But you might ask: why is it exactly this particular invention of Alexander Graham Bell that should swallow all other useful electronic gadgets? Why is it a telephone? Why it's not a hair-dryer, a washing machine, a lamp, a tricycle, the New York Times, or a coffee table?
It turns out that the right answer actually is a coffee table! You can transform and move your windows with your hands across your intelligent coffee table. The most creative readers could suggest that there could also be intelligent walls with such active windows. Indeed, that's possible, too. The technology is called
What's important is that there is no longer just one cursor on the screen. The whole coffee table is controlled by multi-touch signals. The top-secret project called Milan is only known to Bill Gates, a Czech businessman at the Bahamas, PopularMechanics.COM, the readers of The Reference Frame, and to UIUC where they already have a three-dimensional virtual cave.
Thanks to Viktor Kožený.
Off-topic: Michael Griffin told his colleagues that he regretted that he had expressed his opinions about global warming. That's the closest approximation to an apology that the bigots can get, so they present it as an apology in the media. Some of them may start to sleep again, trying to convince themselves that his interview was just a sequence of typos and misunderstandings! :-) When Griffin was leaving the conference room, he said that "it's revolving anyway", at least a legend has it.
