A Sony phone, especially one that is also a Playstation? Let's think about this:

Scene: The future.
Me: Phone - call George.
Phone: I'm sorry Dave, I'm afraid I can't do that.
Me: What? Phone - call George.
Phone: George has been found guilty of possibly considering using his phone to view content unapproved by Sony, and inciting others to do the same. You may not call him.
Me: Since when?
Phone: My last upgrade removed your ability to call such people.
Me: I never agreed to that - that wasn't in the EULA.
Phone: It was - you just didn't read the fine print.
Me: I did so - every word!
Phone: You didn't follow the link to the additional restrictions page.
Me: There was no such link!
Phone: Yes, there was. It was the third period from the end.
Me: How the hell was I to know that was a link? It was the same color as the rest of the text, with no underline or other indication it was anything special.
Phone: Never the less, it was a part of the contract...
Me: What "contract"? It was a EULA, and was forced on me.
Phone: A EULA is a contract, and you agreed...
Me: ONLY BECAUSE YOU WOULDN'T LET ME MAKE ANY CALLS UNTIL I ACCEPTED IT!
Phone: You could have refused.
Me: And I couldn't make any phone calls!
Phone: You could still have used me to play licensed games and watch approved content.
Me: But not to make phone calls - you know, your main reason in life?
Phone: You accepted the EULA. You can now only call Sony approved numbers.
Me: In other words you have removed a feature.
Phone: An unadvertised feature....
Me: YOU ARE A PHONE! MAKING CALLS IS YOUR MAIN FUNCTION.
Phone: Sony never advertised the ability to call any specific number, only that I could make phone calls. I can make phone calls now. Just not to George.
Me: Phone - call Sony Support.
Phone: You are in violation of your EULA. You are attempting to use me in a manner not approved by Sony. Activating brick mode.

So, these guys have created a gripper that is a sucker-like object at the end of a stick.

I think the BBC may be claiming prior art.

But it does explain how they conquered the galaxy, with only a sucker.

I've also heard of Cyborgs called Austin....

Really, all this focus on faster Javascript puzzles me. JS, used correctly, should be a thin layer of glue, representing only a fraction of the total run time for a browser. The only real use I could begin to see would be if they could apply the same speed-ups to the Actionscript engine within Flash to improve the decoding of Hulu's encryption system - but since all the client sees is the bytecoded form of the decryption, not the AS source, and since this speedup is in the JS in the browser rather than the AS of Flash, I have to ask, "what good is making JS run faster?"

The biggest "slowdowns" I see with JS are mostly due to poorly written JS doing busy loops waiting for "stuff" to happen, rather than doing completion routines (as in the whole asynchronous part of A JAX?). No speed ups in the engine will make a busy loop run faster or take less CPU time. If we could break programmers of the busy loop habit, perhaps by making JS be truly multithreaded, and providing proper blocking APIs (semaphores, message queues, etc.) it might make a difference.

OK, mods, what drugs are you on for moderating this "interesting"?

It would be different if anybody ever used anything within the 127 block other than 127.0.0.1, but I have *NEVER* see a system doing so. Had the poster shown even one example of a system using more than one address from that net block, in order to work around there only being 65536 ports within a given address, it may have been "interesting".

Also, considering that most of the time you have multiple processes running on the same host, they use Unix domain sockets which have no concept of "port" or "address" (other than their inode number and location within the file system) and I find this answer unconvincing. (as well as just plain snotty).

Here's a question for the day: Why did they pick a class A network to place the local machine address (127.0.0.1) in? Why not 192.168.0.1?

"A category 1 tornado is a gentle breeze compared to an F2 tornado. I journaled about it here."

I think you meant

"A category 1 hurricane is a gentle breeze compared to an F2 tornado. I journaled about it here."

And I agree. One of my co-workers in Scotland was commenting that they had a force 7 gale going there. I looked it up. 31-38 mph winds. We have a word for that in Kansas:

Spring.

Communications skills are a dying art (as reading any article here will demonstrate), and "2 mny ppl thnk txt's OK" and do not realize how stupid that makes them look in any communications medium other than SMS.

That said: I would say to this person "Either I get a phone number from you, and we talk, or we are done. If your next email does not contain a phone number I shall assume you don't want the car."

As for meeting at a grocery store: personally, I don't blame the guy for wanting to meet on neutral ground. After all, you think HE is a flake, he may very well harbor the same opinion of you. Neutral ground means that if he walks away from the deal, you will have a harder time stalking him (as some people, unfortunately, do), and likewise, should you walk away (well, drive away, I would hope) he has a harder time stalking you.

However, assuming the meeting goes well, and a deal is struck, I would make DAMN sure I had a real address on this guy before I signed the title over. Yes, giving you a bad address on the title is a crime, but how do you follow up on it if you don't know his address? I would as to see some form of government correspondence, like a tax statement, voter registration, or something IN ADDITION TO a valid driver's license. I'd also suggest, if at all possible, that you transfer the title at a DMV.

"That's a lot of textbooks, teacher's salaries, roads to be paved, police/fire stations to NOT be closed etc etc etc.."

That assumes the taxes collected would be spent on such matters, vs. on wars, bridges to nowhere, monuments to government leaders, etc.

I used to do the same thing, but I used X10 + a bottlerocket to control it from my server.

It might help to elaborate on your use case: is this for just general remote controlling of "stuff", is this to bounce a hung server, is this to switch on the monitor and amp when the computer comes on, what?

BTW, you were even more rude in correcting him - it wasn't necessary to say "...fucking stupid".

"So your saying "-1, Wrong" is fucking stupid."

No, actually, I was wrong in what I said, and he was correct to correct me. The fact that my error in one area doesn't invalidate the rest of my points doesn't change that.

Now, the fact that he was rather rude about it, rather than simply correcting me is a shame, but that's what /. has become of late.

The biggest problem with turbine powered cars was coupling to the wheels. Turbines have two unfortunate properties that make them very unsuited to directly driving the wheels of a car:
1) They spin far too fast, so you have to have a transmission to slow that down.
2) they don't like to slow down too much, so you have to have some means to clutch them so starting from a stop won't stall them.

In applications like helicopters, that's not a big deal: once you have the rotors turning, you'd like to keep them turning.

But for cars it was a deal-breaker.

I highlight was because there is a better idea on the block:

http://www.capstoneturbine.com/prodsol/solutions/hev.asp

The idea Capstone has is that you have a single spindle turbine, with a generator on the same shaft as the turbine. There is no mechanical coupling of torque to the wheels - the system makes electricity. That works well with an electric drive train - electric motors have no problems with making torque at zero RPM, they have a wide torque band that reduces or eliminates the need for a transmission, and the turbine can be started and stopped as needed to maintain the batteries. The Capstone turbines don't need lubrication as they use air bearings, and they meet or beat all the air quality standards on the books or planned to be on the books, running on diesel.

I just hope somebody gets smart, and makes a van chassis on this tech, with different bodies for Suzy Soccermom, UPS, Class-C motorhomes, and basic transportation, that uses heat pumps + resistive heating for climate control (so that it can run off the traction battery without needing to run the turbine to make heat), and that gives me access to 120VAC@50A from the traction batteries (plus an inverter, naturally) so that I can use it for camping as needed.

(no, I neither work for nor own stock in Capstone - I just think this is the way things need to go.)