I'm with you. At only 48 I'm in better shape than when I was a kid in the Infantry. And I don't have to sit at the children's table during Thanksgiving anymore!

As the years progressed I slowly started improving my diet and lifestyle to help counter some heart disease and diabetes on my dad's side. I went to the 75th wedding anniversary of my mom's grandparents (triple digits!), and her mom lived to 97. Mom is still kickin' it in her mid 70's!

I sat with my grandmother once while she told me about living through WWI, The Great Depression, moving to Kansas in a covered wagon, rural electrification, WWII, telephones, cars(!) and planes(!), Korean War, Vietnam War, JFK, landing on the moon, computers, medical marvels, and the Internet. My mom told me about hearing stories from her uncles about when they fought in the Civil War. The big thing that I got from their retrospective is this: The most important thing in life is how we treat each other, and how we respond to events. In some ways we've gotten better, but in others worse.

The public perception of our leaders used to be that we were choosing among the best of us, now we feel like we just get the most corrupt with the deepest pockets. Grandma was very disappointed with the administrations of the last 50 years. But she was so proud of her children, grandchildren, great-grandchildren, and the couple great-great-grandchildren.

I figure, with luck and progressing tech, I'll have a long life in which to play with toys and more grandkids.

http://piratebox.cc/

It's open source, anonymous, keeps no records, and acts as an off-line file-sharing system. you can pack it in your lunchbox, or even smaller. You can have it sitting in the bottom of your backpack, and have everyone in the food court up/downloading *ANYTHING* without worrying about getting nailed by "The Man". I don't think that it would be that hard to have it securely wipe it's storage clean at shutdown or startup, so there is no evidence of anything being stored on it, in case of seizure. It's been out for over a year and runs on multiple platforms.

I ran into a "hypercard"-like app for the C-64 back in 1986, that involved you building a flowchart of your app, answer some basic questions, and it would generate the Basic code for it. It was pretty spectacular for the day. There are quite a few code generator programs available today, just get one that runs on Python and give it a snazzy GUI. There you go. A nice easy to understand app generator that's cross platform, multiple output languages, open-source, self-extending, etc. etc...

You would spend more time on the design of the GUI, writing the help files, and creating tutorials, than anything else. The user wouldn't even have to know ANY particular language, just the logic they needed.

But that's just my opinion. I just build stuff.

"simulation" is also a technical description of "driving game". Let them also put the simulator on-line, to provide environment and background as hundreds of thousands of crazed and insane real humans try to crash into the auto-piloted cars. Each time someone succeeds, buff up their capabilities and give them credit and recognition, and develop response scenarios. That's how you "sim" car combat with real humans - you use real humans. It would be just like the dogfighting flight sims they use to train pilots. AI drivers will probably seldom, if ever, exceed the creativity of their programmer, while real humans can be fscking insane and unpredictable. If an auto-pilot car can avoid getting nailed by a coordinated assault team of five people actively trying to ram it, then I would rate it much better than all of the drivers on the road, save some of the elite counter-ambush drivers.

Wow, I could say that about most people, also...

"normal people don't care about the OS". So? Why are you even bringing up "norms"? They don't come here, they don't know how to spell "OS", and don't know that a good OS can keep everything working like a fine watch ... or keep crashing your all-important app. You sound like a "norm" that's stumbled in here, and trying to sound "technical".

Too late, I've already got Asperger Syndrome (autism-lite), so that makes me immune to the full-blown version. Right?

30 minutes? After driving for a couple of hours, I'm ready to take a 30 minute break and stretch my legs...

Hydrogen? Seriously? 45 years ago, when I was little, they were saying Hydrogen was only 30 years away, and would roll out demo cars to prove it. I think they just said the same thing last week.

I used to think the same thing, until I actually looked at the engineering realities regarding hydrogen. It's the lightest and smallest element on the Periodic Table, so it will migrate through steel, making it brittle as it goes. The only way to make hydrogen in the industrial quantities needed is with steam reforming of petroleum based hydrocarbons (check Wikipedia if you don't believe me). Then there is the energy density and storage nightmare of hydrogen which isn't even nearly as good as current gen car batteries.

And that is just to replace the current fuel in an internal combustion engine (not so efficient) with a lower density fuel (even worse efficiency). Now a fuel cell, where the fuel is converted directly into electricity is promising, except that to produce the amount of power needed to drive a vehicle would require an oxidation rate right up there with a controlled explosion trying to go uncontrolled.

And you still haven't gotten away from using petroleum, or the wars,corruption and crime involved in dealing with it. So, hydrogen isn't really looking too good now, is it?

I would think that just changing the power generation method for a hybrid from an IC engine to a micro-turbine generator, with it's higher efficiency, flex fuel capability, fewer and more reliable parts, would provide the fast recharge capability that you say you want. In fact, some companies are starting to do this already. Neil Young's LincVolt was such a conversion, by H Line Conversions in Wichita, KS.

But I think that, except for niche applications, the end of life for the internal combustion engine is in sight. It has to be over-sized and over-built for performance use, and can't compare (favorably) to microturbines for power generation. They are expensive, complicated, dirty, and require an expensive and violently fought over fuel.

I think with the appropriate paint job, and a larger gondola for cargo, there could be airship pirates in our future! Anyone feel like signing up for a (short) life of adventure and riches?

I just need a quick bit of clarification: you are speaking about ChromeOS and not all flavors of Windows, yes?

Microsoft will never Opensource XP. Mostly because it would be a major liability with no benefit to them. Yes, liability. If you have your programmers going through the code and find a module that obviously didn't work like it was supposed to, and exposed the machines to a 0-day hack, your lawyers would race to file law suites against Microsoft to compensate for the companies losses. Or lets say you figure out what ALL the settings in the registry do, including the ones for exclusive use of the FBI/NSA/Microsoft. Now you know that they were fully able to bypass the Microsoft supplied firewalls, and grab whatever info they wanted. And you would spill that knowledge all over the net.

Where is Microsoft's benefit in all this? It's just not there.

The only project to Opensource XP that I've heard of is ReactOS, and it is STILL in Alpha stage, even after all these years. I suppose if the demand for it is there, some companies could be encouraged to donate time/money and accelerate the project, for their own benefit.

This is exactly one of the attack vectors used by China when they went after Google. They slipped some backdoors into the firmware code at the manufacturers facility in Korea. Even if the Google office was running SELinux, all it took was a port knocking to have full access to the machine, totally bypassing the high level security.

Study that a bit more. More eagles drop dead of heart attacks than die from windmills. They are used to dodging moving objects. Windmills don't make a ton of noise, either. The industrial sized ones are fairly dangerously tall, though. And the people building them are whining about how they can't get anyone to risk their life climbing and servicing them for only $20/hr. That's about $0.10/ft of height above ground. Back when I used to climb, the going rate was $1.00/ft, because of the danger.

I hate to say it, but some people can't think even if forced to at gun point or with the promise of vast wealth. I (as an adult learner) was in a class of high school students learning CNC and manual machining. I told them about my father, a CNC programmer of over 40 years experience, and how his tax refund was almost always more than I made for any given year. The instructor backed me up, stating that he made a lot of his yearly income doing side projects and contract work during the summer.

I couldn't believe it. Some of these kids had "squirrel brains", as one so eloquently put it. Many of them dropped out of the class to become welders. It really was the best they could do. I was shocked at the demonstrated lack of (talent/drive/intelligence - pick one).

Give some people tools to build great cities with, and all they can do is use them to crack walnuts. I don't think I've been surprised by stupidity since those classes. Even the average Vo-tech student was smarter than the average high school student, due to additional filtering.