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Comment The oblig. quote from Snow Crash (Score 5, Insightful) 233

When it gets down to it — talking trade balances here — once we've brain-drained all our technology into other countries, once things have evened out, they're making cars in Bolivia and microwave ovens in Tadzhikistan and selling them here — once our edge in natural resources has been made irrelevant by giant Hong Kong ships and dirigibles that can ship North Dakota all the way to New Zealand for a nickel — once the Invisible Hand has taken away all those historical inequities and smeared them out into a broad global layer of what a Pakistani brickmaker would consider to be prosperity — y'know what? There's only four things we do better than anyone else:

music
movies
microcode (software)
high-speed pizza delivery

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Businesses

With Chinese Investment, Nicaraguan Passage Could Dwarf Panama Canal 322

Nicaragua is now home to the early stages of one of the largest infrastructure projects on earth, plans for which have been raising questions for some time now. In a move that will affect global trade in the long term, "A Chinese telecom billionaire has joined forces with Nicaragua's famously anti-American president to construct a waterway between the Caribbean Sea and the Pacific Ocean to rival the Panama Canal. The massive engineering undertaking would literally slice through Nicaragua and be large enough to accommodate the supertankers that are the hallmark of fleets around the world today." (Here's a related article with a bit more on the project from Wang Jing, the Chinese telecoms entrepreneur now also at the head of the Hong Kong Nicaragua Canal Development Investment Co.) One potential problem with the canal: disruption of surfing in Nicaragua.
GUI

New Car Heads-Up Display To Be Controlled By Hand Gestures, Voice Commands 142

Lucas123 (935744) writes "A new company has just opened a crowdsourcing campaign for a heads-up display that plugs into your car's OBD II port and works with iPhones and Android OS-enabled mobile devices via Bluetooth to project a 5.1-in transparent screen that appears to float six feet in front of the windshield. The HUD, called Navdy, works with navigation apps such as Google Maps for turn-by-turn directions, and music apps such as Spotify, Pandora, iTunes Music and Google Play Music. Using voice commands via Apple's Siri or Google Voice, the HUD can also write, read aloud or display notifications from text messages or social media apps, such as Twitter. Phone calls, texting or other applications can also be controlled with hand gestures enabled by an infrared camera."
Transportation

Idiot Leaves Driver's Seat In Self-Driving Infiniti, On the Highway 406

cartechboy writes Self-driving cars are coming, that's nothing new. People are somewhat nervous about this technology, and that's also not news. But it appears self-driving cars are already here, and one idiot was dumb enough to climb out of the driver's seat while his car cruised down the highway. The car in question is a new Infiniti Q50, which has Active Lane Control and adaptive cruise control. Both of which essentially turn the Q50 into an autonomous vehicle while at highway speeds. While impressive, taking yourself out of a position where you can quickly and safely regain control of the car if needed is simply dumb. After watching the video, it's abundantly clear why people should be nervous about autonomous vehicles. It's not the cars and tech we need to worry about, it's idiots like this guy.

Comment Ain't she a beautiful sight? (Score 3, Funny) 54

It was black as pitch on August the sixth
Half a billion kliks from the sun
I'd left Earth 'bout ten years ago
And was ready to have some fun
I'd buzzed past Mars and a coupla asteroids
And saw this comet goin' roun' and roun'
He says "Tin Can, this here's Rubber Duck
And I'm about to put the hammer down"

'Cause we got a little ol' convoy rockin' thru the night
Yeah, we got a little ol' convoy, ain't she a beautiful sight?
Come on and join our convoy, ain't nothin' gonna get in our way
We gonna roll this truckin' convoy 'cross the invariable plane
Convoyyyyy....


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Comment Re:Terrible idea (Score 1) 149

And don't forget that maybe some Chinese dude has problem with typing English (although I think most keyboards all around the world do keep ASCII letters and base ASCII punctuation at least, so there's that at least today...)

Phonetic entry using pinyin is still the most common method, which has been greatly sped up with predictive text like on cell phones, so the most common characters can be entered with a few keystrokes. Google Pinyn in this regard is, as the kid's say, the shiznit.

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Comment Re:Good luck (Score 1) 149

I was once given a corporate e-mail address with an apostrophe for my last name. Perfectly legal, but many web sites choked on it. And they left the apostrophe off my first batch of business cards.

(Fortunately I also had an alias address which didn't have the apostrophe and was about two dozen characters shorter.)

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Comment Re:Sponsors (Score 1) 138

COTTONMOUTH: (see image at right) A family of modified USB and Ethernet connectors that can be used to install Trojan horse software and work as wireless bridges, providing covert remote access to the target machine.[18] COTTONMOUTH-I is a USB plug that uses TRINITY as digital core and HOWLERMONKEY as RF transceiver. Cost in 2008 was slightly above $1M for 50 units.

So AudioQuest has been working with the NSA this whole time?

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Comment Puffins attacked the craft services tent, allright (Score 5, Funny) 181

~ They ate all the lobster salad and the chocolate chip power bars. Look at the feathers and tracks. It's just I never heard of them hitting anything this big before.

~ They didn't. But we are meant to think they did. These tracks are side by side. Puffins always march single file to hide their numbers.

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