So, in other words, an infinite loop.

Oblig. Simpsons: "Lisa, I want to buy your rock."

I think the end of the article deserves more prominence:

I suppose that this system would allow people who want to vote "Anybody but X" to actually vote that way.

When I was working on remote meter reading for Pacific Gas and Electric back in the late 80s, we were afraid that the meter readers would be hostile to our project. They reacted much better than we had feared. We were running a limited deployment test, so we put our meters on the houses that were difficult for the meter readers -- bad dogs, indoor meters, the solitary shack in the middle of nowhere.

At the conclusion of our project, the financial analysis supported the meter readers. Deploying remotely readable meters system-wide was too expensive. It was significantly cheaper to go on reading meters by hand. Apparently, the required equipment has become less expensive since then.

Back in the late 80s, I was working for Pacific Gas and Electric testing out remote meter reading solutions. The group that I was working with used a network of packet radios that communicated with the meters via power line carrier.

One of the customers in a test area had a touch-sensitive lamp that kept turning itself on and off. She complained that the new meters had brought a ghost to her house. So one of my co-workers performed an exorcism, installed a low-pass filter, and the ghost was gone.

The solution that we were testing worked pretty well. We installed a radio on every secondary that had a meter because the power line carrier communications were unreliable when they had to cross a transformer. One of the other groups was trying to use power line carrier end-to-end, but I didn't hear whether or not they got it working. In the end, all of the remote meter reading solutions were deemed by management to be too expensive. It was significantly cheaper to go on reading meters by hand.

I remember when I was working on smart meters back in the late 80s. We installed one on my boss's house to test it and my boss was showing it off to management. We were in the office reading the meter on his house and his usage was high. He picked up the phone, called his wife, and said, "Honey, could you please turn off the air conditioner .... Yes it is .... Honey, I'm reading the meter right now .... Okay." We took another reading about 30 seconds later and the usage had gone back down.

Meanwhile, for those of us who are human... :)

If it were that simple, there would be no money in advertising.

Like this Do-It-Yourself Book Scanner?

I wonder what would be added to that new armed robbery legislation at 11pm on Tuesday. ("Ha ha! Now you either have to fund my pet project or be in favor of armed robbery.") Eleventh-hour riders to must-pass appropriations are sleazy enough. This could add a whole slew of new opportunities for this kind of abuse.

Exactly. I've been using Readability (upon which Reader seems to be based) for a while now and found that I never bother using it on, for instance, Ars Technica. Their site is clean enough that Readability doesn't really offer much benefit.

But without a manned space program, is there any motivation to develop these new technologies? Or will those programs just languish on a back burner until they are eventually cut?

I remember riding in a car when the driver was pulled over for going 58 in a 55. Under "speed", the officer wrote "over 55".

I have a box on floppies on my desk that I use for propping up books because I'm too lazy to buy a book stand. :)

I'm pretty sure that only the MacBook Pro models have been updated. The MacBook and MacBook Air seem the same.