A hovering car certainly has applications. It would require less expensive roads and would be, in principle, much more self driving than a car on wheels. It would have to be as it will likely be difficult to control purely by human means. But a flying car. We essential have those. You just need a pilots license and have begin and end locations near an airfield for takeoff and landings. Of course air fields are not nearly as prolific as they used to be.

Not sure what this has to do with anything, even though it is true. I order through amazon from independent book dealers. The books appears to come from the dealers, packed by the dealers, often with a nice note from the dealers.

The article states that the workers in the amazon warehouse are frequenting the book sellers in the area. Whether they are treated badly, these workers have the disposable income to buy a book. I am big book buyer, but there have been times in my life when I went to the library instead of a bookstore. So as badly as these employees are treated, they are paid, though probably not as much as they should be, enough to have some expendable income.

And honestly, no matter what no independent retailer can compete with the big box or online stores. I used to pay extra just to support the local book and music dealers. Ultimately there were just not enough of us and they went out business.

Although not in Seattle, from what I can see most people who do not shop from Amazon shop at Powell's. I guess they think Powell's is cooler. But here is the rub. I often order books through Amazon from other book dealers. Amazon gives these bookstores the online infrastructure and allows them to reach an audience outside of the neighborhood, and an Audience, that, like me, hasn't spent hours in a bookstore going through books, at least has not done so in a decade or so. I read the reviews, and but the books. So it is good that the Amazon sweat shop pays enough so people can buy books and helps the economy in this way. I am sure it helps the economy in other ways. That does not mean that bookstores have any long term potential. it simply has to do with stock. New stock is too expensive as publishers have always punished the independent bookstore with higher prices. Used stock is going to become increasingly hard to come by.

Innovation is always built on the back of others. Nothing pops out of the blue. It is only the lack of education that makes on believes otherwise. The entire affordable microcomputer industry is based on Compaq's reverse engineering(stealing) of the IBM OS. The free browser for everyone is due to MS conning a profitable firm, then giving away the browser and forcing that firm into bankruptcy. Innovation has never been about pulling a product out of you ass. A knife was not suddenly one day made. We had to figure out how to mine the melt, smelt it, and then how to make it a knife that is not brittle.

No, it's not. It is just that they can't rent hotel room to meet their hookers and keep their mistresses on staff.

How much is this really. As a comparison, our football stadium was supposed to cost $400 million in today's dollars. It actually cost closer to $600 million, also in today's dollars. About $350 million of that is paid by extorting fees from visitor to the city. I can't imagine how making visitors pay for something they have no use for makes, sense, but there it is.

This reminds me of people who complain about the $400 million cost to launch the Space Shuttle. The same amount of a high end movie. But what does a movie give us?

I would hate any municipality t waste $1500 on a such an untested device. The lack of usefulness and high price point of this product is indicated by the fact that, as far as I can tell, anyone who applies to the explorer program gets in. I sent an application a while back, just saying I was going to play with them, and I got an offer. I did not know that they cost more than my first car. Now of course they have a "sale", where apparently anyone can buy the glasses for the low, low price of $1500.

Galileo was circa 1600. This is where, arguably, modern physics begins. Observation, rejection of common beliefs such as giants, geocentric ideas, and inherent properties such as motion, heat, and such.

Issac Newton was 1700. Not a huge step forward, but embedded physics in a mathematical base. He was able to do some things that Galileo could not because of the math.

Between 1700 and 1900, there was much refinement, many extensions, and then the ultraviolet catastrophe among other things

So 1900 saw Relativity and Quantum Mechanics which solved some real problems with the classical physics that dominated in the 18th and 19th century. It explains so much, has lead to so much, but there is so much to know.

QM and Relativity don't work well together. Black Holes are infinities in real space. In the 21st century, for the first time, we have an expatiation for mass, it is no longer just an inertial concept. I don't know if we yet know why inertial mass is the same as gravitational mass.

We thought that if we could sequence DNA we would know everything. We don't. So there is a lot to find out.

Donate the hardware or sell it, sure. But wasting thousands of man hours in order to "save the environment" is wasteful ecologically in the long run because is leads to greater energy, paper, and food waste in the long run.

Agreed, they should keep whatever MSWord licenses they are currently running. There is almost no need to upgrade Office unless you need more than the maximum Excel row count.

Honestly, this is the solution. Unless you and your coworkers are working for free, the man hours you will waste on transitioning and people having issues with the new machines, be it not knowing the file system or the differences between MS Word and LibreOffice. You should run the numbers and find out.
The machines you need, over their projected lives of 4 years cost $X per employee per day. That $X is likely less than 30 minutes. Is it likely that the new systems will cost you more than the same amount of man-hours in conversion and support?

As we grow up we learn to deal with, and solve, problems. Some of these problems are technical, some are social, some are personal. For social problems we learn from various models. Video games, by and large, model the solution to social problems as violence. Yes, there can be models of teams solving social problems by violence, but for the most part it is a narcissistic and individual fantasy of absolute power and lack of normal social consequences.

This, of course, does not in any mean that these violent models imprint themselves on the player. But there is credence to the idea that if a person practices using aggression and violence to solve social problems, that she or he may use those same methods in more authentic interactions.

Battletoads Jet-ski level. Pure hatred that will make you kill anyone or anything you love.

Android has a vast majority share in Asia. Apple tried a cheap phone and Android is still a vast part of the market share. Microsoft has enough cash to give away the Phones, but that did not seem to help with KIN or anything after or before.

As mentioned before, MS does not have a great incentive to kill Android. MS get a free chunk of money for every handset sold. Cheap phones from Nokia simply mean that MS loses money.

Have you read the Wiki pages of Google or Rush Limbagh? Clearly written by shills. Have you seen the responses when one talks negatively about Google. Personal attacks are very common. This is little new, but the solution when certain agents have money to burn to create a very crafted images, is elusive.

This was probably just a bunch of kids 'having fun.' I blame high schools and some colleges. High Schools are still focusing on bullying instead of teaching the kids that it is often assault or criminal intent. There are kids coming out school thinking that cursing out a stranger of threatening to hurt someone if they don't get their way is proper behavior. Likewise, some colleges still call borderline criminals acts 'hazing' or 'initiation', thus leading educated people to believe that getting drunk, committing crimes, and getting away with it makes everything ok.

Gentrification may also be an issue. When I was growing up one thing I noticed was the my friends who lived in more affluent or gated neighborhoods would talk about being taken home to their parents instead of arrested. They might be doing drugs, selling drugs, breaking into cars, whatever. We have seen a case where a teen has stolen beer, gotten drunk, and killed some people while driving, has gotten probation. The parents would pay reparations. So if a lot of wealthy parents are moving in, and protecting their kids, then those kids might be less motivated to not commit crime.