The android Google TV I think will be a nice feature to have. Being able to transfer the web page from the computer screen to your tv screen using the Google Software is something that seems like its already been done,but hopefully many other platforms will jump on board with the idea!

speech software has been evolving at a steady pace. but the issue isn't that its the fact 90% of the users out there don't use it. if you live in a loud place with kids or other noise it will not work well. windows 7 has built in speech software and how many people use it. i played with the latest dragon speech software and i gotta admit its very good even without traning it. i did emails with it without any issue. but as i said speech software is more a toy then anything usefull. as people said it probly will have a good use on a cell phone rather then on a pc being it would be a easy way to chat rather then using the cell phones keypad. .

if we assume a 4 mile effective range (which i think is overly generous for a gun, but hey), that gives a mach 3 cruise missile approximatly 6 seconds within phalanx range, i'd love to see a crew that can reload ammo cans on an opperating, moving and firing phalanx system in that amount of time. you would just need ~8 missiles to overload a single phalanx (2 100-round bursts to take out a missile, phalanx runs out after 7 missiles), assuming its range is 4 miles (i believe that even if it is, it would be severly less effective due to bullet scatter), purely on ammo capacity

Phalanx might work against one or two simultanious missiles, but overpowering it with sheer numbers wouldnt be all that hard

When the web was new and I had to make presentations like this, I would do HTML pages (with bullets) instead of powerpoint slides. The big difference was that I would also provide lots of links to additional information and details on each point. It took longer to write (both because of the additional information, but mostly because we didn't have great tools to assist), but was more engaging with the audience and did provide the additional details that a bullet-list-slide didn't.

Nowadays, I might think about using something like Prezi for some of my briefings. While it does allow a linear path through a presentation, the information is layed out spatially and allows zooms and pans both through the path and independent of the path. This makes it pretty easy to provide additional information and show the relationship between some of the points. It does allow bullet points, but mostly so it can mock their use.

Thank you, sir. I applaud your efforts and admire your wit.

"actual proprietary IE features were never used as widely as Slashdot assumes they were."

Yeah? Like ActiveX?

I think in this case, the chicken (being stupid) came first

Meaning no offense, but why in the hell would this make me want a debit card?

Maybe the bank would give me back my fees and losses, but I've still bounced checks with God-knows-who and caused them all manner of hassle and had them incur fees and lost trust with them. If my bank account gets cleaned out the day before my IRS check hits, do you seriously think they'll just chuckle and say "oopsie, well, we'll clear it again". No. I'm going to spend hours on the phone with everyone I sent a check or made an automated payment to, trying to dig my way out of the hole that used to be my bank account.

I've had an account cleanout happen (account was cleaned out by lawyers suing my parents, and I stupidly left my mother's name on my bank account). My mortgage and car payment checks were in the outgoing mail the same day I received the "summons to trustee" notice, and all my money was gone. It worked out, but I had to take two days off work (lost vacation time) to make all the necessary phone calls, and I still had a black mark on my credit rating for several years afterward, even though none of the bounced checks were determined to be my fault. I worked for a bank service company at the time, and they routinely pulled credit ratings (since I handled account details on a lot of people). I had to spend a couple of hours explaining the whole situation at work, and it's possible I could have lost my job over it. Fortunately I didn't. Net result was an absolute nightmare, and my bank was actually pretty nice and helpful about the whole thing.

I also had my credit card number compromised once (Hannaford breach, and my card was actually used overseas). Visa called me, said that the card had been suspended but that any automated payments I had set up would work for another week to give me time to transition to the new card number, went through the outstanding charges over the phone to verify that they were all valid, apologized for the inconvenience, and I never even saw any of the fraudulent charges at all. I spent 15 minutes on the phone with them, 10 minutes entering the new card on my automated payments, and another 5 minutes cutting up the old card when the new one came in. Impact to my credit rating: none.

"Yes, the debit card can be almost as secure as the credit card if you use it as a credit card, and if your bank is really nice the resulting damage to your account and credit rating can be built back to almost new after a lot of effort!"

Thanks, I'll use a credit card. If it gets used fraudulently, the onus is on the credit card company to help me out, because my money is not gone. A credit card does not have access to my checking account. That's a very important distinction to me.

Yes, yes it is. That doesn't mean it's wrong, and by extrapolation that doesn't mean the vast majority of censorship that happens on a daily basis is wrong, quite a lot of it is perfectly acceptable within the culture in which it exists. Here in the west, for instance, we're happy to prevent minors seeing 18 rated movies or buying pornography - that's one form of censorship which is generally seen as beneficial to society, others might be the use of racial slurs, or sexual harrasment. On a technical definition, both censorship, but most people are happy for them to be censored.

Are Apple censoring? Yes, in fact by their very own definition they are (objecting to it because of its content). Is that a bad thing? Well that's a slightly grey area, I'd probably come down on the side of no, since his works are still available through lots of other channels, even on the iPhone (via the web) - if he had a message which was of specific import to iPhone users and they were censoring him on the device most likely to get the message across, that would be different.

The video above does it some justice. I was quite a distance away (St. Louis), though it sure looked like it was falling nearby. Bright, traffic-light green body and tail, lasting maybe 5-6 seconds of its descent. When the object disintegrated it burst into a ball of yellow/orange, and looked not unlike the explosive, expanding shells they put off during the 4th of July.

Awesome sight. The trajectory must have been very horizontal for the tail to have been so long, and it must have disintegrated very high up in the atmosphere for it to be viewable over such a large area.

All he's saying is that the government should convert some military pork to space pork.

And considering how racist we humans are, meeting the aliens will def not be very peacefull, atleast at first, followed by decades of hatred. So it might be that we are better off not meeting aliens anytime soon.

Or maybe we meet aliens, but the distance is so vast, and neither of our technologies are capable for actually getting into same physical place, and we may only communicate with vast latency.

or maybe they are so much more technologically advanced, that despite them being very friendly our hatred pushes them away.

Who knows, possibilities are endless, but very few of them seem to be positive.

Oh I don't know... try almost any modern window, car body panels, ductwork etc - anything made of polycarbonate, HDPE, UHMWPE...

Not all plastics are untreated, basic PVC or supercheap plastic used in drinks bottles.

1 Photon to one electron is only half the story. If the photon has more energy than the electron then there is a loss. The electron has a fixed energy (band gap) and the photons *must* have that much energy or more before it works at all. There are other details too, in silicon its not a direct band gap, so each photon cannot just eject a single electron, it must also emit a phonon (heat). Silicon has a theoretical maximum efficiency (electrical) of about 29-30% IIRC in sunlight (thats at 100% quantum efficiency for all photons at and above the band gap).

No, the worst case is much, much lower. The problem is that there are two different definitions of efficiency going on here. The 90-100% conversion to electricity means that 90-100% of the absorbed photons are turned into single electrons. This does *not* say that 90-100% of the energy in the original photons is converted to energy in the electrons. In fact, just as in all other solar cell devices, the photons initially create fast moving electrons, converting all of their energy. But most of that kinetic energy is lost to heat before the electrons can be extracted from the device and used to do work.

So, the take-home message is that efficiency can refer to number of converted photons, regardless of how much energy was lost to heat.