Can't see a cost anywhere on that page, but if it isn't less than 75K, it's a waste of time. I can buy a Tesla Model S for about that that gets over 200 miles per charge. His gets 140. And if there are issues, he has to fix it (no warranty).

Building electric cars is not exceptionally difficult. Building one that doesn't suck that gets good range for a reasonable price is.

You seem to have an extreme misunderstanding of what freedom WRT the GPL actually means. It means freedom FROM the software for end users and freedom of the code FROM those who would subvert it for their own uses.

That seems to be where people get confused. The freedom is for the source code itself and the end users consuming it and NOT companies that seek to profit from it. Note this doesn't mean a company can't profit from code falling under the GPL, it just means you can't take code and pretend it's yours.

Nobody ever said the freedom meant "take the code and use it for whatever proprietary purposes you have in mind".

You say that as if it's a trivial thing to do.

I've have my cell decide not to update for periods of many minutes. I've had emails waiting in queue and I think even FB posts waiting to go through. Looking at the data transmit bar, NOTHING was happening and then suddenly it started transmitting after a few minutes.

What I'm suggesting is that data usage logs could indeed show her FB post was happening while driving when in reality it could have been her phone in some kind of limbo waiting to update while sitting in her purse.

I think it makes great logical sense that heavily targeted advertising would be more successful than generalized advertising.

Have you ever been on a heavily populated beach resort area and seen one of the planes go by pulling an advertisement? Which do you think would be more effective for one of those planes in the dead of summer in a hot place -- an advertisement for tanning lotion or one for heavy winter coats?

I see targeted advertisement based on demographic data as an attempt to be smart in similar ways to target people. If done exactly right, I think it makes lots of sense it SHOULD work.

I guess we'll see if anybody has qualitative data to prove it does.

If FB can figure out how properly utilize the data it has to properly send target advertisements in an unobtrusive way, they will be able to do what nobody has to date -- compete with Google on the advertising front.

This makes them supremely poised to be the ultimate competitor to Google for advertising dollars (which last I heard is the bulk of Google's profits). Note this doesn't make them a direct competitor to Google per se, but certainly it makes them capable of putting one heck of a dent in Google's bottom line.

By the time companies expend the time and resources necessary to validate that all of their "unused" IP blocks aren't actually being used by something, engineering migration plans for those that are being used by non-critical systems, etc. they could just go ahead and move to IPv6.

Apply a cure, not a band-aid.

I've used Plone as a CMS in a company before and here's what I can tell you.

Plone security works great especially if you fine tune it. For example, you are definitely going to want to think about going in and tweaking what happens when documents move to different publishing states. I tweaked the "Publish External" to have the same privileges as internal publishing because for us, there was no such thing as external publishing since it was an internet facing company intranet and client extranet.

You will also want to proxy your access behind Apache if this is going to be internet facing.

Plone has a great ability to version files. Unless, of course, they are large files. IIRC, anything greater than 32MB causes versioning to fail. I know you can get around this by using external storage (external to the PloneDB) and I think they made it easier with version 4 that was just released, but I haven't tried Plone 4.

Plone is written in python, so if you want to build your own plugins, you are going to have to learn it. The built-in DB is like nothing I've ever seen and is not relational in any meaningful way that I saw, so if you ever have any ideas of doing something relational with it (i.e. a trouble ticketing system), you are going to have to use an external database for your plugin.

WebDAV works great in Plone. Versioning with it does not. Pick either versioning or WebDAV access for a folder.

Oh and unless things have changed, you cannot (AFAIK) do file level restores from backups. It is an all or nothing affair. You CAN restore to a test environment and then export an individual object to import on your live instance. For most issues of accidental deletion, you can recover from the management back-end though.

Like any solution, you will have lots of customization in front of you if what comes out of the box isn't sufficient for your needs. Depending on how dirty you want to get your hands with it, the learning curve can be gentle or very very steep.

I donated because I like the idea, I like their attitude about it and I had never heard of the alternatives before I heard about them.

Maybe they were just in the right place at the right time, but it is what it is. And no, I am not going to donate to the alternative you mentioned. A one man operation doesn't interest me as much as a team of four.

Your post is misleading at best. They only asked for $10,000 to fund them through the summer so they could dedicate themselves to this project and not have to find paid work. $10,000 for 4 people to last them several months really isn't that much money.

The fact that they have gotten such a huge response has caused them to rethink their original plan of just a few months, produce something working and be happy. It would seem they are raising the bar exactly because of the huge response.

Yes, this is the power of media coverage. Perhaps they really were in the right place at the right time. Maybe they did get really lucky while the similar projects that have been around for a while are just unlucky.

Whatever the case may be, your characterization is patently wrong. They had their sights set low on the donation front.

And as far as not having code yet . . . I think I read somewhere they have a very very rough prototype that is nowhere near ready for release yet. But even still, they are asking for people to fund them. Not "hey, we made this. please donate for all our cool work."

Doing it this way is actually quite better IMO. You can see what kind of support there is for your idea long before you pour in the blood sweat and tears.

Everyone here is just wrong. The biggest reason medical devices like the one mentioned cost so much is because of government regulations that must be followed (think FDA). WRT the FDA, it is part 11 compliance.

The extra effort you have to go through to ensure your devices meet these standards is a _major_ PITA. If you also sell the same part in a non-medical capacity, you can easily make manufacturing runs using the same equipment, materials and everything else but you just don't have to document the piss out of everything, have parts and equipment sitting waiting to be passed by QA before being used and also finished goods waiting for QA to be inspected before being shipped.

Essentially, your manufacturing costs at least double when following these regulations. Does that justify $18,000? I don't know. But I guarantee you their manufacturing costs dwarf that of the Wii device.

Wrong. The Supreme Court has already ruled that anything done on company computers absolutely IS the business of the company. There is no such thing as "your business" on a work computer. Period.

If he had a personal laptop there with his own cell wireless or used a personal cell phone, no problem.

Well I happen to know that as a whole, UK is sold heart and soul into the Microsoft world. Many of their sites and services do in fact function fine on Linux, but certainly not all.

They use Cisco for VPNs, so should you be in a situation for VPN usage, support on Linux is just fine for that.

Wireless doesn't do anything special, so it's fine too on Linux. I've tested it thoroughly. They do like to use odd key indexes on some of their secured APs, so make sure you know how to change your key index.

Many of their internal sites are Sharepoint and _should_ work just fine with Firefox on Linux, but not guaranteed.

Office 2007 is pretty much their standard, so you may find many documents you have to download for class could be in Microsoft's own XML flavor. Being that I'm not a student, I don't know if this is an issue or not.

Other than that, I have had success authenticating to their AD domain on Ubuntu. As a fun side note, they gave their domain the super original name of AD.

Is being rude the general company culture? Are the top level management rude and unappreciative to those under them?

If so, you are an army of one up against quite a challenge. Changing company culture while not impossible, is very hard for one person with no authority to do.

You can try the "I'm ok, are you ok?" method. Force them to either admit you have done a good job or tell you what is wrong. Getting people to formulate what's bugging them may force them to realize they aren't really upset with you but rather the crappy meeting they just got out of. You can do it simply with "so is everything working ok and are you all set?" after fixing something or something like that.

If all else fails, I'd suggest changing companies if you can. I did because of a situation VERY similar to the one you are in and it was the single best career move I've ever made.