There is a certain psychological boundary that needs to be overcome after an injury debilitates your motion. Some people find the motivation easier to come by than others. The Wii isn't meant to be fun, but to serve as a distraction from the complexes of the mind.

Or maybe we aren't there yet. He also mentions that the latest song or a new lecture might be seen around the world on these devices. Sure, that is technically capable now, but we have structured ourselves in such a way to try and prevent that from happening (I'm looking at you ACTA).

But cell towers are a terrible way to design a system. Sure, they are the best method we have for overcoming signal quality and bandwidth requirements now, but a central station like Tesla envisions would be much better. Just like people laugh about the 4 watt suitcase cell phone from 1990, people might be laughing about the "There's a map for that" commercials from 2010.

Plus I believe that we won't get down to wristwatch size without some leap in innovation. Even Star Trek had big wrist mounted devices because your fingers can't get any smaller.

Try booting up Windows ME on an old Gateway. If you don't get blue screens and beeps every 3 minutes you've managed more than I ever could.

I’m pretty sure the T-X injected totally new circuitry into the cars. Not only did it upload a virus, it used minuscule amounts of its own material to design completely new computer & control systems.

So, he was a QA engineer?

I didn't do any of that crap. I joined the art club and then never showed up but once (painted the fall play's background scenes), but still listed it on my college application. Ditto the poetry magazine (published just once a year, and that was the one and only time I attended).

Even though I was a slacker with the afterschool stuff, I still got accepted to all 4 colleges I applied, plus a free $5000 per year grant at one of them. Sometimes I think counselors mislead students, in order to try to get them "involved". You're better off focusing on getting the grades, and only do the extra stuff if you really have a burning desire to do it.

Like Computer Club. Now that was an activity I really enjoyed, even though it had nothing to do with the school.

Indeed the right to privacy should not be abused as a shield from the law, as it often is, by government and corporations. The law does however evolve with the times, new realities, public pressure, cultural changes, momentary needs, etc. It's not set in stone forever. "The law", all aspects of it, includes custom, tradition, social tolerance, a bunch of stuff that's not even written anywhere - like it or not. Copyright and IP law is at a crossroads moment, is widely ignored, ridicularized, called obsolete, bypassed, complained about, in all circles, even in copyright owners homes and offices. That's a sign that it's modification could happen, but that chance exists under pressure only -- they won't voluntarily give up their rights. Eroding the actual profits they gain will help, their ability to enforce the law, public perception of the morality and right of the law, every change in culture, interpretation, opinion, practice, will eventually be possible to become law.

I just started using Chromium as my primary browser across all platforms and I have to say it is pretty sweet. The only extension I really miss right now is ScrapBook+ and there is some hope that another extension will be modified to behave like it. Once it began to support Mozilla plugins (e.g. Flash and Sun Java) and got AdBlock and Flashblock it became eminently usable. I also found a user script that hides the slashboxes so that I can actually read slashdot on my 800x400 EEE 701. Not being able to turn off slashboxes when you are able to disable ads is fucking stupid.

they pointed out that in the little book given for drivers for the written test, it explicitly states that should you be pulled over, at no time should you exit your vehicle unless instructed to do so by the officer

Do you get that booklet in all driving courses over there, or just for that special one? I wonder since most people outside of the US would have no idea about that specific "rule". Which means that I would probably be beaten and tasered because I could act threatingly by just stepping out of my car if I was to visit, drive around and somehow be stopped by the police.

Anyway, thank for the advice!

OK, so you're fine with the federal government listening in to any conversation you have with your friends? That's a "community". But hey, you know, it could be justified, because your friends and you could be a terrorist sleeper cell. And when you go to the game, the park or the bar, perhaps you're conspiring to bring down the government. Or maybe conspiring to lend him a DVD and break intellectual property laws. So it's a good idea to automatically eavesdrop on any conversation. What's more in the digital age, with computer voice recognition and word recognition, all of your conversations can be automatically screened for key words.

And BY THE WAY, any other thought crime you might commit (like speaking against the government, admitting minor laws you broke, threatening someone, etc) WILL be enforced because after all it's a hell of a lot easier to go after YOU and make an example of YOU, than say some illegal immigrant running a drug smuggling operation who is loaded with guns and has nothing to lose.

We're not there YET, but suddenly the above scenario doesn't seem so far away, and so far fetched. America of today is NOT the America I grew up in. In fact with aggressive police, ridiculous punishments for ridiculous offenses (drawing on school desks, making "finger guns", posting "mooninites" on highway overpasses), and covert surveillance everywhere, it looks a lot like what we used to say Soviet Russia was like. Make sure to get your permit from the municipality before you paint your house comrade. We must ensure you use an approved color.

You are correct; I did misread your statement, sorry about that. The legal standing of the Linux community, by which I presume you mean, Linux and Linux flogging companies, is probably something MS is using to help convince them to paying tribute and taxes to MS. Maybe I should phrase that as the *unclear* Linux standing; but the only one making it unclear is MS itself.

Otherwise, it will just perform a word read, and if the pointer isn't aligned you get garbage.
Some but not all arm chips can be told to generate an exception in this case.

from http://infocenter.arm.com/help/index.jsp?topic=/com.arm.doc.faqs/1228.html
ARM processors with full MMUs (e.g. ARM920T) support optional alignment checking where the processor will check every access to ensure it is correctly aligned. The MMU will raise a data abort if an incorrectly aligned access occurs.

Some ARM partners using simple cores such as the ARM7TDMI have implemented alignment-checking for their ASIC/ASSP. This can be done with an additional hardware block external to the ARM core, which monitors the access size and the least significant bits of the address bus for every data access. The ASIC/ASSP can be configured to raise the ABORT signal in the case of an unaligned access. ARM recommends that such logic is included on ASIC/ASSP devices where code will be ported from other architectures.

Linux can use these exceptions to fix up access if you desire (or you can set it up to generate a bus error signal to help in debugging)

from http://www.mjmwired.net/kernel/Documentation/arm/mem_alignment
15 Now for user space applications, it is possible to configure the alignment
16 trap to SIGBUS any code performing unaligned access (good for debugging bad
17 code), or even fixup the access by software like for kernel code. The later
18 mode isn't recommended for performance reasons (just think about the
19 floating point emulation that works about the same way). Fix your code
20 instead!

And some players do not have an update to make this work. Even better will be when they discontinue an old player and you can't play new films on it. Just wait it will happen.

Actually the court can keep him from touching a computer, and they may just do that.

Access to a computer is not a right protected by anything in the Bill of Rights.

Seeing how this is felony, they could take time served and make the remainder of his sentencing probation with the stipulation that he refrain from any computer related activity. In which case he uses or touches a computer of any type, if caught it's straight to federal prison.

But George Bachrach, president of the Environmental League of Massachusetts, hailed the decision, saying it was 'a critical step toward ending our reliance on foreign oil and achieving energy independence.'

Setting aside the fallacy that we can ever be "Energy dependent" or stop consuming "foreign oil" if we want to remain a first world country, unless those windmills are going to be attached to cars, it's not going to have any impact at all on oil consumption. Only about 2.5% of US electricity generation is via oil, and almost none of that is from MA. If you want to argue that having taxpayer subsidize inefficient electricity production is a good thing, fine, we can have that argument, but don't pretend it has anything to do with decreasing consumption of oil.

Stupid hippie.