I bet not.

I don't quite understand how any of it works, but I don't think its all that simple to run a good push service over a shitty public IP network.

Not to mention that you would need some sort of good 2 way gateway in order for it to see any sort of wide adoption. Look at all of people with iPhones that come with "unlimited" data, but some tiny limit on text messages. You don't see too many of them using email to SMS gateways to get out of paying for texts do you?

The fact that people still use SMS in an era of ubiquitous mobile IP is undeniably stupid, but its up to the telecoms to change that.

Umm... more to the point, its a water gun. Am I the only one who doesn't want a water gun by my computer?

On the other hand, just today I was contemplating building a servo mounted nerf gun, that would seem to be more appropriate for use by an "IT guy".

Diskkeeper's contention seems to rely on the First Amendment to the Constitution, which is a higher law than the one you cite. It doesn't matter what state or federal law says if that law violates the employer's constitutional rights.

Now whether the employer actually has a constitutional right to force his employees to take Scientology classes is up for debate, but you can't win that debate by citing any number of lower laws.

Well, I can't find any really great numbers, but heres what I have:

According to the article from the Economist linked below 1.3 GW of solar energy pass through every square kilometer of space (presumably this is near Earth).

According to Wikipedia, nuclear power plants on earth had a total capacity of 366 GW in late 2005.

So by some rough calculations, assuming 100% efficient panels we would need ~280 square kilometers of solar panels in space just to gather as much energy as we can currently produce with nuclear power.

Today, even highly experimental solar cells don't reach 50% efficiency. So 2 * 280 = 560.

Now I can't find any good numbers on the efficiency of this "beaming" energy back to earth, but I'm going to throw out that 10% would be generous, its probably way less. But assuming 10%, 10 * 560 = 5600 square kilometers of solar cells in space just to get as much useful power as we get from our dismal nuclear setup today.

And thats not to mention the size of antennas you would need on either end to beam that power, or the safety issues involved (you think windmills or low frequency submarine radios kill a lot of birds, how about a 3.6 TW microwave beam?)

Yeah, and a trip to the west coast after the Lewis and Clark expedition would only have been for historical reasons and maybe bring back a few more notes.

Actually, what the article is talking about is typically applied in systems of multiple levels of AI. Consider an ideal squad based shooter:

1. Command AI issues squads orders (do/accomplish something) based on a very simple model of the battlefield
2. Squad AI issues individual units orders (go somewhere) based on a more detailed model of the immediate area.
3. "Conscious" individual AI computes a good way of following orders from the squad AI based on yet a more detailed model.
4. "Subconscious" individual AI makes moment-to-moment decisions, for example about how to avoid minor obstacles that the "conscious" AI ignored.

Of course that is very idealized.

I got a MacBook Pro last year for school, and while I still think I made a good choice (powerful, portable *nix laptop with excellent hardware support), I was relieved to be able to revert to a Linux desktop as my primary platform after just over a year.

While many aspects of using a Mac were much simpler than Ubuntu, far too often I found the OS working against me. While it includes some great media apps, it lacks a lot of basic functionality that I've become accustomed to in Linux. Additionally, the included command line utilities were all out of date, and a total pain in the ass to manage once I had to start replacing them by hand.

Even office tools were a major issue. Neo Office sucked, running OpenOffice in X11 sucked, I bought a copy of Office 2008 and it was so unusably slow and unstable I uninstalled it the same day. OpenOffice 3 is nice, and Apple's Pages is a great tool for simple documents, and nice for some simplistic publishing applications. But OpenOffice 3 still has a mediocre interface and lacks some of the functionality of MS office, and Pages (while it has a nice interface) has a few bugs, has only very simplistic functionality and doesn't support .odt files.

As an office tool I found the Mac to suffer from the same problems as Linux in most areas.
As a power user I found OS X to be lacking much of the basic functionality of Linux.
As a development platform, OS X far outperformed Linux and Windows when it came to writing graphical Apps, but anything involving the command line, running in the background, etc was an absolute nightmare compared to Linux (never done anything of that sort in Window).
For Media stuff OS X really took the cake as long as you were willing to play by their rules (buy from iTunes, use Apple portables devices, etc). In order to play my collection of ripped movies, however, I reverted to mplayer and VLC. Also, they lacked any hardware acceleration of video decoding, even though the hardware supports it (probably nvidia's fault).

I would get my Parents or someone a Mac, and if I needed Photoshop or the like I would use one myself. But I don't expect that I will ever buy another Mac for myself, and would never run OS X on a desktop. It's main advantage for a moderately competent user is hardware support, and Linux seems to be coming along nicely in that area.

How about in an airplane? You have plenty of power and weight/space don't need to be an issue. I would think something like this could provide a higher precision alternative to the projectile weapons mounted in an AC130. The main issues that come to mind are stability (how long would you need to hold this steady on a target) and range.

Actually, a quick bit of googling reveals that is in the works,

Thats only true as a result of a social contract between a citizen and their government. When the government violates that social contract the "civil" aspect of the disobedience goes out the window.

I mean rationality would indicate that if you do anything you are willing to suffer the consequences, but there is a little more to it than that. It's really more like:

if( (probablity_of_benefit)*(benefit) > (probability_of_consequences)(consequences) ){
breakTheLaw();
}

In the case of civil disobedience, on the other hand, you would ideally be doing it to make a point instead of simply for the direct benefits you derive from the act.

Can anyone recommend a phone with some sort of useful text filtering capabilities? I receive nagios pages via an email->SMS gateway to my iPhone, but its worthless. There is no way to group the pages, each one shows as a separate "conversation" in the SMS interface. There is no way to do any sort of expression matching to select a ringtone (or for any other purpose). Deleting n pages requires 2(n+1) operations on a not especially responsive touch interface (all the shiny animations take forever).

Can third party apps on Android handle SMS? Any other platform? Ideally I would like to use regexes to group texts into "conversations", to determine what tone or vibration should occur, and ideally be able to tidy up the message a bit (the email->sms gateway loads it down with information I already know).

I'm inclined to agree. Of 3 iPhones in the (college) house I live in, all three are broken in some way, 1 by accidental damage, the other 2 just randomly quit after a while. Our 4th roommate is a Blackberry user who has broken 2 phones (both stupid accidents involving copious amounts of alcohol) since January. But he has some sort of insurance from T-Mobile that allows him to just go into a T-Mobile store and pick up a replacement, no questions asked. And he can even upgrade to a newer version at the same time.

If those of us with iPhones want them replaced we have to drive 2 hours to the nearest Apple store, deal with one of those annoying "geniuses" and we will hopefully come away with a replacement. Note that replacements are often refurbished.