Does this ring a bell for anyone? Didn't Bioshock 2 try to pull something like this where you could buy additional game content that was already on the original disk that you had already purchased? I'm really not sure how I feel about either of these scenario's but it seems like there is an artificial market being constructed here. As people have pointed out, selling a chip to me for $200 with locked features and still turning a profit on that sale, then trying to sell me additional features that are already on the chip for more money seems like price gouging. Why not just sell the same chip to everyone at a decent price? Mind you I'm not a marketing/business major... I guess I don't know how to screw people out of their money...

I agree with the part about fixed speed limits. I really would like to see a different system implemented, but how do you enforce "driving dangerously under the conditions" objectively? I think the Germans have a great approach to dealing with the autobahn, ie. strict enforcement of proper driving practices like not tailgating and not blocking the passing lane, but I can't see that happening here. I don't know if it's because the system that exists would be a pain in the ass to change or what but I don't see anything happening any time soon.

Everyone knows it's a joke too. If you get a speeding ticket in my town you take it to court unless you are stupid. The town prosecutor offers you a fantastic plea deal and you leave with barely a slap on the wrists. As you get higher up in speed you start paying more, but it's pretty hard to get your license taken away unless you are devoid of any ability to spot/avoid cops.

I agree with both Hawking and you. What I think of as the American style of having rights, freedoms, and capitalism can be great for individuals but not necessarily good for society or even humanity on the whole. The trick is to find a balance between the two. By avoiding disasters do we mean famine, inhospitable climate shifts, war, what? Excluding world ending events, dealing with adversity has been a part of human history for centuries. Plagues, bacteria before antibiotics, hurricanes, you name it. I think that this is all simply a quality of life issue. The quality of life may sharply decrease in the future, but there will still be life, and hopefully humans.

Does anyone remember when television commercials started using websites? E.g. "For more information go to http:/// ", that was one of many 'things are changing' moments for me. Being 21, I started with computers as far back as a 14.4k modem, napster, 286 processors, and windows 95. I think that personal computer technology is being a bit overlooked here. It's not just the internet content that has become easier to use; the technology in general that supported the browser was slow and cumbersome. Over the years that has gotten better, although people now have the slow and cumbersome issue because of spyware, malware, etc that they don't take the time to understand and avoid, but I digress. The summary claims that the internet is no longer something that young people waste time thinking about. I believe that a good part of that is because there is a whole lot less effort to get going thanks to hardware improvements at the user level as well as the infrastructure. We're also looking at vastly different capabilities as the distribution technology improved (broadband). I remember creating personal pages and putting them up on a free hosting service. Part of the design challenge was to make something that could load quickly and took up as little space as possible. While there are still those types of constraints on modern content, they have greatly expanded to allow a larger amount of higher quality multimedia (video, pictures, realtime streams, etc). So we went from a time when people had to be more involved with the process, but couldn't do nearly what we have now due to technological constraints. As the technology improved it allowed a more hands off interaction on the end user's part, but with great benefit. You can now interact with more powerful tools with less effort (generally). Who cares that people think Facebook is the internet? I think that is the wrong way to look at this.

I wish he was still alive. He was a bit grim in his later days though. Grim but still funny.

I'm not saying that they would be confused, it's an image thing. It could establish a link in a person's mind between Apple and waste removal. That is not a desirable connection for Apple, but it is desirable for the people making the iPood.

Corrupted nature of IP laws? I disagree. I don't know how this stuff works legally but in my opinion, Apple owns or at least is associated with damn near everything that has the iFormat naming style. What the hell is wrong with Apple not wanting its products associated with poo? Pick a different name.

Even more interesting is two protons: [ . ][ . ]

You can actually make a radiation shield that lets light pass through it by simply 'impregnating' acrylic with lead? Dangerous radiation is higher in frequency then normal light but is it really possible to block the one and not the other? I don't have a great understanding of how waves behave in the environment, but this stuck out as odd to me.

Is it as much fun if you know it's going to happen? I can't wait for the movie that plays off this idea with the protagonist expecting to be faux kidnapped but against all odds being kidnapped for real. My only other question is does this come with the option for a happy ending?

Touché

Asus UL30-VT. I picked that one specifically because it's ready to underclock/overclock out of the box as low as 1.06Ghz and as high as 1.73Ghz. It also has manually switchable video cards so I can use Intel onboard for battery life or the nvidia G210M (I think) for gaming. It will play 1080p though at 1.73Ghz on the onboard graphics. I popped an OCZ Vertex that I had laying around in there for the SSD and it's been great ever since. It has been a much more pleasant computing experience than trying to get by on a netbook.

Is there a legitimate reason to do this? At first it sounded funny to me but wont it become unfunny if it goes into standard practice? Plus, it breaks the convention of naming things after the person who discovered them. I mean he didn't really 'discover' it, I guess it's more like he's trying to brand it. I also suppose that calling a large number a hella is better than calling it a sendek. It's a slow news day.

I'm not too excited about Firefox 4.0 coming because it means that it will probably break compatibility with all my addons and re-arrange my user interface to what Mozilla thinks is most productive. I've continued to use Firefox because of how customizable it is, but that wont matter if they can't clean it up and keep performance on par with the other competitors. Chrome finally added extensions and just seems to make progress in leaps and bounds when they release a new version. I wonder if the efforts to make a cleaner, more reliable, faster browser are constantly being subverted by new features like improved javascript engines and HTML5, can we just slow down a bit?