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clang_jangle writes "For some time now, a company called Ego Lifestyle has been marketing "designer" laptops. T3 reports that the unabashedly swank company recently attended the British Motor Show to promote their new Bentley Laptop, named for the legendary British automaker. T3 appears slightly less than enthused, saying, "Ego's been making luxury laptops of questionable taste and shape for a couple years now, and seems to have finally met the 'alright, I guess' mark with its Bentley laptops." The article has a photo gallery, for those who wish to see such a marvel. Oh, and it runs Vista."

clang_jangle writes "Autobloggreen has a tantalizing if all-too-brief first look at the Lightning GT, an electric supercar from the Lightning Car Company which uses new battery technology from Altairnano. The car was shown for the first time today at the British International Motor Show. It is claimed that the battery pack can be charged in just 10 minutes, with a useful lifetime of up to 10 years. While the Lightning GT itself is to be a limited production, high-priced offering, will this technology "trickle down" to more affordable cars? If so, does this mean battery electric vehicles are finally close to being ready to replace our ICE powered cars?"

The current fortune cookie ("User hostile.") at the end of the page is somehow very fitting.

Offtopic? Look, Steve, stop wasting your mod points and go throw a chair. That comment hit the nail right on the head. What are you Microsoft shills worried about? I find all Microsoft programs to be user-hostile, especially the OSes.

Moving stuff that you knew where it was to somewhere you have to hunt for it, as Microsoft does with every new program and operating system, is as hostile as you can get. It's not just hostile, it's downright mean.

The incredibly long number you have to type in when you install a Microsoft OS (XP, Vista, presumably 7) is hostile. Having to activate is hostile. To demand that I trust you without your trusting me is hostile, would you put up with that from a human being?

The allow/disallow I keep reading about in Vista sounds hostile as all getout. Maybe they're reducing the user-hostility by ridding Windows 7 of it? I doubt that.

Why does Microsoft seemingly hate its customers? It is user-hostile as a company and as such can't possibly write non-user-hostile OSes or programs.

If I see that comment when I metamoderate, whoever modded it won't be getting any more mod points. The same goes for whoever modded a href="http://tech.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=565875&cid=23568891">this comment offftopic as well. Are there any mods today that don't work for Microsoft? This is just too obvious.

I thought the command line was the fastest desktop interface ;)

As an anarcho-communist, I have to say, I don't acknowledge property rights. Why? Because property rights boil down to "I was here first, I stuck a flag in it, it is mine", and everything had a flag stuck in it before I was born, and I refuse to acknowledge a system that considers all of this to be someone elses property. It is not. It is my birthright, to share with others of my generation. If you claim I do not have a right to my birthright, I consider that justification to kill you and take it by force.

As far as intellectual property and creative works are concerned, there are two ways to measure the value of those. The first way of measuring the value is to determine how much leverage you can achieve over your fellow man with them, how much they are willing to sacrifice to get it. That is a valuation based entirely within the system of property rights. But there is another way to measure the value. These types of works can also be measured in the advantage they bring humanity. The more people who are enlightened, entertained, educated, cultured, the more value.

The first type of value is entirely arbitrary. The intellectual work doesn't create the physical work that was used to pay, the amount available to pay was fixed before you came on the scene, and you will get less than is available, because the creator needs some too, and he's inclined to compete and give you as little as he can.

The second type of value, the real value, it is destroyed the more you restrict the propagation of the intellectual or creative work. Your neighbours become a little more barbaric, their lives a little more desperate, their minds a little more closed, their thoughts a little less effective. You cripple their capacity to be your allies and friends, and give them reason to wish to break the system and take the wealth that is being destroyed, because they know it's being destroyed simply because you would pay armed men to keep from them what it would cost you nothing to share with them.

Private property is a bad system. But intellectual property in its myriad forms is a needlessly destructive and utterly stupid system for any person to support who doesn't have harming their fellow man and keeping him small as an agenda.

If you claim I do not have a right to my birthright, I consider that justification to kill you and take it by force.


You do not have a right to what you did not create. If you want something, you should make it yourself. It's my land, my idea, my property, and you can go find your own. Your laziness and lack of creativity does not give you a right to steal.

Oh please don't go bleat on about having the right to food, housing or medical. Those things are important, yes, but, if they are so important than shouldn't you be willing to work for them?

clang_jangle writes "According to this article at sciencedaily.com, "NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., will house the agency's new Einstein Probes Office, created to study the universe's exotic phenomena: dark energy, black holes and cosmic microwave background radiation.
The new division, to be housed in Goddard's Beyond Einstein Program Office, will facilitate NASA's future medium-class science missions to investigate these profound cosmic mysteries.""