Book Of Norm

Google has been building and testing driver-less cars. Today, the CEO of Google Eric Schmidt dropped this gem: "Our computers drive our cars better than you do when you're drunk. That's our starting point."

I am no fan of Tesla Motors. I think it is a hype machine which never should have been allowed to go public , never should have received government funding and never should be allowed to hold another press conference for cars which don't exist. Let me reiterate - this is a company which has always lost money - generally huge sums of money - and has only built and sold 1,800 cars. Those cars are essentially Lotus designed and built, other than a battery pack of 6,000 laptop batteries. And yet, in the last round of idiotic loans to undeserving "green" companies, Tesla was given $465 million dollars. And now, it is going back to the well, and in the middle of a massive economic crises where the last goddamn thing we need is expensive electric toys for the super rich or mathematically challenged (or both), they are asking for more government funding. They have not disclosed how much they are asking for, or even why they are asking - but they are asking. Supporters of th...

Just put this together as a possible PC for a home media server - all from Newegg Basically, while these are "low end" specs these days - it would still be a highly capable machine, with the exception that it would not really be capable of HD video. Qty. Product Description Savings Total Price Foxconn SFF R10-G4 Intel Core 2 Quad/Duo / Pentium Dual-Core/ Celeron up to 65W Intel Socket T(LGA775) Intel G41 Barebone Item #: N82E16856119045 Return Policy:  Standard Return Policy -$30.00 Instant $99.99 $69.99 CORSAIR 1GB 240-Pin DDR2 SDRAM DDR2 667 (PC2 5300) Desktop Memory Model VS1GB667D2 Item #: N82E16820146580 Return Policy:  Memory Standard Return Policy $13.99 Intel Celeron E3400 Wolfdale 2.6GHz LGA 775 65W Dual-Core Desktop Processor BX80571E3400 Item #: N82E16819116348 Return Policy:  CPU Replacement Only Return Policy Protect Your Investment  ( expand for options ) $49.99 Western Digital Scorpio Black WD3200BEKT 320...

First... read this on what I think the Kindle Fire will mean for the industry But second - here are my thoughts on the device itself rather than the overall industry implications. Amazon got it right: tablets don't sell on specs. Hardware only sells on specs when all else remains equal: the heyday of this was windows 98 beige and then black boxes which were indistinguishable other than ever improving hardware. In tablets, all else is not equal. There is a big difference between different mobile OS's, and only one of them which is really, fully, properly optimized for tablets (and sadly, that one is not webOS on a TouchPad... or even XDA flavored green robots... damn you Apple)... And Kindle OS might be the second. Ok ok, Kindle is not an OS per se - it is built on Android. But that is like saying the Karmann Ghia is a VW Beetle underneath - which it is, but it is oh so much more sexy. No one will really know or care that it is running android underneath, other tha...

Yes, it is getting to the point that you can look back on the early internet with nostalgia. That was certainly my reaction to seeing this. That, and how the hell this was sold for $3.5 billion... (then again - if facebook just fades away, that would be pretty much the same). Untitled from deletedcity on Vimeo .

Ok... the title is kind of more exciting than the post... but basically, Android keeps gaining market share, while Apple stagnates, BlackBerry collapses and "other" (including my beloved webOS.... *tear* ...) loses out. So is it going to be a little green robot world? Are we seeing the rise of another Windows? Are we all going to have to suffer through years of limited innovation and poor customer support? (Does Google even do customer support..... ???) The short answer is "No." Windows 7 is good and windows 8 looks fantastic. There of course is always the iPhone for the hipsters and  follower types (which I will admit is a good product, just so hamstrung I would never want one) and of course....

My new phone (the Motoroloa Photon 4G from Sprint) has some serious issues. Sometimes it just decides to be an asshole for a few hours, and in that time it will do nothing except restart and get stuck at the sprint launch screen (which ironically is just a big "NOW"...) So, I was in Target yesterday and I picked up a $10 AT&T prepaid phone. I chose AT&T because every other phone was $30 or more, this ancient candybar was on clearance for $10, and I really did not care what phone I got. All four major carriers offered $2/day plans (Sprint = Boost in this case) so I figured I would be paying the same (as clearly - the phones I was looking at were not capable of data anyway). As the carriers often do stack up, "$2/day" gets you very different things Sprint = Unlimited Calling, Texting, and Data (!!!) T-Mobile = Unlimited Calling, Texting AT&T = Unlimited Calling, Texting Verizon = Unlimited Calling and a free punch in the face Though Boost was cl...

I debated whether to post it, because I find the image pretty disturbing, but also very interesting. I love air shows and air races. I love the concept of the rocket racing league and the Red Bull air races. But, this brings home just one more time why aircraft are so damn scary. When things go wrong in the air, everything can go to hell very quickly. Which is what happened at Reno. The modified P-51 mustang was rebuilt for racing, which means it was more tail heavy and had shorter wings. It also meant that the aircraft could hit around 500mph. Current thinking is that an elevator trim tab (which basically holds control surfaces in a certain place so that the pilot does not have to) broke off, causing the aircraft to pitch up, the (72yr old) pilot to black out and the plane to dive in to the stands, killing 10 and injuring 66. I don't know what pre-flight inspections are done, what kind of g's pilots must be capable of handling, or how close to the course the stands we...

Indian company Tata has built a completely over the top version of its $2,500 people's car, the Nano. This thing would make 50 Cent blush: That is a tiny little Nano covered in 176 pounds of gold (22 karats) , 33 pounds of silver and studded with more than 10,000 precious stones and gems. BLING. The net result is a car which is worth $2,500k or so originally being worth $4.6 million instead. So you could buy this, or 4 Bugatti Veyrons.... MMMmmmmm Of course, the reason for all this extravagance is that the Tata family is celebrating a little anniversary for its Gold Plus jewelry stores.... As in, the family is saying this year marks the 5,000th anniversary of the business. I wonder what the grand opening looked like... Trust the monkey scales, and yes, I am three times larger than you

Got this one from freakonomics, but I would have put it the same way myself. The concept of forgiving student loans is just to appease useless young liberal college grads who have somehow gotten it into their heads that they represent the majority or what is "normal" in this country, and are some kind of driving force of anything other than idiotic iPhone photos The main product of 18-35yr old liberals Let’s look at this through five separate lenses: Distribution : If we are going to give money away, why on earth would we give it to college grads? This is the one group who we know typically have high incomes, and who have enjoyed income growth over the past four decades.  The group who has been hurt over the past few decades is high school dropouts. Macroeconomics : This is the worst macro policy I’ve ever heard of. If you want stimulus, you get more bang-for-your-buck if you give extra dollars to folks who are most likely to spend each dollar. Imagine what would...

Yup. That's why. It's why Seidio has become my favorite aftermarket accessory company, and why micro-usb chargers have taken over my house like kudzu weeds.

Ok ok, Amazon is not likely to knock four modern titans out of the ring with its first tablet... but think about what Amazon can leverage when it brings a tablet to the market. It already does streaming video, with an improving selection (while Netflix is making a string of dubious decisions). Amazon will tightly integrate Prime streaming into the heavily-skinned version of Android, making Prime the go-to streaming video system. It is the worlds biggest online market place, with Amazon Prime offering near-instant gratification, all from your couch. This means that Wal-Mart, already hurting as it is not longer seen as a price leader, will get hit as it become ever easier to impulse buy from your couch (already pretty damn easy with my netbook or my Photon - one click ordering and 2-day delivery? I love it). It already has the second-largest and (in my opinion) best android marketplace, doing a capable and high-quality end-run around Google to get a share of developer dollars. ...

What sucks about modern smartphones? They are always in your pocket, beeping. You are sitting there in your meeting/diner with your wife/movie/class/sex and your phone is beeping at you or vibrating like a coin-op motel bed from the 50's, and you have no damn idea why. But you really really want to know why. This could be the big one, the text that changes your life, the email from the one that got away, publisher's clearing house finally (finally!!) coming through. This really happens. Promise. So what do you have to do? You have to take your phone out of your pocket, hit the power button, and if you don't have webOS, you have to hit a couple more buttons just to read the damn text or email. Not to mention,  you have to go through most of that just to tell the time... Enter the smart-watch. I dont want my watch to be my cellphone, too many problems with that. But a watch add-on to a cellphone? Perfect. All i want it to do is connect via bluetooth 2.0 (ultra low po...

I'm confused NASA is building a new rocket. And by new rocket, I mean a bastard child of the space shuttle and the cancelled Constellation program. The new rocket is called the Space Launch System, and its purpose is...  ummm...  this is awkward.  It turns out that NASA has no damn clue what they are going to use it for. Literally, they say "we might use it for a variety of future projects." In the mean time, we are using Soyuz to get to and from the ISS, and we are planning on using SpaceX in the future for trips to our floaty home away from home. In addition, the Europeans, a variety of NewSpace companies, and little Boeing/Lockheed United Launch Alliance are planning on building crew capsules to pair with existing launch systems (read:rockets). So what the fuck are we using this thing for? "Today NASA unveiled the design of a new rocket to help the agency meet a challenge from President Obama: send astronauts to an asteroid by 2025 and to Mars by the mid-2...

They are everywhere. Or really, sadly, they are nowhere, yet. Carbon nanotubes promise so much, but have yet to really come through in a lot of key areas. However, in one, there has been a major breakthrough. Researchers have now figured out how to make carbon nanotubes "just so" in order to conduct as much electricity as massive copper cables. Just so Here is the original article: http://www.technologyreview.com/energy/38615/?p1=A1 But basically, big deal is that pretty much everything could get smaller, lighter, and more efficient. Oh yeah, and these guys would be spared the trouble of fighting off a jackass utility company:

Great franchising opportunity for all of you out there.. only $50k in startup and endless shit to take care of.. . http://franchising.doodycalls.com/ Really, how the hell can that make money? Unless people are willing to spend way more than they should instead of buying a $15 pooper scooper and a bucket... if you can't handle the poop, you might want to reconsider that whole pet-ownership thing.

Back in high school, I competed in a national economics challenge. At one point, I was asked by judges whether I thought the Euro was a good idea. I told them I thought it was a terrible idea, because it meant tying completely different kinds of economies together with the same monetary policy. This works only if you can enforce absolute fiscal responsibility, which is like saying "temporary teachers can be effective, as long as the class behaves". Yeah... The ECB and EU never really put a whole lot of muscle behind auditing and enforcing the regulations about fiscal policy, because everything was going well. And I have to admit that there have been times in the last decade where I seriously questioned whether I was wrong, whether I should support the common currency (in Europe, I never once considered supporting it for the UK - keep it the hell off our island). Ireland was doing incredibly well, Spain, Greece and Portugal were all improving, and the common currency seemed ...

This is just stupid: The former vice-presidential candidate told conservative presenter Glenn Beck that it was worrying that the US could not be trusted to make appropriate decisions about the escalating conflict on the Korean peninsula. “We're not having a lot of faith that the White House is going to come out with a strong enough policy to sanction what it is that North Korea is going to do," she said. "This speaks to a bigger picture here that certainly scares me in terms of our national security policies, but obviously we've got to stand with our North Korean allies,” she added. When the host immediately corrected her Mrs Palin repeated: "Er yeah. And we're also bound by prudence to stand with our South Korean allies, yes." Her response shows, yet again, that her IQ is probably hovering somewhere near the "advanced orangutan" level. How the woman ever got to govern anything beyond a checking account amazes me.

Ever borrow money from a crack dealer so you can buy more crack? That's pretty much what Europe is looking to do right now. Though I have to be honest, it might be the best option on the table. Winning Wen Jiabao has said that China will be willing to offer Europe some loans, which Europe desperately needs. But there is one, rather large, string attached. China would have to be classified as a “market economy” instead of a “nonmarket economy.” In international trade legalese, the new designation would make it almost impossible for Europe to impose tariffs on Chinese goods considered unfairly cheap. Which means all that European protectionism would have a hard time, at least in the lower-end manufacturing sectors. By classifying China as a nonmarket economy, the European Union allows its antidumping investigators to compare the price Chinese exporters to Europe charge with the price of goods from other low-cost countries. Antidumping duties, which can exceed 100 percen...

"Greentech, cleantech, come and get it. It's cheap, it's reliable, it'll save the American economy" More or less that was the pitch made a couple years ago as Obama was coming into office. One of the things he did is started playing the US government as a venture capitalist, pumping loans (granted, just loans, not really being a VC, but still) into random ass companies which happened to be making "green" products. Oh, and by "random ass" I mean companies which were associated with the administration in some way, mostly from Obama's big 'ol fundraising campaign. The one which really has the President sweating right now (actually, who am I kidding, he is so wrapped up in delusional grandeur I doubt he ever feels he has made a wrong decision), is Solyndra. Which, as I mentioned a while back , got an idiotic $530 million dollar loan. The company went bankrupt as everyone other than el Presidente expected, and tax payers are out 1/2 a ...

Long a symbol of the unattainable, blue roses will be for sale this fall in the United States and Canada. Named “Applause,” the rose is genetically modified to synthesize delphinidin, a pigment found in most blue flowers. The rose was first released in in Tokyo in 2009, after 20 years of research by Suntory, a Japanese company that also distills whisky, and its Australian subsidiary, Florigene (now Suntory Flowers). Today  Suntory announced the rose will be for sale  at select florists in North America, beginning early November. While the flower might appear more silver-purple than sky-blue, Applause is the nearest to a true blue rose yet. Arguably the world’s best loved flowers, humans have cultivated roses for more than 5,000 years. Roses can signify love, beauty, politics and war. Blue roses have a mythic quality because they, until recently, were impossible to grow. Roses appear naturally in many shades of red, pink, yellow and white, but lack the natural ability to produ...

Supercomputer Reads the News to Successfully Forecast World Events - http://www.popsci.com/technology/article/2011-09/supercomputer-analyzes-news-articles-predicts-revolutions

Scottish Scientists Are Trying to Create Inorganic Life - http://pulse.me/s/1EByG

IBM's Watson set to tackle health insurance, takes 'Diagnosis for $1,000' - http://pulse.me/s/1DIXd

Nearly a Century After We Started Drooling Over Them, America Gets Its First Police Auto-Gyro - http://pulse.me/s/1DO0g

Glow-In-The-Dark Cats Could Provide Answers About AIDS - http://pulse.me/s/1DAUE

This is pretty sweet. A Swedish treasure hunter who was going after a couple of cases of really rare champagne ended up finding, potentially, a history changing object (or not..). Finally, I love how the article ends with the the assumption that he could make a couple billion off of this, rather than the fact that if it were a UFO it would completely change live on earth and the history of mankind. Then again, a couple billion sounds pretty good also. Peter Lindberg's team found what appears to be a crashed flying saucer on the ocean floor. CREDIT: www.oceanexplorer.se An ocean exploration team led by Swedish researcher Peter Lindberg has found what some are suggesting is a crashed flying saucer. Lindberg's team, which has had success in the past recovering sunken ships and cargo, was using sonar to look for the century-old wreck of a ship that went down carrying several cases of a super-rare champagne. Instead, the team discovered what it claims is a mysterious round o...