Your laptop has the best batteries there are, considering cost vs. performance. You already know how expensive they are and how short their lives are. Major improvement will be in the form of a fuel cell using butane or propane — fossil fuels!!!

Go nukes!

My cousin is a guy who could have attended any college in this country, but chose a different route in life after winning a major contest for high school students that the major automobile manufacturers have each year to find the best budding automotive engineers. His win gave him a job and an education in the automotive engineering field, this was supplemented with a 3 year stint in the Coast Guard and intensive training in diesel engines. He now owns his own company and is considered one of the country’s experts in diesel and is highly sought after by companies that depend on diesel technology. He lives and breathes engines. If anyone can come up with workable, affordable alternatives, I believe he and his partners can.

When he was still in high school, he complained that his Mom was such a health nut, no fried foods, that she was limiting his experiments. He gathered coffee cans and distributed them to all the neighbors and asked them to save all their used oil/grease for him, which he then used to experiment with different types of used oils that would power his engines that lined their garage. That was more than 25 years ago. He has also worked on experimental steam driven auto engines and solar as well.

Technically, the Internet, or the path gateways, is a US federal government creation thru ARPNET and the NSF

You were heading down the same path that I was MataH. I wonder if Obama scoffs at the contests and money rewards that DARPA initiates. The most recent can be read about here The DARPA Urban Challenge The top 3 prizes winners took home a combined $3.5 million.

Very good write up, by the way. Do you ever sleep?

I agree with the whole premise of this article though. It is the common man in the basement or in his own laboratory that invent things. Bill Gates and Steve Jobs pretty much invented the home computer industry from a garage. Xrays were found by mistake in a lab. It is people, not governments that produce things.

If someone invents a great new energy source, that person will make tons of money from their inventiveness. We don’t need washington deciding.

Not the present administration but the present congress. Bush has asked that congress to pass a drilling bill but congress refuses; therefore congress is the problem.

Obama is a communist and a communist believes the state owns everthing even the thoughts and inventions of one of the masses. Naturally, he would think the government is supreme and all giving and all taking. Obama is so curiously lacking in understanding anything about the people or the history of this country it is bizarre. It’s as if he lhas lived in a dream world of his own version of utopia. Everything that come out of his mouth gives me the feeling that this guy has lived in a bubble all his life. He has shown not one iota of interest the the way this country actually works but rather in how he would like it to work. He now is projecting his perceptiion of our way of life on us and trying to make it seem real. Maybe “Dreams of My Father” is really about Dreams of Obama.

Only one slight correction… INRE your

It was not the government or Al Gore that revolutionized the internet; it was Bill Gates, a private entrepreneur, who saw a vision for home computing.

Technically, the Internet, or the path gateways, is a US federal government creation thru ARPNET and the NSF. Created as a intra-computing network for communications, i.e. the first versions of email - a separate creation. The private individual instrumental in taking this govt foundation, and advancing this data exchange between systems using incompatible O/S was Bob Kahn. Gore’s part in this is that he supported the original federal funding for the development (ala his infamous “created the Internet” gaffe), overstating his import.

But the WWW (world wide web), which is the user friendly point/click/link browser interfaces came from a guy named Tim Berners-Lee out of Geneva. He is the father of the http protocol, which is the backbone of the Internet travel now.

Gates has his part, but it was O/S, or hardware that enables computer components to “talk” to each other, as well as software development. Without an O/S, a computer is nothing but a box of gadgets, lying inert and useless. Because of his “Ford” mass production mentality, his development brought computers within financial reach of the home user. We all know Gates is not without his troubles and scandals. Then again, had he not purchased the DOS system dirt cheap, and revamped it, would it have gone so far so fast? Hard to say.

So “the Internet” is composed of different arenas… the “gateways”, called the Internet, the browser http navigations system thru the gateways, called the WWW, and the computer hardware and software extras. All were, as you say, advanced to their current state by private and ambitious individuals. However the base foundation for all of it still came from the US feds… both funding and initial computer designs and O/S.

Part of a class I had to take was computing/Internet history… can you tell?? LOL