The answer is NO, definitely not. 220V would not be good for rapid charging. But why do you need to recharge at home that fast in the first place? Now, out at rapid charging stations where you can stop and recharge in a few minutes they will likely have 440V circuits that can deliver that kind of current. If you have a 200 mile battery you will probably be able to recharge at home in 4 hours (on 220V) anyway which should be enough after you get home from work to charge up for the next day. If you are at a place where you need a quick charge then stop at the quick charge station. Adding the kind of infrastructure it would take to have 440V circuits in every house plus substations and distribution network for every house to handle that much power for rapid charging is unreasonable except for at targeted locations that have quick charge stations. Even then I like the idea of the other poster of using fly wheel storage systems (where a flywheel spins on magnetic bearings) for quick charge stations. A station could have have several of the flywheel systems that are running at all times (large ones). So that as people charge quickly it slows down the flywheels a bit but then when no one is charging (maybe over night or middle of the day etc) then the flywheels speed up again and are ready for more quick charging at the station. Also it would allow for even higher voltages and currents than a 440V infrastructure can provide and make it less expensive to provide a power connection to a station.

I put science in quotes because the people that oppose fact based science simply invent science from their own religious or spiritual or anecdotal point of view. I mean I have other beliefs myself. But when it comes to Science for the purpose of implementation we need to base it on science fact. It is scary and disturbing that this movement against real science is taking hold. Especially, it is scary coming from the religious right and the teabagger/republicon crowd. These loons in the right wing will set us back centuries in science if they get their way. A bunch of nutcases. Thanks again (NOT) for voting republicon. You get what you vote for and so this is what we get from the right wing freaks. As for left wing, I honestly don't see this as much. Most "liberal nuts", as they are named by ring wingnuts, are usually attached to at least some basis of science fact when talking about the environment, technology, or even policies for energy, etc from the Government. The one exception that IS notable has to do with Nuclear energy. They are usually not educated on the new generation of nuclear technology that is much cleaner and safer than older reactor designs (IE newer Molten Salt, Breeder Reactors, etc). Anyway, there is at least some consideration among them for science fact. Where as the "intelligent design" and other delusional nutcases don't base anything in collected scientific discoveries.

As with some of the other posts I would be concerned about raising the eyebrows of the local intelligence agencies by encrypting a connection. In some countries (Iran for instance) i would think this would almost automatically trigger a police officer at your door for questioning or a visit to a local police station for interrogation. They would want to know what secrets you are hiding from them. I also imagine that leaving things unencrypted is undesirable as well. Personally, using "normal" channels is a mistake. Too bad there are not some affordable yet covert communications channels that have little to do with traditional phone networks or internet. Or at least something that transmits at different frequencies in small bursts that just look like background interference etc (I know CDMA works on this but that doesn't help in foreign countries and it is still in a domain that the authorities monitor from the CO, backbone, etc). I am sure the CIA has something like this. But it is about time that we had alternative paths that are covert and very difficult to even detect. In which case, it would not even have to be a really high speed connection for something like sending an email now and then or the occasional document or file. Even then, there is still risk with something like that being suspect by the local intelligence agencies if it is a device they know that you have and they become curious about something that is not simply a "normal" cell phone or small computing device. It seems best to just live with their local laws and try not to counteract them because otherwise there is a high risk of winding up in a very bad prison or similar situation and maybe no way for your own country to get you out of trouble.

I fail to see how this is informative. My droid phone multitasks to one's heart delight without even thinking about it. And even IOS doesn't allow full multitasking all the time. The downside with the multitasking in android is reduced battery life at times. However, it is a tradeoff I am willing to make. I can switch between apps at will and no problem. :) I am sure WP7 is pretty good. Still, I will stick with android for now. :) Multitasking is nothing new. These are the not the droids you are looking for. Move along. Move along.

I have mixed feelings about this. First of all the government cannot really afford to be doing overarching things like this right now. Is having LTE everywhere important? Yes, I think it is. Can the government afford to fund it for the carriers? NO. There needs to be a massive contraction in spending right now including on the defense budget. I think that given enough time that LTE will probably get close to the government mandate of 98% coverage. It might take longer but it will get there. I only wish that mobile wireless wasn't so darn expensive and limited. 3g is not that specacular. REAL 4g (as in LTE) is pretty good but it is still going to have capacity issues compared to cable and DSL. I think it makes sense for rural areas where telecoms cannot afford to wire every neighborhood or home with fiber. And when I mean REAL 4g I don't mean T-mobile's or ATT's "4G Like" HSPA+ system. It is fine on its own but it is not 4G and should not be marketed as such. It is rather misleading I think.

How in the H did this post get rated up to 3 for insightful. This is not an insightful post. In fact, it is exactly the kind of uninformed opinion about high speed rail in the US that prevents it from being possible. Now personally, I don't think we should do it right now mainly because we can't afford it. But more dangerous than an airplane? You don't know what you are talking about at all. Not trying to be offensive but you don't. Rail is very safe and even safer than flying statistically. IN fact, if you look at the safety record for the TGV in France you will see that they have had ZERO fatalities in its operation over the last 34 years or so of operation. There have been a few derailments but not many. Find out the facts before you open your mouth. The shinkansen in Japan has a similar safety record. The ICE trains in germany have been a little less safe but only because of stupid things like a recent accident where a sheep herd managed to break out into a tunnel which caused an ICE train to have a massive train wreck. But even then that is amazingly the exception and not the norm. Even then, I am not aware of any deaths from the accident. To some extent its true about train stations in some cities. But in NYC? Are you kidding. Of course the subway goes to the train station. I don't know about other cities. I will only comment on what I know. But unsafe? Hardly. MUCH, MUCH safer than flying actually. Although, flying really is not unsafe either. Just like to clear up some things that aren't even half truths about high speed rail but rather total untruths.

None of this is surprising. Windows 7 is pretty good and so is office. But these are not the paradigms of the future. Mobile and cloud computing together are the future. I think that the Meteoric rise of Android proves it. As well as the continued popularity of the Iphone and other mobile devices. I think the Ipad's success proves it as well. M$ has barely shown up lately for the mobile space. WP7 is decent but it doesn't have all the details and functions of the Iphone and Android. It amazes me how Android has barely existed for a little over a year (at least in the minds of consumers) and it is already a platform that is sophisticated, (relatively) easy to use, and has a large market full of usefull apps. Only the Iphone rivals it. And vice versa. Blackberry also has stagnated lately. The deal in the mobile space is Apple Ipad, Iphone, Android phones, and with honeycomb you can include Android tablets. Google is not going away in this space and certainly not Apple. Both have been visionary and innovative while M$ continued to rely on their desktop and corporate server Hegemony to live in lala land and hope for continued automatic replacement and upgrade sales for Windows and Office. They can no longer guarantee this market anymore. It is changing fast and M$ is asleep at the wheel. Interestingly enough, Linux has actually pushed forward into the consumer space in some forrm (finally) I mean this in the form of android. Now I wonder what is going to happen with intel? I mean they are not going away right away. But really they need to come up with something better than ATOM in the mobile space if they want to survive. I don't understand why they sold off their ARM division and products anyway. Especially now that ARM is growing in the mobile space and even the slumbering giant in Redmond has realized that the next version of windows will need to run on the ARM architecture.

Why were they this clueless? The internet was already beginning to take off. At the college i was at in 1993-1994 a lot of people were already logging onto the internet and learning the graces of pine, gopher, telnet, and FTP. I mean it wasn't very sophisticated but it wasn't new! A significant number of students were already there. In fact, I remember logging in to chat with people and use forums on ISCA which some of you may remember at the Univ of Iowa. It was a fairly popular BBS online at the time it seemed. I do remember mentioning to other people including some students of the era what the "information superhighway" was going to mean and many acted like idiots. "Why would I want that?" "Well, that's just stupid. No one will want that" Etc. Pure negativity which is a pretty American way to respond to something new they don't understand. Anyway, they have their foot in their mouth today.

I think this movie should be named Cablegate 2010: The Assange Story. LOL, or maybe Michael Moore will make his own documentary by this name. "The most dangerous man in the world" sounds a little overkill to me. :P But if it has enough drama then maybe it works.

Another US company selling off our technology to the Chinese to make a quick buck. And yes, what another user said about business schools is true. I know because I went to one RECENTLY. And the mantra is "Take care of your stockholders and their return before anything else". Even accounting books will tell you that the corporation's primary objective is to earn a profit for the stockholders first and pretty much everything else is secondary. That includes employees and customers. They are important but only in so far as making a profit for the shareholders. I think the answer is that corporations and the government here have long since sold us all off to the far east. The chinese are pretty clever and before long they will be the biggest economy and the largest "superpower" in the world. How do we turn this all around? The people of this country have to take the government back for us. How to do that though when almost all the politicians are corrupt and they to are only interested in a quick buck in their back pockets? I'd like to think it would stop short of armed conflict or revolution.

There is an historical context for building PHYSICAL (not virtual BS) walls that protect one territory from another. Honestly, I would be for copying the engineering plans that the israelis used to build their wall in the west bank. Use those plans to build one just like it across the mexican border.. ALL of it and then implement the plan that was suggested by another user for 31,000 guards every 1/4 mi along the wall with machine gun nests, snipers, electronic sensors, AND the wall set back enough to have a mine field. Further, I'd have underground microphones or seismomoters that measure for vibrations. If someone is detected digging underground then we go out, drill a hole in the ground down to where the tunnel is and drop some C4 in and be done with it. I would not play games with this. The great wall of china worked great for a while and for a time so did Hadrian's Wall in England during the roman empire. As for those already here? If they have been here a while and have been well behaved, have a job, etc then give them work visas and a chance at citizenship if they keep a clean criminal record for 11 years. There is no way we are going to deport 15-30 million people back across the border who are here illegally.

This is why for all their platitudes and supposed small government aims that I will not vote for Republicons. The Dems are guilty too. But the republicons lie more when they claim small government. They want all the low taxes in the world (to help subsidize their industries) and then whey get a chance they use the government to step in subsidize business even when its not in the best interest of the country or in this NASA. They block out competition which is anti-competitive behavior and has nothing to do with the "free market" economics that the republicans claim to uphold. They are all liars the whole bunch of them. Duplicitious, greedy liars who only support their own company and their own aims. The only reason they don't want any regulations is so they can make a faster buck and take more public money for themselves and their own corrupt corporations. Many will argue loudly. The more loudly they argue the less any should listen to them. All their bunch with the tea partiers, haters, homophobes, corporate welfare state mergers, Glenn Becks, Rush Limbaughs and other literalists are a bunch of crazy, lunatic, psychopathic fascists. Cast them out and ignore them. They are self delusional and out of control. Well, my vote didn't go for them. Good day.

Well, he got his due. Thats about all I can say. For playing this game he gets the slammer where he belongs. Enough jobs have already been lost to China as it is. Ford has greatly improved their products recently and they have a right to protect and prosecute on lost IP like this. This means american jobs and so I am all for what happened. Maybe Chinese will think twice again before trying to steal trade secrets and plans. Go make your own and stop worrying about what ours are.

Valid points were made about mobile computing. It seems to me that mobile devices are the future. For that matter, I can imagine having a computer and interface system built into a set of sunglasses or eyeglasses to where its hard to even tell they are there. That is a little way off from now. However, I can definitely see an android device in the near future that has a built in projector for video display and then another laser projection device to project a virtual keyboard and mousing/pointing/trackpad virtual device. Add on top of this the possibility of cloud services like Google Apps (which really is not yet developed anywhere to its full potential yet) and you can see that Windows 7, mac os, or whatever desktop OS will not matter (as much). Of course, they will still be around especially in school labs and in offices. But the mobile device will be king especially with a built in projector, virtual keyboard device and virtual pointing or motion based system. It will not be long before mobile devices have the computing power of a laptop (but not a good desktop). That will be enough for most people I suspect. :)

Very interesting discussion. For a time I used Ubuntu 10.04 and finally I think there is a version for the average person. However, there is a problem. Myself and a bunch of other people have quite a bit of money and time sunk into windows programs. I've heard all the arguments and have used openoffice myself. It is pretty good! But it doesn't have absolutely 100% compatability with office and I don't have time to play around with that unless it works right with word, excel, etc formats perfectly every single time without a hitch. That is not a realistic expectation though. Basically, until there is an easy way to run all windows programs (or nearly all of them) under linux without a lot of hassle and configuration and to where it is a one or two click install people are not going to bother with it. We can kid ourselves all night and all day for the next 20 years that people should be using linux. But if they already have windows on the computer they bought and linux won't run the software they've already invested 100's in then I don't see it happening. I know there is crossover office which is pretty good but that is not a solution for 99%+ software compatability. WINE is impressive but is even more difficult to get working with some programs. No one has the time or the energy to D*^& around with it and then still not have it work like they need to. Add to this the fact that Win 7 is now pretty good even good and there is not much motivation to change. I like Ubuntu 10.04. It is easy to use, well designed (as a consumer grade OS), easy to install programs and many comparable programs to windows. The quality of the software is pretty good. But its gotta run windows programs. Plenty of people will be offended by that. Even with compatability it would be no guarantee. Even history shows that from the OS/2 experience in the early 90's. There was a very nice OS that ran most dos and windows programs seamlessly (or nearly) but then IBM released subsequent buggy versions of the OS in a hurry and M$ stomped them with win 95 and imcompatible Win32 libraries and API's later. So, there even with compatability there is not a guarantee that people will switch. But nearly full compatability would be a huge step toward attracting more users (myself included). I am saying this from observation, from experience, and the resistance to change which is part of human nature (for most people). Windows is not perfect but Win 7 has improved stability, security, and usability to a high level (relative to all other previous versions of windows). So it makes it even harder to convince people to switch. And people are afraid of change.