In 1957, semi-retired from commercial illustration, Radebaugh brought samples of an an ambitious cartoon about the future to a major news syndicate. Shortly afterwards, Sputnik was launched, confirming the sense of what Radebaugh was proposing in several of his panels. The syndicate was suitably impressed, and in early 1958, Radebaugh’s ambitious syndicated column, Closer Than We Think, was launched to an audience of over 19,000,000 metropolitan newspaper readers. “Halfway between science fiction and designs for modern living” said Radebaugh of his strip. From streamlined flying cars to glamorous skyscrapers, his renderings were both pragmatic and fantastical, showing possibilities unimagined, derived from the technology of the day. “believe-it-or-not”-style cartoon strips represent an alternative technological, architectural and social history of the 20th century.
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Since the recording industry sued Napster in December 1999, the P2P community has tried to evade persecution by making their systems more autonomous and less traceable. Unfortunately this process has also adversely affected the user experience. This may not be so obvious when we look at P2P just from a technological perspective. Today's networks serve many more users than the first generation of file sharing platforms. They also enable us to move bits around the network much faster than before.
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Today, the whole display industry loves plastics. Every maker of TV sets and computer monitors is working on OLED screens..

Displays, though, barely scratch the surface of what's coming in plastic electronics. A typical home probably has only a handful of displays, but it has hundreds of food containers, toys, medicine bottles, and other items, each of which could be endowed with a modicum of computer smarts if brittle and costly silicon and glass can be replaced with plastic. With the advent of cheap plastic circuits, food packages could sport a "sell by" imprint that keeps track of time and turns bright red when the limit is reached.

Moreover, in a world of polymer electronics, virtually any company could become a chipmaker. Thanks to inks made from conductive and semiconductive polymers, it will soon be possible to print proletarian circuits on almost any surface using an inkjet printer or offset press. A billion-dollar semiconductor factory isn't needed [Read More!]

Transfers data between USB devices (slaves), without requiring a USB host (master) or a computer. Use the Bridge as a link to copy files between a variety of USB peripherals such as an iPod (and other MP3 players), USB Flash “Thumb Drives”, external hard drives, CD-R burners and memory card readers. Supports USB/USB 2 and are Battery powered.
se also Macally's SyncBox

Because free will is the very thing that makes us human, we naturally assume choice is a good thing. And from there, it's logical, perhaps, to think that because having options is good, the more choice we have the better.

Well, stop the presses. Scientific American is reporting that recent research "strongly suggests" that, psychologically speaking, that assumption is wrong.

In an article titled, 'The Tyranny of Choice', Barry Schwartz, professor of social theory and social action at Swarthmore College, wrote: "Although some choice is undoubtedly better than none, more is not always better than less."

Schwartz points to studies by David Myers of Hope College and Robert Lane of Yale University, who conducted surveys on individual well being.

They found that increased choice and increased influence have been accompanied by a decrease in well-being.

Schwartz conducted his own research and, in doing so, categorizes his subjects into "maximizers" and "satisficers."

Maximizers are "those who always aim to make the best possible choice" and satisficers are "those who aim for 'good enough'."

Through Schwartz's study, it was found that maximizers are the least happy. "Naturally, no one can check every option, but maximizers strive toward that goal, and so making a decision becomes increasingly daunting as the number of choices rises.

"In the end, they are more likely to make better objective choices than satisficers but get less satisfaction from them," Schwartz writes. copy and pasted from Mahalanobis