I was talking about "Photo Cops" this weekend while driving on the Garden State Parkway and saying "if they ever introduced [photo cops] on the GSP, people would be screwed." Referring, of course, to the fact that it is a 55 mph road and everyone was driving 70.

They tried having photo cops on Route 80 in NJ back in the late 80's or early 90's (don't quite remember) and it was simply a camera sticking out of the back of a van. Trip the speed limit, take a photo of the driver, mail summons to person. From what I remember at the time, it caused a bit of an uproar after a few politicians got pictures of them driving with their mistress and the summons envelope being opened by their wife.

Speed enforcement is fine; it keeps people relatively sane with their driving habits. I personally feel that the dangerous ones on the road are the ones who are driving more than 5-10 mph away from the average that everyone else on the section of road is driving. But sometimes you have a clear shot where there is nobody around you and goosing it up several mph to gain some time isn't that big a deal. If an automaton is going to penalize me without any context, that's where I draw the line.

I thought they meant 33 Thomas Street, which is another old switching building but has no windows, unlike the Verizon building they're talking about.

Back in the day (as recent as the late 80s or even early 90s) a lot of downtown Manhattan businesses had multiple phone lines going to every desk at those office high rises. These buildings existed just to house all that equipment, from what I always gathered. While I don't know what it looks like inside today, I'd imagine the technology of today requires only a fraction of that space now.

If it decreases the influence of lobbyists, then yes.

Lobbyists will have to email and thus hopefully get caught by spam filters?

Forget studying in your dorm room. Go to a study hall and preferably find one of those desks with the walls on three sides so you can get into your own little world. Just try not to sit near the cute girl or that will distract you.

Tesla took this to another level. Their sedan has pretty much vertically rotated 23" LCD touch screen as their control center. Sure, that's great you can google while you're driving (uhh.. hang on..), but this screams "take your eyes off the road and focus on this screen to turn up your radio volume". Now introduce a software upgrade that rearranges buttons and I'm SURE there will be auto accidents because of this "innovation".

I have a feeling you mean 10.5.8; 10.6.x is Snow Leopard which dropped support for PowerPC. Leopard's 10.5.8 release was in August 2009, according to Wikipedia.

Many years ago I read about how you were dedicating a lot of your time to teaching school kids how to use computers. I was always a fan of yours prior to that, but reading about your work there solidified you as a hero in my book. I think I even sent you an email years ago saying that if you were willing, I'd come out on my own dime to help out for a week (I've always been one of those highly technical people who can actually be patient and teach effectively as well).

Are you ever going to return to this? Sure, I can imagine that kids might not need as much help these days; for those of us who stopped our family VCRs from blinking 12:00, I've always thought that my kids are going to have something similar as they get older with me. But still, do you think you would ever do this again?

Actually, the button does work but in most cases is probably disabled.

In an apartment building, most likely the button does function.

In an office building, most likely the button is disabled. Specifically, the button is disabled by the operator switches (usually those fire marshall keys below the buttons) since they do need to control the doors in some situations. On some of the more advanced elevator systems, I think they might work after a period of specified delay (just an observation).

I forget where I read about this, but it was in the same article explaining how most of the cross walk buttons in NYC aren't even hooked up though at one time they were; when the systems were computerized and synchronized with the rest of the grid, the cost of removing the buttons outweighed the small perceived benefit of having people think they're making a difference.

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I've seen this so many times it amazes me. Think you have a lot of mosquitoes on your property? I bet you have a lot of stagnant water pools. No, it isn't your neighbors pond because if they have fish, they're eating the pupa. Most likely, it is that bird bath or that wheelbarrow or that childrens see-saw with the foot wells that collect rain water or, as I see almost all the time, that tarp you have over your firewood that has ever so small puddles of water (like half a cup). Those little wiggling specs of dirt? You better believe they're flying tonight!
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Besides file format, the only compelling reason I can think of is greatly improved speed.

Sure, for 95% of the users out there, they'd never notice and think that Office 2003 is fast enough. However, start working with a several hundred page document in Word. Any time you do anything, you'll see that it drags to a crawl.

Next, take a spreadsheet that includes thousands of rows across multiple sheets with references and calculations across them. You'll discover that 2003 was single threaded and can take 20 minutes to calculate a sheet (ever wonder why there is the option to disable automatic calculation?). Introduce Excel 2010 (never tried 2007) and you'll see that it will happily parallelize the problem across all CPUs.

Though I think the sound quality tends to be awesome, I would suggest avoiding buds that seal your ear canal with a gasket of some sort. For an example, see this picture of what I mean.

Why? Because if you put on your headphones after taking a shower these headphones will seal the moisture in your ear and if you don't keep both your ears AND headphones clean (I mean wiping with alcohol or something), it will create a perfect environment for an ear infection to form. I had two painful ones before I realized it was the headphones and switched to a different design.

It is a shame since you can hear everything beautifully with these kinds of headphones. I've realized it is either buy some cans (read: large whole ear covering kind) or "fits in your ear" type buds (like what comes with an iPod) for the best and least infection prone experience.

Interesting, I was under the impression that Rosetta emulated a G4. If you used the G5 specific functions I think you might have been out of luck, but I've never tried it.

If they're using standard components, then why is the darn thing so expensive? Sure, the Xeon processors gouge your wallet, but the fact that you're supplying your own display should at least put the cost on par with the high spec iMacs.

I have an early 2008 model and I think it is great, but after realizing that the only real upgrading I could do within a reasonable budget was RAM and hard disk (graphics card is price locked for Mac-usable ones), I think I'm fairly relegated to getting an iMac instead next time.

I've had data only plans for years. Unlimited international, at that.

The big difference is that if I actually make a phone call on that device, it costs me about $0.50/min domestic, and add on the roaming charge for international (e.g. about $2/min in the UK, $4/min in Poland, etc.)