In fact there were many companies making battery powered, wireless connected, handheld PC-clones in the 90's.

Where I saw them, they most commonly were used on local wireless networks in industrial/warehouse/trucking settings but I also know they were being used in some retail and manufacturing settings. The wireless local area networks back in the early 90's were in reality not much more than radio channels with analog modems.

They had small text displays and ran MS-DOS applications that were hardcoded to the proprietary wireless network. Certainly nothing like a real network stack.

Part of the difficulty is that AFAIK they were never usable as phones and barely usable as data network devices in the wide-area sense. The "data network" concept with cellphone networks in the early 90's was exquisitely awkward in the US, with the most common access method being to have an analog modem hooked up to the cellphone network (which was all analog in the early 90's and just beginning to move to digital in the late 90's) and you called your ISP's phone number. That was really super sucky.

Certainly Windows CE had some concepts that were more high-minded than the custom-built MS-DOS applications, but in most ways it was even more sucky to the end user (who just wanted to run the same application over and over again, scanning barcodes, taking inventory, etc.) I think it's not even ironic that even Apple is having a hard time making inroads into these single-purpose applications with their multi-purpose iPhone/iPad platforms; the specialized platforms being used in this area for the past 20 years are not sold on computing buzzwords or brand cachet but on pure utility.

I'd expect 90% chance for a good techie startup with a cool innovative idea to go under, without producing a product or getting bought out, in 2 years. (Number can be radically different if it's a "copycat" techie startup. Ironically the copycats have a substantially better chance of getting bought out by a bigger company.)

Maybe 9% chance that the startup will get bought out by a bigger company if they had any vaguely promising technologies.

Maybe 0.9% chance that an actual product will be produced (if a service oriented company... there may be a different number) and not be successful in the marketplace.

0.1% chance the product will be successful. That's different than turning a profit on the balance sheet though.

Does this mean that I have to go update all my webpages that proudly declare:

BEST VIEWED AT 640 X 480 ??

I think Daisey using Foxconn's name in relation to the Hexane poisoning was probably the tipping point. A hexane poisoning incident did happen but it was a different company, Wintek. http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/feb/22/chinese-workers-apple-nhexane-poisoning Daisey using Foxconn's name made his monologue sound too much like journalism which it never was. But it was good muckraking.

I think that it would be more accurate to say, that Daisey took bits and pieces of various real stories, all of them reported by actual journalists, put these details in rearranged form into a fictionalized monologue, and that became a TAL segment.

Daisey's monologues should be compared with say Upton Sinclair's _The Jungle_. That wasn't actual factual journalism, it was muckraking, a fictionalized account including some examples from real life. I don't think there's anything wrong with muckraking.

When public radio starts running TAL right alongside real new programs, then things get confusing. I think TAL did an interesting and intellectually correct thing by essentially fact-checking the monologue and turning that into a story.

In wartime, congress (with the help of the FCC) has shut down radio communications modes before. They've even coordinated plans to do such shutdowns on very short notice, google "CONELRAD".

I would far rather put this in the US congress's hands via the FCC, than in local law enforcement's hands. It's not that I think the world of the current US congress, but rather it's their inability to get together and agree on ANYTHING. Contrast with local yokel law enforcement and city councils setting up a patchwork of local laws and limits on radio and phone and other forms of communications.

I typed in my symptoms and my iPhone says that I have:

Internet Connectivity Problems

Oh no, do I have to go to the emergency room??!!!!?

I'm sure that IT security folks made billions of dollars making sure the electronic copies of the soft-tissue scans were not kept in the scanners themselves.
But then the person (and knowing how security works... probably an ex-military) reviewing the image whips out their cellphone, and wow.
I'm not very surprised that most smartphones have difficulty autofocusing on on a soft tissue scan.

This is just Intel jumping on the "extended warranty" bandwagon. "Extended warranty" always means gigantic profits for the guy selling the extended warranty.

Ever notice how hard they push extended warranties at the electronics and computer stores? There's a good reason, there's a huge profit margin in them. I bet they pay out $1 for every $20 they take in.

Only chumps buy the extended warranty. Maybe this is a sign... overclockers are chumps?

I'm going to start printing out Wikipedia today.

I figure I'll be done by Tuesday night.

If anyone needs something looked up on Wednesday, give me a call.

If you've got a Geiger counter, orange Fiestaware is the cat's meow.

1.6 mSv is 0.00162 mrem.

http://www.orau.org/ptp/collection/consumer%20products/fiesta.htm Estimates for consumer exposure to the uranium in the glazing of orange Fiestaware show you could rack up to a mSv in just a few hours exposure.

Who wants to bet, that this batch of concrete had some orange Fiestaware mix into it, or perhaps just a natural concentration of pitchblende, and it has nothing to do with Fukushima?

All the consumer hard drive retailers (e.g. Newegg, microcenter, anywhere) hiked hard drive prices by 200-400% months ago as a response to the floods. I know the big name storage vendors spend less on spinning media and more on, well, overhead and profits, but they come out looking like good guys if they only hiked their prices 5 to 15 percent.

And that's why you don't use a one-armed man to scare someone.

A guy being treated for a decade for pancreatic cancer, certainly has more need for a handicapped spot than 90% of the folks I see using them.

The first internet-age era step was (at least in physics publishing) 20 years ago: the LANL Preprint Archive, later known as xxx.lanl.gov, now www.arxiv.org
Previous to that there were paper preprints mailed out for decades and decades.
Now other fields have indeed have a harder time getting out from under the thumb of the publishing houses and will indeed need the kick in the rear that Princeton is giving.
That doesn't mean that refereed journals are going away - just that they are not the bleeding edge anymore, I would argue they never were.