The year that Woz completed the Apple, I completed my high-school education. I already knew how to code. 75 pages of occupational work and safety safe work method statement vs 34 lines of nested code. Thank $DEITY that I'm left-handed.

I have recently 'retired' a Nokia E71. I simply wish to use it as a skype phone (app installed). It keeps complaining about 'SIM card registration failed' but skype over WiFi seems (a bit laggy at times) to work fine. If I could get rid of the SIM complaints, I would be happy to live with the (understandable) WiFi lag.

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Not quite. Yes the cell tower will put out 5kW, but each user (even if they eren't recharging their 'phone) will put a load on the cell. For a down-town cell, this load could well be significant. The RFID tag example is a good one.
The RFID sensor is a simple transmitter radiating at a specific frequency. The RFID tag represents a load to the transmitter. the sensor looks at the current being drawn by the transmitter (and by proxy, the tag) and decodes the current pulses into voltage pulses which are then decoded into a serial data stream. This is not how cells work. They transmit at one frequency and receive on another. BTW, I guess that I should mention that we are talking about 2.4 GHz here which means that cell-phone communications should be fine, but they'll annihilate any WiFi hotspots nearby, since that's where they'll be drawing their energy from. WiFi tends to run at about 1W. Hardly enough to charge more than say, 20 handsets...

Not arguing, responding.

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I am of the belief that yes, you can re-charge your 'phone's battery from an R.F. power source (after all, it works for RFID).
There are IMHO two caveats;
Your 'phone needs to be in standby, since when talking, you'll be using far more energy than the cell can provide.

Any active users will suffer reduced signal-strength due to all the passive users re-charging their 'phones. This power has to come from somewhere and that place will be the cell transmitter. Given enough 'phones re-charging and you won't be able to make/receive a call because your 'phone won't be able to hear the cell due to all the other 'phones sucking all the signal from it...

Just a thought.

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I had this thing called an Amiga. While the upper echelons could muster the folding for an '030 or an '040 (hence task-protection and memory management), the rest of us had to make do with the occasional guru-meditation. Either way, a massive hard-disk partition was not necessary (I agree, however, it was helpful). Don't dismiss minix. If AmigaDos could boot to a fully-functional desktop from a floppy, why can't minix?

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Moore's Law is about the bleeding edge. Netbooks are about compromise. Different churches, no hereticism. C:\>

I guess that they'd better get rid of C:\WINNT\system32\drivers\etc\ first.

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I've read this whole mind-numbing thread (and the links). There have been some good and some bad arguments. I'll be upfront, I'm a big fan of nuclear (disclaimer: if it wasn't for medical isotopes, my mother wouldn't be alive today). After absorbing all this information, the choice is simple: CANDU, which works, or IFR which was working until they canned it. Any reactor where shutting down the cooling system means that the reactor becomes sub-critical is, for me, a major criterion.

This whole thread has missed the most important point. Heat. Everything we do, every process we engage, every time we press a button on the remote, the resultant activity involves the generation of heat. Let's say that we can provide ourselves with unlimited carbon-neutral energy. We still have the problem of inefficiency. Assuming zero methane and CO2, the heat we produce will remain a significant problem.

I wonder which car company will be the first to start producing boats?

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Precisely. It's not about the economy, it's about survival of the masses. C:\>

Don't use terms at all. I'm sick of the euphamisms. Being an Australian, I freely admit that while we whiteys enjoy a comfortable standard of living, At the bottom of the food-chain we struggle, but even at the said bottom, we still experience a better quality of life than those at the bottom end of the indian experience except, perhaps for our indigenous population who run into the same degree of day-to-day suffering as the lower castes of India. It isn't about first or third world. It's about the spectrum of privilege to despair of it's citizens. First, second and third world is about that ratio. Given what we do to the people that had stewardship of this country before we came, I'd rate my country up with the U.S. Exploitative. That is the real term for first world. Ask the Navaho, ask the Cherokee, Ask the Koori, ask the untouchables. More power to India (just hold off on the nukes, mkay? - There is an alternative). Two pesos expended.
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