OK, these OLEDs are really expensive right now. Just remember, in 1997, Fujitsu was selling the first big screen (42") Plasma TV, for an eye popping price tag of $15,000! Since then things have changed in price a little, what was 15,000 is now available at Costco for 800 bucks. We can probably expect OLEDs and e-ink to become cheap and widely available in the next 5 years as the initial cost of development is paid off and the per unit licensing costs drop to near zero.

Fixing the economy means embracing the change that is causing the problem in the first place. We can't buy our way out of this by supporting failed huge bureaucracies like the banks and auto companies. We need to invest in small companies with new ideas. The era of the giant conglomerates is over, their advantage was their size, they could do everything within one big, top-down, company. The savings on logistics, communication, and design work made these dinosaurs work. Those expenses reduce linearly with our ability for electronic communication (making logistics, communication etc cheaper). They've stayed alive by slashing labor costs, thus weakening our entire economy. We need to embrace an open source mentality and invest in the infrastructure that will make a real knowledge age work, Japan has already done this with their 50Mbs + broadband, but they have cultural congestion that will take them time to get over. In the US we don't have that congestion, but we lack the proper capital and infrastructure. Do away with venture capitalism that's only for the rich, let me put my 401k into a the blooming flowers of technological capitalism. In hindsite, the bubble of 2000 just went up a little too fast, the fundamental value was there. Unleash people from the bondage of corporate fealty and let them start their own companies that bloom and sell, or bloom get subsumed by the next company. Technology and science are the critical dimensions of our new economy, finance is a structure that slows change. Allow individuals to invest directly in non public companies more easily, allow those companies (with close supervision) to borrow like banks and watch the economy recover and bloom.

I don't see this machine as too expensive. If you are using professionally you'll be saving time and money compared with an AVID or other video editing solution. The same goes for photographers, graphic artists, animators, etc... why? because your time is money. I own a mac and a PC, I am the defacto computer support guy for my family and friends. Those who have a mac are happy and bother me rarely, those with PCs come to me frequently. If I charged them $20/hr for my services every single one of them would be way better off with a mac. Now, some small portion of the population can build themselves a hackintosh and get most of the benefits of a mac without the expense of the hardware.

There are some areas where this machine seems clearly lacking.

1. who is the target audience for this device? Professionals (non-professionals are much more likely to get an imac for half the price) graphic artists, animators, small movie makers, music makers.
* They all need LOTS of storage. I would build a high quality (most are low quality) hot swappable 3.5" SATA doc into the machine so storage was as simple as buying a new drive. Even 4Tb of storage fills up fast if you're shooting 6 hours of video 3 or 4 times a week (pretty normal for a wedding videographer).
* I would make the machine water cooled so it was as quiet as possible.
* Blue ray recorders should at least be an option. (at 179 on newegg, they're totally affordable for professionals)
* More ports on the FRONT. Two USB and one firewire port isn't enough for people that have a LOT of peripherals. There is a design issue here of how the front of the machine can simultaneously look clean and have a lot more ports (I don't quite know how to solve it elegantly).

http://www.popularmechanics.com/science/research/4237756.html
(dec 2007)
A silicon anode, by comparison, can hold a much greater charge—4.4 lithium ions per single silicon atom. But because silicon swells to four times its volume when charged, using it in a battery causes the anode to break apart, rendering standard silicon useless for power. The breakthrough is in the discovery that, while 100-nanometer-wide silicon nanowires expand, they do not break.

Ok, he's taking charge (likely for the VC's that funded Tesla) so he can get the company CASH positive. Tesla needs to be cash positive if they're going to survive. I must confess that I don't much care for Musk's background as my run-ins with people that went to private school and were born with a silver spoon indicate that they lack vision and spend too much on the business and too little on the technology. However, if Tesla is going to grow, they need to get profitable. There are some important differences in how you run a start up till you prove your idea and how you take that start up to profitability (and eventually public). I wish them the best of luck. If we can get the US government to stop pouring money into the huge-failing-decrepit Detroit auto makers I think the US might be able to get back to making the best autos in the world via upstarts like Aptera and Tesla. As institutions age, if they aren't careful, they develop rules to solve problems, those rules develop into a thicker and thicker layer of bureaucracy that eventually kills the institution. It's not that rules are bad, they are usually necessary. It's the build up over time of those rules. They need to be melted off periodically like the ice on the wing of a plane. Because Detroit-auto hasn't done it's maintenance it's time for it to die (and hopefully be reborn like the proverbial phoenix).

It does look like there is little crumple room. BUT remember that a lot of the visual crumple room in a standard car is an engine and it's engine mounts do not crumple. This car has an electric motor which is much much smaller for the same amount of power as an internal combustion engine. Nissan may also be building this car out of carbon fiber which, if shaped correctly, can deform very regularly and make a car much safer for a given amount of room and weight. Despite their size SUV's are not all that safe, their high center of gravity is a serious problem in an accident, a former housemate of mine hit an SUV at about 35 mph in a honda civic, both cars were destroyed, no one was hurt, but the SUV rolled over (side, top, side 270 degrees). The only accident the SUV is safer in is a head on collision (very rare), it's much more dangerous to be in a rollover accident (which is much more likely in a SUV or Van). So, bigger == safer is largely mythology.

58% of the vehicle occupants killed in 2003 were not wearing seat belts, most of the additional vehicle occupant deaths were in SUV and van rollovers.

my current model of the brain is that it doesn't work as a single unit. There are a bunch of subsystems (like the video card and sound card and possibly the physics card in your computer). This might be analogous to the sound card, the work that novamente or numenta has been doing lately would be the cerebral cortex, cognex or vision-systems work for the visual cortex. I'm unaware of a limbic system but it might not be necessary for an AI. I'm actually surprised to see how fast the pieces are coming together. It seems like we might have a couple AI's (and I think we'll need two, so that they can learn from one another and not just from our weirdly different perspective) sooner (4-8 years) rather than later 20+ years. So what do we humans do afterword? We moved from hunter-gathering societies to agricultural societies then to industrial societies, and now we're moving to knowledge/service societies. As far as an AI or robot uprising it seems a little funny. Human uprisings have occurred because of a lack of resources (and advanced from there by classism, racism, religious-isms, etc to justify the war beyond that point). A robot or AI will be smart enough to make unlimited money (Warren Buffet would rapidly look stupid to an AI aimed at making money in the stock market), have unlimited time to live, and it will realize that reasonably quickly as well. So, what do we do when we have (from our current perspective) unlimited resources. Robot workers plus AI's will finish a space elevator quickly, figure out inertial confinement fusion, biofuels, cheap solar, thorium nuclear reactors, etc in quick order. They will take up no room (they might exist within server farms moving around as they wish, with a million eyes in the form of every camera on every computer, a million ears in every microphone on a conected computer, they could be made to 'feel' data, I know people that (tell me that they) can 'feel' misspelled words, what happens when you can 'feel' all the scientific theories that exist in all fields simultaneously?

dammit kid, keep your frickin sharpie away from my whiteboard.

the deflation we have become so used to in technology applies to the power of the chipsets (moore's law). In the case of something like a graphing calculator, the packaging, distribution, and miscellaneous hardware (lcd screen, case, battery holder) are subject to inflation. For the academic use that the calculator is aimed at more functionality is not appropriate ( the (academic) 'man' is holding the technology back). The relative cost of the chipset in the TI graphing calculator has been very very low even in 1997, so it may have moved from $.30 to $.05 but the overall cost of the device hasn't changed much at all (and has even been subject to inflation).

this looks really nice. Well designed. When are they bringing out the phone version? I'm not seeing anything about this being a wifi device. It does seem to be a better PMP than the touch, but the touch is a PMP/PIM device. Having said that, the UI work to get this device to work well with one handed operation is very very nice and whoever did it certainly deserves kudos.