Uh, reducing mass DOES reduce the wear on the road.

That's not quite correct. Certain strains of yeast are able to make wine with alcohol over 16%. Some California Zins hit 17 and maybe even 18%.

First post

I think you're right. Another generation or two of mobile processor improvements and a way to connect your device to an external screen/monitor/mouse via a wireless connection, and you'd have something really special. You'd have a computer suitable for web/media consumption/basic office document processing, and you simply take it with you from terminal to terminal.

This was originally, mistakenly, scheduled for Saturday 10/20. Rescheduled for Monday 10/22 as intended. Pizza and Hot Grits will be provided :)

...but which one's the cloud?

Unfortunately, this is not correct. I work in the e-learning industry which relied heavily on Flash, and I can tell you there are lots of things we did that were easy in Flash that are a PITA to get working correctly using HTML5. Sure, we can develop native apps for each device stack, but that brings it's own mess of challenges, particularly since the training content and training delivery system are typically not developed by the same vendor. In order to support mobile devices, we've had to ratchet down the overall lesson quality. Also, our Flash lesson content worked great on our Xoom tablet. I'm not saying Flash didn't have issues and wasn't used in places it shouldn't have been, but it did die too soon for the e-learning industry as HTML5 multimedia is still not particularly well supported or capable.

That said, this isn't meant to be industrial grade security. Compared to no security at all, this is a big step up. The likelihood that I loose my phone in the parking lot and someone who finds it has a picture of me to unlock the phone with seems extremely slim. More likely, this would be vulnerable to attack from people I know, but even then, it's better than nothing.

This is what I got my 6 year old daughter (the Duo-Scope). While not a professional quality instrument, it is quite capable. The inclusion of the top-down lighting has allowed us to view numerous opaque objects (pennies, all manner of insects, etc) and a prepared slide set has provided plenty of opportunity to explore. I'm in about $100 for the scope and the slides and it's been very much worth the cost. My daughter finds new things she wants to look at with the microscope every week.

While you can surely see more detail in astronomy (as well as microscopy) photos, the experience just isn't the same. For me and my family, watching the transit through my safely filtered binoculars is much more exciting that simply browsing through the results of a Google image search for '2004 Venus Transit.' For my kids especially, who live in a world full of digital experiences, seeing something significant in person is not to be missed.

You go into a hospital and say 'my insurance is paying for this'. You get costs that are 2-10x what they should be plus whatever other procedure they can think of that seems legit.

Actually, this is backwards. In almost all cases I've seen, the insurance company has a "negociated rate" which is much lower than what I would pay on my own. Looking at my bills I see, for example, that the insurance company has negociated a rate several hundred dollars less than what I'd pay for a blood test. Scan your EOBs and look for contract adjustments to see what I mean. It pretty crazy when you think about it since it means those least likely to afford the care (folks who are w/o employer provided insurance) will pay the highest rates.

"If we're going to require employers to provide health insurance to their employees" You're on the right track. This wouldn't have been an issue if we hadn't started mixing healthcare coverage up with employment.

So, obviously, we need to rework the system so that the incentive so that rejection is the most rewarding/path of least resistance. A simple idea might be to double application fees and refund 1/2 if the patent is granted. Perhaps the patent examiner should be compelled to testify in IP cases where the patent is questioned. In today's world the barrier to getting a new patent should be much higher (with regards to prior art, not an impossibly high application cost). The PO's default answer should start with no, and take a very compelling argument to make it yes.