I guess you're right. I shouldn't have said, "never worked." I should have said, "never entered commercial production." I'm just upset that Concorde wasn't allowed to enter super-sonic speed close enough to the US continent to be profitable long-term and folded before I was old enough to afford a ticket.

I almost forgot that my keyboard is now always at the right height! Great feature, keyboard trays suck ;-)

I don't use it every day but on days when I know I'll be sitting at home, too, it's nice to stand. Or on days after a big workout and I don't want to cramp to my chair. It's also nice to be able to stand when you're watching Live Meeting or Lync so you don't fall asleep or feel like you haven't moved in a forever if you call into two or three meetings back to back.

I wonder if Microsoft is subsiding Sony's bid to make sure tech enthusiasts won't buy any? Or could the Raspberry Pi be okay because it doesn't have any lithium batteries or rely on any Sony-supplied software or media?

The only problem with sonic booms from the Concorde was that Boeing's own supersonic airliner never worked.

You have your facts wrong, but in an interesting way. We never decided that we couldn't force people into quarantine. One of the first pieces I ever read on drug resistant tuberculosis included an interview with a guy shackled to a bed in a New York hospital because he repeatedly skipped his meds. I didn't dig up that story which my quick search, but I did find this NOVA timeline. Check it out:

• New York City detained more than 200 people who refused TB treatment in the 1990s.
• The powers to involuntarily quarantine people were expanded after 9/11.

And a direct quote (from the as of 2004 part):

• The Division of Global Migration and Quarantine, part of the CDC's National Center for Infectious Diseases, controls quarantine issues in the United States today. The Division oversees eight national quarantine stationsâ"in New York, Atlanta, Miami, Chicago, Seattle, San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Honolulu. At present, federal, state, and some city health officials have the right to isolate or quarantine individuals who are ill or may become ill with a potentially lethal infectious disease.

So we never stopped quarantining people. Anyway, political correctness has nothing to do with TB treatment, or with drug resistant strains of TB. From my readings, drug resistant TB incubates in Russian Prisons and Mexican day laborers, and in India. Given your self professed aversion to political correctness, I'm surprised you skipped over those populations and leapt to "immune compromised patients with no self control." You may have meant inmates in the aforementioned Russian prisoners, who literally have no control over their surroundings or their treatments, but it sounded like an unsubtle swipe at gay people. That part of your comment sounded an awful lot like 90s-era hate speech, which had moved from "AIDS is God actively killing homosexuals to", "HIV isn't a problem because it only kills people who lack self-control [and have un-Christian sex before marriage]". I have never heard, anywhere, that people with AIDS are contributing to drug resistant TB. If they stop taking their meds, they die.

Lastly, you seem to be upset about "ObamaTax". That's okay. But to clarify, did you really think a government that can force people people to buy insurance couldn't already force them into quarantine? Or is the costs aspect that upsets you? Maybe you have some nuanced views, but you sure seem like a troll, so I don't mind feeding you LMGTFY links. But even if you are, I didn't want you worrying about our government not being able to quarantine people ;-)

Keep reading! You can find the PDF here via the Texas GOP Convention site. I had to track it down myself because it was so unbelievable; it seemed like Huff Po had fallen for a juvenile prank.

We affirm that the practice of homosexuality tears at the fabric of society and contributes to the breakdown of the family unit. Homosexual behavior is contrary to the fundamental, unchanging truths that have been ordained by God, recognized by our country’s founders, and shared by the majority of Texans.

Homosexuality must not be presented as an acceptable “alternative” lifestyle, in public policy, nor should “family” be redefined to include homosexual “couples.” We believe there should be no granting of special legal entitlements or creation of special status for homosexual behavior, regardless of state of origin. Additionally, we oppose any criminal or civil penalties against those who oppose homosexuality out of faith, conviction or belief in traditional values.

I just goes on

Voter Rights Act – We urge that the Voter Rights Act of 1965 codified and updated in 1973 be repealed and not reauthorized.

and on

We urge amendment of the Internal Revenue Code to allow a religious organization to address issues without fear of losing its tax-exempt status. We call for repeal of requirements that religious organizations send the government any personal information about their contributors.

and on

We support adoption of American English as the official language of Texas and of the United States.

It covers everything from banning red light cameras, opposing mandatory animal identification, and opposing Federal highways through Texas to rubbing salt in wounds like the restoration of plaques honoring the Confederate Widow’s Pension Fund to the Texas Supreme Court building. No wonder these people are so upset. They're beset on all sides by people who want to speak Spanish or burn American flags or say that gay bashing is bad or let African Americans and Hispanic Americans vote. You know, people who don't want to say "under god" in the pledge of allegiance, or who think that religious monuments shouldn't be erected on Federal land. Maybe they should feel under assault, people who think like they do are dying off because they just don't make bigots like they used to.

In most offices environments, PCs with Windows Vista or Windows 7 are used for MS Office (or some other word processor, email, and calendar suite), web browsing (or accessing company internal web applications), and sometimes other little job or company specific utilities. Windows 8 doesn’t do any of that better, so there’s very little reason for IT organizations to push their companies to adopt Windows 8. What will they say? “The file copy dialogue box is better, and it will be more secure on devices that have an EFI feature your computer doesn’t have, so please accept long periods of downtime and relearn how to use a computer to do simple tasks while meeting your quarterly goals”?

The feature of note for Windows 8 is the ability to run on small, touchscreen devices. None of these new devices have been seen in their shipping form, businesses don’t have any running a previous version of Windows and that will need to be upgraded. The only small, touchscreen devices that business and entrepreneurs have deployed is the iPad*, and it won’t run Windows 8.

Microsoft’s sales office may be looking to license as many Windows 8 keys as it can, perhaps to create the impression of a successful launch. But the adoption of Windows 8 on PCs won’t determine the success of Windows 8, the adoption in the “post PC world” will.

As an elective, I took a course on the history of science in western civilization. Many of the breakthroughs in science came from scientists applying a better understanding of math to older experiments. So, the glory didn't always go to the person who first created and executed an innovative experiment, it went to the person who had the mathematical background to link the inputs to the outcome. This will especially relevant to your students, very few if any of them will get grants to conduct their own experiments right out of school. If they understand that they can make meaningful contributions to their field using only preexisting data, they may pay more attention ;-)

Do you mean the next generation of Linux programmers? I'm really happy to say that they can buy a Linux computer, an unlocked one even, at RadioShack. That's not even considering Raspberry Pi. I'm not going to say that Microsoft can't, won't, or wouldn't exploit UEFI Secureboot to hurt Linux, but the future for gadget geeks is looking a lot better than if did a decade ago, when RadioShack stopped selling things like the "Engineer's Mini-Notebook".

The idea of Monsanto as IBM is interesting, but I suspect it would turn out more like Monsanto as Sun. The developed a miracle gene, once that gene is in a plant, the plant does a lot of the rest. I don't think they could give their IP away for free and then rely on services rather than licensing fees. The only alternative I can see, if licensing seeds is too ethically or legally dubious (or becomes impractical), would be for Monsanto to own their own farmland and vertically integrate. They would have to use their seeds and not allow anyone else access. I can see a million ways that could go wrong, and if it went right it would create a farm system where the only way to grow soybeans or corn would be as a Monsanto employee, no self-owned farms. When one person (or company) owns all the capital you wind up with sort of a neo-sharecropper situation. Which I guess is what we have now, Monsanto owns the IP, and takes a share of the crop (revenue).

If Monsanto's practices are legal (which I think they are, they win a lot of court cases) and the situation must change (I'm not sure how dire it is but I'm not involved in agribusiness) the options seem to be:

• Wait for their Roundup Ready patent to expire. Pay the piper (as I said in my last post) or don't use the seeds.
• Regulate them as a natural monopoly.
• Break them up like AT&T.

Having Monsanto around may be scary, but I don't know if their behavior demands intervention :-/

I generally think of Monsanto as evil. The power that Monsanto has over large portions of the global food supply frightens me. That said, the "Roundup Ready" gene is really useful to farmers. People complain about Monsanto's use of terminator seeds, patents, lawsuits, etc. only because it is so difficult to compete without using Monsanto's products. Otherwise, no would care.

Soya beans and civilization in Brazil are both older than Monsanto. The Brazilian state could have banned the import, distribution, and cultivation of GMOs - but it did not. And Brazilian farmers could have used their existing seeds, but they did not. They used the piper's awesome seeds. Given what I know about Brazilian politics and trade practices, and human nature, I suspect this case is rooted more in the desire not to pay that piper than in actual law.

The summary isn't wrong, but it seems like a lot of people who are reading it (and commenting) are getting the impression that Intel has already made improvements and is using them on shipping devices without knowing if it's going to give them back.

Mike Bell is talking about something he says Intel is"working on, not something that Intel is shipping or even something that he claims is totally functional and free of bugs. There's a big distinction between "we're greedy bastards" and "we're not releasing source to beta versions of undistributed software." I think the summary could reflect better.

Thanks for that tip. I'll have to check CherryPy out now that I'm find myself writing web apps again. One of the things I liked about GWT was that not all of the Java compiled to JavaScript, if that makes sense. You could leave parts of your app as Java classes that would communicate with the pages, but execute server-side. In my (admittedly limited) experience, GWT was the easiest way to hook up active Java to a web GUI.