Couldn't agree more. iPhone works like complete shit where I am unless I log into my home wireless network with cable internet. On 3G it's slower than 14.4 modem. The internet is virtually unusable for anything but gmail. Weather info almost never updates. The iPhone has great potential, but in my experience it basically just sucks shit in real life when running on AT&T's network, and isn't worth the money - especially since it's far faster to text with a full qwerty keypad.

I'm actually surprised at how confident and competent the NSA seem here

No offense to West Point and the other military academies, but I'd like to see NSA take on the top team from MIT, Cal Tech, etc and see how they fare before putting total confidence in the NSA.

While I agree that the Next Generation lacked depth in the sense that more or less all of its characters were cut from a single moral mold (unlike, say, the new Battlestar Galactica), I think that all the stuff about being needing to be able to 'relate' to characters in order to be interested in them is overrated.

I can't really 'relate' to Superman, Darth Vader, Captain Kirk or Captain Piccard and yet they some of my favorite characters of all time.

I'm far, far less interested in characters who share my own character flaws and would sooner stick pins in my eyes than watch reality shows, dramas or sitcoms about more 'relatable' characters.

My personal take is that the story and character interaction needs to be dynamic, with moral dilmenas and problems that are not simple or black and white enough to be solved with phasers or a punch in the face in order to be interesting. And that's it. I don't need a character to be an alcoholic or a single parent or someone wracked with guilt or a betrayed friend or an embittered rival or any of a hundred other stock cardboard cutouts in order to 'relate' to them. When a person is faced with a tough situation and no easy choices, I find it interesting, whether their own personal backstory (or lack thereof) is one I have firsthand knowledge of or not.

Maybe they should put the review of the 150,000 ideas out to the public as well? They'd probably get a lot of interesting (and some useful) feedback. Crowd-sourcing the review would probably make sure that the best ideas did indeed percolate to the top. They might also attract other sources of funding too. Not sure why Google is playing this all so close to the chest if the goal is to save the world. Seems like they only want to save the world so long as they control the process and get the credit. Hmm...

I recently tried Windows 7 and Ubuntu 9.04 on my older laptop. To my dismay, neither worked out of the box, nor could I overcome driver problems in a reasonable time period (1 hour). So, back to XP. It's frustrating. I haven't tried a slackware distro in ages, so maybe I'll give that a shot but my hopes for working broadcom 43xx wifi drivers aren't high... Harder to understand why radeon xpress cards aren't supported in Windows 7 given that they work fine in Vista...

So, drivers are my first big complaint, but right up there are all the problems of bloat you describe. It just seems ludicrous that MS Office needs GB of RAM to run well. I'm old enough to remember GUI running spreadsheet apps on a C64 (yeah, that would be 64 kilobytes of RAM) using GEOS (http://www.c64-wiki.com/index.php/GEOS).

You make a good point, and provide evidence in favor of the argument against any and all corporate taxes. It makes much more sense all around to simply tax the owners of corporations.

What we need is just what common sense tells us: a heavily progressive income (including capital gains) tax structure, as originally suggested by Thomas Jefferson:"exempt all from taxation below a certain point, and tax the higher portions of property in geometrical progression as they rise."

Here's another option:

Require companies to generate ONE set of financial statements each year, not two.

At present, companies create one set of financial statements for shareholders (showing big profits) and one statement for the IRS (showing little or no profits). A simple law that forbids this two-faced scheme would do a great deal to bring companies in line.

You miss the point. The details of the Bush administration's restrictions on scientific research are irrelevant.

What is relevant is that the Bush administration crossed the line that separates Church and State by imposing a religiously-based notion of morality on our entire nation. It doesn't matter how, it only matters why the administration interfered with scientific research. Worse still, in a competitive world this put our entire nation at a profound competitive disadvantage for 8 years.

So not only were my rights to religious freedom violated by the Bush administration, my livelihood and that of my children and grandchildren has been threatened as a result. I along with millions of others believe such trampling of constitutional rights to be a crime tantamount to treason, and that the Bush administration should be prosecuted accordingly.

That's the issue.

Particulate matter that settles decreases albedo (reflectiveness) of ice, and causes heating. But airborne particulate matter and aerosol emissions _increase_ albedo, making the atmosphere more reflective. The net effect, as I understand it, seems to favor reflectivity, which suggests that cleaning up PM10 and PM20 air pollution, and especially SOx emissions, would result in more rapid warming.

Oh, there are plenty of other problems with hydrogen. It's massively corrosive, for example, and since it's comprised of just protons it's got an amazing ability to escape through microscopic cracks and holes in materials. Add those factors together with the need for 15000 psi and/or cryogenics to get it into a compressed semi-liquid or slush state, and you've got pipe connections that won't last for any significant length of time before becoming so leaky as to be more or less useless.

Hydrogen is absolutely DOA as a combustion fuel, and probably for a fuel-cell based energy source as well.

The total loss of primary energy is around 70%, meaning that, on average, for every joule of energy stored in the fuel (coal, oil, gas, uranium) only 0.3 joules gets delivered to the consumer. From well to wheel, the energy loss of transmitting electricity is considerably higher than the energy loss of transporting liquid fuel (gasoline, diesel) to the consumer. So much so, in fact, that even though electric drivetrains are much more efficient that ICEs the total fuel cycle efficiency is higher for ICE vehicles given the US's current energy mix (again, on average). When every state is like Oregon, getting most of its electricity from renewables, then it'll be a different story.

The distinction between value and utility also seems skewed. The two are not remotely the same, even in purely financial transactions. Add to that all other 'transactions' across a 'network', such as me posting this comment to slashdot, that are non-financial but which certainly have utility, and you're nowhere near a meaningful valuation of said network.

So I'm forced to agree with the cynics: this seems to be a put-up job designed to make it easier to assign $$ losses resulting from network outages in court cases.

This is probably dumb, but can't ISPs/networks put spam filtering policies in place and then monitor and enforce their connections?

Say you're Yahoo: put spam filters on all outgoing mail, in addition to those already filtering incoming mail. Now whenever Google gets mail from Yahoo's domain, if something is spam then Yahoo gets a point against it. More than, say, 10,000 points per hour and Google imposes a latency penalty on all its connections to Yahoo. Escalating penalties for ongoing violations.

Think of it like fines: if you don't take care of your spam, your network will run slow as shit when it interfaces with us. Don't like your servers having to wait 10 seconds for each packet/parity test/ping/whatever? Then filter your outgoing mail better. Can't get your filters working up to snuff? Then try making it impossible to do bulk mailing from accounts that aren't at least X months old. etc, etc, etc.

This utilizes the market dominance of the major email providers like Google and Yahoo to impose a penalty on ISPs and anonymizing services that don't police their traffic for spam.

So if you're some seedy ISP in Romania that's pumping billions of message per day into Google's servers, Google effectively caps the bandwidth from that server. If the Romanian ISP's mailserver lets users send everything through a an anonymizing service or proxy, then that anonymizing service or proxy will get hit with the cap instead. Then when the anonymizer service realizes its system is only getting 10kbps to Google, it'll ban all the crap coming from the Romanian ISP. Even if spammers chained stuff through a dozen anonymizers, it'd get back to the Romanian ISP eventually.

That's my theory. It's probably stupid.

Advance In Making Stem Cells From Skin

Don't get me wrong, I understand why this is cool. But I'd still much rather hear that there'd been a breakthrough in making skin from stem cells.

If you're really a mathematician and you disagree with the premise that economic growth cannot continue in perpetuity against a finite resource base, then you need to ask for your money back from whatever 'institution' gave you a degree.

Population growth remains the single greatest driver of unsustainability on our planet. To date there is no socially acceptable method for enforcing population growth control anywhere on Earth, whether in Africa as you so disparagingly suggest in your fruitcake allusions to the Club of Rome New World Order conspiracy theory nonsense, or right here in the United States.

Since apparently my imagination is lacking, I invite you to suggest an balancing feedback loop likely to stabilize the system in the face on continue population and economic growth drawing from a finite (and dwindling) resource base. Good luck.