True. QWERTY is obviously not a very good keyboard layout, but it has been around for a long time simply because people like UIs they are used to, as long as they do the job.

"By the by - the reason this is different from Scientology is because Scientology is a cult. They don't tend to gain membership just from selling people a line of B.S. but rather through indoctrination."

Show me a "real" religion that does not start indoctrinating at a young age?

"They've gained religious status as an organized religion through intimidation and litigation, but having a shit load of money doesn't make them any less of a cult."

Just wind the clock back about 500-600 years and replace "Scientology" with "Catholic Church"...

What is being proposed here is exactly the opposite of one size fits all. Insurance companies already discriminate based on driver's age, gender or marital status. If insurance companies could come up with some actual data that shows some degree of correlation between miles driven and accident or claim rate, it is perfectly reasonable to expect that they will offer insurance rates based on this.

What I am wondering is this: If the data shows that people with a certain age group that drive less than a certain number of miles per year have the highest accident and claim rate, would the insurance rates for that group go up? Will the politicians have the guts to counter the outcry from the AARP?

As the number of chiller-less data centers in the Northern Hemisphere increases, New Zealand may become the ideal location to build alternate climate data center capacity to deal with hot summers in Europe and Northern America... :)

But seriously, flow management/queuing may be useful at the very edge of the network, like a BRAS. But most provider edge products (Juniper, Ericsson/Redback, ...) already have similar capabilities. Flow management past the edge of a network is pointless, especially for TCP/IP traffic.

The language projecting the cost savings for this new solar technology is somewhat dubious as usual. Even if the developers of this technology have good reason to think that the cadmium sulfide based solar panel technology will cost 1/10th compared to today's cost of developing silicon based solar panels, what happens between now and when they are able to take this technology to mass production in five or more years?

There is a massive world-wide technology complex driving the optimization of silicon based manufacturing technology. The amount of capital invested into silicon manufacturing process and tools is measured in tens of billions of dollars per year, if not hundreds of billions. If the conventional process improvements is able to achieve 20-25% cost improvement per year, in five years, the cost of panels based on conventional panels would be down to 25-30% of today's cost. A few hickups in the development of the new technology like yield or reliability issues can easily delay the mass deployment by a few years which will negate all cost benefits. Not to mention the possibility of cadmium prices going up if the volumes are picking up...

And don't forget the cost of capital investment, which is already funded due to other "useful" applications in the silicon case. Most other technologies that tried to compete against silicon lost so far, not because of fundamental technical issues but because of the economics involved.

I am not against developing new innovative technologies to achieve substantial improvements in the solar power area. However, it is best to keep the optimism about new and unproven technologies in control until they reach at least beta production stage...

These new 1U/2U servers may appear to be even less interesting than the California (UCS) products that were introduced earlier this year. However, the reality is that Cisco is actually rounding out the lower end of its server product line before they introduce the much more innovative, higher end (higher margin) SMP systems later this year. Intel just announced the new SMP platforms based on 8-core processors that scale to 4 and 8 sockets. Expect Cisco to scale the socket count even further. Going into the server market with some conventional products enables them to build sales channels and ramp up the service organization to get ready for the real stuff.

Welcome to East Germany 2.0!

There is only one reason IBM wants to acquire Sun: If Sun is acquired by Cisco instead, Cisco will instantly become a credible enterprise computing supplier. Cisco is the #1 competitive threat for IBM in the long run...

There is simply not enough data to support this conclusion. Reduced amount of streaming bandwidth could be due a sustained congestion at any point in the network between the Netflix server and your client. A lot of ISPs oversubscribe their access network very heavily based on statistical multiplexing assumptions that simply do not work when even a small percentage of customers on a subnet are streaming video.

If there is any throttling going on, it is more likely that your ISP is responsible for it. Cable companies and DSL providers who are getting into the video on demand business may not like Netflix beating them to market with a more cost effective product...

I am not sure if and when TTS is going to replace human voice. Animated movies have been around for a long time, and computer animated movies have been around for more than a decade. We have yet to see an animated movie with computer generated dialogue. Even the fully animated Pixar feature films have high paid actors/actresses doing all the talking.

I guess Neal Stephenson was able to see this emerging lack of parity between computer generated graphics/video and computer generated audio many years ago in Diamond Age

A book that is read by a competent actor is an "artistic performance", and is subject to copyright as such. In this context, the audio rights for the book used in that performance does not apply to a book that TTS converted by Kindle.

If TTS technology becomes so good as to be comparable to performance by an accomplished actor over the next ten years, it is the Actor's Guild who should be worried instead of Author's Guild.

By the way, the technology to convert plain paper books to speech electronically has existed for some time - even through the resulting form factor is not as convenient as Kindle.

And teflon skin...