So, Google decided to do something about traffic. Instead of having dozens of cars on the roads, spewing greenhouse gasses and burning foreign oil, they decide to do the "green" thing and provide buses, and they are condemned for it?! Are these buses running off of fuel made from baby seals?

Who can blame businesses for wanting to be away from crowds? If you can get a large campus for much cheaper, why not?

Imagine having to move into an existing urban area.... If you want to have a new, large facility, then you possibly have to purchase the land from multiple owners (maybe the site already has multiple smaller buildings, each separately owned). Then, you have to demolish the old buildings.

Of course, you could always move into an existing building. How old is it? Does it have asbestos in it? Are there any maintenance nightmares in store? How does the building look? What is the floor layout? Will you need to remodel?

Whether you tear down and rebuilt, or use an existing building, there are other questions... Is there a crime problem? Who are the neighbors? How bad is traffic? Where will the employees park? Do you also need to build a multi-level parking garage for your employees (vastly more expensive than a regular parking lot)? Do you just let them use public paid parking?

All of this stuff simply means that it is probably far easier just to get a few dozen acres away from town and build a new building there. If you want to change this, then you need to change the economics of the situation. Tax breaks for urban areas ("tax breaks" and "urban" are not normally used in the same sentence). Maybe make the permitting process easier. I do not know what the answer is. I do know that if I were running a business, building the exact building that I want away from town where the land is cheaper just seems to make a lot of sense.

Yeah. Why bother with knobs that you can feel without taking your eyes off of the road. Make life exciting! Change the station on your radio by having to press a tiny soft button that may allow you a more exciting life of car accidents and hospital stays! Meet new cute nurses! Get sponge baths! Try interesting new drugs!

Sorry, but LCD displays are nice for SHOWING information, but they absolutely suck if you put a touch screen on there. I rented a car with a stupid touch-screen radio, and I was in a new area where I did not know the local stations, and trying to change the station while driving was an accident waiting to happen.

On a completely unrelated topic, as a current owner of a Nissan mini-van (got kids, sorry), the only way that I would buy another Nissan would be if they hired a mechanic to live in my garage to fix it every night. That is the worst vehicle that I have ever owned.

No. Not at all. You are just summing 1 GHz. Simple (or not-so-simple) constructive and destructive interference...

It is sort of a combination of the two... Phased array usually has one source (well, dozens of sources, but clumped together). Radiation treatment involves multiple sources, as this does. But you do still need to control the phase. It is really sort of a combination of the two.

True about the noise floor.. However, if this works as advertised, the net gain in one spot should overcome the generalized increase in the noise. For example, a 10 dB gain in local signal would be well worth even a 6 dB gain in overall noise.

Well, I can't comment on the prices, but several things go into the voice quality...

1) Voice quality is actually pretty good if you stick to a POTS land-line. Back in the 60's, everything was analog, so the noise added up.

2) Cell phone reception certainly can be bad, but back in the 80's when cell phones were invented, you had giant phones that could pump out a couple of watts because you had a large antenna and large batteries. Modern phones have tiny batteries and tinier antennas. This is partially compensated by a better noise floor on the cell-site receivers, but there ain't no such thing as magic.

3) Old analog cell phones transmitted actual analog voice at full bandwidth. While a waste of bandwidth, it sounded pretty good. Modern phones compress the heck out of your voice before sending it. The last time I checked, it was using some variant of CELP, which sounds fairly good, but far from perfect.

4) Data is now packetized (part of the compression). If you loose any part of the packet, you loose about 1/4 second of voice or so. In analog phones, you would hear a pop. or 1/10 second of silence.

It sounds like a logical extension of phased-array technology. Or, sort of how they do radiation cancer treatment with dozens of weak beams converging on one spot.

However, in order to get this to work well, you need the transmitted signal to be phased-aligned to within an appreciable fraction of a wavelength. Since we are around a gigahertz, that means that the phase of the carrier should be accurate to within a couple hundred picoseconds, max. How you maintain this accuracy over multiple cell sites confuses me. Of course, this is all a wild-ass guess on how the technology works.

Ahhhhh. That make sense. Thanks.

What is the problem with UPnp??? From what I understand, UPnP works like this:

1) All devices inside the local network are considered "trusted"

2) Trusted devices can poke holes in the firewall pointing only back to themselves.

Assuming that UPnP is implemented properly, and assuming that an attacker is on the outside of the local network, there is nothing for an attacker to grab on to. Now, if an attacker is on the INSIDE of your LAN, then you are already boned.

What am I missing?

If people are concerned about status, then prestige becomes the new currency. People work hard to obtain it, and spend it on "things" like invitations to events. Just because it is not formalized does not make it less real.

So, when you go to see a live play, you want robots or holograms? Nice.

Or, since I call the restaurant "Milliway's," you travel forward in time to get there, and then when you return to your own time, you make the reservations.

There is one thing that will never be able to replicate easily: human time and human skill. While a citizen might be able to "replicate" food, some people might still enjoy the touch of a real person, and feel that it carries a certain status. Let's assume that you have all of your needs met. So, you decide to open up a restaurant because you enjoy it (let's call it "Milliway's"), and for no other reason. You cook great food, and people flock to your restaurant because of the reputation. You cook for fun, so you have no desire to expand, and you can only serve a few dozen people per evening.

Now, if you can seat three dozen couples per evening, and you have 300 dozen couple wanting reservations, how do you decide which ones to seat? First-come, first-served certainly seems fair. However, your friend runs HIS own restaurant: you want to eat there, and he wants to eat at your restaurant. So, you can bump each other to the top of the reservation list.

Hmm. You decide that there is some food in the next town (state, country, continent, etc.) that you want to try. You do not know the person, but you want to figure out a way to exchange bumps to the top of the reservation list. Rather than having to do this manually, and having to contact each restaurant owner individually, you come up with a scheme. Each diner that you serve suddenly counts as a "dining reputation token." By accumulating, these tokens, you can use them to visit other restaurants. All of the chefs agree that this is a wonderful idea, since, by serving food, they can also get themselves to the top of the reservation lists at other restaurants.

Suddenly, you now have a new currency.

Of course, similar arguments can be made for other things that have more value when done by a person. Art being another fine example. An original painting can be worth millions, while a poster of the same painting can be worth $10. Both can look the same, but the inherent value is that one of them is one-of-a-kind, while the other can be produced by the boatload.

So, it is easy to imagine an "artistic" or "prestige" form of money, where the value is determined by the human skill and artistic vision that went into it.

Another thing is that not everything can be easily reproduced. Yes, you might be able to get a house built by robots for cheap (or even free). But there are only so many plots of land available by the side of a lake / ocean / river / etc. How do you divide up this property?

I cannot imagine a world without money. I can imagine that the essentials are free, so that you do not actually NEED money to get by. But there will always be luxury items that will NOT be free.

Brand new news:

The House votes 221-201 to raise the nation's debt ceiling, but only 28 Republicans, including Speaker John Boehner, vote yes

The government is whipping out the credit card again, with mostly democratic support.

????? Proof???

To me, at least, the GOP is not about money to the rich. They are about trying to keep a balanced budget. I don't know about you, but I have a wife and kids to support. I am certainly smart enough to know that living off of a credit card is not the key to happiness. Sure, it would be great for about a three or four months, but eventually the credit cards reach their maximum, and then the party is over. The latest fight over extending unemployment benefits went something like this:

Dems: We need to keep unemployment going for much longer.

GOP: Sure. Just find a way to pay for it without putting it on the credit card.

Dems: But.... but.... the credit card is free money! We won't get the bill until after I am out of office!

The left keeps on waging a war on people who are successful. I do not understand why. I do know that a lot of people have money who do not really deserve it (inheritance, investment banker, etc.), but a lot of things in life are unfair, and a lot of people have money who DO deserve it (followed their dream, worked hard, made wise choices, etc.) Punishing the successful is not exactly a way to make people want to succeed.

One thing to keep in mind is that taxing the "rich" has a very nasty side effect. Companies are legal entities, and they are "rich." Increasing taxes on companies will leave less money to hire new employees. It also makes it more expensive to be here, and is the reason that so many companies set up other corporations outside of the US (Cayman Islands, for example -- Wikipedia page) Yup, Cayman islands gets those jobs instead of the US.

Now, if there were no loopholes, then the rich would certainly pay more than their fair share of taxes. They use the same roads that I do, use the same police and fire services, and yet pay a lot more.

Now, about tax "loopholes." Some of that may indeed be the result of lobbyists buying favors from politicians. However, tax "loopholes" are often used by the government as a carrot to make people and businesses to do what they want. For example, hybrid cars and alternative energy earn tax credits.

By the way, the top two richest people in America (Gates and Buffett) are Democrats. The third (Ellson) is kind of in the middle politically, so you cannot characterize all rich guys as evil white republicans.

It is also interesting to read the wikipedia pages of the richest people. Other than the Wal-Mart children, they are generally self-made billionaires. While the Walton family did inherit their money, they got it from a man who literally built a retail empire from the ground-up.

When you do not have any money, it is all to easy to point at the people who have worked hard to achieve success and blame them.