The interstate highway system in the US was built by the government to increase bandwidth on the highways. It made it much easier to get lots of cars and trucks across the country cheaply, and did in fact create a lot of jobs both for the highway workers as well as auto workers. Making the automobile an unalienable right seemed like a good idea in the 50's with 30 cent gas; now, maybe not so much.

The last 30 years or so have made it seem that we might have been better off going more slowly and letting the market decide if highways were better than rail or possibly other transport systems that never got to see the light of day due to unrealistically inexpensive highway travel. It's seems equally obvious at this point in time that more internet bandwidth is also an unalienable right. On the other hand, it's hard to say what unintended consequences might come from mandating perhaps unrealistically inexpensive bandwidth for communications.

I can't think of any reason why cheap unlimited internet bandwidth might be counterproductive. On the other hand cheap unlimited travel seemed like a good idea 60 years ago before pollution and energy became the problems they are now. I think we should pay for the bits we use now at a realistic market rate that isn't skewed by mixing the price of content along with the price of bandwidth to make it seem cheaper.

I was very excited to see this come out & watched it within hours of release. Unfortunately, the very first scene has some of the worst acting/directing I've ever seen. Sure they're teenage actors and this is really a technology demo, not a film for the masses, but it wouldn't have taken much to get this small part right. As soon as I saw that 15 second section I nearly shut if off. I'm glad I didn't because the tech stuff was very interesting, but only to geeks.

While you can argue for hours over what the film does and doesn't get right, it simply is not on the same level as Big Buck Bunny. Everyone I show that to loves it, kids and adults alike, and it gives me the opportunity to talk about open source principles to people who would never know this sort of thing exists.

I would never be able to show this film to people and get that effect because it is in fact just like many Hollywood movies: good effects, but awful writing, directing and acting. It looks like something made by geeks with too much spare time while Big Buck Bunny looks like an old time Disney or Looney Tunes short film: funny and thoughtful with perfect timing.

I'm very sorry to say that this film is a showcase of people's stereotype of geeks.

I guess it's old news, but this sounds exactly like what was being described in Neil Stephenson's Diamond Age. Actors there were paid to read/act short pieces of text/commands to reply to a young girl's questions. In the story, the girl was asking a book to explain a concept to her. Not much different from what happens with a chatbot.

I guess this might also relate to the earlier post on online math courses. Presumably grad students could be given micropayments to answer specific questions for an online course that the teacher doesn't have the time/inclination to answer.

My real concern in using this sort of thing for important information/decisions is how the answers get moderated quickly. Wikipedia has a pretty good, though certainly not perfect, way to deal with this, but it's not necessarily fast enough for real time issues.

FM has also been extremely vocal about vp8/webm. While I'm the format certainly has its problems, both technical and legal, I can't help but believe the slow advance of the project is at least partly because a supposed expert on open source spent a lot of his time ranting about it.

I am far from unbiased on the situation since the I feel an unencumbered video codec would make the world a better place. Even knowing my bias, I can't help but be really upset at this revelation. On the other hand all's fair in love & war, so Oracle has a right to hire a shill to promote their agenda.

Maybe the real culprit in this is the wider web's need to have an expert, even a self proclaimed one, tell people what to do so they don't have to do all the work to find the truth themselves.

Nice. I did the same thing but I had blocked it out of my memory. I had really forgotten about Gazette and the long listings of code you could type in from the magazine. I'll have to check the basement to see if I have any of them left. I found it really hard to throw that stuff away. I know I still have a 64 down there with an old vic20 keyboard I had mounted and wired in through a multipin connector hot glued into the side of the c64's case. I thought I was one cool cat with a keyboard I could sit back in my chair with. I wasn't afraid to take it apart and just try things with it. I guess it really did change my life.

Actually high cellulose content products don't work much at all. You need a high nitrogen content material (poop is the preferred material, ideally bird stuff because it contains the urine as well). There is a particular ratio of carbon to nitrogen that works best and by using various combinations of poop and different vegetable matter you get a mixture that gives the most methane and the least CO2. Vegetable leaf matter by itself will work, slowly, but produces a much higher CO2 to methane ratio so is not very useful for combustion. I assume that actual fruit and vegatables have higher nitrogen content than the leaves.

I built a few methane digesters in the 70's and I can tell you that it's not as easy as it sounds to actually produce useful amounts of methane. There is a lot of continuous mixing that has to happen or thick viscous mats form and keep things from working right. This consumes energy. You also can't really compress methane much without using more energy to compress it than you get out of it.

Of course if it's armageddon and you have lots of pig poop & crazy midgets to run things, this could actually work.

I think this sort of thing could find a lot of use in school programs, whether robotics, engineering or programming courses. Schools would like the MS part and being able to use a "high level" language would make it popular to supplement some programming courses. MS would certainly cut deals on price to get the schools involved.

While all of us here know that it's really simple to program an arduino, or propeller, or for that matter a pic with assembler, I think schools will be able to more easily justify an expense if MS is behind it along with a .net api. While I would prefer them to take a different approach, anything that will get kids into tinkering with home made projects is a very very good thing.

I have a fair amount of experience with assembler and some limited c programming on microcontrollers (mostly pic, but some propeller), but I sometimes wish I could just knock off a quick proof of concept with an easy language and a board with enough power & memory that I don't have to worry too much about how I do things. I'd likely never do that for a real project, but in the end the most important/expensive thing is my time.

If a tool is appropriate for a particular job, I don't think you should lose sleep over whose name is on the box. This is the main reason I rely mostly on open source solutions, and also why I sometimes use closed, propriety ones.

In Kurt Vonnegut's 1997 novel Hocus Pocus, the United States is brought to its knees financially by a company called Microsecond Arbitrage. Everyone invests through them and makes lots of money until a glitch happens and someone else's computer is faster that day. Then the entire country loses its shirt.

Word to the wise.....

I feel so dirty when I agree with Steve Jobs.

Pat Metheny is touring now with a "robot band" on his Orchestrion tour. There are a couple videos on the web and a fairly good writeup on Wired: http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2010-02/01/robot-band-backs-pat-metheny-on-orchestrion-tour

Pat's website has more info about his reasons for this approach: http://www.patmetheny.com/orchestrioninfo/

Not much tech weenie info, but pretty interesting for the musically minded.

We're a small AV company, 8 employees, and even we have 40-50 wireless mics. We got rid of our old ones and bought new ones that were all in the allegedly safe bands. However, even though we don't have to worry about breaking the law, now we will never really be able to know if the mics will actually work in any given location.

We travel a lot to convention locations around the country. While the databases that the FCC talks about sound nice, in practice they simply do not exist in any meaningful way. There is no one out there asking us to input our frequencies into a DB somewhere, and even if there was, it wouldn't help when we travel.

We will, of course, invest in spectrum analyzers we can take on the road, but even then we won't know if someone powers up after we've done our sweep and settled on frequencies. This is a big problem because if a mic goes out on the CEO of a big company we may have to comp a portion, or all, of a show to keep them happy.

I'm happy to have better wireless communications available, but it won't come without a big cost to us and companies like us.

VRML was hurt by people expecting to see cyberspace like in the movies. The actual reality was that it was a way to do simple visualizations when you didn't have the horsepower to do it "for real". I still believe that even with all its warts, it was a terrific piece of work for its time period.
.

My current (and very talented) designers spend hours producing scenes that can barely be properly viewed on quad core, gigabyte graphics card machines. The scenes are beautifully detailed and very pretty, but I can't seem to get through to them that there is also a place for extremely basic quick "sketches" for mundane functional uses - we do audio visual work and use visualization for planning purposes.

.
More than ten years ago, VRML, along with some simple java code for creating it automatically from a 2D sketch, allowed me to, in less than an hour, create a fly through that would run comfortably on a 486 with a 16 MB graphics card. I wouldn't begin to put the simple textures from that up to the beautiful work done today, but it got the job done.

Where did the black holes come from, after only a billion years since the big bang? I think most stars survive for a few billion years before possibly contracting & maybe forming a black hole.

Did these early black holes form in a different way?