The point is to unify the TV/DVD/blu-ray firmware ecosystem.

Google doesn't want to sell you a box. Although GoogleTV is available to Logitech and Roku and others to make boxes the real long term goal is to get GoogleTV to run *on the TVs themselves*. (And on DVD and blu-ray players.)

Right now each tv manufacturer writes its own firmware. My parents recently got an LG tv & home theater system which runs it's own special LG firmware which has it's own special UI and connects to it's own special LG app store. If you got a Samsung system it would have it's own Samsung firmware with a slightly different UI and a totally different app store. Similarly with Panasonic and Sony (Sony already sells a GoogleTV tv but most of their tvs run special Sony firmware) and so on. Even worse if you have a TV from one manufacturer and a blu-ray player from another. Then you have two different types of firmware with two different ui's and two different app stores.

With the market divided like that people have to learn different ways to control different tvs. Sure, technical people can switch between it fine, but it does confuse some such as my elderly parents. A unified system would be better. But even more relevantly with 50 different app stores an app developer needs to write 50 different versions of their tv app to get on all tvs. Or more likely they'll just give up and go develop cellphone apps for iOS or Android instead.

And speaking of cellphones, this is roughly where the cellphone market was 5 or so years ago. Before Android (and now WP7) offered a third-party alternative that almost all manufacturers could [eventually] agree upon using. This made life easier for end users and for app developers and eventually even the hardware manufacturers themselves. Google, as an 'app developer' wants to do the same thing to the tv market. Plus extra bonuses for them if they get a Google OS of some sort adopted as that standard because then searches go to Google, so Google gets to push out more ads. But even without that latter bonus just having a unified platform to target for development really benefits Google - and everyone else at the same time as well.

This is not what you think it does. In this context 'like' is being used as a 'filler'. The 'filler like' itself has no meaning, but in a place holder for a pause. Similar to other 'words' such as 'uh' or 'hmm' or 'er'. It does not mean necessarily 'nearly' or 'almost' - although it could mean that too, it depends on context.

At least in universities, yes.

I've read a lot on the internet (especially when a science kook is claiming some big discovery) about people being afraid to share ideas or work with others because 'they'll steal it!'

But the reality is that professors almost always give primary credit to their assistants and students - even undergrads - (in the form of listing them first in the authors list of a paper submission). Now, of course there are the odd exceptions to this - unscrupulous researchers who take primary credit for everything they touch. But they are very much the exception, not the rule. And you can avoid these type of people simply by first previewing their own publication history. Typically one gets primary or secondary author status early in their careers and slide down the authors list as time goes on.

There is often good reason for this. A tenured professor may have half a dozen or more grad students at any one time. Plus a post-doc or two, and maybe a couple of undergrads serious about doing research too. The professor can't possibly be heavily involved in all of the projects under their supervision. Instead they are there to provide initial ideas, high level guidance (their experience can be especially valuable - they know the field better than you do and so can point you at previous research, other people that can help, important variables to consider, etc.), and name recognition which helps students' work to stand out more. Professors also provide access to resources and shield assistants and students from university bureaucracy (getting ethics clearances and such). Plus professors are drafted into that very bureaucracy to help run their department or school government or whatever. And constantly chasing grant money. Oh, and some of them also teach. ::P

Since they're so busy students often *are* the primary workforce on their own research projects.

In this case I wouldn't be surprised if the core of the idea ('hey, maybe we could use a nano-particle to ...') came from the supervisor but that the 17 year old student actually did do a lot of work (with some sage advice from others) to actually develop that idea into it's current forms.

You don't want to burn classified stuff because the government can read what was on the paper from the smoke patterns rising from the incinerator. . (Yes, the above was a joke. And not an original one either. I heard it a few years ago when an ex-government spook was being interviewed on the radio and he was talking about how paranoid he'd become about destroying personal information. Referring to how much he learned over his career about the tools available to recover stuff (from paper, or from harddrives, or whatever else. I'm sure he didn't actually believe the smoke thing either ...)

I could be wrong, but the impression I got from the video was that the artist wasn't trying to produce a [realistic] model of traffic flow (future, present, or past) at all. I think people get confused when he makes the comment about the cars' going 230 miles per hour and how that gives him 'hope for the future.' I don't think that's equivalent to saying 'this is (my idea of) the traffic flow of the future.'

A couple of quotes from the artist in the video I think show otherwise:

So he's making a 'model' of a car-centric city on the idea that soon that will be an anachronism.

In other words this is art for art's sake. Something I personally am often rather ambivilant about but I still think this is cool for the sake of the amount of time and effort put into this. It's a giant working mechanism. If he called himself a 'geek' instead of an 'artist' would the comments here have been less hostile?

And who doesn't remember playing with Hot Wheels and the like as a kid. Wouldn't you have loved to have a setup like this back then?

No, they're moving their high-end phones to running MeeGo.

MeeGo is the product of the merger of Maemo (Nokia in-house developed Debian (and thus linux) based OS) and Moblin (Intel in-house developed OS (based on Fedora?)). Unlike Android MeeGo won't use just the linux kernel but rather the entire standard linux tool-chain and user-space right up to and including X.

Everyone that's used Maemo agrees it has a lot of potential but requires a lot more 'polish' on Nokia's part before it'll really be able to compete with Android, et. al. Maybe co-operating with Intel will help them there.

Although on the other hand a lot of 'smartphone' buzz is around app stores, and MeeGo is pretty much destined to be a 3rd-place runner (after Apple's iPhoneOS and Google's Android) in that space. (Although since Android is a modified JVM on top of linux I wonder if there's any reason why someone couldn't just port the Android JVM to run ontop of MeeGo ...)

Ok, this reply is coming so late that nobody will ever look at it, but ...

I used to agree that all alarm clocks sucked, but then I found a good one a couple years ago from RCA. Model number RP3711A, which, oddly enough, I can't find a picture of anywhere on the web. It's not listed on RCA's website either - the closest looking model currently avaliable seems to be the RP3720, which looks like a bit of a step back towards the 'cluster all the little buttons together rather than sanely spacing them out and making them large and easy to find when sleepy'.

Anyway, the RP3771A isn't perfect, but its by far the best alarm clock I've used. For one thing it has a nice big clock display that I can actually read when I wake up, before I put on my glasses. It also has some nice big buttons for common controls (snooze, changing the station, a fairly big volume wheel). The alarm is nice and loud to :) Etc. Etc. As I said, its not perfect. It still has a few too many features and buttons for my tastes. Also, the speaker is in the back (mostly, it seems, in order to make the clock display bigger, and that's a good thing), so the sound is pointed in the wrong direction, but that's a minor complaint really, and a demonstration that all designs involve compromise.

Anyway, my point, believe it or not, is not to pitch a clock radio/alarm clock that appears to be no longer in production, but rather to point out that if you look long and hard enough you do find products with semi-sane designs. If more people did that, rather then settling on the first thing they see at walmart, then companies would have more incentive to spend more time creating better designs.