I thought I read that the extra radiation from being at airplane altitudes for an entire flight dwarfs the radiation from the scanner. They also make passive scanners that only use your body's natural radiation.

Named columns are very useful. Using those tools would be like going from named variables to directly using memory addresses.

Now if you took the tools and bolted on the ability to read & use a header row, then you could be on to something. Having the ability to use sql from bash would be useful in some cases too, especially for devs and admins who use a lot of sql.

For radio antennas there are tuners to match the impedance of the antenna to what the radio is built for. I assume it's the same on a TV antenna for digital TV, just with everything built in, but I'm too tired to look past the first 5 search results for someone else's question. Also, some antennas are amplified, with a knob to adjust the amplification level instead of or in addition to a fine tuning knob.

b4dc0d3r seems to have lost his edge. Maybe he turned on Do Not Track and now gets worthless advertising everywhere?

Our manufacturing base in the US is growing. You must be listening to misguided politicians saying we need to expand it to provide more jobs (notably Santorum), when manufacturing provides fewer and fewer jobs. We are losing manufacturing jobs worldwide, and China (a scapegoat for taking our jobs) is losing jobs at a faster rate than us. It's generally cheaper to manufacture in the US than China, and companies are taking notice.

With the growth of new manufacturing technology, such as small scale CNC lathes, 3D printers and cheap/free 3D software (e.g. Google Sketchup), the means of small scale production are becoming cheap enough for anyone industrious. It's a second industrial revolution. One where you don't have the service of a local factory telling you things they'll pay you to do, but you get to control production. If you learn to design and build something that people want to buy, you can make a rather good income running a factory out of your garage. If you quickly become more popular than you can handle, then you can buy manufacturing services for your design. If you give up on all the a generic education in a college degree (or get a 2nd job), you'll save plenty of money to get started.

Abraham Lincoln or FDR

If I don't have a free market, then how do you explain Google Fiber? Unlimited, uncapped, dedicated to the Internet backbone, 1Gbit/s, symmetric, fiber connection for $70 (US) per month, and it comes with a decent looking router. If you don't need the speed yet, then you can get at least 7 years of 5/1Mbit for just an install fee of 12 payments of $25 (or all $300 up front). They weren't one of the 2 exclusive providers in the area.

Google makes their own network equipment and their customer facing network is larger than all but 1 ISP. I'm betting they know how to roll this stuff out for the install fee. Hopefully Kansas City doesn't break the Internet backbone. I'm betting that businesses subscribing to non-Google ISP's will be choked by AT&T, Verizon, etc. overselling their 100Gbit backbone.

I'd agree with you, except I can't think of an open standard they supported without perverting to their advantage when they had the chance.

Microsoft broke the web about a decade ago, and many/most sites failed to work unless you were running MS Windows and Internet Explorer. It all started on open standards and MS tools to develop for the standards.

They are getting very agressive at pushing web tech again. It would surprise me if they never started adding proprietary MS extensions that are "standard" (only having support from Microsoft and whomever they paid to support it, with no access for anyone else to support it). I will never trust them again until they show decades of good behavior and apologize for breaking the web previously.

Kansas City has a rather low population density, and Google is deploying 1Gbps (each direction) fiber to the home for a similar price to Time Warner's 15/1Mbps service. Each home will be wired to a "fiber hut," which will be on the Internet backbone. Installation is $300 (waived for a 1 yr Gbit contract or payable over 12 months), then service is $70/month for 1Gbps or free for 5/1Mbps (guaranteed for 7 years), and it comes with a nice router. Their next phase of roll out will include areas with fewer than 350 people per sq mi.

Service cost is a matter of population density and infrastructure. Unless upgrades require different cabling, the level of bandwidth included in the service generally costs per port, not mile.

Since Apple is rewriting all the Google apps, the new iPhone 5 w/ iOS 6 sounds like it introduces as many problems as improvements. I don't know why they're splitting, but I would be surprised if Apple can keep up.

I don't think Apple can survive without Jobs. He wouldn't provide breakthrough technology so much as be the first to put it together into a good system. I expect the next few generations of Apple products to become less revolutionary and more humdrum. They nearly died their first time w/o Jobs. They're in a much better position this time, but w/ competition from Samsung, Asus and Google, the only Apple innovation I'm seeing is higher-resolution screens and an integrated e-ticket/e-coupon/e-rewards app. There's even android apps for the second, who just don't have the resources to sync w/ information from the corporations.

I have had rather few problems with NVIDIA chips and their closed source driver. VDPAU was buggy w/ Compiz and 256MB video RAM (now works except for low RAM issues), and I have to turn off desktop effects in KDE with a GeForce Go 6150. That's about it. Intel has given me a lot of problems with video drivers over the years, despite drivers being open source, and I always avoid them.

Open source drivers have no reason to be better than closed source drivers with good support. In fact, closed source drivers can contain technology licensed from other companies that they may not have the rights to release under the GPL (e.g. NVIDIA signed a deal with SGI several years ago).

A qbit is a quantum binary digit, so there will only two states by definition. Otherwise, it's not a binary digit. Eventually, we might find a way to pack more than 1 qbit per physical device, but we're having enough trouble just getting a usable number of qbits.

On the other hand, regular transistors are a technology that is quite mature, and most people don't realize they're actually analog devices. We just pick a threshold current, where anything above is on and anything below is off, in order to make them binary, but it can be divided into more categories. Flash memory is currently storing 2, 4 or 8 different values per transistor to get 1 (SLC), 2 (MLC) or 3 (TLC) bits per transistor.

If we do arrest everyone who sounds scary, the terrists have won!

Sometimes it's cheaper to settle than fight in court. Everyone laugh at Google for fighting Viacom on accusations of copyright infringements. Google correctly insisted they were right, and eventually won in court. In the process, people in the media called them foolish for wasting so money on legal fees and all suggested that settling would be cheaper. Something is seriously wrong when you can be falsely accused, and your best option is to pay them off.

Yeah, we all know how lacking Linux is in databases and operational infrastructure, and how limited it is at running cloud computing. I think you've finally found why Linux isn't catching on.

As a developer, I must say that Linux platforms have been much more stable and reliable, and Qt is much better designed than anything I've seen from Microsoft. If you throw in the vastly superior Linux shell (bash) and the large and wonderful ecosystem of command line utilities and languages, Microsoft is rather unpleasant development environment. However, the large array of good, free applications in Linux may be the biggest downside.

It's hard to operate a business without selling something, and it's hard to sell something when everyone knows others are giving away something similar and almost as good (switching an OS is a little more involved than switching word processors). When your livelihood isn't on the line, there's not as much incentive to cross the line into greatness. For example, all the Linux media players I can find have intermittent problems with menus on an occasional DVD, but if that was revealed in reviews of PowerDVD, they'd have trouble collecting their $50-$125 from new customers to make payroll.

I think there are plenty of developers who are attracted to Linux. It powers much of the internet, including most/all the largest sites (except Microsoft's which lose money hand over fist). Could you imagine Facebook trying to store 250 million photos a day (in 4 resolutions each) and serve millions of photos a second on Windows servers? It also attracts a lot of talent from Hollywood including DreamWorks, Pixar, Disney, ILM, Maya, and Sony to name a few. Lastly, in the Top 500 supercomputer list, Linux is beating Windows 462-2.

I think Microsoft claims Linux violates their patents because they are a patent whore, who is afraid of the competition. The only platform that Linux can't beat them at, desktop/laptop computing, is fading to little more than a web browser for most people. Until Microsoft discloses which patents they are, I'm calling them liars. Just because companies are settling on licensing agreements, doesn't mean there would have been a violation. Sometimes it's just cheaper than court cases. I think in Novell's case (SUSE Linux), Microsoft pays them.

First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win. -- Mahatma Gandhi