World: r3wp

Roads should be built of rare earth magnets.

It does not work that way.  You would have to have a giant coil in 
the ground, and the car would be the object (creating a magnetic 
field).  In fact this is the way street lights know when to change. 
 There is a coild of copper in the ground.  You might notice octagonal 
cuts in the ground even in Australia where they place these.

If the road was made of magnets, then when you dropped your pen knife, 
you could not pick it back up.  The ground would quickly be covered 
in paperclips and screws.

(sorry, I just realized you were writing tongue in cheek).  I'm working 
on a technical paper, and was in "literal mode")

Sensors could sense the car's magnetic field, then switch on the 
opposite polarity in the ground magnet, so magnets are only powered 
when there is a car nearby.

(only half tongue in cheek.)

That is possible, but so expensive it would be better to have minimin 
wage works carry you to work and to the market.

They can fan you too.

If you are hot...

That's so last millenium, though.

You've got to have floating magnets involved somehow !

True, but cheapper than magnets...and more fun really.

The Germans are working on it....I hear it is getting cheaper, but 
still not cost effective even for a monorail.

I wonder about those stories sometimes.

Also, you still have to have a giant power source, and it would not 
be availble everywhere, so you still need to bring power with you.

Microwave dishes on the top of skyscrapers beam power down to where 
it's needed on the roads below.

So that works for the city....

Actually that does not work, for a lot (insert misc. dead humans 
and animals in line of site here) reasons.

Maybe a beam which converges to a focal point under the ground, passing 
weakly through objects above.

Never mind the power - surely rare earth magnets can be kept in opposite 
polarity ? In the ground, in the car. So the car floats above the 
ground. A fan powered by push-bike pedals moves the car through the 
air like a hovercraft.

nah, let's just use antigravity. :P http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2006/03/060325232140.htm

Aha! Looks very interesting :)

I'm in two minds regarding gravity. All my logic and understanding 
tells me, that Einstein was right, when he said, that gravity is 
curvation of space-time. Then gravity is not a field like electro-magnetism 
(light) and the other natural forces (strong and weak kernel forces), 
and there's not a particle (which are actually waves) called a graviton, 
like we have fotons, gluons, Z0 and W+-, whose are responsible for 
transfering the forces. But I really really hope, I'm wrong, so that 
antigravity can be reality one day.


The spacecraft Gravity Probe B was finished collecting data almost 
two years ago, and results should have been published last year, 
but they wasn't! There's something wrong with the data. They might 
come to some very interesting results: http://einstein.stanford.edu/


CERN are upgrading their accelerator, and they should start some 
new experiments this year, where they hope to find the Higgs boson 
and maybe the graviton. I'll be very surprised, if they find the 
graviton. I don't know enough about the Higgs boson to have an opinion 
on that.

But it's exciting times! :-)

give me this one - http://www.dynamism.com/oqo02/main.shtml

those things start to look good ... but imo pricey yet ...

http://www.6502asm.com/<--- 6502 compiler and emulator in javascript.

The OS that Apple iPhone uses is MacOS X. Does that mean our REBOL 
programs can run on iPhone?

I'm a little fuzzy on that too, Jerry. They say it's OS X, which 
should mean that we can hack at it all we want, or at least transfer 
applications/scripts to it. But I'm hearing that Apple is opposed 
to 3rd party development for the iPhone. I wonder if they plan on 
locking it down somehow.

But I see that idea was touched on in OSX group while I was gone.

The iPhone is locked down, and not even open source.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/01/12/apple_lockdown_iphone/

Finally, D 1.0 is released. http://www.digimars.com/d/index.html

http://www.anandtech.com/displays/showdoc.aspx?i=2904&p=3<--- amazing 
OLED displays

Open Firmware was made free under the BSD/MIT license in Nov 2006. 
 http://lwn.net/Articles/209301/
Would that help a Rebol OS ?

HP claims nano-chip breakthrough - http://tech.monstersandcritics.com/news/article_1247407.php/Hewlett_Packard_claims_nano-chip_breakthrough

OpenMoko - an alternative to iPhone with free-to-extend OS? - http://www.libervis.com/article/forget_iphone_hail_openmoko_the_true_revolution

He characterized HP's results as 'amazing' and said it had the potential 
to extend indefinitely the reach of Moore's Law which posits that 
the power of microchips will double every 18 months.

uh...............no....

just the number of transisters ...

Yahoo Messenger for Vista! - http://messenger.yahoo.com/windowsvista.php

looks like they used Cyphre or Gabriele's background generator ;-)

is that a good or a bad thing?

I want B/W GUI so more CPU cycles can be used for something useful 
:)

Henrik: I think, it was a joke

oldes, I know. :-)

http://www.technologyreview.com/Biztech/18086/

if true that would make my day

hum... someone in the comments explains and rebuffs the patent and 
describes that the idea actually cannot really deliver more than 
1% of the theoretical numbers claimed by the patent...  which would 
bring it at about the same levels as current top of the line batteries.

so the 10x power for .5 the price... well actually makes it double 
the price if the 1% is exact

another person also explains how the batterie's reaction to thermal 
changes might be rather high (50% power fluctuation between cold 
and hot temps)

but all agree to being glad if  proven wrong.

US answer to global warming: smoke and giant space mirrors http://environment.guardian.co.uk/climatechange/story/0,,1999968,00.html