+1.

None of the land line ISPs could guarantee that their connection speeds would always be greater than 0 either, and cable/fiber is a lot more dependable than wireless. Even at five nines any claim other than 0 would be false. Legislation like this is totally inane.

In my own little cynical version of reality I hope this bill passes and all of the providers put 0 bits per second as the minimum data rate on all of their phones, just to poke fun at the bureaucratic world we live in.

Ten years is a long period of time to come up with sums like that and expect the number to be shocking or even newsworthy. Yes, Blackberries have been the standard portable media device for government employees for over ten years. Yes, there is a PS3 supercomputer. Yes, both overseas and domestic troops are provided with entertainment systems and mp3 players for downtime when/where it's reasonable to do so.

I'm still not convinced that any of those figures are too high. The almost eight hundred billion we've spent so far on the Iraq war is a bit more of a concern. As a US tax payer, have you gotten your personal share of $2550 worth of value out of it? I don't think I have.

Thorium is about as abundant in the Earth's crust as lead. It's going to take a bit more than fifty years to use that up. The Thorium Energy Alliance (biased, I'm sure, but still) says there's enough of it in the US alone to sustain our country's current energy use for a thousand years.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thorium

C++ is nice, but I wonder how the game would perform in GLSL? Having spent a big part of my undergraduate CS elective budget on physics simulations and advanced rendering methods with GLSL, the first thing I thought when I got the game was how much faster it would be if all the heavy lifting was done on the GPU.

I am sure Notch had his reasons for programming the whole thing in Java, I just hope those reasons weren't speed and cross-platform compatibility.

For the record, since there seems to be a fair amount of finger wagging here - it was a hypothetical situation. I don't go to bars. There aren't DUI checkpoints here. I've never driven drunk and I don't think it's okay to do so.

I know it frequently happens though, and I think a service like this is one way to potentially reduce the number of borderline (possibly over the limit, though probably not) cases of people taking that risk. Those that are too drunk to check or lack the judgement to make the appropriate decision would obviously be unaffected.

Having a breathalyzer handy is even better, though. I like binary yes/no answers.

I'm at a bar, I've had a couple drinks, but nothing excessive. It's not late and I can safely get myself home as I have done in the past, but there's a plausible chance I'd get busted for a DUI if I got stopped on the way home. I'm a little buzzed and 0.001% over is all it takes. I check my new iPhone app and lo and behold, there's a checkpoint on the only highway between the bar and my house. I don't want to spend the night in jail, so I take a cab instead.

That app would save me money and jail time, save my district a bunch of paperwork, and make the roads safer.

The other side of the argument is that people will know where the checkpoint is and try to drive around it. If anything, this being open should encourage better checkpoint planning. There are plenty of high traffic bottlenecks in every state, so that's a poor excuse. Worst case scenario is the appropriate side roads would need increased patrols.

If anything, we should pursue more nuclear power. Want to be safe about it? Start by redesigning, replacing or refurbishing the older US plants that have a remote chance to fail in the (overly dramatized) way the Fukushima plant did. From there, build more plants - especially in places that depend on oil or old coal plants to keep the lights on. It's an opportunity to make more jobs on all levels and regions, and will actually provide a return on the investment via lower power costs.

Right now fuel costs for a nuclear plant are less than half that of its closest competitor (coal) and that gap continues to widen. Throwing that away is totally unreasonable given the current state of the western economy. Even better would be to start using thorium 232 - there's three times as much of that in the Earth's crust as there is uranium 238 and many modern plants can switch over to that with relatively little modification.

Ignoring the drivel that goes through trade chat (which can be turned off), World of Warcraft by itself isn't unreasonable for a father/daughter pair in her age group - it starts off easy, there's plenty of reading, it's actively rewarding, and there's lots of action and content to go through. If you want to be able to play with her, it's hard to go wrong with an MMO like that. It's designed with group play in mind. Then again, introducing her to that may be the first step down the long road of lifelong nerdiness, so exercise discretion.

I'd also give another vote for Minecraft, especially if you can set up (or find) a multiplayer server to play on with her. Double on the nerdiness there, though.

I don't value any of those things in a mobile platform. I don't even carry a regular phone. What's wrong with taking care of that stuff at home, and actually taking a break from the mindless tech noise in favor of being engaged in your immediate surroundings when you go out?

Then next time you're in a city restaurant or coffee shop, take a look around at any of the groups of people under thirty. There's a pretty good chance that none of them are talking to one another, because they're all too busy playing games or texting elsewhere. I don't want any part of that. The benefit simply doesn't outweigh the cost to me, and it's not because of the money.

Doing all those things you mentioned at full speed on the freeway is an entirely separate problem.

It's interesting trying to imagine how we, as relatively tech-savvy generation x slashdotter types (yes, I'm generalizing), will function around new technology when we're older. I'm already old enough that some of this new-fangled stuff doesn't appeal to me, like smartphones or Facebook or Twitter - but that's because I find them useless and intrusive. Will that somehow eventually devolve into me not being able to figure out the TV remote?

I suppose it goes the other way, too. When we're older, how many people will be left that know how to set the timing on a small block Chevy? I'm sure more of our parents know about that than we do.

In the winter here, none of those options are viable. The wind doesn't blow, the rivers are frozen, the sun doesn't come out, and there is no city-scale geothermal activity within 500 miles.

When the coal and oil run out, we'll need nuclear. Or hamsters.

Don't forget about the part where it doesn't count miles driven on roads that are privately maintained or already tolled. If I now lived in the house I grew up in, I'd be driving several miles every day outside the state/federal road maintenance area. I certainly wouldn't be pleased with getting fined for that.

There's really no good way to do this that works as well as the gas tax. And even that isn't great.

I can work here for the rest of my life, since this place is federally funded and I'm valuable enough to be virtually unfireable.

On the other hand, the pay sucks and I don't like the location so I'll be moving in a couple years.

I know exactly what you mean. Being decent looking, well dressed, in shape, having an education, a new car, a good 8-5 job with benefits and my own place doesn't do me a bit of good if there isn't anyone that'll go on that first date.

Mine is probably a two-fold problem though - there aren't 1000 women around my age within a 300 mile radius that I'd consider above the level of 'dreg'.

Fairbanks, Alaska. You will never find a more wretched hive of scum and villainy.

I've been pretty happy with my lossless collection though my Sennheiser HD598 on a Asus Xonar ST.

Of course my landlord scoffs at my measly garbage as he decides between his Bowers and Wilkins CT700 home theater and his Grado PS1000 + Woo Audio WA6-SE headphone setup. His mortgage payments make me feel a little better, though.