FLYING CAR. The Terrafugia Transition is a flying car or a roadable airplane, depending on your point of view. The concept design is still months away from certification and production. Preliminary reports critique the craft's airborne handling and range, kinks which should be addressed before sales begin. My policy for new designs is wait-and-see. A number of sexy and innovative aircraft have fallen by the wayside, just since my initial involvement in aviation in 1999. Still, the idea of a commuter aircraft landing pretty much anywhere, then driving to one's destination, is appealing -- especially if one were to encounter threatening weather. Time will tell. Here is a video showing test flights of the aircraft.
ONLINE RADIO. Pandora Radio is an automated online music recommendation service and custodian of the music genome project. Users enter a song or artist that they enjoy, and the service responds by playing selections that are musically similar. Users provide feedback on approval or disapproval of individual songs, which Pandora takes into account for future selections. The service offers free (with ads) and paid (without ads) subscriptions.
Selecting a song or artist establishes a "station" for the user. One can branch out to other genres of music simply by simply adding songs from that genre, thus setting up additional "stations." Could be fun -- it is unclear whether this mode of delivery will compete with, or act as a complement to, music and news services such as XM Satellite Radio
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