The shooter lists the Communist Manifesto among his favorite books. This is hardly Palin and Beck teritory. Among the killed was one of the most conservative judges in Arizona.

Crazy Schizophrenics do Crazy things. Its what they do. Its because they are crazy.

The actions of those who leap on every thing a crazy schizophrenic does to try to turn it to partisan advantage, though, are harder to justify. The best that could be said for some of them, is a tendency to overwhelming confirmation bias. Of course, those who are revealing their bias that all who disagree with them are crazy, should contemplate themselves, perhaps.

That was rather my point. Has Apple charged for ANY of the iPod Touch updates? If they have, I'm not aware of it.

<quote><p>I don't have any problem running 10+ apps simultaneously on my Palm Pre. Perhaps some companies besides Apple can do things right! But that's unpossible!</p></quote>

You must have an amazing Palm Pre to not get the "No additional cards can be opened at this time" error message that pops up when I try to get the 7th or 8th card open. The Palm Pre is the best illustration yet for why blind, pre-emptive multitasking in a phone OS is a bad idea.

<quote><p>They are. Major software upgrades for the iPad are probably not going to be free (except maybe the first one).</p></quote>

Exactly like they did for all the iPhone updates that have worked on all the original iPhones.

Unlike me, who can't even edit the quote tags correctly. - Tim

<quote><p>Sounds like every geeks wet dream. And yet I can't help but think to myself ... this is a <i>telephone</i>. This is device whose primary purpose is to facilitate <i>verbal communication</i>.</p></quote>

You must be new here. - Tim

Imagine a civilizational crisis. War, Famine, Disease, whatever. How will we recover without Britannica and its peers. The renaissance was sparked by the rediscovery of ancient books. If we lose technolgoy, how would we ever recover digitial records? A CD or DVD is a nearly magical device, with assumption piled on techniology atop compression algorithm, with healthy amounts of assumptions about scan rates and directions tossed in.

Wikipedia will be, not surprisingly, off-line.

The last print Britannica might be the last back-up check point for our civilization.

They only lean toward MAC/IP topologies in BPL. In lower-bandwidth scenarios (metering) they go a variety of ways, largely because extended distances mean signals from a given node won't be visible across the entire network, which forces a repeater mechanism of some kind. It gets complex fairly quickly, especially in commercial systems, where huge banks of fluorescent lights create some unpredictable behavior.

Making things worse are the customers who have heard about BPL and say, "Why can't you just replace all these devices with something that does broadband and greater throughput?"

Actually, the way they do this is using an address layer like most any other protocol. A bunch of different topologies exist, but generally speaking, each monitored node will be uniquely addressable with a value embedded in the data frames rather than just by frequency. Multiple frequencies are used to dynamically adjust to the presence of various types of noise.

How about a jar full of mosquitoes instead? - Tim

People said the same thing when they launched the Zune. Go figure. - Tim

Another freebie:

PC [Hodgman] sitting in his king chair, surrounded by windows that have no apparent walls holding them up. Mac [Long] walks up.

Mac: What's up PC?

PC: Enjoying life without walls. I'm still the king, and all my subjects are PCs.

(Strangers come up behind PC, carry off some of his stuff)

PC: Hey! These guys are stealing all my stuff! (disgustedly sitting back down) Maybe going without walls was a bad idea.

Mac: Could be, but I have to ask. If you don't want walls, why do you have Windows?

PC: (long pause) I banish you... again.

First read SMidge's reply above. It is quite good.

About the only thing that I saw him leavving out wwas that in humid parts of the world, there is heating going on every day of the year. Take in 8% humid air, cool it, and get ranstorms in the building (and mold). Chill it down to get enough moisture out, and you have air too cold, a cold breeze no one wants. So the air is heated again.

Waste heat from data centers can be a predictable source of re-heat. You need re-heat even while you are cooling offices every day of the year. Energy recycling is a great way to reduce footprint while preserving amenity.

In the riight scenarios, you can store heat as well, even in counterintuitive ways. Capture the heat from the overnight processin in the data center, run it through an absorption chiller, and pump the cool somewhere. If there is some reason to not put this into the cooling stream for the data center itself, you can store it in a pool of icey brine in the basement to use for cooling during peak electrical demand tomorrow...