Are we part way through a transition from shops being where you both browse / research products and purchase them, to separating these two phases of the shopping process.

The way I see it there is still a need for bricks & morter 'showrooms' where you can go and compare products side-by-side or even try them out in real life : e.g when buying a netbook / laptop, I always go to the local PC world or similar to try out the different keyboards and see how the displays look.

However to make the purchase, it is clearly more efficient and therefore cheaper to sell through either giant mail-order only warehouses (e.g. order from amazon, or order direct from the manufacturer) or something like Argos for when you want to be able to collect it yourself same-day.

The problem is how the showrooms get payed for? will we move instead to individual manfactures paying for showpiece storefronts (maybe Apple stores already are this? do they expect to make a profit on on-store sales, or are they just giant adverts driving their sales through other channels?)

The current middle-ground that retailers seem to be using is the online 'reserve and collect' - but they still tend to be keeping the much of their stock on the shelves rather than having it all more efficiently stacked away in a warehouse out the back.

Here you've highlighted probably the biggest problem to overcome : how to allow voters to verify that their own vote has been correctly counted (and be able to prove that the vote was rigged if not), but in an anonymous and deniable way (to avoid coercion) : it may not be possible to have both at the same time (but I'm not an expert on the subject : maybe the unreadable-article has an answer).

OTOH if we live in a society where you may later be threatened in to proving how you voted (showing your hash-receipt, revealing your private crypto-key or password, revealing what secret mark / signature you put on your ballot paper etc. depending on how any such verification system is implemented), democracy would seem to have failed us anyway and the actual results of any such sham election probably irrelevant.

Indeed, it is a tricky problem - I was trying to keep it simple and just answer the parent's post about what such a system might offer over and above today's sytems : I was hoping it was implied that it would also include existing features such as anonymity (and telling you how many votes each candidate / option received)

In an ideal system, anybody should be able to independantly verify the following (which currently can't be done in a simple paper based ballot)

• was _my_ vote counted correctly for the candidate I selected (or not counted if I chose not to participate)
• Are all the votes that have been counted attributable to real voters
• has each person voted either 0 or 1 times

Unfortunately I can't RTFA to see how many of these ideals the proposed system achieves, as it seems to be a video rather than a text based article.

The BBC news article on this ( http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-11632944 ) has a selection of comments from other people in the industry too - I think this one sums it up better for me than the quotes from Broughton (re-quoting from bbc article):

1 : put the windows-taskbar (or linux desktop equivilent) on the side(s) of the screen - ideally the left side otherwise it slows down the time taken to hit the scroll bar or window-close buttons with the mouse. You'll have to make it a bit wider than it normally is tall and learn to live with only viewing the 1st few letters of the window titles.

2 : combine as many menus or toolbars together as possible - eg. in Firefox have the menu, back/fwd buttons and URL location all on the same line. Not all windows apps seem to allow you to put toolbar buttons on the same line as the menus, but wherever that feature exists you should use it.

3 : Remove all the other toolbars / excess status-bars - use the menus or learn keyboard shortcuts for your favourite applications (using the keyboard shortcuts is vastly more productive than hunting the toolbar buttons)

4 : Modify the window theme to make the fonts and icons for menus, window-titles, scroll-bars and min/max/close buttons as small as possible that you can still read them / click on them.

5 : (this one I have more problems with) - try using auto-hiding menus / panes / taskbar (notably in visual-studio which has many many panes of useful info). This one I'm not so keen on because it slows me down considerably, having to first move the mouse to make a pane show, then move the mouse to select the item of interest. Similarly you can try to use full-screen mode in apps that have it available and you don't need to view multiple apps concurrently.

You are right (but somehow got marked as 'Troll') - I should have worded it as you suggest : "patents can, at least in some circumstances, stifle innovation"

Mind you this is Slashdot and where would we be without spelling mistakes, uninformed opinions and sweeping generalisations?

I was at the london science museum last week and saw something interesting on the information board regarding one of the steam engines on display. Unfortunately I didn't think to take a photograph / transcribe it, but this blog gives a summary: http://www.currybet.net/cbet_blog/2006/08/engineering-parallels-at-the-s.php

To quote the blog's transcription of the caption:

So even the science museum is suggesting that patent's stiffle innovation, and have been doing so for over 200 years

In a few years presumably some even higher bandwidth specification will come along - no problem if they used version-numbers, but once you have labelled the first generation "standard" and the current generation "High Speed" what're you going to be left with to use next and not end up looking stupid?

"new higher speed", "max speed", "ultimate speed", "super more ultimate than ultimate speed", "I Can't believe its not high speed... speed"?

Floppy disk drives (0.1 to 3MB), ZIP drives (100 to 750MB) have been totally replaced now by solid-state drives (in the form of USB memory sticks) - and re-writable CDs and re-writable DVDs are pretty much dead except for specialist cases (maybe medium-term archiving or transfering data to other devices like DVD-players or CD music players ; but for data-transfer an 8GB USB stick is far more convenient than burning a DVD).

Read-Only media for mass distribution is another matter entirely : physically stamping out the data in disks that can be spun past the reading mechanism like in a CD or DVD is unlikely to be superceded by something without moving parts for a while - although it is not unfeasible to imagine something like a CD but with the media stationary and the reader moving / directing its reading mechanism / beam accross it in 2 (or 3...) dimensions its a lot simpler / cheaper currently just to spin the disk around to provide one dimension of scanning (Simplifying the complicated / expensive movement of the heads to just one dimension while still allowing access to the whole 2D surface)

Is this the beginning of what Asimov predicted in his Foundation series : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Foundation_series_characters#Lord_Dorwin

from the article:

* I accept that the occasional overview / review of the current state of the literature has its place, but attempting to draw conclusions in this manner is treading a dangerous path fraught with possibilities of inadvertant bias (through cherry-picking of _which_ previous literature to include) and statistical noise amplification by recycling a limited set of original measurements (ie. if the results of this 'research' are considered in future meta-analysis in addition to the original publications) : see for example http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/09/29/yamal_scandal/

re:
> a kilowatt for 5 minutes or so at a time, and can sustain 500W practically indefinitely.

You've probably been mislead by much exercise equipment being (deliberately?) vague about whether they are measuring power output / mechanical work done, or 'equivilent food energy burnt'.

A typical assumption used is that the human body is only 20% to 25% efficient, so if you output 150W of mechanical power for 1 hour on a bike you've supplied 540KJ of energy (129 kCal), but the chances are your heart-rate-monitor, bike computer or whatever is going to tell you that you've offset the consumption of more like 2.4MJ or 600 kCal of food-intake (or a equivilent fuel intake to over 600W if you work back the other way through the calculation)

Some generous exercise equipment may also include your BMR in their display of calories-burnt, which is another 100W or so of power output but entirely lost as heat not mechanical power.

Reminds me of something I've not yet found the answer to: Why don't we have ground-based GPS transmitters in addition to the satellites? - wouldn't this give improved reliabilty / accuracy / easier-maintenance in places where you need it (ie. near ports) with standard GPS receiver equipment (rather than needing extra equipment like for differential-GPS)