Wow - this is really impressive. I am definitely going to fly to London and check out this energy saving club. I really want to show my solidarity with the people at this club and what they are trying to achieve. Any questions about how much energy it takes to produce and deploy and promote this new new thing are un-green and miss the point. Whats really important is to show others how green they need to be, and I for one applaud anything these people do.

Please - no more unboxings - I cant imagine anything more boring than watching someone stating the contents of a box of consumer electronics. This is one fucked up nerd-fetish too far and it must die.

Reviews, yes. Unboxings, eat shit and die.

Im pretty sure this image is a fake. The air/water cooling hybrid thingy just doesnt make sense to me.

Water coolant is used to move heat from one part of the PC to another. In most cases, this means it is used to move heat from the CPU to a radiator at the back of the PC, over which air is blown to remove the heat.

Why then, does this graphics card have both a fan/radiator/heatsink AND inlets/outlets for water? The only reason I could think of is that some parts of the card are directly air cooled (e.g. the RAM and such), while the GPU chip itself is water cooled. The thing is, if youre going over to water cooling, theres no reason why you wouldnt go the whole way.

The photo we are looking at is either fake, or some mutant hybrid prototype. Its unlikely to be a production device, in my opinion.

Brilliant - now you have to scan the crowd by pointing your gun at each person in turn, and an automated back office system tells you who to shoot.

A long silk scarf would no doubt be considered a weapon... maybe not by the hassassin, but probably by the thugee

If the image was reversed, with a black woman dominating a white man, would it be offensive? What about a black man dominating a white woman, or a white man dominating a black woman?

Hello ATOT,

Not sure if youre still reading this, but Id like to respond to your points.

First, you are right that I am saying the subsidy has artificially inflated hardware costs, but more than that, it has skewed the market towards dedicated hardware, and dedicated hardware of a certain form at that. I understand that R&D and support costs can be quite high, but not necessarily so. Certainly, the price of the device has nothing to do with the cost of R&D and much more to do with the amount of subsidy.

1. Every AAC users needs are different. For there to be a rich ecology of machines on the market is a good thing. For some people, a rugged PDA would be a workable solution, thought it wouldnt be subsided unless it was a dedicated device. There are manufacturers in Asia that have PDA internals ready to go, at a bulk cost of a few hundred dollars a unit. All thats required it to drop them into a specially designed case. Not too much R&D there. I tend to agree that surface area is important, but there are PDAs with a variety of screen sizes. It would be interesting to know what the rationalle for Tango's small screen was.

2. Having the AAC device have more than one function would be a boon for users of AAC devices. Even something as simple as enabling it to act as a cellphone would be great. Its a communications device.

3. Youre right that AAC devices need to be very rugged. But I have looked closesly at the devices on the amrket, and they dont look to me to be designed to be any more rugged than military devices. In some ways, the seem quite flimsy to me. Again, this is mostly a matter of the design of a casing. Not exactly revolutionary R&D.

4. Dedicated device. Must only do one thing. Legislating the form of the device. Nuff said.

5. Hardware is the easiest thing for a lay person to understand, hence the emphasis on it. Is it better to have better hardware or better predictive input? By building better boxes, how much better can you make the life of an AAC user compared to building better software? What about AAC devices that dont look anything like PDAs? Im thinking of voice enhancement systems, or multi-modal systems that bring together gestural and speech recognition, etc etc. I dont see to much thinking outside the box in this field.

Being passionate and well-meaning is a necessary, but not sufficient, condition for bringing about positive change.

The subsidy has created a whole industry around building assitive communications devices (AAC) for children. Thats a great thing for those children.

The problem is that the subsidy is structured to severely limit the kinds of devices it covers, effectively controlling the form and utility of those devices. For example, a devices which also functioned as a TV or as a laptop or cellphone, would not be covered (as I understand it).

The subsidy has also artificially created a price point of $6-7K for assistive devices. There are companies that make very effective AAC software that can run on everydray or rugged multifunctional PDAs, but they arent elligible for the subsidy. Those companies tend to be ought out by the companies selling dedicated hardware, if only because they are competitors selling a cheaper product, but making less money because they arent subsidised.

In the end, the great leaps forward in assitive communications arent going to come from better boxes, but from better software.

Better boxes might just be a transitional phase, but until the subsidy covers software, all the innovation will tend to be in the packaging.

Characterising the subsidy thing a scam was probably too strong a term. Clearly it has value, but I believe the form of the subsidy is misdirecting resources.

The price is correct. All of the assitive devices are priced around the $5K to $6K mark.

Why, you might ask? Well, its a bit of a scam.

Theres a subsidy of $5-6K available from medicare/medicaid.

That subsidy is only available to devices that are dedicated to assistive communications purposes.

So while you can run off to taiwan and buy the guts of a PDA for a few hundred dollars, if you put it into a nicely designed case, and prevent it from running anything but your own assitive communications software, the government will pay you $5000 to sell it to the parents of disabled kids.

Theres plenty of very smart people making very usefull software for assistive communications, but the way to make bucks is to make dedicated hardware.