What if you were working on batteries the size of a tractor trailer that had the energy density to power large cities for a week or two. Then you wouldn't need the grid. You could just drive the battery to where it could be charged, near the wind or sun, then when it was full, move it to the place where it was needed.

I appreciate the real time complexity of the power grid, but it is time to rethink distribution. It would be cool if every house in the USA could get off the grid through local energy storage.

The sun and wind are essentially free endless energy, the challenge is buffering, but I challenge you to think outside the grid. The solution is a new battery or fuel cell.

You are correct in saying that these devices all existed and have owned hand held Garmin and have worked with stereo sized GPS units. Unfortunately, I never had access to military tech like crusie missles or 1-jigawatt orbital death rays. All I am saying is that I am impressed at the refinement. sophistication, and packaging of what I can hold in my hand.

Dude, the electronics industry needs 4k to sell us 4k panels for our living rooms. Right now, everyone is happy with a el'cheapo 1080p. Time to step it up to 4K. Personally, I am happy with my 720p plasma TV. I am sad to see plasma go in favor of LCD, LED, OLED or whatever over-saturated color technology is being pushed out cheaply.

I am with you, but keep in mind, these projects are hard. They need years of a dedicated team working together on the problem. I always think of Dragon Dictation and how they were on the path to decent speech to text. We still haven't gotten past that hurdle yet due to semantics, grammar, accents etc....

I do marvel at handheld devices with 1080HD cameras capable of video editing, GPS, accelerometer, flash memory, digital audio capability, unbelievable fast with decent battery life. To me the iPhone is an amazing piece of tech only a few steps away from the tri-corder on Star Trek (just add a sensor package). Google has the self-driving car (in BETA), doesn't work in snow, and of course we still don't know who is responsible if the car gets in an accident or is caught speeding.

To me technology is moving pretty fast, must faster than our species can evolve or adapt to the new technology like the NSA's Total Information Awareness Project.

So while the work is incremental, it is becoming highly refined. I still say groups staying together for decades are the only way to pull some of this big stuff off.

Summer vacation has an effect size of d=.02 on learning, which is not good. .4 = 1 year of growth

http://ibiologystephen.wordpre...

But here is the deal, the longer we stop doing something, the less proficient we are at doing it. Think balancing a chemical equation in chemistry or solving the a Lorentz time dilation problem in physics, or remembering the plot of Snow White (assuming you haven't seen in 10 years).

Sure kids forget, we all do, but it is easy to dive back in and strengthen those memories with review, just like exercising a muscle.

To me the point of education should be this, teach kids to love learning, be curious, and learn how to learn. As a teacher, if you have done this, you have done your job. The goal of teaching is not to turn kids into homework machines that suck the life out of them so they can perform on the standardized test, all the while making them hate school and learning. Anything you learn today is obsolete in less than 4 years anyway and many things forced on kids in schools via state standard wish-lists are useless.

Childhood is a precious time where we learn lots and lots of stuff without sitting quietly in a desk. We build, we play, we explore the world, we ride bikes, dance, sing, play with dad's tools, and make all sorts of discoveries which aren't covered on standardized tests.

So it comes down to this, do we want study machines or children? Ask the children in South Korea.

Scroll down, school is like prison.
http://www.ashesthandust.com/t...

To reinforce your point, just ask the people in Toledo Ohio about a centralized water supply that is crippled due to an algae bloom in lake Erie.

Yes it can, as long as battery technology improves. Did you happen to see the article on the new Panasonic/Tesla GigaFactory for batteries? Really the only thing holding us back is batteries. As long as the sun keeps on shining, we have a near infinite amount of FREE energy.

Don't forget about about the mandatory training in Ethics and Legal Issues, Digital Citizenship, Workplace Safety, Copyright education and why the ripping of CDs is evil. :)
Here is a link to the Michigan High School CTE Computer Programming standards.
http://www.ctenavigator.org/re...

I agree with you, I had a Zen moment the other night. A young child was watching the news with me and the war came on where people died and the child looked up scared and said, "people died." Then asked, "Why is there a war?" I replied with the only answer I could, "That's because, sharing is hard."

When kids are little, it is hard to share and it doesn't get any easier as we get bigger. Instead of clocking somebody with your fist you hit them with a bomb.

At some point we will have to turn away from war. I am not sure what will force us to this possibly a plague, virus, disease, aliens, the planet running out of something, a Solar CME taking out the global power grid, or Putin nuking the world.

Exactly, let them come and speak. They more they say the more they lie. They (the CIA) just admitted lying to the US Senate and hacking Senate computers. The NSA/CIA should pull back and be quiet while they still can. Unfortunately the PsyOPs guys in the NSA/CIA are trying to be clever and divide the black hat community into thinking that the NSA/CIA is somewhat cool and necessary. Tons of cash, lot's of computers, hack any network, and no accountability, lie and spy on power without any legal consequences, it's great, come work for us. Don't be like that principled loser Aaron Schwartz who tried to set academic papers free and got slapped with a $1million fine and 35 years in federal prison, come work for us where we are immune to everything and no one can stop us from hacking anything... WHA HA HA!

From my PsyOPs perspective, the only way to end this is to make it incredibly personal and publish phone records of the Press, Senate, Congress, Mayors, Supreme Court Justices, and military officials. Publish phone logs and full text transcripts. This will bring down the house. Snowden was supposed to name names and promised to publish information like this but it never happened. He may have lost control of his data trove.

A large group is "ok" with ambiguity, but when you make it personal, the ambiguity fades to a laser focus.

Yes, the IRS still runs Windows XP. Their systems are an archaic cluster of crap. Remember, the IRS just collects the money but doesn't get to keep it and spend it on upgrades. Only police departments and judges can do that using forfeiture laws.

Agreed, It looks decent and both readable and writable. Hope it catches on.

Really, it is not the fault of MS, Google, or Apple but of academia. In the CS curriculum they still teach the "compiler" class and as long as you keep teaching kids how to write compilers, they will keep writing languages. SWIFT is definitely a variation on a C theme, but much better than the Objective-C (superset of C) syntax, at least at first glance.

Ok, you guys are too slow, I RTFA and downloaded the iBook. So far, I am very much liking the SYNTAX, especially OBJECTS and FUNCTIONS, they even brought the LET keyword in from BASIC. SWIFT will make programming Apple products much easier for the C loving syntax crowd, from what I can see. Ahhh... what a breath of fresh air. Code snippet below of creating an object and exercising it. I feel bad for those that suffered through Objective-C.

“class Square: NamedShape {
        var sideLength: Double

        init(sideLength: Double, name: String) {
                self.sideLength = sideLength
                super.init(name: name)
                numberOfSides = 4
        }

        func area() -> Double {
                return sideLength * sideLength
        }

        override func simpleDescription() -> String {
                return "A square with sides of length \(sideLength)."
        }
}
let test = Square(sideLength: 5.2, name: "my test square")
test.area()
test.simpleDescription()”

Excerpt From: Apple Inc. “The Swift Programming Language.” iBooks. https://itun.es/us/jEUH0.l

I wanted to write apps and tried to learn Objective-C, but as a coder that started with C and then moved on to C++ and PERL (the swiss army chainsaw), the language syntax hurt my ability to read it. In case you don't know what I am talking about, here are some of my learning notes

        myObject.someMethod(); // old school
        [myObject someMethod]; // send a message or call a method

        result = myObject.someMethod(); // old school
        result = [myObject someMethod]; // method returns a result

        result = myObject.someMethod(arg); // old school
        result = [myObject someMethod:arg]; // pass an argument

You can see the Old School syntax above (which works in Objective-C) and the Objective-C standard syntax below. The square brackets [ ] and colons : just hurt my mental debugger... [ ] and yes I know Objective-C is a Superset of C, so they had to steer clear of the C-Syntax but it just looks wrong. Further, I know that I could write my own style of Objective-C but I wouldn't be able to read the code of others. Apple had to start somewhere and Steve had the NeXT languages ready to go but to me the syntax is ugly and offensive. However, I am ready for a better Apple language.

I can't wait to see a SWIFT code example, if it gets rid of the NeXT Objective-C Superset Syntax, I might be coding for iPad and Mac sooner than I thought. If anyone has a code example, please share it, I would like to see what a function, method, or message call looks like. Hoping for parenthesis and a Standford iTunesU class. Guardedly excited!