Turn the wireless off and plug in some Cat 5. Problem solved.

Taking your comment a few steps further...

It's staggering how many hours of potentially productive time are wasted in traffic every day. Think of if this way: you hit a traffic jam heading to work in the morning. Even if it takes only 15 extra minutes of your time, you multiply that by the hundreds or thousands of people who are stuck like you, times some average hourly wage, and the potential worth of that time that was instead wasted is huge. The ability for a car to drive itself and for you to spend the time even just checking your work email would be of great use to many.

It might be caught by modern browsers, but if you turn off all the security features (or just load up IE5 or something like that), you might be able to pull the one where you open an html document (with embedded javascript for the "virus" portion) and it, in turn, opens up two copies of itself. Those two each open two copies, and so on and so forth, until you've brought your machine to a screeching halt with the glut of windows opening up.

Easy to fix, too. Just manually shut down the machine (either hard power off or yank the cord), then delete the offending file.

Looks like a Lambo and a Lotus had a baby, then added turbines.

I will admit, having an electric motor dedicated to each wheel allows for some great control. With the physics of how electric motors typically work, you can also get crazy-huge horsepower & torque across nearly the whole range of the motor (assuming it's an induction motor). I can't imagine what the maintenance requirements/costs would be.

However, if this car actually makes it into production, I'd bet it will go the way of the Tesla Roadster: few made, high price (but that's a given), and hard to own/operate. It might also get butchered (visually speaking) between concept and production (remember the Chevy Volt concept car?).

See title.

I will admit, though, as far as all of the things ISPs and other entities track, news preferences are noticeably lower on the chart. Still...

Agreed.

A mathematical model is just that: a model. Not an exact duplicate, but an estimation, and approximation. I'll filter my news myself, thank you very much.

Centrifuge.

Might not be so 'human-friendly,' but it might do the trick.

One factor I don't think is emphasized enough is the choice of major students select. With respect to Robertson's outlook, many liberal arts degrees are a waste of an investment. The odds of you landing a well-compensating job with one of those degrees is slim. On the other hand, if you pursue a technical degree the outlook is much brighter. Programmers, technicians, scientists, engineers, and other similar workers usually earn higher wages than what Robertson lists as his median.

One additional subject I would have liked to hear touched on is the investment potential of a 2-year degree (e.g. welder, certified mechanic, machinist, etc.). I would think that a 2-year degree would be a decent investment for many. Any thoughts?

S.T.A.L.K.E.R. is another good example of a "choose-your-own-ending" game.

Surprisingly, I've found more Labview than Matlab out in the industry. I've only got a total of 3 years experience in as many places, so that's probably not a good sample size for a true representative of "industry," but still...

Two places I worked used Labview (an automotive company and a medical devices company), and a third didn't use anything (food packaging machinery company). Kinda surprising.

Moreso than experience with software common to industry, I find experience with instrumentation more valuable. If I hadn't gotten "real world" experience before I got my job, I would have had little knowledge about how you measure signals, or even what a relay really is. Darned pet projects and budget cuts in the University scene.

{cough}...Matlab...{cough}...Labview...{cough}

Ooof. Excuse me.

(Though if you're willing to forego Simulink, Octave is a good alternative to Matlab.)

I agree that electric-based transportation is a great deal more "green" than traditional ICE vehicles. However, I don't expect as great a movement toward the former whilst fuel prices remain so low. This is one of the key elements holding back the proliferation of electric vehicles: they cost more. Not only do they cost more upfront, but replacing a vehicle-sized battery pack is also quite expensive.

Another factor I would like to argue for is this: it saves more money, and is better to the environment, to upgrade your 10mpg gas guzzler to a modest 20mpg vehicle than to go from a 20mpg vehicle to a 33mpg fuel-sipper. I'd like to prove this mathematically:

Let the three aforementioned cars be Car A (10mpg), Car B (20mpg), and Car C (33mpg). Drive 100 miles in each. What is your fuel consumption? Answer: 10 gal for A, 5 for B, and 3 for C. By changing cars from A to B, you use half the fuel you did before, while "upgrading" from B to C only saves you 40%. The absolute changes also matter: a 5 gallon difference instead of a 2 gallon difference. An easier and more practical benefit (given the current state of affairs) to both the checkbook and the environment would be to first eliminate the extreme gas-guzzlers in favor of [simply] more efficient vehicles. (On top of that, driving habits affect milage. Simply not gunning it from the stoplight will save you a few mpg, as will coasting up to a red light instead of mashing the brakes a hundred feet in front of it.)

I will admit that the 33mpg cars do use less gas (duh!), and for those of you who are willing to pay the extra money to help the environment that much more, I applaud you; you are a more generous person than I. I doubt I've convinced many people to change anything, and I expect a few instances of "Over my dead body will I give up my Hummer H2. I'll run you over with it and go to jail first!" Well, that's okay. You have the freedom to do that. I can at least point out the difference and hope some positive effect will come from it.

For those of you who have seen Idiocracy, doesn't this jog your memory a bit? Perhaps something about a "latte?"

From the article...

Oh boy...did he ever hit the bullseye with this one.

I'm not an expert in chemistry (I'm an electrical engineer by trade), but I would think that if the carbon was formed into a real diamond, it wouldn't break apart easily. Each carbon atom in a diamond is linked to four others nearby in a tetrahedral shape. This makes for a very strong bond. Graphite, by contrast, consists of carbon atoms linked to only three neighboring atoms in a sort of hexagon-tile sheet. This makes it pretty easy for them to break apart.

Here's more on synthetic diamonds and here's the website of a company that makes them.