I have nothing to add to this discussion other than if you get a chance to see Taj Mahal the musician, you should.

Wow, what timing. Just discovered this museum an hour ago as this morning I was given a Cox-Cavendish Galvanic Battery (I think) by my physiotherapist and was doing some Googling about it. What a great site, though it does have me wanting to start a new collecting hobby. Great to see that someone who collects these also opens his collection to others, documents it, and puts it on the web. If only more collectors would do the same.

I've been out of the TV loop for a while. Every time I get tempted to start watching again, I'm put off by the overabundance of hype and the poor signal to noise ratio - see other poster's comment about stretching two minutes of substance into half an hour.

That said, I'm looking forward to the day when we have giant mechatronic "robots" fighting in arenas. By "giant" I mean big enough that you'll need to host these in stadiums - think monster-truck shows, and attendant audiences. This would, of course, be vastly expensive, but at $30/seat in a 30,000 seat stadium plus corporate sponsorship, it could work. I'm talking fire-breathing, metal crunching, roaring beasts, twenty or thirty feet tall. Burning Man meets Survival Research Labs meets Mythbusters, with enough WWF to keep the seats full of hollering fans full of two percent beer.

THEN I'd watch TV.

No, I think his point is more "why the hell spend money on cutting edge hardware when that money goes further on traditional materials". To which I fully agree. I think the amount many schools spend on desktop machines is scandalous. You don't need brand new hardware to teach kids computer skills. You need to teach kids the basics of fishing rather than how to catch a trout using the latest carbon-fibre rod and GPS depthfinder. Teach kids how to use Open Office AND how to use the 'net to learn what they don't know. Industry can plop them in front of shiny silicon and the latest M$ "Productivity Suite" and they WILL function. I used some of the very first computers in schools in my county (thanks Mr. Varney!) but I now have a very dim view of computers in education, to the point our daughter is on a waiting list for a primary school that uses NONE.

Well, someone's been trolled. MDI is linked to IndraNet here in New Zealand, and these buffoons have been scamming investors for years by bringing out the Next Big Thing every couple of years. Mesh Networks, the nGen Engine (try to figure out how it works!), and air cars. Vapour central. As far as I know, they have never actually made a product or earned a dime, but that hasn't kept them from spewing PR crap and soliciting suc.. - I mean, investors. Run. Away.

Well, there's "can they charge you with it?" and there's "do you want to pay for a lawyer to defend you from it?" I'm quite sure popping any restraints, no matter what you do afterwards, is going to get you further charges, either escape or resisting arrest. Neither furthers your cause. If you're protesting to make a point, don't give the press or the judge further ammo. A future prospective employer/border control officer may not care so much about a disorderly conduct if the reasons are explained, but the resisting arrest or escape can look a lot worse.

Look, if you're protesting, you should go into it knowing how far you're willing to go, and if it's arrest, just take the medicine and get on with it. Most cops would much rather be fighting "real" crime than clearing away a bunch of filthy free software types upset about Unity,

The irony is if you had somehow made public the names of the kids responsible for the thefts you would probably be sued for charged with violating libel/slander/privacy laws. Frustrating!

My experience with the Panasonic Viera with cam has been less than satisfactory. In fact, it sucks so bad we just use my netbook ( and yeah, try to keep the toddler from touching keys or pad). The wireless and camera were a "gimme" when we bought the panel. Which is just as well, if I'd paid list for them ($NZ300? No way) I'd have taken them back. The firmware is buggy, slow, and closed source. Acquiring wireless signal is hit or miss (netbook picks up strong signal in same room, that part of house isn't wired with CAT5 yet). And to top it off, folks on the other end tell me both our HP Mini and Toshiba netbooks, with their tiny pinhole cameras, give much better picture. Probably my last Panasonic purchase for a good long while. Avoid. Unfortunately, you can't try these things out in the store so you can get stuck with a turkey. Pity, because in theory it's brilliant.

And to anyone who nay-says the need for a child to have Skype, EABOD. Our toddler can identify five different grandparents and gets to talk to them every other week. Someday you'll be old and your kids will move to the other side of the planet and then reproduce. Toddlers don't "do" letters and usually clam up when you hand them a phone with someone on the other end (they'll fucking recite the Gettysburg address into the TV remote just after you hang up though).

I reckon the group most affected by this will be patternmakers. This is already a dying art, now designers can print a pattern directly from their desktop, with shrinkage rates and draft calculated by software. I've worked a bit in a foundry - our guys were more mouldmakers than patternmakers, and the amount of work it takes to make a mould that allows a clean finished part is phenomenal. This technology could take most of their work away - except for the most tedious final polishing.

We are still a long way away from people making bootleg Fisher-Price at home, but I'm sure that day will come. Hopefully the manufacturing industry can cope with it better than the media companies have with their product!

Also, see http://bathsheba.com/

And Amazon has patented the one click method anyway...

I'm keen to have them re-create the Moa and the Haast's Eagle. Nothing says bad-ass like a bird with a 9-foot wingspan that can dive at 50mph

Maybe I'm getting old, but wouldn't we be better off spending $1.6B educating, feeding, and homing people? I feel the same way about manned space flight. I'm not saying it has nothing more to offer us, but as a benefit to mankind, the cost/benefit ratio doesn't look good.

...which I read over my Christmas holiday, having jetted 12,000 miles, is "Oil 101" by Morgan Downey. Very very good information, written by an oil trader. Explains how they find it, how they get it, and what they do to it to make the stuff we use. One good point in this book is that now that a lot of the "low hanging fruit" has been tapped dry, the remaining wells produce a more sulfurous product which yields poorer quality feedstocks and requires more hydrogen (you know, the stuff we're gonna run our cars on in the Magical Future) to refine. Somebody please stand up and say we have to consume less of this stuff. Not "none", just "a lot less".

I sure did after that. The size of the operation didn't warrant daily checks of the logs - this was a bricks and mortar toy/hobby store that did maybe $500 a week over the website and I wasn't webmaster as much as I was "guy who knew more than anyone else". Why should someone not complain about $1000 of totally unnecessary bandwidth usage? You provide restrooms for your customers, but you don't expect anyone to come and take a grand's worth of toilet paper and walk out without buying anything.

This was when MS was in testing of their search engine, and Google searches at the time showed we were far from the only ones hit.