It's always Sony vs. their customers, unfortunately. a shame because they have some incredible engineering talent. It will probably be beautiful device but will have a proprietary media format, proprietary headphone jack, proprietary charger, proprietary batteries. And media and peripherals will cost double everybody else's. Sony's scammer mentality is to screw their customers at every turn rather than build something beautiful and usable that will then become indispensable. Their Walkman music player products and phones are a tragedy... So much potential, such a waste.

Rolled up things are not necessarily an inefficient use of space... Check out this NYTimes piece where a flight attendant shows how to get 10 days of clothes in a carry on by roll-packing: 10 Days in a Carry-On

Why is this article tagged Idle? Surely this is most important News For Nerds!

I remember being in a school assembly for an earlier launch - Columbia or Atlantis, I think - and the whole way up, I just kept thinking to myself, "explode, explode, c'mon explode. please explode. c'mon, this is booring... explode!" not out of any malicious or malevolent intent, but just because I thought it would be cool and I wasn't old enough to realize the ramifications.

When the Challenger disaster happened two years later, I was mortified. By that time I already could understand what it meant and was wracked with guilt, convinced it was somehow my fault for having wished that such a thing would happen.

Which, of course, is silly. But just in case - I really hope that no more shuttles or rockets explode.

According to Google's blog post on the issue, automated sentiment analysis doesn't really work...

As it turns out, Google has a world-class sentiment analysis system (Large-Scale Sentiment Analysis for News and Blogs). But if we demoted web pages that have negative comments against them, you might not be able to find information about many elected officials, not to mention a lot of important but controversial concepts. So far we have not found an effective way to significantly improve search using sentiment analysis. Of course, we will continue trying.

which makes it seem like whatever fix they instituted in their algorithm in response to this problem is just a kludge and that the underlying problem remains...

There is a solution to this problem that a lot of people are already using, however: Web Of Trust, which lists user recommendations as to trustworthiness, vendor reliability, privacy and child safety. Sure enough, WOT gives decormyeyes the lowest combined rating, which according to my settings would not allow my browser to even visit such a site.

Queen Amigdala, regulator of the Phantom Menace... There, mnemonic device sorted.

getting a bit offtopic, but, there are such amateur sleuths following the money in politics... check out http://www.opensecrets.org/ and http://www.legistorm.com/

I'm guessing it's because there might not be an outdoor outlet and the people inside might either shoot you or act in such a way as to increase the chances that you'll have to shoot them. Seems like a better idea to just stay undetected outside, steal your juice and go on your way.