There was a standard for inductive charging paddles some years ago. They had the interesting advantage that they were completely waterproof.

Why has that been thrown away?

For instance, Australia always puts elections on a Saturday.

Then, too, Australia also has a Federal election commission, unlike the many state-based ones in the US. And mandatory voting, too. And pencil-on-paper ballots. And instant run-off. And we almost always know the result of the election before midnight of the election day.

Remind me again what is so great about how voting works in the US? It sounds very broken, actually.

Have a look at app.net, then. It's aiming to be what Twitter could have been.

Then pick a month of the calender, please, rather than a season of the northen hemisphere. The Internet has been global for decades and it's long past time the US recognises that.

Wade, who was annoyed by that just the other day somewhere else on the 'net.

This is what I do. I've got it all on one PC that knows how to turn itself on and off at the right times outputting to a projector. I find I can usually rely on the EPG and look through upcoming programs every once in a while. I do forget what nights things air on...

She needs to hear the other point-of-view from someone she trusts and respects. Someone she will listen to and actually take it onboard when they tell her she's being pretty stupid and wasting her own time. Probably someone she works for at one of the sites she maintains. And if you locate someone, be nice. Real nice. I shouldn't need to say it, but distingush between Ms Schwager and her actions and also between her actions and these organisations. Point out how her idiocy is making them look bad.

Wade.

Electric car makers are recreating the performance of petrol-driven cars with electric drive-trains, and then selling them as "more environmentally friendly". This is completely mis-marketing. The problem is, as many people have commented, the manufacturing techniques are not environmentally friendly.

The current prime culprit is the lithium batteries. This is touted as energy efficient storage, which it is, but it ignores two problems: whilst it is not a rare-earth, mining it and manufacturing with it has been linked with large environmental problems. And the recycling industry is minuscule. By contrast, lead-acid batteries are a very well known and mature technology, and the recyclability of lead-acid batteries is better than 97%. The only problem is that they're heavier than lithium.

I think electric car makers need to figure out how to live with that problem. It would mean they can make and sell electric cars for considerably less than they are doing at the moment. And that means people would find them affordable and would buy them. It also means they could make them user-replaceable. As for lack of performance, that shouldn't be a problem. People buy and use many many small, underpowered cars that struggle to beat a bicycle down a hill.

The other problem is the infrastructure for charging. Research proceeded apace some years ago for a paddle-based system for electric cars to charge whereever they were parked. Whilst this seems to have been abandoned, it does show that the problem of infrastructure *must* be tackled by manufacturers. They need to look at the history of how the petrol delivery infrastructure developed and see what they need to leverage to make that work. And they need to look at working together, not in competition. A battery exchange system might be one answer, but you have to be able to put Ford batteries into Mitsubishi electric cars (for instance).

Just be aware that he has some strong views on JavaScript and it's foibles which you may find you need to disagree with.

Your post reads a lot like all those people who hate PHP. "It has all these things wrong with it!" Well, actually, no it doesn't - because most of them aren't a problem to the people busy using it effectively. JavaScript doesn't have 'inferior' abstractions: it has *different* ones.

I have programmed a lot over the decades in both strongly typed and weakly typed languages - too many to name. I've come to Java in the last few years after a much longer time in JavaScript and PHP (and others) and have experienced the reverse of the OP's problem. But it's only a problem if you let it be a problem. Solving problems in an untyped language has some fundamental differences to a typed language. Get over that and a lot of the perceived 'problems' Just Go Away.

There's a competition to build them at various Lego shows. This one is one of the better ones: except for one module, it cleanly and successfully moves all the balls. Others I've seen often have modules that have difficult reliably moving the balls around.

Pity that your FCC doesn't seem to have enough teeth.

In AU, our competition watchdog forced the monopoly telco (Telstra) to sell wholesale access to DSL services. This not only created a huge market for selling ADSL internet, but it set a precedent: when other suppliers started providing ADSL2+, they had to make it available, too, AFAIK.

It's about identity.

There is a reason I have multiple accounts on Google's services. And that is because my identity on Youtube is different from my identity on Blogspot and that's different from my identity on Google+. I don't need them merged. I don't want them merged. I made them separate and I want to keep them separate. Google has been showing signs for some years that it doesn't want to accept that. That's too bad: lots of people really want multiple accounts on Google's services and will bend-over backwards to do it.

Fortunately, many of them are corporate (i.e. *paying*) customers, which is posibly why they've done multiple-login. Which is technologically clever, though not documented well enough. But it needs much wider implementation (for example, on the G+ Android app).

There were some Minolta film scanners that had APS modules, though they were an extra purchase. My D'Image Scan Elite II could, and there were several others as well. Not having used APS myself, I never bought the extra module, but I know it was made. The software could scan a whole roll in one go, though it would take some time.

Finding one of those modules might be a difficult thing, however.

Wade.

The purchase of the movie ticket comes with certain obligations on the purchaser. In this cinema chain, one of those is no talking or texting.

An identical principal applies when I buy a train ticket. On Sydney's trains, you are not allowed to smoke or drink and by purchasing a ticket you agree to those obligations. Get caught and you get thrown off without a refund. In fact, you usually get fined as well.

There is no reason you should get a refund for not following the obligations attached to the ticket.