Knowing how to drag and drop files qualifies one as a "geek" nowadays?

You have it exactly backwards my friend. Far better to say, "If internet companies are not forced to collect taxes, a small mom and pop restaurant should not be asked to collect taxes either.

...we just perfected them!

Coordinate with your contractors to standardize the graphical systems and control panels of the various systems. All systems should follow the same basic navigation hierarchy. All systems should use the same neutral colors for basic monitoring. They should all use the same high-contrast colors for warnings and alarms. A critical alarm requiring immediate attention should mute all non-critical alarms.

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You may wish to add animated graphical elements, flashing lights etc. These should only be used for show-and-tell with clients and investors. Normal day-to-day elements should be simple yet maximally informative (trend screens > text; basic line drawings > animations).

To mangle an Einstein quote: I know not with what weapons World War IV will be fought, but World War III will be fought with sticks and stones.

The XUL stuff might also run afoul of Apple's refusal to allow any apps that include scripting languages.

I couldn't imagine a civilian having a real use for it unless it was just for target shooting. Even then, it would be a hassle. A police officer, though, I could envision it being useful for. Maybe instead of a ring, they could wear a necklace or something. Something that wasn't immediately visible to a criminal, and the police could be trained to back the fuck off if their gun got taken away from them.

      If I ignore the encoding issues and assume some mix of frequency and amplitude shifts or whatever to get that kind of bandwidth, I can go along with the idea that a well placed optical transmitter could bounce light around the room enough to do this -- but what about the return signal from the workstation or device? That would hardly be placed in an optimal location.

      Further, consider that wireless is most useful for mobile and transient devices -- laptops, sure; but what about cell phones, pda's, sensors, and all manner of other wireless things. These are frequently -- even usually -- not placed in direct visual sight.

      Frankly, I see this technology as potentially useful in long distance settings between stationary platforms (particularly in space) but not so much for day to day campus or home-office use.

The Mercury Grand Marquis I rented 4 weeks ago to made the trip from Los Angeles International Airport (Thrifty Car Rental) Las Vegas International Airport - a distance of 281 miles - in 3 hours, 7 minutes, an average speed of just over 90 MPH (with several stints - such as Victorville, CA to Barstow, CA, and Baker, CA to Jean, NV - in the 100-105 MPH range). Averaged 22.2 MPG based upon the on-board computer. That car just sips the fuel (beyond 25 MPG) when you're cruising at 85 MPH. The mileage was below 20 MPG until I cleared San Dimas and traffic opened up. As the speed increased, the mileage jumped dramatically.

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Gearing and volumetric efficiency of the engine play a huge part in highway speed mileage. Some cars really do get better mileage at higher speeds because of those effects. I usually rent this model of car when in SoCal/Nevada because of the comfort over long stretches, the ability to take 3-5 people with me, tons of luggage space (or, in my case, demo products for CES and NAMM) and the great mileage on LONG highway runs. Add in the 19 gallon tank and you can get 400+ miles on the highway before having to refuel.

And when you rent a white or dark blue one, people tend to get out of your way when you come up behind them, since the only people who actually buy such cars are either retirees who putter along at 50 MPH or police who typically patrol that stretch of road at 80-90 MPH speeds (for those not familiar with the LA-LV road, the speed of traffic is typically 75-80 MPH, with a good 30-35% of the traffic moving at 90 MPH).

Microsoft was rightly terrified that a software ecosystem would develop around Java. At the time, many people expected Java to displace C++ and more.

Java was being shipped via the web, but it's not quite right to say that Java is the web or even that Java is a subset of the web. Java could run stand-alone, and it made apps portable to non-Win32.

Even the winmobile requirements are pretty harsh (128Mb ram), which pretty much means it can only be used on devices within the past year.

The only people who could love this idea are liberal gun grabbers who are afraid somebody might get hurt with a gun.

I don't know, there might also be a market amongst conservative gun enthusiasts who want to keep a gun around the house, without worrying about their kids getting to them and blowing each other's heads off.

I know a guy that has an office full of Aluminium iMacs that only run Windows - he likes the design, especially the space saving and the quality of the screens. It was the best all-in-one machine he could find.

Wow. That's (especially proportionally speaking) a lot of money to spend for aesthetics. What kind of business was it ?

Yes, indeed. Powering the RAM and part of the logic board is really draining....

The last time I used hibernate on an XP machine it had to do that "preparing to hibernate" stuff beforehand, then it took time to come back up again afterwards. It was about the same time as just shutting it down.

With sleep I can just close the lid, or hit command+option+eject and it goes off right away. Even if you come back to it the next day, the tiny trickle on the battery is nothing.

Hibernate would be more useful on my desktop machine, where a power cut would cause the sleep mode to fail, requiring a cold boot, but even then if I'm leaving it for a while sleep is normally fine, and if I'm gone all night or for an extended period I just shut down.

If enough people request it, I'm sure Apple will include it.

Well...we have flying cars...they are called helicopters. A few of us are wealthy or important enough to actually use them like cars and get chauffeured around in them.

In a similar manner, there might be a way that you could do amateur exploration of Mars. Some day there might be so much robotic hardware already on the planet from cheaper space travel that you'd be able to remotely control some of it as a member of the public or as a kid.

Personally, I think when the Singularity finally happens, whenever that is, our nanotechnology equipped AI overlords will create a digital mapping of mars down to the micrometer level as they are tearing the planet apart for raw materials. You'll be able to explore every last crevice of what (was) mars at your leisure as you live in one of the rotating Hab modules that act as a human reservation.