You know how to tell when I politician is lying? He lies only when his lips move. ;)

Duke,

Obama says he will reduce taxes for folks earning under $250K, but they will go up quite a bit for folks above that ...

My point was that when McCain says Obama will raise taxes, thats true, but only if you earn over $250K.

I'm not sure where economists draw the line for what counts as Middle Class, but $250K seems like a reasonable number.

So while they may try put taxation fears into the hearts of the crowd at their rallies, I doubt many of those folks are in that highest tax bracket.

Of course, we're talking about politicians in a tanked economy, so its anyone's guess what will end up having to happen to set things straight ... We couldn't have anticipated a $700bn bailout a months ago

Oops forgot my source:

http://www.mangoboss.com/ObamaNetWorth

So when Obama says he will raise taxes he's talking about the middle class?

I fail to see how Obama speeks to the middle class seeing how his net worth is over $7 million. Unless your definition of middle class is $40,000-7,000,000.

thinkin' bout dippin' his wick in that cold Alaska muff

Is this one of yours Steve?

http://failblog.org/2008/06/03/fialblogorg-fail/

I can't decide if American beer is about to get better, or Belgian Beer is about to get worse...

They have animations and lots of graphics that they are panning around. I'm not sure how fast the graphics chip is on there, but I suspect the CPU is doing a lot of the work. Maybe its just a perception, but it sure seemed to run the battery down in a hurry.

try a colonoscopy...i've done three and about to do my third over the weekend...fun!

would that not be a problem with the app? you got any insights as to how that would drain the battery? Cycles or some such?

when'll it be in the app store?

... and this is exactly why you don't let someone tinker with your cell phone when they know its tied to your blog

and who says one must use a question mark at the end of an interrogative sentence(?)

I took this week off work so I could go to WWDC, but in the end decided not to go so I could catch up on some home projects. I'm glad really - the keynote was very disappointing, unless you were holding out for that 3G phone. I already have .Mac, and some of Me looked interesting, but still...

After lunch they detailed Snow Leopard ... but it seems like its all about making it easier to write apps to use multi-core systems. Whoop-di-doo.

What about the professional market? I would be surprised if we didn't see a MacPro and MacBook Pro update that incorporated an eSATA port, to allow for large external drive storage at speeds greater than USB/FW800.

Then again, it is also possible that Steve finds eSATA a little raw and inelegant, and may simply announce FW3200 (FireWire @ 3200mbps vs 400/800 today) "available today". Only problem is, as with the release of FW800, its a nice sound bite but means nothing until compatible devices come out.

Mac Mini is the only question mark for me. I'm sure Steve would like to beef it up to take AppleTV's place in the living room (and killing ATV off), but it will need faster graphics to make it there (I don't think GMA950 can do full HD playback at 60fps). It'd be good to see nVidia or ATI get in there, with a design that uses the GPU to help with HD decode. You may even see Mini support BluRay, as Sony is using BluRay to drive PS3 (and vice versa) and I suspect Apple would see that as an opportunity (using BluRay to drive Mac and vice versa).

Reposted here ...

iPhone 2.0 with 3G is happening, so I'll skip past that.

There is talk of this new "Snow Leopard" build of MacOS X, but of it only being incremental (i.e. it may or may not be called 10.6), and will supposedly only have Cocoa APIs, not Carbon, so no Creative Suite, Final Cut Pro (yet), and no MS Office 2008.

I suspect you will see Snow Leopard features being more aimed at consumers, giving time for Adobe to finish its Cocoa version. MS had 4 years to move to Cocoa, and Steve probably thinks that was enough time, and they still screwed it up.

So, what will be in Snow Leopard? It has been announced that Windows 7 will have multi-touch, with an SDK coming in October. Apple won't let MS out-cool them, so it will be in Snow Leopard, and possibly even out at WWDC. It is also a perfect way to convert iPhone users to Mac users ("you love iPhone ... now you'll love Mac!")

Apple will update all of them monitors to incorporate a touch screen, and may update iMac also. Notebooks could be upgraded to support it, but the screens tend to move around when pushed, and Steve probably wouldn't like that ... so ... expect a tablet, probably called MacTouch Pro. You want multi-touch - you buy the tablet. The table will have a lot of the same screen behavior as the iPhone, allowing compatibility through common Cocoa APIs. This is a big part of why Carbon support is being dropped - Apple feels it has held them back from really innovating the user experience and it time to let it go.

Also expect a new version of iLife that is fully multi-touch enabled, letting you use touch to manipulate photos as on iPhone, but also to scrub through movie frames in iMovie, resize preview images in iDVD ... even to play instruments on screen in GarageBand. Microsoft has nothing like iLife, so this is how Steve will aim to beat them.

continued ...

There was an electric car developed in the 70s, but GM and other Detroit firms got it killed. There is a documentary about that also.

Water could work as long as it was sea water, not tap water. But then there is the issue of what your engine does with the salts and gunk from the water. The problem with tap water is, as you say, it is becoming scarcer and desalination is a crazy energy hog.

Water cars, based on fuel-cell technology could help, but the technology is probably 20-30 years away at the earliest, and probably more like 40.

We need to do something, and fast. If we don't, the recent food riots around the world will be the tip of the iceberg. If the world cannot support 90% of the population, you can expect them to just roll over and die. There will likely be mass migrations on a huge scale, putting a huge burden on richer nations, and reducing their ability to then fix the problem (due to diversion of funds to support the influx). Imagine all the people from sub-Saharan Africa walking to Europe, or the those from Central America walking into Texas and California looking for food (there's nothing in Arizona, trust me)

Then there is the other possibility - increasing desperation amongst Western leaders as resources deplete, leading to more and more war, and possibly ultimately a nuclear conflict (countries nuking other countries so their enemies are not around to take what they believe is theirs)

there is anecdotal evidence that cars specifically can be run on water, that is, a water engine. Howard Hughes and this other guy, John Hall, an actor, were purported to have built such an engine. Unfortunately, Hughes pulled a Howard Hughes and the other guy who actually built the thing, was murdered...or some say he committed suicide. Course, water ain't all that renewable either. Maybe now those fatcat oilmen will stop with their special interest lobby and increase research into alternative fuel methods. I want my Mr. Fusion, dammit!

We treat oil like its going to last forever, but then look at West Texas ... Pretty much everywhere but the Middle East has hit peak production and the decline starts now.

The US didn't discover new oil after 1930, and hit peak production in 1970 before declining to well below our domestic consumption today.

There have not been any new fields discovered since the late 1960s (the North Sea being one of the last to be found). If history repeats, thats it - we're done.

When Bush went out to meet King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia he was told they would not increase production. Wouldn't ... or couldn't? They have new fields coming on line, but only to compensate for wells that are closing up.

Anyway, imagine a world where oil is $300...$400...$500 a barrel, and gas is $15...$20 a gallon. We don't want to give up our cars, so there will be huge pressure to grow bio-fuels at the cost of food crops.

Imagine a world where there were no fertilisers ... Where you couldn't afford to commute to work ... Where cities die because its too expensive to get the food there. You get a return to subsistence farming and taking your excess to market.

The world only had $600 million people before the Industrial Revolution. In the next 100 years it doubled. Since the oil economy began it grew 4x. By 2030 there will probably be 10 billion people on a planet that without cheap oil energy, will probably only sustain 1 billion.

Another interesting question raised was "will my grandchildren ever ride on an airplane?". What happens to the world economy when you can't travel anymore? Do we return to the oceans in solar-powered ships? Sail boats?

Its interesting to think of the plastic, electric-car world of Minority Report or iRobot, and realize the world will not end that way. It will end like Jules Verne's The Time Machine - in a future world of people living in the remains of our civilization, with no idea how our technology worked.

The light that burns twice as bright burns half as long.

Haha

That's pretty good.