It doesn't have to be the bottom of the ocean. (If you look at that link, it has some big names in the technology world behind it.)

As above, my car's radio antenna is embedded into my windshield glass.

As for talking on a cell phone while carpooling, I carpool for lunch with coworkers and sometimes one of us (one of the non-drivers, usually) does need to take a call from work and the rest of us understand as we all work in the same place.

What Spectre says above. My Toyota Avalon has an antenna embedded in the windshield glass.

Passengers can also use cell phones, you know. Some people carpool. Also, I don't know about you, but I like to listen to the radio while driving.

What's funny is Sprint phones can and do roam on Verizon. Since I switched to Sprint (from AT&T), I've been able to surf the web on my phone on the DC metro by roaming on Verizon towers - for free. (Of course, now GSM towers for AT&T/T-Mobile are going up in the DC metro too.)

I like how at first the OP mentions that the Droid has the same hardware as the Pre and later in the post says that users aren't impressed with the Pre's hardware.

Also, the Samsung Moment coming out in 2 weeks for Sprint has an 800MHz ARM-based CPU, where the one powering the Droid is apparently only 600MHz (I'm assuming that since the design is similar, the clock speed is a valid way to compare the performance of the CPUs; could be wrong on this).

As far as running Android 2.0, anyone with an Android phone can upgrade to that. That's one of the great things about Android in the first place.

In the end, though, I wish Motorola and Verizon good fortune launching this phone, because anything that increases Android (or Linux in general - Maemo is nice) adoption on consumer phones is cool with me. IMO Apple is so control freakish that they are firmly in "evil" territory, much more so than Microsoft.

I had to read The Lottery in English class in HS because the author graduated from my high school. It's kinda cool still seeing references to it, even in popular literature.

Oh, and for classic fantasy you can't do much better than pre-monotheistic mythology. Gilgamesh, the Iliad and Odyssey... all those fun gods and creatures that form the basis of modern fantasy. Don't forget the Celts and the Norse and the Slavs (Orson Scott Card wrote a book based on Slavic mythology!), and also don't forget African and Asian and pre-European-dominance Australian and American cultures as sources of myths that to this day color horror and fantasy.

I'd add some H. G. Wells and John W. Campbell - classics before Asimov (although Campbell's personal views are somewhat controversial now). And of course Asimov was mentioned by some people above me already.

Also, there are genres that fall within sci-fi and fantasy, like alternate history. Some good sources for short stories, too, are the Asimov's, Analog and SF&F literary magazines, and also short story digests published on a regular basis that include some big names writing short stories for the more literary public.

How are they going to use this for protecting crops? If ants are repelled, wasps and bees will be, too, and there goes your pollination.

Sweet, thanks for the awesome pointers. You've given me a whole lot of stuff to look over as a research starting point.

They're still pretty far from being able to do this at a scale practical for breaking RSA... ...but when scientists have reached the scale for breaking RSA, are there quantum algorithms that would work for breaking ECC? What about D-H? Are there any public key schemes that will still work when quantum computing is available?

It doesn't really matter to me whether it'll only ever be practical for labs to break - the government can afford that kind of muscle. If it's physically possible, they'll be able to do it. I'm working (very slowly) on an implementation of Chaumian anonymous crypto-cash, and in that application, all a government would need to do is break one key and an entire currency would go kaput. I need to include support for future-proof public key crypto algorithms as early as possible.

RTFS. It's a design patent, not a software (utility) patent.

Really?

FTFS: The complaint states: 'The notes are still accessible on the Kindle 2 device in a file separate from the deleted book, but are of no value. For example, a note such as "remember this paragraph for your thesis" is useless if it does not actually reference a specific paragraph.'

It's a sad day when we don't even bother reading the SUMMARY any more.

And that's a holdover from CP/M days.

Actually, Netflix used a different way to prevent gaming the system. They split the submitted predictions into two sets - the "quiz" set and the "test" set. The quiz set results are on the leaderboard; the test set is used for final judging.