Extra Dialer Pro 3.0 Beta 5 Released [BetaNews.Com]

Abstract: Software sends a voice message to a large group of people, and gives them the option of replying.

Product: Home Assistant that helps manage your schedule and appointments based off a set of rules and/or hueristics that you have set up, as well as by learning from your behavior. It could then keep your lights on at appropriate times when you are on vacation as well as answering the phone and forwarding messages to you, again, based on said rules. Something similar was depicted in both The Mote in God's Eye and The Gripping Hand, with each such assistant named by it's owner.

Addendum: By using a common interface between the various data types that this would handle, you could add a lot of functionality and share info between tools. How would you define the mark-up for it though? It is far more than a datebook, though it uses that functionality for handling who it calls. You could have it looking at a set of tables in order to work it's magic, but minimizing redundancy across tools is an issue, as is insuring proper sharing... Time to do some research.

11:57:56 AM    

Military palmtop to cut collateral damage. The super-palmtop is called JEDI and combines laser rangefinding, GPS satellite positioning, a satellite phone and text messaging [New Scientist]

"JEDI is a lot more robust, he says. To test quite how much the gadget can take, the Army had a game of football using a JEDI as the ball - and it worked just fine afterwards."

Now THAT is product testing. it is good to know that they developing tech to help keep our soldiers alive, though I wonder what safeguards there are against it falling into enemy hands.

Battlefield technology has been an interest of mine since I read Firefight 2000 (Hmm, new cover has it as Firefight Y2K) back in high school. This UberPDA should be a big boost, as long as it's transmissions are secure, and untraceable. I'd hate to see someone getting shelled because an enemy can triangulate their location by pinging their PDA.

11:50:07 AM