I think it's easy to see where they are going: You take your Amazon phone to the store, snap a picture of what you want, and get it shipped to you. Or not.

Amazon then uses the decisions and GPS coordinates of the people using their phone to discover that store X in your city is cheaper than Amazon. They then lower the price of that item that they show to the people whose phones are or have been in that store, until the people in that store start buying it from Amazon instead.

I believe that you can get a manual in the Honda CRZ, though apparently you take a noticeable mileage hit compared to the CVT. Though the most disappointing thing about the CRZ to me is it actually gets worse mileage than the CRX from the late 80's.

Also, by buying a new car you can also get what you want, as opposed to what you manage to find on the used car lot. Which may be important if you have to live with the car for 15 years. With that said though, nowadays you just don't have the option to order it exactly how you want from the factory like you could 50 years ago, with some high-end exceptions.

It's a bit more like the house has a toaster in it, and the wiring was upgraded to handle the current the toaster draws, which gives you a rough idea of how old the house must be because of how old the toaster is. Except now you discover that the upgraded wiring may have been done to power some other appliance before the toaster showed up.

Maybe I should try a car analogy?

Perhaps to keep it from transmitting and interfering with radio astronomy?

The world population is still growing at just over 200k people per day. That's like 200 Enterprise-D's worth of people every day that you would need to transport off the planet. Barring some crazy new technology straight out of science fiction, there's just no way we could move that many people off the planet.

On the other hand, litigation encourages innovation through design-arounds.

Aside from clear ownership of invention, it's also necessary to understand what is patented. Setting aside Microsoft's "we've patented this but we're not telling you which patents they are" there are cases like the "in-app purchase" patents that have absolutely no mention of purchasing in the claims (the claims are specifically about providing feedback to the developer through an app). Is buying a smurfberry "providing feedback"? I guess we'll have to wait for someone to spend a million bucks to fight it in court in order to find out.

Even when it's clear who owns the patent and how the patent applies, if you do a workaround you'll still likely find yourself on the other end of a C&D letter advising you that your app looks like it infringes their patent and if you don't settle now you'll face an expensive discovery process and have to hand over your source code to us to prove that your code doesn't do what the patent says it does. Not a big deal for OSS, but for proprietary software the prospect of handing over the family jewels to the competition isn't a good one.

And at the end of it all, after you've shown them your source code, shown them your workaround, shown them that you don't do what the patent says it does? They can pull the "Doctrine of Equivalents" card, and claim that despite the fact that the patent doesn't specifically name your workaround in the claims, it still applies. Enjoy your million dollar lawsuit.

I have wondered about those i3-taking, ECC-supporting server boards if the error checking still works with the consumer processors.

Since the memory controller is part of the CPU you can't just drop in a regular consumer processor and get ECC this way. You're stuck with whatever models that Intel decides to turn on the ECC bit for, which is pretty much the Xeons and a few oddball embedded versions.

The RAM is responsible for damaging the file while it sits in a buffer waiting to be written to the disk in the first place.

My experience is that it's decent enough hardware, but you pay through the nose for it. On the other hand, their software is the worst bloatware I've ever seen, which basically installs a whole interdependent ecosystem of NI drivers and services on top of Windows, with many of the drivers, libraries, and services doing little more than duplicating the functionality that's already there.

On the other hand, it is pretty simple to get started. It's likely you could connect that device up to a computer, fire up LabView, drop in a few VI's and drag some wires, and have it plotting data and turning LEDs on and off in a few minutes, which in an education environment may be the way to go. In many ways, it's a lot like doing things in Excel - you can whip up something to solve a problem quickly and easy, but it may not be a good solution for building a complex application.

That's not strictly true. There are some rock formations in Canada and Australia that have been dated back to about 4 billion years or so. Though those are the exceptions - most of the Earth's crust is far newer than that.

Interestingly, the oldest dated rocks on Earth are the moon rocks brought back by the Apollo astronauts.

Well, perhaps it was aliens who destroyed the technologically advanced dinosaur civilization, and then systematically erased any evidence that they ever existed including their satellites and moon colonies?

When it comes to the electrical grid another example is the "Saver's Switch" that the power company will install on people's air conditioning units. This allows the power company to remotely "prioritize" what gets electricity by allowing them to remotely shut off my air conditioner. So yes, on a hot day if the power grid is strained to the max, I expect that someone at the power company will push a button and shut off a bunch of people's AC.

Of course, the program is opt-in, if you opt-in they give a discount on your bill, and there are some rules that the power company claims they will follow such as they can only shut off the AC for a maximum of 20 minutes in a 3 hour period (or something like that). I think the past 6 years I've had this, I've actually noticed that my AC was shut off remotely twice. As far as I'm concerned it's a win-win.

the judge upheld the conviction based upon the fact that the cops "didn't believe they needed a warrant"

When it comes to the cops, ignorance of the law is an excuse.

That's an interesting idea.

1. Spoof the Comcast SSID & login page.
2. Wait for people to 'log in' to your router with their Comcast credentials. You could even grant them access to the internet after gathering their login information so they wouldn't even suspect anything is amiss.
3. Now you have access to free wifi anywhere Comcast is.
4. ???
5. Profit!