How do you think they got rich in the first place ?

Funny how ASUS "invents" these things a few years after someone else gets them on to the market (but without the big publicity)

"Anyone who is still buying a device separate from their phone to listen to music needs to have their head examined."

I have an iPhone and an iPod.

Yes i have some playlists on the phone (rarely used for playback), but the iPod is used for music playback when I don't want the playback to be interrupted by phone calls, like Back Ground Music in between bands, at whatever venue I am working at.
It is handy to be able to carry my whole music collection (close to 90G) in one player, I can't yet do that in a phone.

I chose the iPod because quite simply MP3 is a crappy format, I have had students try to convince me that MP3's ripped at ever higher and higher rates (until they take up nearly as much space as the original file and thus lose the only advantage of being converted) are fine, and yet still the compression and conversion artefacts are noticeable (and on presenting my students with an A/B/C blind test, none could tell the difference between the original CD and the iPod rip, but all of them picked the MP3 nearly every time as the worst sounding).

I mean, we went from Vinyl to CD because of a perceived improvement in quality and longevity (both arguable from different quarters), but then ripping to MP3 is to me like copying a CD on to cassette, you can do it, but it sounds worse, so why would you?

And yes there are other formats out there now, and if i were digitising my CD collection from scratch now, I may choose another format that was not available when I first did it, But it would not be MP3 !

As an aside, I buy all my music on CD and rip to iTunes, but I am rare person these days, yes I have some playlists but often I will listen to whole albums at a time, and it is almost always cheaper to buy a whole CD than to buy the Album on iTunes. and on the rare occasions that I am after 1 track only by an artist, that track will often be on a compilation CD with some other tracks I am interested in , so I buy that, and end up with more music for the same cost as a few downloads, plus of course the free albums I am given by the Artists I work for.

Yes there is a largely electronic system, and yet....

How would Garage sales work, kids lunch money, and the million and one other personal transactions every day,
the guy who does the coffee run for the office every day.

Yes, all the business transactions would be easy to do, nearly everyone has a credit/debit card these days, but there are still a number of transactions we do everyday that we do with cash because it would be impractical to do any other way. and by the time you set up "cash cards", or "instant credit", or some other form of personally transferrable small transaction system, all you are doing is creating another vector for counterfeiters, fraudsters and hackers.

and as we all know here at /. , the average person is useless at securing anything electronic, so you would trust the average person with an eftpos machine or equivalent ?

and of course having a digital 'cash' system would rely on having ever-present and reliable digital communications everywhere, and a helluvalot more bandwidth..... and your mobile phone supplier supplies that now, and will in the future, without throttling. If they are anything like my last one it would be a case of, "john, can you get me a cup of coffee while you are at the shops, ill just come half way there with you so i can transfer the cash to your account".......

Cash is counterfeitable, but for the millions of legitimate small and personal Transactions that happen everyday, it is still the better system.

And then there is the aspect of those small transactions you don't want (for one reason or another) anyone else to know about, the teenage boys buying condoms, the teenage girls buying the pill, anyone using the services of an sti clinic, those porno's you hide in the bottom of the wardrobe, those donuts that your doctor says you should not be eating, If you accept electronic transactions, you are accepting that sooner or later, every transaction is going to be available to someone else, even if its just your girl/boy friend looking at your statement when it comes in the mail.

"G'day mate."

He said Austrian, not Austrayan.

Another one for Bill Engvall to add ftp his "Heres your sign" routine

"Hey Jimmy boy, come over here
We want you to hide in this fridge while we set off a small nuke over there
and we will come back later when the place has cooled down enough to see if you (and /or the fridge) has survived......"

"Well all right, you better hold my sign though, I don't want to see it get damaged"

I don't see where they turn completely black when they sense panic.

Vote for who you believe is the best candidate, not just for the lesser of 2 evils

And encourage everyone you know to do the same

Your vote DOES have a value

Remember this , A landslide victory is made up of a lot of single votes.....

A Japanese artist has assembled a map of the world with a moving timeline showing the location and relative scale of each nuclear detonation from 1945 to 1998

It also has a score card,of who is responsible for each detonation

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I9lquok4Pdk

fascinating

I was once told that 2 out of every 1 people working at the BBC has a multiple personality disorder

but will it have enough memory to run any Microsoft software ?

In Thailand, Many intersections have a large clock indicating how long is left for the green light and then how long for the red light, It seems to work pretty well, if this was combined with a remote sensor system (the clock kicks in when the sensor kicks in , if you don't see a clock then the lights stay the same), I think it would pretty much solve all the "what if's" that most people are asking
except for who to sue, but that is probably why america does not have these clocks, because someone is scared they would be sued if another person did something stupid based on the information supplied by the clock.

And this is all about improving the system of sensors, putting the initial triggering devices in to vehicles, and not into the roads themselves.
putting a sensor loop in to a road is not difficult, but does mean shutting down the road for a period of time and employing a number of people to install and test it, and reinstall if it doesn't work right the first time.
and to minimise inconvenience to raod users it is often done at night (with additional costs of extra energy for work lights etc and of course overtime/night pay rates for the people involved.)
If this could be replaced with a simple transponder (that would also be able to be used for Toll roads etc.) that all cars would have to carry (how about a digital registration transponder) and then coordinated with a modification of the current sensor system (to work with a series of directional antenna's instead of road sensors)
it would potentially lead to an increase in traffic efficiency and a potential fuel saving to a majority of road users,
And the fringe benefits for government and law enforcement of being able to track individual vehicle more accurately speak for themselves.

someone is driving the car (I assume), so you still follow red/green lights as they show to you.
If the light turns red before you get to the intersection (because say, an ambulance has triggered it, just like they do now), then you stop, you learned how to do that when you got your licence.
This will not guarantee a green light, just increase the chances of a green light when you are at the intersection, if the light is red as you approach then slow down, there are a myriad of reasons that the lights may be green the other way (starting with a greater number of cars approaching the intersection/ going through the intersection, or as mentioned before, maybe triggering to gig an emergency vehicle priority)
If the car is a self drive, then I am sure it would not be difficult to have a 'communication' of some manner, with the intersection saying 'the light is green in x seconds time for y seconds' and the car would behave accordingly, if no communication then the car would treat the lights as normal traffic lights and not assume anything about greens or reds except what can be deduced by looking at the lights (e.g. they are green now, or red now)
so in other words it is not about sending a guarantee that the lights will be green for you, it is about improving the average of green lights across a greater number of people and vehicles, you still have to drive according to the road conditions as they are in front of you.

I also am used to loops in the road as traffic sensors.
And I laugh every time i see some idiot stopped 1 or 2 car lengths back from the stop line, way back from the sensor loop wondering why the lights don't change for them.

I still wonder what is their reasoning for stopping so far back, but I don't think reason has anything to do with it ............