Corporate Suit
Thinks it's a hoot
$10B in loot
GM still a coot
Burma Shaved

For all its servers and software, Google does not have an Army or a Navy.

This wouldn't -- no counldn't have happenned in the days before computers.

Eventually, I think centralised computer control is going to go the way of semaphore. It's too easy for a centralised computer system to glitch, break, be shutdown, and then screw up the lives and functions of millions.

What we should see is decentralised systems run using independent computer systems.

No need. Orcs mostly speak the common tongue or else their own tribal dialect. The Black Speech -- as devised by the Dark Lord in elvish runes -- was a failed attempt to linguistically distinguish his followers from those of the Alliance. It didn't take among the Orcs, but strangely the East End London accent did.

The journals of course are businesses and quite reasonably want to stay in business and make a profit.

Sadly I don't have a good idea for a solution.

Nationalise the journals.

I have just calculated that in my head. Am I safe?

Actually if you fig a bit deeper there is something interesting about this project. Look at the USB stack - it's all done in software using GPIO pins! Very clever. There's a company that wrote the USB stack. You can get it GPL licensed for free or you can pay for a BSD license, but they start real cheap

http://www.obdev.at/products/vusb/license.html

They've got a load of projects too

http://www.obdev.at/products/vusb/prjobdev.html

If you go above 10,000 units you probably pay more but by that point you can afford it.

Very interesting mix of clever code and a well thought out business model I think.

This isn't an anti-patent troll bill. It's an anti-small inventor bill.

If so, good then; the sooner the myth of patents being for the small inventor dies the sooner everyone will finally be rid of the impediment of patents forever.

It's another FU to small inventor, just like the last patent reform.

The small inventor, and the little guy in general, has been FU-ed out of the game for a long time now. Patents are now all about legal fights and trolling, not innovation or rewarding it. It's time for them to die.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PWkWQ-39KLo

That's the genius of USB really. Most early USB devices probably had a Serial Interface engine in hardware and a few hundred bytes of firmware written in assembler in flash or masked prom.

This device is actually quite high end

http://www.atmel.com/devices/attiny85.aspx

http://www.atmel.com/Images/Atmel-2586-AVR-8-bit-Microcontroller-ATtiny25-ATtiny45-ATtiny85_Datasheet.pdf

You've got 8KB of flash. You can program it in C and you get a USB driver.

http://www.blinkstick.com/help/firmware

Looking at the firmware main.cpp it implements HID class device. Writing to reportId 1 means you set the 3 PWM oscillators for red, green and blue leds. The other reportIds seem to read and write the EEPROM.

Warning: you'll need to be ADHD-free as the video is thirty minutes long :D

It's not just you Yanks, either. Check out this interview hosted by Andrew Marr from the BBC with Noam Chomsky:
  * http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GjENnyQupow

Exactly. For content consumption, small and mobile devices are very convenient.

Who exactly spends all of their time simply "consuming" on these devices? It's virtually impossible to spend more than a day online without feeling the urge to add to the conversation, and all iDink devices and touchscreen interfaces do is get in the way of that (2-way) conversation with the outside world.

As to the consumption itself, as far as I can see, everything is clunkier on touch device. Everything. Designers are having to make buttons and icons cartoon sized in order to accomidate simple viewing on these "computers".

I simply cannot accept the proposition that people are -- willingly -- going to accept a future of either creation or consuption on these restricted devices. Even if the whole industry collectively decides to abandon PCs, in a decade or so the current infants playing with iDinks will manage to "rediscover tactile touch based text input devices once called 'keyboards' " as a faster, better method of interfacing with their computers.

Eventually, some of them will even rediscover the command line as well.

When you talk to managers, you need to talk business. Throw every reason you think important into the trashcan. Then build your case from the ground up as a business case. Show that it saves the company money or increases productivity. Basically, make the case that your proposal == more $$$.

Essentially, you must dance the corporate Dance of the Seven Veils, in order to entice managers in the only language they are able to speak.