Come on. E-book that you can stuff in your pocket. E-book that you can unfold like a newspaper. An e-book reader that you can drop on the floor without shattering. The ultimate reader. And it only gets better from here.

Tesla will receive a 350 million dollar Federal loan to build the S.
http://www.boston.com/cars/news/articles/2009/02/22/federal_loans_will_help_jump_start_tesla_sedan/
The "free market" would have sold them off for scrap by now.

Once again: regular scanners need close proximity to read RFID tags of this sort. One simply needs to use an irregular scanner, running at higher power, to read them from longer distances up to several yards... OK? We've been at this for years now. The vendors are full of it, they are lying, not telling the true, I am questioning the veracity, it is not a fact, a falsehood is being told. The cards can be read from a distance. The experiments are many and this is one of them.

Do you actually think they made us carry those cards for fun? They're conditioning us to accept the things. Reading a passport with eyeballs has worked fine. The RFID cards are no less copyable than a paper passport. Those cards can be scanned from a distance, in large numbers, by the proper equipment, and believe me, they possess the proper equipment. They are crowd scanning devices in embryonic form. What other purpose could they have?

Yeah, that's Bruce Willis. He posts as 'Walter B', or did, on aintitcool.com's Talkbacks.

One night he simply showed up posting, claiming to be one Bruce Willis, people called the poseur out, and Walter B there decides to set up an iChat session with his doubter. It was last year, I think.

http://www.aintitcool.com/node/32598

"Pining for the fjords"?
http://www.giantitp.com/comics/oots0526.html
Referencing the Order of the Stick? Priceless.

This isn't because of Apple so much as it is AT&T requiring in-store activation as a part of the deal. Jobs is probably calling the albino genius monk into his office right now to deal with his little problem with the $%#^%'s at AT&T who got us into this mess.

I have no idea where the posters got the notion about "eyes" and "ears" and all the other... stuff. I've read shinyshiny's article. What is SAYS is that there are integral turn signal lights on the ends of the handlebars. A great idea, one I've been proposing for years. The rest of the stuff about riders not paying attention is shinyshiny's wordplay, and I've no idea what the hell that has to do with turn signals.

As for the bike itself, apparently the chassis is reinforced with interior structure to make it very strong and very light. It has integrated rear lights. It probably has headlights, can't see them. But is about time that we stopped pretending bikes are toys that can be operated with a 1 watt flashlight acting as a headlight. Would you ride a motorcycle in traffic with a 1 watt LED flasher your only light? Hell you wouldn't.

The enclosed body will be useful someday for housing batteries and GPS's and anything else that is expensive and prone to destruction when it rains.

Why should a bike be a collection of tubes forever? I swear, young male techies are amongst the most conservative people in the world. Weird, considering what your professions are.

I think the "begging to be hit" meme has something to do with drivers righteously killing the dweebs riding a bike like that. Talk about your peer pressure. Perhaps a built-in missile launcher with car-piercing projectiles would be an appropriate add-on for the hollow chassis, just for the occasional would-be critic of the bike who wants to sideswipe the hipster.

Somehow, I don't think the US is going to lead the world into a brave new century of cooler transportation as long as its most technical people sound like a pack of dudes from Jersey hassling a Prius owner.

Japan isn't all that small. Neither is any European country. Anyway, a larger country isn't all that more expensive to fiber than a small one, because finance scales to match. Fiber is cheaper elsewhere because the governments stepped in and regulated. Also, economies of scale kicked in as it is cheaper to build a mandated countrywide network per capita than to have a few mega corporations trickle improvements while Haliburtoning profits to the limit. And let's not forget that we've ALREADY PAID for the fiber to our homes in 1997, when the Federal government gave billions in tax breaks to the major telecoms with the express earmarking to provide high speed internet to all our homes. They stole the money, and now or gouging us after we've already paid. Yet somehow, South Korea makes it cheap and profitable. The problem isn't size, or time, or money, as size is defeated by scale, time has been 11 years and counting, and they have already been paid by our taxes to build these networks. The problem is lies and greed.

To the great cloud of people (not here on engadget necessarily) who said it was foolish to think that the built-in government mandated GPS tracking of your phone could be controlled by the user and not by remove command by hostile parties:

Duh. They flip a bit and know where you are. Fun, huh?

Could be useful for in-wheel electric motors. The problem with such is the penalty in "sprung weight", the weight added to the wheel by slapping a motor in the rim. Now, this plastic rim could lower the weight, which could enable the addition of the motor with no net added weight compared to the steel or aluminum version.