Once you can answer the WIIFM question, then you are ready to talk to Bob. Bob will be asked to do work - to change the way he works, to learn a new system. In the short term, this will cause hassle, frustration, delay and extra work. Those are all negative things. Change _itself_ can be perceived as a negative thing.

To be worth it, it needs to either save Bob time, or remove one of his pain points. The board doesn't matter, no one else matters. Only Bob's pain points matter.

So, look at the existing system from Bob's point of view. What does he spend most of his time doing? How can you make that faster and less error prone? If you can do that, then you have the hook to pull in changes that benefit everyone else.

Because seeing this on the news as an advertisement for a TV show wasn't enough.

There's already been a court case about this, and the company which was doing it lost.

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

Canada's got two of them, with really imaginative names. :)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radarsat-1
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radarsat-2

The level of cost involved used to provide a limit on the intrusiveness of the search. Police used to need to provide at least 6+ officers (2 on 8 hour shifts) to watch an individual, that means that following someone involves substantial cost to the department. The cost itself provided a check on the intrusion.

Using a tracker changes that entirely. The police can quickly check many, many trackers from a central location. They don't need to invest 6+ officers to each individual, it's 6+ suspects per officer! All of a sudden, large scale intrusion is cheap and the limit is no longer present.

That's the point you need the courts to step in and put limits in place.

It's called a Loaded Labour Cost. Back the last time I had to deal with this (back in the 90's), the LLC for a staff member, regardless of salary ended up being around $150k/year. That's how much it cost the _employer_ to have you in a seat, pretty much regardless of your salary.

So, the federal government can either pay that themselves and have a full time employee on their staff, or they can pay that plus a markup and have a contractor they can get rid of whenever they want.

The contractor is typically better if only for the ease of downsizing.

http://scienceblogs.com/goodmath/2008/12/another_bad_metric_error_wages.php
http://answers.onstartups.com/questions/10624/calculating-loaded-labor-cost-for-roi

It's the _total_ international internet traffic which is down 10%. Given that P2P forms 30-50% of an ISPs traffic (supposedly), that means that there has been a 20-33% drop in P2P traffic. So, while it sounds small, it is actually a large difference to P2P, all without a single $25 letter being sent out.

Android is a loss leader, and not worth a lot to Google. Google's patents are probably in their core business, search and advertising. Since a lawsuit would result in settlement and cross licensing, Google's patents are worth a lot more for keeping Microsoft out of that core business than saving HTC $5-15 per handset.

Because vectors can't be initialized from initializer lists. At least, not until C++0x:

std::vector v = { "xyzzy", "plugh", "abracadabra" };

Won't compile with older C++ compilers.

While the following works now:

char *foo[] = { "xyzzy", "plugh", "abracadabra" };

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C%2B%2B0x#Initializer_lists

Considering we've seen a story about how everyone is using the same password everywhere, and how Sony got hacked again , exposing even more passwords, is it any surprise that a number of people are having their iTunes and PayPal accounts attacked and drained to buy game gold?

iTunes and PayPal are pretty huge targets, but who'd attack a single game if they had access to the back end?

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

Worldwide it was estimated in 2004 that 1.2 million people were killed (2.2% of all deaths) and 50 million more were injured in motor vehicle collisions.[1][39] India leads with 105,000 traffic deaths in a year, compared with over 96,000 in China.[40] This makes motor vehicle collisions the leading cause of injury death among children worldwide 10 – 19 years old (260,000 children die a year, 10 million are injured) [41] and the sixth leading preventable cause of death in the United States[42] (45,800 people died and 2.4 million were injured in 2005).[43] In Canada they are the cause of 48% of severe injuries.[44]

Complete with references.

Government mandated insurance policies and then insurance companies offering deep discounts for automated drivers will push the solution through.

According to wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electrolysis_of_water , traditional electrolysis is 50-80% efficient, and solar cells are ~20%.

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

Therefore, the efficiency of using the solar panel to power electrolysis would be .2*.5 -> .2*.8 = 10% -> 16%, wouldn't it?

So, unless there's a pretty substantial price benefit to the cell, where's the benefit?

They didn't track the phone in this case either. They recorded the cell sites the SIM card was connected to when the device performed an action which would attract a charge. Extremely different things. Specifically, it is the lat/long/antenna of the cell site which is recorded, not the device. The device can actually be several km away, or even using a different SIM.

Carriers can mark a phone as "stolen". Once you do that, then that _device_ (separate from the SIM) will be barred from the network, along with a tonne of other international networks. However, they still don't track the device.

They can track it, but only at the request of the police, and it will typically require radiolocation using several different base stations. Sometimes they use A-GPS on the phone. However, they will only do this at the request of the police, and typically only for a 911 call.