Still have a few questions about this, what if you build like 20 miles of this, and theres a faultline or heat causing two 10-mile halves to separate like 10 cm?, do you upend and move one half after the other?, or do you patch it in with cables and concrete? You might say earthquakes are rare, but even a change in heat can cause the road to expand. I have seen this first hand, I once worked on a bridgeproject on a 5km long bridge, and the edges moves quite a lot due to changes in temperature making the bridge expand or contract.

Im sure this modular concept works fine for building a porch, but making thousands of miles of road under all kinds of conditions, terrain etc is a whole new bag of problems.

I also worked in an office building once, that had these kinds of modular tiles for floors, buildt on stilts, so that you could stretch cables under there (the kind used in server-rooms) again, these things are fine for small server rooms/ilses etc, but when applied to large open office landscapes, they caused all kinds of havok and problems (they became wobbly, uneven, gaps formed etc.) And this was inside, in a brand new building, about as controlled an environment as you can get.

I would love to see these things becoming reality, but highly skeptical that its even doable.

True. I wonder how well it would work in a typical American style apartment or house? From the stuff I have seen of Asian apartments they seem smaller than US ones, so it may still work. I saw another video of this stuff in action where they showed an animation of somebody tossing 3 of them into a room to get to somebody, toss one move up toss another and so on.
It seems proper fire extinguisher education would be more effective. Unless they are marketing this to be used by younger people and the infirm... which seems to be somewhat the suggestion based on other videos.

>> ^rottenseed:

>> ^RFlagg:
It appears to be a mix of CO2 and a tiny bit of ammonium gas. The CO2 of course starves the fire while the ammonium appears to "restrains the burning chain reaction." (source)
>> ^Bruti79:
Does it work by releasing some CO2? Or some other type of gas?


Which means it'd probably work better in a small wooden box than, say, a large warehouse or open office.

>> ^RFlagg:

It appears to be a mix of CO2 and a tiny bit of ammonium gas. The CO2 of course starves the fire while the ammonium appears to "restrains the burning chain reaction." (source)
>> ^Bruti79:
Does it work by releasing some CO2? Or some other type of gas?



Which means it'd probably work better in a small wooden box than, say, a large warehouse or open office.

Non of these would be valid points if public schools were to use Open Office as a standard instead of Mirco$oft bloatware.

The most consistent arguments they were able to make were that the staff was "unfamiliar" with the product and being conveniently incompatible with a closed-source proprietary software.

The teacher quote that graded student's work lower because of compatibility issues was disgusting.

I am not a hipster (I grew up in/live in echo park, and I hate their parking spot taking/beard growing ways), but I have to say that most of the time, a mac is a good deal.

It just works.

Another reason is the bundled and subsidized software. iMovie and Final Cut Express are unmatched on PC. I LOL when I see the MS PC commercial that shows some woman buying a computer for video editing for less that 2 grand. What is she going to use to capture and edit video? Adobe's Premiere costs almost 2k.. iMovie is free, and is more than enough for 95% of home users. Need more features? Final Cut Express is subsidized, $99. Want to spend a shit load of money? get the full final cut package, it will cost the same amount as Premiere Pro.

I have never bought a mac. I have a retail license for windows xp pro that cost $150. I did this because, at the time, there was more open source video encoding software availible on Win32.

However, I will never upgrade to Vista, and will likely never upgrade to Windows 7. Linux desktops are mature enough for everyday use, especially since 95% of poeple ONLY use their web browsers (my sister-in-law has used her computer for 12 months and has not created a single document).

Need a document? Open Office is okay (not great), and works on Win32, Mac, and Linux. Open Office Base works very well.

Summary: most users would be better off with the closed hardware and subsidized software that comes with mac. Nerds should be using Linux 100% of the time. Microsoft should be severely punished for their OS blunders (home users chose them only because it is the de facto standard in busness, but the majority of businesses are still using XP, two years after Vista's introduction, so there is NO reason for home users to use Vista.)

In reply to this comment by chilaxe:
Perhaps reinstall Firefox or do a system restore back to when it was working. Or try the open source version of word, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenOffice.org

Also, if you keep your comments shorter and more to the point, there's a greater chance people will get through the whole thing

In reply to this comment by GeeSussFreeK:

{ps. anyone know of a good online spell checker? My firefox is buggerd and it spelled checked for me}


Hehe, thanks. The open office I can do, hard to keep my answers short though...im such a wind bag lol. Just been to lazy to install open office...now is as good a time as any.

Oh man these ads are really, really giving me the shits now. I mean really, they're just getting outright abusive these days.

I run Vista at home, and you know what... it works... yup, does all I want of it, which includes:
* My wife being able to do all her university work on it, using... yup, Microsoft Office, because we bought the 'Ultimate' edition for $75 after battling for ages with Open Office... sorry, Microsoft actually does a damn good office product.
* I can play all my games. Yup, when I actually get the chance, I get to play Bioshock, Half Life 2 Ep 2, Crysis etc. etc.
* I can make DVDs from videos from all over the damn place (including my digital set top box) using open source software. (yeah, just because you use Windows doesn't mean you're some sort of free software hater)
* I do photo editing etc. with Photoshop.

Really, it does all I want, it does it well now that it's running SP1, and I'm happy with it. To have a smear campaign that is based around attacking your competitor is just pathetic. The ones where they highlight there good points are better, but they do spout an awful lot of crap in these ads. (They did a whole 'blue screen of death' one... come on, I can't remember the last time my pc locked up... )

They really, really need to try a different tack (tact?) now, really.