A fun read... http://www.amazon.com/Dealers-Lightning-Xerox-PARC-Computer/dp/0887309895 excerpt from summary:

reasonably good voice recognition? Maybe, for a given value of "good'.
Voice recognition is hit or miss for me on android now... it works "reasonably good" provided I have....
1) Low background noise.
2) Solid network connection to upload & process voice sample on google's server farms.
3) In a place where I can talk and don't care if others hear what i'm saying.

So when it works I am suitably impressed, but it doesn't work often and I'm not always able to use it.

Just a data point: my ancient Palm smart phone had more usable voice dialing than my android does today, and that thing was 100% local processing. None of this "busy icon" for 30 seconds to time out and say "Please try again" because 4G data skipped out or something, which is what I see often enough to be a pain when I'm voice dialing or map searching etc.
(and yeah, I would probably complain about my flying car if I had one :-) I am amazed voice recognition works as well as it does, it just isn't at 100% yet.)

Kirk vs Picard: White and Nerdy (Weird Al), excerpt (2:13):

And no, it isn't deep, nor profound. But it is funny.

+1 for parent; I'm just learning about Vyatta. If you want to build your own as a research project, cool. Otherwise read up on this: vyatta and see if it might do what you want.

r.e. .8 vs .85
argh :-)

I'll start by saying thank you for the analysis; that was thought provoking.

The numerator above seems off: what is 6445 ?

For the weight of a big tub of petroleum containing 4.75t carbon, I think you'd have:
4.75 tons of carbon / .85 = 5.938 tons of petroleum.

To see how many Liters of petroleum that would be, we get:
5,938 Kg of petroleum / ( .737 Kg/L ) = 8,057 L.

Using that average fuel economy of 5L/100Km yields a range of
8,057L / ( 5L/100Km ) = 1,611 / (1/100km) = 161,100 Km
(Or 100,040 miles for our readers in Burma, Liberia and the United States.)
Which is indeed a LOT of driving in one year.

The oracle of Yahoo Answers suggested that 19,000 to 24,000 km (12,000 to 15,000 miles) is a more reasonable average.
So by carbon weight, yeah... the gp's claim for Carbon is roughly a factor of 8 too high (161,100 km / 20,000 km/yr).

You raise a good point considering whether the gp meant 4.75 tons of CO2 instead of carbon.
To do this I think we need to revise our petroleum footprint.
You'll recall we first derieved that above based on just the target carbon weight.
We'll take the same approach for our target CO2 weight.

So... to get 4,750 KgCO2 emissions we need to burn a certain amount of petroleum.
That works out to 4,750 KgCO2 / (2.331 L/KgCO2) = 2,037.8 L of petroleum.
Which yields an alleged annual distance of:
2,038 L / ( 5L / 100Km )
= 408 / ( 1 / 100Km)
= 408 * 100Km
= 40,800 Km (25,351 miles)

Which is closer, but still off by a factor of at least 2 unless maybe they were talking fleet cars.
*shrug* don't know... it is hard to tell what point they were making.
(and yeah, this was much more fun to do over lunch than reading yawn-inducing project requirements :-) )

If you want to be with your family, be with your family. Read a book to your children. Play a game. Do something with them.

So... just what kind of interaction are you going to have with your "wife and children" while you're working on a deadline sitting in your recliner? Maybe this will help you more than a recliner: https://www.lifesizecustomcutouts.com/CustomCardboardCutout.

When I want to spend time with my family or my friends, I make it a point to leave my ipad turned off, my smart phone in my pocket, and my laptop closed. If I get a phone call I need to take, I excuse myself and go take the call and come back when I'm done. I find it pretty rude to "spend time" with anyone whose attention isn't there; if I'm putting my tasks and goals aside to spend time with people, I expect them to do the same for me.
And when I need to get work done, I focus on that.

Oh well... at least you've got the whole proximity thing going for you.

I'll just leave this here...
foil "how to" video

Kind of depressing hearing about HP (I like to toss this out whenever I read about HP doing something unwise).
Step 1. Buy a really expensive company.
Step 2. Ignore it for a year or so.
Step 3. Rationalize how to dramatically throw it away.
Step 4. Profit? What is a few billion $ between friends?

Out of the longgg list of HP acquisitions, here are some
of the more notable ones that caught my eye:

* Verifone 1997 $1.1 (billions)
* Compaq 2002 24.0
* P&G IT: 2003 3.0
* Peregrin 2005 0.4
* MercuryInter. 2006 4.5
* Knightsbridge 2006 ?
* Opsware 2007 1.6
* EDS 2008 13.9
* 3Com 2010 2.7
* Palm, Inc 2010 1.2
* 3PAR 2010 2.3
* ArcSight 2010 1.5
* Autonomy 2011 11.0

So have any of these actually been profitable for HP ? I knew that Palm tanked (bye bye, WebOS). I haven't heard good things about Knightsbridge. Compaq seems like it was a break-even deal.

Does Anyone Want Any Toast? - Red Dwarf - BBC

r.e. FTL research: you raise some good points.
But nobody (except maybe a Comi-Con panel) is going to get behind funding FTL research.
Our species also has some baby steps to work on first: in no particular order... orbital solar power, fusion, space elevators, mars colonies, asteroid mining. *shrug* Let's solve those things first because they will (eventually) set the stage for interstellar work, including FTL research.

As for basic physics research, I would say China is showing some interest in basic research and advancing the state of the art; with any luck that will motivate some other governments to not be left behind. India also seems hungry to establish itself as a prestigious space power; they're doing some cool things - I hope they are successful.
Likewise I'm optimistic about the progress SpaceX has made; I hope they're wildly successful because it will open new doors for humans.

That makes sense r.e. "tilt-up". I've read that with plastic molding getting the mold to let go of the plastic itself can be non-trivial; I wonder how thin one could make the nested structures in cement-based molding and still get the form out of the wall once it had set enough to support its own weight. *shrug*
All very cool stuff; some days I think it would be more fun to work with atoms instead of bits. I suppose there a lots of people doing both these days :-)

Wisdom indeed. Also... can you elaborate one what real innovation is? Seriously. Do you have an example or two of what opportunities are being crushed by the existing culture of "fake innovation"?

Because if not... if this is really large company, you may be perceived as a "precious little snowflake that also complains a lot."

And if this is a really large company, they're going to be able to coast along on the status quo for LONGGG time and I don't know why anybody would listen or care about a whiny snowflake.

So... can you (OP) elaborate the "real" part of "real innovation" ?
What amazing market opportunities are the current group missing?
What kinds of obvious fraud detection is slipping through their collective fingers?
What tremendous potential for increasing shareholder value is being left on the table?

Look, I'm not saying this incredibly large organization of yours could never benefit from some innovation, but realize this: you're going to be pushing against the inertia of entrenched culture and "we've always done it this way", which makes those "Stop Plate Tectonics" bumper stickers seem like an easy task by comparison.

I'll close with an alternative possibility: "I don't much like SAS. Nor do I like the people who have built a functioning SAS-ecosystem that handles this company's Multi-Billion euro statistical needs 'well enough'... it just doesn't encourage real innovation ('real' being code for 'fun'), instead I have to spend my time reading through thousands of pages of documentation and requirements specs and I have to troubleshoot this existing install base... Boy, I wish we had an opportunity to do real innovation here..."

Well... the tfa had a video (t=20sec) showing a latice-work inside the wall's exterior surfaces. I suspect that lattice would:
1) offer strength-to-weight savings (vs. solid slab cement walls)
2) use less material for a given surface area (yeah, this follows #1),
and 3) allow some extra insulation if warranted by the destination environment.

Also it would probably allow different configurations depending on how tall one wanted to stack (thicker lower-flow pieces; thinner upper-floor pieces). And the other point about embedding services cabling & plumbing stands; I could see them using standard interconnects to splice things together as they get assembled. *shrug* Maybe all that is common place today with prefab walls; don't know ianapfba (pre-fab building architect).

My first thought was "Big deal, another kind of prefab building" but the design + deposit is pretty interesting. This gets into some of the same things for machining I've read about where casting and/or subtractive (cnc milling) runs into limitations; additive manufacturing can create nested structure that were just not possible before. *shrug* It is cool to see people doing neat things with cement++.

And maybe - at some point - it would be cost effective for larger & taller structures to print segments on-site (and possibly at elevation for multi-story units). I don't know that they need to print in-situ; having useful-sized freshly printed & cured components (think just-in-time lego-blocks for the construction crew) could still be useful.

(One downside: I wonder about the "quick-set" additives and how nice (or not-so-nice) it would be to breath anything that off-gassed after it was all put together.)

Also... I'd consider buying a Smart Watch with any of these capabilities...
* Time travel, +/- 5000 years, with return feature
* Teleportation, up to 50km distance
* Time dilation ("bullet time"), minimum 60 seconds subjective to 1 second external observer.
* 3D copier (3D scanner + 3D printer; synthesize feedstock from atmospheric carbon)
* Flight (up to 30 minutes, max load 200kg, max speed 50km/hr)
* Force shield (deflect rain + bullets), 60 minute runtime
* Transforms into giant Battle Robot
* Underwater breathing support + waterproof (rated to 300 m)
* 2d projector (4m diagonal w/1200 lumens @ 20m)
* Holographic projector that plays "Help me, Obi Wan Kenobi..."; monochrome image ok
* Sleep gas feature
* Dog-walking feature