This *is* a giant thermocouple.
Aside from being stupidly expensive, anything you took out via thermocouple at the base wouldn't come out as power through the top.
Moreover, the heat differential wouldn't be nearly the same.
In essence, you'd be spending much much more money to make much less power.

Nobody is living inside the tower.

It will be significantly easier to build this than any building for occupation at half that size.

The speech recognition on my G2 is fannn-tastic. faster than i can peck out with the hardware keyboard. People look at you funny(er) at first, and it won't work well in a noisy environment, but definitely my preferred method of entry when possible.

How silly of us to be compiling to binary all this time!
We've been relegating ourselves to only two different options for decades!

I reckon that a memory cell and single bit of a processor opcode should have --at least-- 7000 different possibilities. Think of everything a computer could accomplish *then*!

Seriously, someone tell this guy you're allowed to use more than one character to represent a concept or action, and that these groups of characters represent things rather well.

There are PLENTY of autorun.ini based trojans that spread thanks to many versions of windows insane desire to interpret autorun without asking. What's more, with the default settings, the victim would never even see the trojan files.

Even turning off autorun isn't enough.

If you're interested:

http://windowssecrets.com/2007/11/08/02-One-quick-trick-prevents-Autorun-attacks

I set these registry settings on every family member's PC.

The story of the thief who returns someone's goods with some opera tickets and an apology comes to mind -- when the victim goes to see the opera, the thief cleans out the victim's house.

Kinda makes me wonder if there's a rootkit on that drive for the purposes of emptying out this gent's bank accounts.

Also, wtf, no backups? ffs.

While I'm fairly certain that google doing this is the right thing to do, I don't see how this hurts China. It would be trivial (read: a matter of trivia, not necessarily super easy, but it has obviously been done before, and is a known process) to have a new emerging search engine for China.
Google could stay there and stay on top because they have the best product (for now). If they leave the market, something will fill the vacuum and profit greatly from the billion.s of people in China.
I don't think China has much to lose here, I'm curious as to whether or not someone has a good convincing argument to the contrary?

I see that I'm actually "running" IE 6.0.whatever.

I never actually "use" it (use in quotes because who knows? the system is probably utilizing components of it for something stupid, like image display or file searching or playing the shutdown wav file), and I keep everything patched, but I suppose I'm possibly part of the problem... I am wary of what updating to 7 or 8 would do as far as installing more stuff on my otherwise working systems..

Is there any consensus as far as whether to upgrade or patch when the user will --never-- use IE6,7 or 8?

[nerd voice]
It was "kick this dog house down"
[/nerd voice]

at the risk of feeding two trolls at once:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PID_controller

That aside, there most certainly are several control systems in the car, the problem is that they wind up in some kind of state that they shouldn't, and the result is full speed ahead.

I have to admit that I am somewhat underwhelmed. I got the G1 shortly after it came out a year and a half or so ago, and the touchscreen definitely falls short of what it could be. It is FAR less responsive than the iphone's, and the accuracy could indeed be better. I was coming from a winmo 5 device, so i'm still incredibly happy with it, relatively speaking.

So the big question is whether or not all the manufs of android devices are using the same screen/screen chips, or if android has a fundamental problem interpreting data off the screen?

So not only do you have the display, you need a telemetry sensor to detect physical movement of the device? You could do this with a gyro or an accelerometer, but moving your head and not your eye would result in false readings... unless there was another sensor on your head to provide difference data between head movement and eye movement... connected to the system as well... I guess it is conceivable. just sounds like it would be many years off before it were reasonable.

I don't have contacts, but from what i understand, they center on your cornea and move with your eye, right?

How would someone "look around" on a screen with contacts? Wouldn't the center of the screen always be what you're looking at, drastically minimizing what you can read and properly make out?

Pity the blogger removed the advertising, I reckon traffic is about to skyrocket for a few days...

All cell phone companies allow the caller to skip straight to the beep.
It is usually # or *.
Figure yours out.
Make your message something to the effect of:
"Hi, this is fred. I can't take your call now. Leave me a message. In the future, to skip straight to the beep, press X"
Most cell phone companies have a "fast prompt" setting for retrieving your messages. It isn't fast enough for a geek who is used to memorizing interactive prompts, but it is at least 50% faster than normal prompts. Turn yours on.