Of you don't have to be a psychic to know prices rise. It's called inflation, but you would have to have been psychic to know how fast they would have risen over the course of the past two years and to know at what point that was going to happen so you could suddenly have a boat load of fuel efficient vehicles hit the market at the exact time the market started demanding them. The point is that vehicle sales are market driven and here in the US gas was, and has now returned, to being dirt cheap. When you have dirt cheap gas and serious tax incentives to drive SUV's it doesn't take a genius to figure out there is going to be a serious market for SUV's. Had US auto makers ignored that market somebody else would have stepped in and done it. That's how free markets work. If there is a demand for something, somebody is going to fill it.

If the US government had a brain it would have been slowly raising gasoline taxes to curb usage over a period of several years starting about a year and a half after 9/11 (when the partially 9/11 induced recession hit). That would have eased consumers out of their bad habits. Instead the Bush Administration did nothing. You can't blame US car companies for building vehicles that consumers want to buy. It's basic supply and demand. It's the government's responsibility to either raise taxes to affect that market or to pass laws that force fuel efficiency on all vehicles sold or driven in the US. Time will tell if the US has learned it's lesson and I'm skeptical. Our government would be insane to raise taxes on fuel now that we're in the throws of a major recession but in about a year when this thing has subsided it would be insane not to announce that there will be national gas tax that will raise the cost of gasoline to $6.00 a gallon over the course of 5 or 6 years (with 100% of the revenue generated being put into research into alternative energy and upgrading our energy infrastructure). That will create the market for fuel efficient vehicles and lower fuel usage over time without the economic shock of the recent spike. $6.00 a gallon gas is a great incentive to decrease our dependence on oil and will create a serious demand for fuel efficient vehicles and vehicles powered by alternative sources but it's got to be done over time so consumers can prepare themselves for it.

There is no need to posts facts as an AC. The facts are the facts. Just because these fools can't handle the truth doesn't mean that reasonable people like you and I should hide from them. Damn the facts, these tools are in college so damn the real word. They've studied it so they know better than we do.

Kudos for speaking truth to the idiots who believe they are enlightened. Hey, let's rip on Detroit. It's their fault that there are all of these SUVs and damn them for the fact that consumers ate them up like crack. That clearly had nothing to do with it. The car companies are clearly at fault for making products people actually wanted to buy. Damn them!!!!!

Do those same rednecks know how to capitalize letters that begin sentences? For someone claiming intellectual superiority over these "rednecks" your failing.

Thank you for introducing a little truth into the Detroit bashing. As someone who doesn't work in the auto industry but who lives with many who do and as someone who is sick and tired of all of the crap that's gets tossed around as "facts" your comments are greatly appreciated.

You are correct sir. We should pass a law preventing any company from trying to do something as dastardly as "satisfying the market". What a horrible, horrible thing to do. How dare a company build something that people actually want to buy. Instead, let's pass laws where we force companies to build things that people have no interest in buying. Then we can all sit back and scratch our heads and try and figure out where these companies went wrong. How removed from reality does one have to be to post something as completely and utterly stupid as you've just posted? Do you not understand the basics of economics? Were US car companies too slow to build fuel efficient vehicles? Yes. Do you think that had anything to do with the fact that until about a year and half ago no US consumer could imagine $4.00 a gallon gas? Get real. There is a reason more fuel efficient vehicles have been being built on the other side of the pond for a long, long time and they haven't been being built here. The US government, in it's infinite wisdom, choose not to tax fuel and make the price more expensive to reduce demand like the European countries did and the result was that when prices finally shot up high enough in such a quick fashion nobody here was prepared. Feel free to go ahead and blame the US automakers all you like though. It's clearly there fault they didn't employ enough psychics to see that coming. If only Miss Cleo would have been left out of jail she could have warned them. Oh, the shame!!!!!!

I don't usually reply to myself but before some smart ass looks at my example and says "just type in 'coke soft drink'" or something else like that my response is well no shit Sherlock. That was just a very, very basic example. The point still stands. People change and so does their behavior so the point is that past behavior doesn't necessarily indicate current or future behavior and that has to be accounted for in a service or a certain percent of the population will eventually find the service less than useful. In some instances it could be a hindrance.

The only issue I have with any kind of computer software that "learns" about your tendencies based on your past behavior is that human beings are unpredictable. We learn new things, we try new things and we aren't the same people today as we were 4 or 5 years ago. We grow and we change. So if I'm dealing with a search engine is that is filtering my results based on some previous information about my behavior what happens if I change?

Here's an extreme example. Let's say a drug user decides to clean up his act. He decides he wants to order a bunch of his favorite soft drink and have it delivered so he types in "coke". Well if he had previously searched for "coke" looking up information about the drug and how it affects your body and had previously been looking up information about other drugs and the search engine accounted for that then what comes up when he searches for "coke" but wants information about the soft drink? There better be an easy way for the system to set aside your previous behavior and start from scratch because people change and when you change the context in which you want information changes as well. Learning from past behavior has serious upside but there are some downsides as well that must be considered.

Agreed. The consulting business that I work for has an IT services side that I fill in on from time to time if they are short staffed. Most of my clients on the consulting side of the business and most of the small businesses that we provide completely or partially outsourced IT services for that believed they'd need new PC's in the next couple of years (who didn't have volume licenses for XP) have already purchased them so they could downgrade to XP. These are mostly non-tech savvy people here who have either heard bad things about Vista from others or who have some first hand experience with it on a home PC that they purchased and they wanted to be sure to buy new systems while they could still get XP. We have a neutral policy when it comes to Vista so they haven't been doing this at our behest.

In fact, I can count on two hands the number of times I've encountered a client who has one or more machines on-site running Vista. It's amazing to me how few clients we have that have even a single Vista machine and it's amazing to me what a bad rap Vista has with the non-tech savvy crowd.

I don't particularly like Vista and on my box at work I've stuck with XP but I don't absolutely hate the thing either. Perhaps that's because I have limited experience with it but if they replaced my box at work with new PC (and I wasn't given the choice to go with a Mac ... I switched at home in 2006) and the box came with Vista pre-installed I probably wouldn't wipe it and re-install XP unless the box was a total POS and I needed to downgrade for performance reasons. I think the Vista to Windows Millenium comparison takes things a bit too far. Millenium was a complete and total POS that was clearly less stable than Windows 98 even on new hardware that came with the OS pre-installed. I've found that Vista, from the admittedly limited experience that I have with it, isn't that bad when it comes pre-installed on new hardware but Microsoft clearly screwed the pouch with it and I think that Apple is benefiting a little bit. We've had higher ups at a few of our clients opt for Macs in the last six or seven months who have asked us to setup Boot Camp or a VM product to run their Windows apps and if you would have told me we'd be seeing that a year ago I would have laughed in your face.

We have a winner. AT&T stands to lose a hell of a lot more if Apple brings the iPhone to other carriers than Apple has to lose if AT&T offers other smart phones that run other OS's. AT&T's move is smart. Not everybody wants an iPhone so you might as well offer other smart phones. It would be suicide not to. I doubt Apple cares. Last time I checked the iPhone is doing pretty damn well and Apple isn't the kind of company that wants every person on the planet to buy it's stuff. They realize that there is a certain group of people willing to pay more for their products and they've done pretty well for themselves catering to that market.

Oh wait .. now you see the danger of activist judges who like to interpret the the law and try to measure it's "intent" but since it encroaches on your freedom only now are you upset ... hmm ... stupid is as stupid does ... what a predicament ......

With millions of iPhone and gPhone users out there, free streaming audio applications like FStream, and thousands of Internet radio stations to access, the question is: why would anyone want to pay for proprietary hardware and a limited selection of a few hundred stations all controlled by one company?"

Oh, I don't know ... perhaps it has something to due with the fact that not everybody has a iPhone or a gPhone ... just a thought ...

'One of the things we've seen in the last two years is that attackers aren't even going after the browser itself anymore,' Eric Lawrence, Security Program Manager on Microsoft's Internet Explorer team, said.

And if you believe that I've got this great piece of land I'd like to sell you.

This woman can and will be punished in civil court which is where something like this belongs. She could probably be sued successfully for wrongful death and could definitely be sued successfully for the intentional infliction of emotional distress. She'll be taken to the cleaners and rightfully so. That combined with the public shaming that has come from the publicity surrounding this case is just punishment in my opinion. This woman did a very mean and petty thing that resulted in a real tragedy but at the end of the day it was just words typed on a keyboard. Not actions, but words entered on a public social networking web site. Unless the women in question knew this girl was mentally unstable with possible suicidal tendencies I don't believe this is a criminal matter in any way, shape for form.

It is so ....