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Comment Form factor? (Score 1) 414

Personally, I'd love to see such a thing. It would be great not having to travel with both a laptop and a phone. It would also be great to have your phone function as your computer and to be able to use that computer with any display, keyboard and mouse that happen to be nearby. However -- there is that question of form factor. No one wants to do serious work on a tiny phone display, so especially in travel situations you would need to take a proper display, keyboard and mouse -- in other words, a laptop. Someone else already hinted at a laptop "shell" form factor that would just function as a dock for smartphone. But really what company would want to sell the shell when they could just as easily sell a full fledged laptop? And wouldn't traveling with the shell defeat the purpose of traveling light and "discarding" the laptop?

Comment Antarctica doesn't need dead drops... (Score 3, Interesting) 174

As a six month veteran of the US Antarctic Program, I can tell you McMurdo Station doesn't need dead drops. There's plenty of file sharing going on pretty much in the open. I attended meetings in the library that would pretty much devolve into file sharing swap meets. I suppose it must have been like the mid-1990s on college campuses. Fun stuff!

Comment Re:The future of driverless cars looks like a bus (Score 3, Insightful) 662

Expect to see a lot of competition and lobbying from local taxi authorities to prevent you from doing exactly this. They will argue that it's not safe for individuals to rent their cars out in this way - and to some extent they will have a point. Plus, when your fancy new car comes home with vomit (or worse) all over the interior you're going to be really angry.

Comment Insurance companies... (Score 5, Interesting) 662

Just wait until insurance companies start requiring automated driving. That is likely to be decades away, but I think they will be a big factor in the push toward driverless vehicles. The irony of this is that ultimately the need for auto insurance will decline dramatically once accident rates plummet. At that point I think we're likely to see auto insurance become the domain of the auto manufacturers rather than the auto owners.

Comment Re:EMusic and Bitrot (Score 1) 221

I'm using FreeNAS with ZFS-RAIDZ2. I've got twelve 1 TB drives in it and a total usable space of about 10 TB. It's very nice. It's an older server so it's loud though, even in my basement. I love it! Super convenient.

Comment Re:Oversimplifying misses the point (Score 0) 293

Mistake? By standing in the way of an interim, better technology (nuclear vs. fossil fuels) the reactionary anti-nuclear crowd indirectly allowed the worse technology to flourish. What's worse, they're obstructing progress in favor of a "perfect" energy technology that will never exist. Solar power is ideal, but the costs, necessary land area, and infrastructure are decades away from being realized. Those are decades of abuse that our environment doesn't need.

Comment Re:Oversimplifying misses the point (Score 0) 293

I was actually talking about both coal and oil. The idea that cars and transportation require fossil fuels is also very short-sighted. If nuclear power had been allowed to develop starting in the 1950s we could have been well on our way to electric or possibly even thorium powered vehicles by now. Again, the anti-nuclear crowd stood in the way of a better technology in favor of a perfect one that will never arrive.

Comment Re:Oversimplifying misses the point (Score 4, Insightful) 293

In the 1970s and 1980s it made a lot of sense to be anti-nuke just as it now makes sense to be anti-GMO. Those people did us a huge favor.

Absolutely wrong. Those people allowed the use of fossil fuels to proliferate and poison the atmosphere for DECADES out of a misguided fear of radioactivity. The blame for global warming can largely be placed on their shoulders. Those people made the world a worse place for everyone.

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