TFA didn't suggest that she was forced.It said she took the advice of the TSA worker over the advice of her doctor. The doctor's note said to avoid the body scanner, she asked the TSA worker if it was ok, and the TSA worker said yes. IMHO, a doctor has more credibility over a TSA worker in this case, I'm not sure why she didn't think so.

I agree. I don't know anybody who uses a computer and doesn't rely on Microsoft Office. And crossover office is not good enough (it might work well enough, but it's not easy enough for my parents to install themselves).

It comes down to the fact that distros like Ubuntu are still too difficult to use for normal folks. Give your parents Ubuntu and see how far they get trying to play a DVD or uploading music to an ipod.

I was thinking along a similar vein a few years ago.

I was thinking of something like a long string of Christmas lights, with the individual bulbs being small, high-efficiency types. If you put them on a dimmer, they could shut off a certain fraction of the bulbs, reducing the light output. You could string them around the room, in the corner between the wall and the ceiling. That way, you'd have more even lighting, with fewer "hot spots."

Alas, no one has seen fit to produce such a beast. And LED rope lights, which come closest to implementing this idea, are neither cost-effective nor bright enough for what I'm wanting.

Also, I've been very disappointed with the color temperature of LEDs and CFLs.

A few years ago, Aerovironment had a 2-seat kit car they'd built. With lithium batteries, it had excellent range, but they wanted to be able to drive it further. So, they made a small, two-wheel trailer for it which contained a small, gasoline motor, a small fuel tank and a generator. Drive it around town on batteries. Hook up the trailer when you want to do a road trip. Best of both worlds.

I'm surprised no one has come out with one of those for the Nissan Leaf, yet. Seems like the most logical way to proceed. Alternately, if you don't want to drag a trailer, come up with something which attaches to the rear end, like a trailer-hitch-mounted cargo rack. It would add a couple feet to your length, and you might want air shocks on the rear end for load leveling, but you could attach the engine when you need it and do without the extra weight when you don't need it.

Actually this is exactly what I want. I need something like an Asus RTN16, but cheaper. The Raspberry Pi seems to fit this bill quite nicely.

"NHTSA in fact drains the gas tanks on gas cars (including the Volt!) BEFORE they wreck them because of the danger of the gasoline."

Do you have a reference for this? Not that I don't believe you, but if this is true, GM just got a whole load of bad press which may have set back the electric car over something that was NHTSA's fault. It's unbelievable that they wouldn't test gasoline cars and electric cars on the same footing. If they first drain the gas tank then they HAVE to drain the battery before the test for a good comparison.

I think the tweet idea is slightly different. For example, a lot of work that a scientist does is collecting data to make sure equipment is working properly. Usually these experiments aren't worth publishing and probably wouldn't make it past a peer review because 1) they're usually not novel experiments 2) they don't tell a story or add much value, but I think it could be useful to share this type of data. I mean, if you've collected it, why not share it?

My smartphone changed my life (I think for the better). It's the GPS, not the web browsing that is the best feature. Last week I went on a business trip, rented a car, didn't have to bother with maps or worry about getting lost, my phone told me where to go.

This is getting blown way out of proportion.

See this article for another view: http://www.economist.com/node/21541395

Specifically the last paragraph:
"What is left unsaid in all this is the fact that conventional cars with a tank full of petrol are far greater fire hazards than electric cars will ever be. Some 185,000 vehicles catch fire in America each year, with no fewer than 285 people dying as a consequence. But, then, people have been living with the hazard of petrol for over a century. Irrationally, electric-vehicle fires are perceived as somehow more worrisome simply because they are new."

In this case, the backplate of the iphone had been replaced (you can tell from the apple logo in the picture). Obviously I don't know if this was the cause though, but perhaps the backplate was replaced because the original broke during a fall which may have jolted some internal circuitry close to the battery causing a local hotspot near the battery and then thermal runaway. Somehow I doubt that the battery would have been punctured just by dropping/replacing the backplate though.

Apple purchasing this patent from Xerox is essentially equivalent to Apple outsourcing their R&D. Same end result.

After reading multiple posts and comments about Apple's patents, there are a lot of people who feel this is counter productive...I don't know why.

IMHO, the patent system is broken when a company can file a patent without actually having a solid working product first, this sometimes happens. But clearly, in a lot of Apple's patents, such as this one, it isn't the case. If Apple, or another company, invests billions of dollars into R&D to make a product, they should be able to protect it. In fact, it would be counter productive if they couldn't protect it because it would discourage them from investing in R&D and then the nice things wouldn't even be invented in the first place.

I'm just saying be realistic and stop making it sound as if lithium-ion batteries are intrinsically dangerous so that you can push your agenda for your design

A lithium-ion battery will not normally reach 120C. It will only do so if damaged or if there's a defect. Just like you don't want to be driving around in a car with a damaged gas tank. You're in just as much danger sitting on top of a tank of gasoline as you are sitting on top of a lithium-ion battery pack.

Lithium-ion batteries are not any more intrinsically dangerous than other high energy content materials. Whenever you concentrate high energy things, they must be treated with respect. Just because you have to take different precautions when working with lithium-ion batteries as opposed to gasoline, does NOT mean lithium-ion batteries are more dangerous.

You realize that you're talking about lithium-metal right? All mainstream electric vehicles are using lithium-ion which is a different technology. A lithium-ion battery _will_not_ catch fire when exposed to air and water. Lithium-ion batteries will catch fire when heated to above around 120C which can happen by an internal short circuit, or if punctured by a piece of metal.

Stop spreading FUD. Lithium-ion batteries are much safer than lithium-metal batteries, which is why lithium-ion batteries are being used despite their lower energy density.

One of the main things about "cloud" is that you can "spin up" a server image in some professionally-managed (you hope) data center and put whatever on it. There is plenty of talk about "private clouds," which is where you have in-house servers running VMWare or Xen or something like that, where you can "spin up" new server images on your existing hardware.

Companies have been building intranets, which use Internet-type services but run internally. Private clouds are merely "clouds" which run internally. Those are NOT going away.

There are simply too many questions about security and reliability with publicly-available clouds. And, as many others have pointed out, there's a bandwidth bottleneck when you put heavily-used services somewhere outside of your building.

I do see an increasing amount of "Bring Your Own Device" in businesses. People are using personally-owned cellphones to connect to company directories, e-mail and the like. The problem I see what this is that you have to let your employer have admin rights on your device. If your cellphone gets stolen, they need a way to ensure that your credentials, stored on the phone, aren't used to access proprietary corporate data. I'm pointedly NOT accessing the corporate e-mail system through my phone because I'm NOT comfortable with giving someone else admin rights on a device for which I'm paying, and which holds a great deal of my personal data.

Consequently, a middle ground will need to evolve. You will need a way to use your iPad or Android-based tablet to connect to company data, in secure fashion, and be able to use it, but keep NO data permanently stored on the device.

There is already a system out there which allows you to "drive" apps on one device but run them on another machine, using the CPU, RAM, storage, etc. of the other, possibly faster, machine. And I'm talking finer granularity than PCAnywhere, or RDP or VNC.

X-Windows

You can have a desktop on the machine you're physically using, driving multiple applications which are actually running on other machines. You can be using some wimply little thin client, but running 5 different apps on 5 different, server-class, application servers. Each application server hosts one (or more) app(s), not an entire desktop. Citrix will let you do something similar. Sun had some really sophisticated software which would do this, too; you could run Linux-based apps next to Windows-based apps, driving all of them from a thin client. You could connect multiple thin clients together, giving you multiple screens and the system would automatically scale your desktop to handle all of the screens. I haven't looked too closely since Oracle acquired them, so I'm not sure if the software and thin clients are still available.

Take this to the next level. You bring your tablet to work. You connect with the corporate wifi and make a secure connection to the application servers. Your "start" menu (or something like it) populates with apps you can use. You use the user interface on your tablet to drive them, but the apps are actually running on server-class app servers within the company. The data stays on the servers, your tablet is little more than a dumb, graphics terminal. You aren't constrained by the CPU in your tablet. Low CPU usage = long battery life (assuming you can come up with some kind of low-power-consumption wifi).

You travel on business. You use existing wifi (or cellular data) infrastructure and VPN into the company network. Your apps appear. You do what you need to do. Not as responsive, because there is more latency, but still usable.

If you take a laptop on business, it doesn't matter if some TSA bonehead feels the need to confiscate it. No data is stored on the laptop. It is just a mobile thin client. And, if it's company provided, you probably shouldn't have any personal data on there.

If you have a desktop machine at the office, with wired networking, it hits the same set of app servers. Consquently, your apps are consistent between the desktop machine and the tablet. Also, the data is in the expected places between the desktop machine and the tablet.

You leave the company. Your credentials on the company network are shut down. You keep your device but you can no longer access the corporate apps and their data. No data was ever stored on your machine, so there is little worry about loss of proprietary corporate data.

I was able to use xterm, vim-gtk, netscape and various other apps over LBX and a 28.8 modem connection back in the '90's. Viewing images was painfully slow, and you certainly didn't want to play video through that link, but a lot of stuff was quite workable, even then. Modern 3G or wifi has much more bandwidth. The connection protocol would need some kind of caching and compression, especially for remote VPN connectivity.

Yes, you will need network engineers to install and maintain the wifi. You will need system/network admins to keep track of who can access what and from where. You will still have systems in-house, in a private cloud. A small company may use publicly-available cloud servers, but when they start having multiple people working from one, physical location, the services will need a way to migrate in-house. As such, there needs to be a common way of storing server images, so that you can migrate your existing apps and data from a publicly-available cloud server to a private cloud server.

Certain positions are not going away. Only clueless bean-counters will think that network engineers and admins aren't needed. But then, they already think that, until such time as their absence causes problems. Additional application developers will be needed as platforms change.

That's where I think IT will be in 10 years. Everything old will be new again. Certain positions will always be needed.