Excellent post -- I wonder how many potential PS3 customers are sitting on the sidelines angered by the continued inferior-ization of the device? I wanted to get a 60 GB but just missed the window before they introduced the software-based PS2 emulation models, at which point 60 GB models went *UP* in price on ebay. I delayed purchasing one, thinking subsequent revisions would have *increased* PS2 compatibility, but they have just gotten cheaper and cheaper (in quality), removing support for things like SACD, continued erosion of PS2 compatibility, and kept the price the same. For a while, a new 60 GB model would sell for near $1000 on eBay!

Ugh, come on Sony. Way to alienate your fanbase, especially the tech nerds who know and care about such details.

Not really -- your argument sounds attractive, but is not always the best. People always have these grand fantasies about reaching doctors on call, but added redundancy does not always help. If something works 99.9% of the time, it is probably "good enough" for the expense, given redundancy already exists.

If docs were issued a prepaid phone for home call (would have to be an entirely different network e.g. Verizon(CDMA) vs AT&T's GSM), most likely somebody would forget to charge it (rarely used: I would estimate once every couple years) or forget to add minutes (most of them have expiring minutes over time), or the physicians would not want to carry it (another thing to carry / charge / drop / break / lose / clip to the belt with four other things.) The numbers would get mixed up -- would you rather have one number for the busy nurse to call at every nursing station / call operator, or 4 in decreasing order? Everything has to be grounded in practicality. A good paging network as cellphone backup is better.

A typical physician setup is email/blackberry for nonurgent, long communications (e.g. patients to see tomorrow AM when you get to the hospital.) For urgent communications most docs rely on a cellphone, and also carry a pager for the reliability (far above 99%) and increased range (much better than cellphone.) Landlines, as some of the people insinuated, are of course only practical when sitting at home or in an office.

Thus, my blackberry went out, cellphone went to VM, and the pager came through for me. An additional cellphone might have helped, but possibly not. If my pager happened to be out also, they would have overhead paged me throughout all hospitals I cover, which I would have heard and called back (this is how they did it in the old days anyway, and I was in a hospital at the time.) If I didn't hear this, they would have called my home, but I wasn't home anyway.

If all this failed, they would have called a colleague of mine. If he just got in a car crash, they would have called an in-house ICU doctor cover. If the in house intensive care doc just fell down the stairs and was out of commission, they would have called an on-call emergency doctor. If he was just kidnapped by terrorists, you're just being silly.

Point is, there's a lot of redundancy designed to make things safe already. There is generally decent technological support behind the basics. Electronic health records, that's another matter, and don't get me started... :p

I knew somebody would claim this impossible, but both SMS and voicemail were working, at least in my area. Incoming calls seemed to go to VM and then I could retrieve it (I was driving, so might have been simply out of range). Outgoing calls worked for me. All 3G internet / WAP was down.

This morning service is back to normal, and there was no announcement SMS nor notification of recent downed services from AT&T, therefore, before I knew about all this I was still aiming to replace my phone. Hence my comment.

I would argue that the OP has a point. I am a doctor, was on call (I'm not kidding), and missed several important messages due to my cellphone going out (my blackberry just silently stopped receiving all work mail, all internet functions went dead, full 3G signal but "tunnel failed.") Granted, there is a lot of redundancy in communications, so my pager later started going off with a lot of people saying "where are you???", and I then called them on a landline.

I thought it was my phone, rebooted 3 times, and only today did I find out that it was a national outage (saw here, confirmed all over the net.) I think AT&T should just have sent a free txt saying "We are having problems" or made an large scale announcement via voicemail, which would have helped me (and others) plan. I was about to get a replacement phone from a friend and plug my SIM into it.

The point is we start to rely on these devices, and blackberries, for better or worse, are used for very important things in business, health care, and otherwise.

I sincerely hope you were joking:

All VISA cards start with 4.

All Mastercards start with 51, 52, 53, 54, or 55.

Don't believe me? Take a look in your wallet. :)

Thus, iCONICA, if you just shared the last 12 digits of your Mastercard, you now have cut down the search space of your password to 500 numbers. Moreover, credit card digits have to conform to a checksum (double every other digit + add them all up, must be 0 mod 10.) Thus, I'd estimate we could guess your card within 10 unique numbers, around 100 if VISA. There are ways of getting around the "security digits" and expiration date...

Short story is, don't share your credit card number. Even as a joke.

Yeah... this is stuff every nerd kid did... a lot. Maybe that's why we all wear glasses. Remember when the 3d random dot patterns were all the rage? Those were a bit more tricky to "see."

A neat think you can do with a digital camera is make your own steroscopic pictures. I did it myself just a couple months ago -- a good technique is to put your digicam with its back against a ruler, and fix the ruler in place. Take one picture of the scene, and with the ruler still fixed, move your camera several inches to the right. Then take the next picture.

Put the two images next to each other on your computer monitor, cross eyes, and instant 3D representation of the scene. Just like your own eyes! You can experiment with changing the depth of focus, etc. I found that it works best with a very large depth of focus -- otherwise you would get weird effects due to the fact you in effect had a "infinity focus" by not changing your camera angle during the translation to create the 3d effect.

Car battery capacity is usually between 40-60 amp-h. That is, if you wanted to use battery power for three hours of peak, you would get (generous estimation) of 20 amp-h per battery. Your battery gives 12 volts, and, again under ideal conditions you should get 12*20 = 240 W-h per battery for the peak time.

A standard light bulb is 100 watts. Your plasma TV may be 800-1200 watts.

Thus to run the TV for three hours you would need five batteries, and that assumes that you could run them to dry. Lead acid batteries can produce surge power pretty well, but it would likely be cost prohibitive unless you could get a lot of duty cycles out of them.

Looking at Sears -- a cheap car battery is around $50. Electricity costs $0.08 per kwh where I am. Thus to equal the cost of one battery you would need to produce 50/.08 = 625 KW-h of electricity before being spent. That is 625,000 W-h or 1,000 charge cycles.

I'm not sure if a battery can handle this before getting corroded and functioning badly. Of course, this is only the cost of the battery, and really what you care about is the delta cost from night and day electricity. Additionally, people could not use retail car batteries but could get cheaper lead-acid apparatuses.

At delta cost of $.05 per kw-h, then if you could get more than 1000 charge cycles from the battery, then anything above this is profit on the order of $.05 KWh * 1kW * 3h = $.15 = 15 cents per day for your plasma. Is it worth it?

The short answer is no. The long answer is probably not.