Austin rarely gets freezing rain weather (that can bring down trees and utility poles). The worst Austin could get would be high winds that could bring down trees (which may topple utility wires). It's cheaper and easier to put up poles than to have to dig. Plus when you need to run new cables (like what Google is doing), it is a lot cheaper to add these. If google had to go and burry new cables throughout the entire city, the costs would be a lot higher.

I spent a short stint working for a SAN company in their drive group. You are definitely correct about the firmware within drives that SAN companies ship with their drives. The primary reasons for custom firmware on SAN harddrives that I remember: disable write-cache, change timeouts/retries, and most important: lock-in.

There was no way to go from the off-the-shelf version of the firmware to the SAN companies version of the firmware (well, nothing that was public, and that process was very tightly controlled). The SAN could then verify that the drives were running their specific firmware, if they were not, the drive would be rejected.

For me, Amazon + prime isn't a better deal than newegg sometimes when buying computer parts. I have to pay sales tax on purchases from Amazon, while Newegg isn't collecting sales taxes in my state.

I think it's important to remember how complicated the full mechanical/electrical system of a car is. Over the life of a model of a car (normally 3 years), there will be hundreds of changes to the manufacturing process. This could mean sourcing different parts, changes to how different components are made, and lots of other junk. Rolling out a firmware update that works across all the different models of that car can be very difficult for them.

Wacom tablets have a javascript interface available to them. Not exactly the same as a signature tablet, but pretty close.
http://www.wacomeng.com/web/

When I did my printer hunting a little over a year ago I ended up with a Xerox 6505. I was looking for a color printer, and they have overall good reviews. When you are looking at toner, there are fairly cheap aftermarket toners you can get for Xerox printers that keep costs down.

One thing I looked for in a printer that would let it work on any OS was that it could accept PCL and PostScript (that way you don't need a print driver). Though, still having a printer driver is nice for configuring little things (like duplex printing if your printer supports it).

This data is out-of-date at this point, but I put together a spreadsheet of all the different printers I was considering.
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0As4u6h7EmJ5sdHhRalNzMl9OV2x6Q2xRSU0zdjJHcEE&usp=sharing

I don't remember my exact issues with HP and Brothers printers at this point, but the one thing I did like about Xerox versus some of the others was their toner cartridges were stand-alone from other components. So it made it cheap to get after-market toner.

My thoughts exactly. To take it further. "Dispatch" for these self-driving cabs would just be sitting there watching feeds from all the cabs they have out and about. They could look illegal behavior and either send someone to look into the problem or to call authorities.

As for someone "hiding in the cab", I'm pretty sure they could easily tell the weight changes to the vehicle (preventing someone from sticking around).

Just wondering, when did you have that car experience and what model was it? Lemon laws in many states protect consumers against faulty cars (it's a massive pain-in-the-ass to go through the process), and I think it dissuades auto manufacturers from completely cheeping out on cars anymore. Though, there may be issues that creep up beyond the lemon-law time window, then you're basically at the whim of the manufacturer to fix it.

As for electronics, if you buy from a company like Apple that has a good warranty or return program, buying a new device on day-1 isn't that much of an issue. I've owned 3 models of iphones (original, 3Gs, 5), and every one of them I got a full replacement from Apple on (original I had replaced twice). All 4 times I've had my iPhone replaced, it didn't cost me anything to do it. (Note that I've had great service from other companies like Amazon with the Kindle and Philips with their electric toothbrush).

My basic understand of it is: for when a new auto manufacturer comes around, they don't have to setup a dealership themselves in every city across the country, instead they can just ship their cars to all the existing dealerships. This is a service provided by the dealership to the automaker to help the automaker grow when it is young. Then, to prevent the automaker from cutting off all their shipments to dealerships when they are big enough to setup their own stores, laws were put into place to prevent automakers from setting up their own stores.

Looks like they are going to be keeping their open source products open (ClamAV, Snort, and others).
http://blog.sourcefire.com/Post/2013/07/23/1374581400-cisco--sourcefire--now-bigger-stronger-faster/

Also, it looks like Snort is dual-license: http://www.snort.org/snort/license

It seems like at least a few states us a thing called the "Average Daily Attendance" to track how many kids are actually going to school. Then this is the number that is actually used when allocating funding to the school. Here's a story about how much 1 student being chronically absent costs the school (87 days missed, school lost $2464).

This isn't all the funding a school gets, but it is part of it.

I've been doing a lot of car research recently (shopping for a new car), and I've been reading a ton of different reviews from consumers and professionals.

A lot of people don't like the Ford SYNC stuff as it is just too complicated for them. They want a radio and climate controls in their center stack, not all that other crap that some auto makers are pushing. GM with their Buick brand is having the same issue, their older customers are annoyed with a lot of the center-stack tech that is being added, as they don't understand it or want it.

My other issue is how relevant all these features will be in 10-15 years. Will Pandora still be around? How about BlueTooth? Will iPod support even matter in 10 years? My current car is pushing 17 years old, I'm pretty sure it has outlasted most tech that could have been put into it at the time.

It is much easier for a prosecutor to throw a bunch of charges at someone and hope for some them to stick. The US's double-jeopardy prevents a defendant to be tried for the same crime twice. Where exactly the line is for what is considered double-jeopardy isn't always clear, so the prosecutor has a better chance of getting a conviction if they change someone with all possible crimes they are guilty of from the start.

If you want top stop the state from throwing a bunch of changes at someone, double-jeopardy laws need to be changed. But changing those laws so neither side of the law can easily abuse them is a difficult thing to do.

As others have said, if a lot of the charges were indeed bogus, a defense attorney should have been able to get them thrown out.

You are correct. But they wanted to get Dart out to the world very early so that they could start getting feedback from the community. They actually listen to the community quite a bit and have taken a number of patches and features from external committers as well.

Their goal was to show that they were going to be open about the design of the language, but I think they ended up presenting that wrongly when the language launched, so they caught a lot of flack.

I've been following Dart on and off since it's announcement. I'm still a little skeptical of the language, but I'm a fan of what they want to do. Here are their basic goals:

• Create a class based (OOP) language for doing browser heavy apps (like GMail).
• Allow it to inter-op with today's browsers (hence compiling to Javascript)
• Create a DartVM so the code can run faster than there javascript counter-parts. This also allows for server-side, but this much lower on their priorities.
• Make the language easy for Java/C++/C# developers to learn.
• Only work with "the modern web". meaning IE9 and higher.

There is a lot more to it than this, but it's sort of a beginning. The language still hasn't hit 1.0, so no one is seriously using it (as the language itself was seeing large changes up until recently). Google has not talked about anyone outside of the Dart team itself that is using Dart within Google (they are doing it, it's just not being talked about yet).

Since 1.0 is expected this summer, you probably won't see many people using it until that milestone is hit. Once 1.0 is hit, people will be more willing to create real products with it, so you can expect to see more about Dart after that. As well, once the DartVM makes its way into Chrome (which will happen sometime after 1.0), you'll probably see a lot of press about the first Google App that is written in Dart.

It's still early in Dart's life. The only people really seriously using it are people that like learning new languages. Companies and most developers won't touch an in-progress programming language out of fear that syntax and behavior changes will screw them up.