Here's a link to the original paper on Grossman's website.

Look back to how Windows propagated. When DOS first came out, hardware was all over the map. There wasn't a standard PC platform. In the mid-80's I was running a Mac publishing firm and I simply wasn't interested in trying to port our products to DOS because I didn't think we could do a good job supporting customers who had such disparate hardware. So products like Crystal Quest, Fluent Fonts and Conflict Catcher stayed Mac-only. By the late 80's, my sales VP was pushing to expand into the early versions of Windows. At that point, we had a solid foundation in Mac software and I thought perhaps we could handle the issue. I was wrong. When we started shipping Windows-3 versions of our products, we had a support nightmare. There were just too many platforms to make coherent support possible.

In 1995, fifteen years after DOS hit the shelves, Microsoft set out a definitive list of what minimum hardware a manufacturer had to provide to be able to bundle Win95. Prior to Win95, it was so bad a manufacturer could sell a Windows PC without a mouse. The market learned that if they wanted the new Windows, they had to see a special logo that meant their new PC could support it. That one move changed the landscape and made experiences like yours possible. It took him 15 years but Bill Gates finally saw the value of forcing manufacturers to build a standard PC.

Google is run by smarter guys and it probably won't take them 15 years to figure this out. Somewhere down the road, there'll be a Android-Inside logo that only appears on handsets that meet minimum hardware and software specs. Moreover, the Ai logo will mean customers will be able to upgrade their OS whenever Google releases a new version instead of having to wait for the telcos to allow them to do so.

Once that logo appears, you'll see your WinXP-like experience repeated and Google will see more iPhone developers working on Android. It's just a matter of time.
 

Diesel is 35 cents a gallon more expensive in California and California has the most expensive gasoline in the country. Do we also have the distinction of having the most expensive diesel as well?

Why wouldn't you expect this of Sony? Recall that:

• Sony intentionally shipped a rootkit on their music CDs in 2005.
• Revoked the ability to boot into Linux after people had purchased the PS3.
• Sony sued George Hotz for disclosing Sony had messed up their PS3 crypto implementation. Since the cat was out of the bag, the only reason for the suit was to punish Hotz for publishing the truth.
• Sony supported SOPA.

Don't know how many times you have to see SONY acting in this manner to realize that's the way SONY really is.

> Parking and traffic have to do with the number of cars, not just their driver's skill.

Traffic has to do with the number of cars on a road plus the space each car allocates itself on the road. As traffic speeds up, we spread out to give ourselves time to react to the driver in front of us stopping unexpectedly. A robot doesn't have to do that as it's reactions are faster and the robot can talk to other robots up the road. The net result is that instead of 70 mph traffic requiring 7 car lengths between cars, you can have cars traveling within inches of each other. You've suddenly multiplied the carrying capacity of the freeway by sevenfold without laying any concrete.

Parking has to do with finding a place that's out of the way of other cars and convenient to your destination. If the car can self park, it can drop you off and trundle off to some location miles from where you are. Or better yet, it can hire itself out to carry someone else somewhere else and then come back and get you when you're ready.

What you're proposing is a No Fault liability scheme. Circa 1989-1992, the insurance companies attempted to get a proposition passed that would have established No Fault insurance. Their pitch was very similar to your list of advantages plus they said that since their costs would decline, our rates would have as well.

  Despite the idea making a lot of sense, the personal injury lawyers succeeded in killing it as they viewed the proposal a direct threat to their livelihood which of course, it was. The proposition was aimed at cutting their take out of the transaction.

Your post makes a lot of sense but unfortunately, I think the political climate in California has gotten more bizarre over the intervening 20 years and what makes logical sense doesn't mean too much in California.

The data's study show that 1 in 6 in the control group had a familial incidence of cancer whereas the study group's ratio was 1 in 4. Moreover, the study asks about the number of cigar and pipe smokers but ignores cigarette smokers.

Not clear to me how you can draw much of a conclusion with those confounding factors.

A single iron atom isn't going to much of a sword. Iron swords work because the iron atoms support each other.

A lone iron atom might do something chemically like pretend to be a heme molecule to bypass the bacteria's defenses.

>You will find that the top execs there were republicans, which is part of why they pleaded the 5th.
Citation needed. Open Secrets doesn't know anything about Brian Harrison and Bill Stover, the execs who pled the 5th.

Yeah I could go on but I'll let Biden tell us how their first choice for financial advice was Jon Corzine.

n.b. Jon Corzine recently admitted he didn't know where over a billion dollars of his customer's money had disappeared to.

Costco already beats online retailers with three strategies:

1) It sells extras with the package that are not included with the regular offering. My roomba came with extra room markers and extra filters.
2) When the first two roombas I purchased crapped out, Costco exchanged them no questions asked. I had to try three units before I got one that worked reliably. Had I bought from Amazon, I would have had to pay to return the units and that's assuming they would have accepted them back.
3) Costco prices goods very aggressively.so they're usually around the same price as what's offered online.

> No kick-backs to friends he has in big business.

Except for Solyndra execs taking the fifth when asked about their ties to the White House.
Except for George Kaiser, a Democratic fundraiser and Solyndra investor.
Except for the Keystone pipeline being killed when it just "by accident" benefits Warren Buffett's holding in railroads that transport oil and coal in Canada and the midwest.
Except for the raid on Gibson Guitar for using Indian rosewood and ignoring Martin Guitar's use of same. Just a coincidence that Gibson is owned by a Republican and Martin is owned by a Democrat.
Except for the peculiar way the Feds rammed General Motors through the pseudo-bankruptcy that stiffed the bond holders and the share holders but kept the contracts intact to the benefit of the unions.
Except for the fact that the "green jobs" stimulus funds went to companies owned by Democrats.

I could go on but the fact is Obama, a politician out of Chicago, is crooked. Quelle Surprise!

P.s. Don't forget that Eric Holder's Justice Department broke numerous statutes when they ran the Fast And Furious program that resulted in 1000's of firearms going into Mexico and some later returned to kill American Border Guards.

What if it's a hoax and we incur societal costs we can't afford?

California is levying carbon taxes on business and as you might expect, businesses are leaving California. That means more unemployment in a state that already leads the country unemployment figures.

There are very real costs to carbon reduction.

Adobe has a mixed record. For every surviving adobe house, there are scads of adobe ruins in California that didn't survive the numerous quakes we have here. I suspect it's a matter of luck as to how a particular site moves versus the alleged benefits of adobe. Unreinforced masonry just doesn't cut it when the land starts shaking.

Even if rebar is used, concrete has been known to fail. The Oakland Cypress Overpass which was made of concrete and rebar collapsed during the Loma Prieta quake because the contractor skimped on the rebar. He was supposed to have tied the rebar together to form a metal fasces and he either used substandard wire or in some cases, none at all.

I can't see a printed house working in California if the printer can't properly lay and tie rebar.

Sony should be next.

They're on record as supporting SOPA and Protect-IP.

They're also the guys who dragged George Hotz to court for revealing their random number generator always returned 42

They're not as easy to boycott as Go Daddy is but a nice, polite email reminding them why you're not likely to buy, or recommend, their products wouldn't be amiss.

.
How you can own a monopoly in an environment where switching to a competitor who offers a better product at zero cost is beyond me but evidently some people in Washington seem to think differently.

Odd that the issue is being raised (yet again) just as Google publicly comes out against SOPA and Protect-IP.

The threat comes from the same politicians who are clueless enough to think they can tinker with the Internet's infrastructure without harming it.