Basically Apple is becoming a cell phone company. Verizon, ATT and the all crippled their phones so they could grab the revenue stream of on phone purchases. Apple opened it up, for a while, introducing a more open approach, then they decided that the phone companies had a good thing going and they could get a piece…

By 1973 the Arpanet had grown to include Hawaii's radio based Aloha net, Britain's Indra PDP-9, Uppsala in Sweden, and at least one "earthquake" monitoring station in northern Scandanavia. (They were rather vague about their location and the nature of those "earthquakes" they were monitoring.) There was also the…

Sounds like their answer to the MacBook Air.

The single line thing is old fashioned 1930s queuing theory, so no surprises there.

@AugureTheCensored: Ever since Bush pardoned Scooter Libby, it has been open season for leaking American secrets. That was the word from the top. If Obama had made a distinct break with Bush policy, the Wikileaks folks would have thought twice, but with a federal pardon and cushy consulting job in the offing, why…

I just watched a great movie, The Transatlantic Tunnel. Not only did people have video phones in their homes and personal airplanes, but they had maids and butlers to answer them.

I don't mind being tracked to some extent. I just want multiple accounts so my tracking trails don't necessarily cross and I get useful results for my tracking. My Safeway can do this. I just use multiple cards. Why can't web browsers let me have multiple persona? Right now, Google requires a log in to get a…

Henry Ford didn't invent the automobile. Steve Jobs didn't invent the windows-icons-mouse interface. Benjamin Franklin didn't invent the pot belly stove or lightning rod. You can go down the list. James Watt didn't invent the steam engine. Alexander Graham Bell didn't invent the telephone. What they did, was in some…

According to his obit in the journal Science, of all places, Guccione was a big backer of tokamak fusion. He even spent $17M of his own money trying to commercialize it. If fusion power ever proves practical he'll probably figure as one of its more colorful pioneers. (Could he have been an inspiration for Tony Stark?)

@Justin Elledge: My guess is that they sent an analog video signal, probably some slow scan protocol to get a decent signal to noise ratio. I doubt they had CCDs, as CCDs were still experimental in the US back then and the Russians were well behind. Venera probably had a vacuum tube iconoscope. Iconoscopes are made of…

This has been going on for a while, ad not all of the robots are industrial. Look at bank tellers and ATMs. Consider that recent article on how more people are doing more stuff, for example, a database administrator is now also a system security expert, partly because improved software tools.

They did have mobile phones before cellular, but they were crazy expensive. I remember the TV show Burke's Law because Burke drove a Rolls Royce and had a car phone. Even better were the multi-line line car phone in James Garner's car with a panicky Lee Remick juggling the lines.

He sounds better than most. The typical CEO drives his company off the cliff and comes out just fine.

I can sort of understand the problem measuring batteries and cell phone signal strength, but why are fuel gauges on cars so non-linear, especially now that it is possible to adjust digitally.

There's an interesting virtual reality story about Jacques Lipchitz. Back in the late 60s or early 70s they used a video archive of an extensive interview with him to present a virtual interview show. I think it was called An Evening With Jacques Lipchitz. People in the audience would ask questions, and the video…

And where is Captain Nemo in all this? He developed the first atomic powered submarine and terrorized the English fleet in the 19th century. Where is J. T. Maston the brains behind the first moon launch and the grandest climate modification scheme ever attempted?

Ron MacNeil at the MIT Media Lab built a digital franken-camera using an SLR camera back, one of those single line CCDs and a stepping motor. His output device was a wall sized printer/plotter based on stepping motors and an air brush controlled by a speaker cone magnet. It was awesome.

Could it be an artifact of HDRI?

Apple has already done this to some extent on the iPhone/iPad platform. How many apps give you a choice of ads or pay?

@Ccomfort: That's what automation is all about, getting prices in the face of rising labor costs. The only reason we had an industrial revolution at all was the high wages in England in the 18th century. Otherwise, no spinning jenny, no steam engines, no radios, no iPhones, and we'd all be dirt poor. Cheap labor can…