Women spent 32% longer on the phone to their helpers than men – but 66% of the helpline staff preferred speaking to them, the survey found.

In general terms men treat technology as something to be understood and conquered while women are more motivated by appliances that benefit them, she added.

You can see it in action on YouTube:

Apparently it will “print, bind, and trim a 300-page book in less than four minutes…” – not bad, but I’m not sure it’ll work for places like supermarkets, who wants to wait four minutes for their book?  On the other hand, online shops can carry an almost infinite (assuming they have the relevant files) number of books without the storage space.  It could also mean an end to large print runs that don’t sell out and so have to get returned.  Imagine the drop in shipping costs alone (to distributors anyway).

It would also be useful at places like airports where you seem to get stuck with someone else’s ideas of interesting reading. Not to mention allowing a ‘bookshop’ to be located almost anywhere, how long before they convert this into a vending machine?

The benefits for smaller publishers and self-print authors is obvious, potentially cutting out the middle-man and allowing bigger profits for no cost increase.

In a similar vein, the article also linked to Kirtas Books, where you can ‘invest’ in an out-of-print/undigitized books and make a percentage of any further sales.  This seems to mean that you pay some money towards the initial scanning costs and bump it up the to-do list and in return you make 5% of any future sales.  Not sure you’ll be raking it in (as it suggests on the site), these things are out of print for a reason, but an interesting idea.

Another issue is what to do with the black hole when it reaches the end of its life span, as they tend to explode. “Such an explosion is powerful by terrestrial standards, but not by astronomical standards”, say Crane and Westmoreland, so it’s merely a matter of dropping the black hole around 1 AU away from anything too important, and letting it detonate.

An AU, for the uninitiated, is an Astronomical Unit, which equates to 149,598,000 km.

On the other hand, the do point out:

A civilization equipped with our four machine tool set would be almost unimaginably energy rich. It could settle the galaxy at will.

Does that sound like a sales pitch?

The range is phenomenal, from live action scenes through various animation types, puppets, paper cut-outs, you name it, even chins that are reminiscent of the Vidaloovian people from Red Dwarf.

via io9

His demands will need a really rich person. Bill Gates fits that bill, in 2008 he was worth over $50bn. But even Bill Gates’s pockets aren’t deep enough.

What if everyone on Earth, all 6.8bn of us, were as rich as Bill Gates? Not enough. That super-rich planet would be worth only $340 million trillion.

What if we had 1,000 planets full of Bill Gateses? Still not enough to pay the bill, because 1,000 Bill Gates Earths adds up to only $340 billion trillion.

It would in fact take 5,247 super-rich, Bill Gates-filled planets to just barely cover Mr Chiscolm’s demand for $1,784 billion trillion.

And why is he suing, apparently:

“He seems to be claiming that he placed a series of calls to the bank in New York and received inconsistent information from a ‘Spanish woman’,” says the judge’s ruling. “He apparently alleges that checks have been rejected because of incomplete routing numbers”.

I also look forward to its successor, because while advocates of cloud computing, ultra-thin clients and distributed systems argue that Windows 7 marks the last major release of a Microsoft operating system, and perhaps of any operating system, I am not so convinced.

Some see a world in which Google’s Chrome OS or something similar provides a lightweight, network-oriented set of services and a translucent user interface, offering trouble-free access to a range of applications and tools in an always-on world.

Although I used to share this vision, I’ve started to feel differently.

For the last few weeks I’ve been living the life of a digital nomad as I’m between houses. I’ve relied on the kindness – and the network connectivity – of strangers and friends.

Although I’ve managed to get most things done, the pain of the slow wi-fi on a recent train journey from London to Newcastle, the general unreliability of my 3G dongle when away from the centre of large towns, and the continuing inability of O2 to provide decent data coverage for iPhone users have cast me into the fourth circle of network hell on far too many occasions for me to feel comfortable about the cloud.

I’ve come to rely more and more on the applications and data that reside on the hard drive of the laptop that I carry everywhere. So I can see why Microsoft’s decision to walk a careful line between a full operating system loaded with all the applications you can ever need and its Azure cloud platform makes sense.

Windows 7 is not going to be the end of the line for Microsoft operating systems.

“They look like they’re all legs … They live in webs, right, so they’re spindly, relatively delicate spiders,” said Jonathan Coddington, an arachnologist at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of Natural History in Washington, one of the scientists who identified the new species.

“If you were standing there, you wouldn’t say that. You would probably freak out. Most people do.”

Like other giant golden orb weavers in its family, N. komaci spins a web that is equally impressive in size, measuring more than a metre in diameter.

“The webs are so strong that you bounce off,” Coddington said Tuesday. “It’s not a diaphanous experience.”

He said the researchers aren’t sure why the females grow so big (at one-fifth their size, the male of the species is positively puny). But he suggested that the bigger the spider, the more eggs it can lay in its lifetime, so size may confer an evolutionary advantage.

“They’ve probably outgrown most of their predators,” Coddington said. Hummingbirds, which are known for plucking spiders off their webs while on the wing, “are too small to nail these guys. Bats could, too, but bats couldn’t take something like this.”

In fact, with this behemoth of a spider, the traditional hunter has become the hunted, as it were. N. komaci would have no problem chowing down on any bird, bat or lizard unfortunate enough to get ensnared in its web, although its usual diet would run more to flies, bees and grasshoppers, he said.

I agree the US will be a major player ongoing, but China and India have populations of over a billion each, this is a numbers game, it won’t happen until near the end of the century, but you bet those guys will be dictating more and more before too long.