actually worked quite well.