I was talking with a fairly large group of tech-savvy friends here in Austin the other day, and it was nearly unanimous - the last thing we ever want is another damn app to download, constantly whine for updating, and try to find among the other 200 crap apps on our phones or tablets. We coined this rising level of disgust "App Fatigue"...

Web apps could conceivably be a decent alternative, but only if someone gives me Settings option checkboxes labelled,

[ ] Never, ever, show me the crippled mobile version of any website at all, as long as I live., (preferred) or maybe,

[ ] Always lie to web servers so they think this is a desktop computer with a real browser. Because it's more powerful than my desktop computer, and has a real browser.

I know this is a really radical idea, but perhaps instead of a bunch of government regulatory czars making technology decrees that they are hopelessly unable to comprehend, maybe, just maybe, we should let the market sort out the winners and losers rather than mandate them up front as a fait accompli. Just sayin'...

(Oh, and although I firmly hope to never have to drive an electric car, I think the mere existence of the new "Frankenplug" EV connector proves my point...)

You put it in, and it doesn't fit, so you turn it over.
You put it in again, it doesn't fit, so you turn it back over.
Now it fits.

And if it's like the one on my daughter's Kindle, that's because one of those insertions bent the shield enough that the connector can be inserted the wrong way, so that very soon, you'll break the little plastic piece inside the connector, essentially rendering your Kindle trash.

Ironically, this boneheaded government mandate will lead to far *more* e-waste than actually letting companies and their customers decide what works without the divine wisdom of a bunch of socialist lawyer potentates in Brussels....

No thanks, EUroweenies, I'd rather be free to choose a connector that actually works. I certainly would love to never see another microUSB connector again, as it's probably the worst power connector on the planet. (And it took some doing to beat the monstrously clunky UK power plug...) The *only* decent application for micro USB is for devices that are never unplugged, like some small consumer electronics equipment/appliances - it's *completely* unsuitable for anything that needs to be plugged or unplugged frequently.

Actually, we prefer to pay with little pieces of green paper. It's much more secure than the plastic stuff, chip, pin, or whatnot...

We used to use money that had actual value, but that perfectly logical practice was deemed barbaric by our betters in the last century.

As Scott McNealy famously said (and was pilloried for here on Slashdot, IIRC), "You've got no privacy anyway - get over it."

Turns out UPS (but not FedEx) will deliver anywhere with an address - even a vacant lot. A buddy of mine had his card used to buy thousands of dollars worth of TVs and other home entertainment electronics that were delivered to a vacant lot in Round Rock. The bad guys just waited for the truck to leave, then swooped in and loaded up. Far as I know, they were never caught. (To be fair, this was a few years ago, one would hope UPS has changed their policy on this....)

That's just another one of those old canards... /geese

Oh, that sounds really f-ing convenient...

That's because electronic evidence *isn't*.

You're assuming people even *can* look at their statements in something like an real-time fashion.

A great many of us (even here at /.) deliberately disable any and all "online banking" features, simply because we *know* they're not secure. If someone compromises my card (it would have to be someone else, since I don't allow *any* online account access) , then unless the bank or card bureau calls me, I have no way to know until I get my next statement in the mail. (No, I don't allow electronic statements, either.)

BTW, I was comparing notes with a good friend of mine the other day - he's one of the world's leading experts on software engineering (his seminal paper is cited more than any other), and he's even tostricter on this stuff than I am - and for *all* the right reasons.

I thought it was interesting that the article mentioned that Dyson has never released a robot vacuum, but then failed to note that the company did *announce* a robot vacuum back around 2001, and finally (quietly) decided to cancel it in 2005. That vacuum was called the DC06 - a summary of the letter "announcing" its cancellation can be found here: http://www.robotreviews.com/ch...

Those who say this is an easy problem have clearly never really looked at what it takes to solve it. I have - my original background is robotics, and I worked on (and we abandoned as infeasible) a robotic floor cleaner design back in the late 1980s. Time and tech advances haven't helped much - Like most problems in robotics and AI, the real issues are stubbornly immune to increases in compute power or software technology. In addition, "simply" designing and building reliable robotics hardware is insanely difficult to do well. The very best (and thus very expensive) robots we can build are still finicky, fiddly, and incredibly fragile things that require staggering amounts of maintenance (both preventive and corrective). My friend Dewayne Perry, one of the world's leading experts on software engineering, is right when he says that Artificial Intelligence needs quantum improvements to reach even the level of natural stupidity...

FWIW, I've never seen a robot that doesn't suck, except for the robot "vacuum cleaners" out there.... Nothing makes you appreciate the Intelligent Design of living systems like trying to build a robot that actually really works and is truly adaptive to real world environments!

I remember reading that is all benefits were removed from oil than the price of gas would be between 12-15 dollars a gallon!

And that, children, is why you don't believe everything you read, especially from those on the Internet that don't bother to sanity check their figures.

Let's do some grade school math: The US EIA says we used 134 Billion gallons of gasoline in 2011. Assuming a $3/gal current cost of gas and subtracting that from your ridiculous $12-15/gal figure, that means the federal government was subsidizing the oil industry by between 1.2 and 1.6 TRILLION DOLLARS, or roughly HALF of all federal receipts.

I find that very difficult to believe!

Oh really? Then why aren't American companies over there owning, running, and profiting from all that oil? I'd bet there's not enough oil under the whole place for the next 100 years to break even on the Iraq war. Sorry, but the US oil industry really didn't gain much, if anything from the Iraq war. It may shake your world, but there may have been other considerations...

I remember reading that is all benefits were removed from oil than the price of gas would be between 12-15 dollars a gallon!

And that, children, is why you shouldn't believe everything you read, especially if it's hearsay from an uninformed source on the Internet...

That figure's complete BS - it has to be. Even if you counted all of the oil industry's tax deductions that are analogous to those in other industries as subsidies, (they're not), there's not nearly enough subsidy there to raise the price of gas anywhere near that much - that doesn't even pass a first-order common-sense test...

Do the grade school math: 134,000,000,000 (1.34e9) gallons of gasoline were used in the US in 2011, according to the EIA. Assuming current prices of $3/gal to make the math easier, that means you're claiming the "subsidies" amount to between $9 and $12/gal, for a total of $1.2-1.6 TRILLION. I find that very difficult to believe, since that's roughly HALF of the entire revenue of the federal government...

Lots of people tried to do thin-film/amorphous solar panels. All the others had the sense to make them flat to maximize the sun exposure rather than coat the entire inside surface of a tube, only half (at best) of which was going to catch sunlight anyway. Solyndra's engineering and design wasn't flat - but it was just flat awful.

Seriously, it's hard to imagine a stupider idea to throw over half a billion dollars at than Solyndra (maybe feeding plants Brawndo?) - this was corruption and unsavory dealing at its worst. Solyndra was doomed by a stupid concept, as anyone with any technical ability at all knew from the beginning.

Every rooftop that doesn't have solar panels is a target for panels

No, that's just wrong - your roof has to face within about 20 degrees of due south if those panels are ever to produce enough power to recover their cost. (Actually, about 15-20 degrees West of South is ideal from an economic point of view, since power is worth more in the late afternoon.)

Also, if your roof has any shade (trees, chimneys, etc.) then you can lose a large portion of your generating capacity. Microinverters help, since they keep the losses to only the shaded panels, but they are really only cost effective for homes and fairly small commercial rooftops, today.