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First, why do you say that Sony lobbied for the laws you're complaining about (it would help also if you articulated those laws with specificity, but then that would make your assertions falsifiable, which I imagine you don't want.)

What, have you been living under a damn rock for the last 20 years? Sony has lobbied for pretty much every recent copyright law. DMCA, SOPA, PIPA, TPP -- you name it, they've lobbied for it. It's not a goddamn secret, you know!

They're mostly hardware, they have no skin in the game on software protection.

What the fuck are you talking about? Sony operates major movie, music and video game studios in addition to making hardware. And don't even try to feed me some bullshit about "that's some other division" -- they're all owned by the same corporation.

Also, I find it telling that so many seem to switch seamlessly back and forth between characterizing Microsoft as using their monopoly powers to coerce manufacturers into doing things that aren't in their own economic best interest, and characterizing Microsoft and Sony as voluntary co-conspirators

Microsoft is not forcing Sony to install Windows at gunpoint. Sony is installing Windows because they want to install Windows and have entered into a contractual agreement with Microsoft to do so -- that's called a partnership.

http://www.the-scientist.com/?...
Despite a lack of evidence that peer review works, most scientists (by nature a skeptical lot) appear to believe in peer review. It's something that's held "absolutely sacred" in a field where people rarely accept anything with "blind faith," says Richard Smith, former editor of the BMJ and now CEO of UnitedHealth Europe and board member of PLoS. "It's very unscientific, really."

http://www.ecnmag.com/blogs/20...
As soon as we receive a paper, we publish it," after a cursory quality check. Peer review happens after publication, and in the light of day.

http://www.economist.com/news/...
The hallowed process of peer review is not all it is cracked up to be, either. When a prominent medical journal ran research past other experts in the field, it found that most of the reviewers failed to spot mistakes it had deliberately inserted into papers, even after being told they were being tested.

There's a podcast where Fossey talks about the device on the Electronic Component News website: http://www.ecnmag.com/audio/2011/01/tinkers/first-Commercially-Available-Chip-Scale-Atomic-Clock.aspx

Btw, anyone deriding the value of this technology clear doesn't love a handicapped person whose life could be changed by being able to function with minimal limits via this kind of technology. They also, I suspect, don't own a business that would benefit significantly by people being able to casually lift and move items weighing hundreds of pounds, without significant risk of injury.

The inserts are being distributed to EW subscribers in NY and LA. Newsstands and other subscribers will get regular versions. The success of Video-In-Print could stimulate more widespread video print ads, but as of now, the prohibitive cost of these items (especially compared to traditional motionless ads) prevents wider distribution.

So don't expect to buy one off the shelf.

zigbee was fine in certain circumstances, but has largely been superceded by IPv6 over Low power WPAN aka 6lowpan Two major advantages of 6lowpan are that it is more or less regular Internet (TCP/IP) the other is that, as a result, more secure and almost infinitely more scalable.

Additionally, zigbee is not a standard, 6lowpan is. That difference has important repercussions for long term planning of projects. The IETF has a good track record for standard maintenance. There are also GPL tools for 6lowpan devices.

6lowpan is more flexible. Unlike zigbee, which is fine in some contexts, 6lowpan works with a variety of wired and wireless, low-power, low-bitrate transmissions.

The Internet is where things happen nowadays. 6lowpan is part of that.

Uh, yes, as frequently as the topic is discussed in Slashdot threads, I didn't feel the need to include the phrase "given typical usage patterns." I figured anybody reading it would understand that's what "works out to be" implies. But feel free to be pedantic.

That wasn't the point, anyway. The point was reads, which are apparently so reliable that nobody feels the need to quote read reliability at all. According to this, flash memory can be read up to 100,000 times before it needs to be refreshed. Given the date on the article is 2006, I speculate that more modern flash memory chips may include built-in refresh circuitry.

You already do. The backlight inverter in the LCD screen produces several thousand V(rms) initially to fire up the fluorescent tube, and somewhere in the high hundreds of volts while in operation.

http://www.ecnmag.com/article/CA602416.html

Ah, Roland the Plogger again.

First, this isn't about a battery with a 100x higher energy density. That would be a major breakthrough. It's about one with a high peak power, for surge applications. That's a specialty item.

It's also been done. Flat batteries with high peak-power outputs were invented over 25 years ago at Polaroid, for the PolaPulse battery. One of those was in every Polaroid film pack for years. It could put out 15 amps for a brief period, providing plenty of power to run the camera mechanism. (Since, in that camera, the battery had to power the mechanism that squeezed the film between the development rollers, substantial power was required for about one second.) The battery chemistry wasn't rechargeable, although there's no reason a rechargeable chemistry couldn't have been put in that packaging.

PolaPulse batteries are still available, and turn up now and then when a flat battery with a high peak current is needed. One amusing use of PolaPulse batteries is StartMeUp, which is a pocket-sized unit with six PolaPulse batteries used to restart a car.

Several other manufacturers claim to make flat batteries, some of which are rechargeable. However, none of the manufacturers mentioned in that article actually seem to be shipping product.

Capacitors like this are usually referred to as electric double layer capacitors. These days, they are made mostly with ultra-high surface area activated carbon powders, but there is a lot of research into making the electrodes out of aligned carbon nanotubes. They are constructed in sort of a sandwich involving for each electrode a metal foil current collector (usually aluminum) onto which the active electrode material (either AC or CNTs) are deposited. The anode and the cathode sections are sandwiched with each other and seperated by a thin mesh layer to prevent electrical shorting. The two electrodes are then rolled up with each other and placed in a canister and the entire assembly is filled with a dielectric fluid. The double layer part of the name comes from the fact that the polar molecules in the dielectric fluid align along the entire surface of the porous electrode. Therefore, the active surface of the capacitor is not just the portions closest to the opposing electrode but the entirety of the surface which is in contact with the dielectric fluid. The presence of the fluid dielectric as opposed to a solid dielectric material usually placed in a parallel plate capacitor gives the engineer allowances in not having to painstakingly align all the surfaces to very high tolerances. Here are some websites with illustrations which are probably a lot more elucidating than my descriptions: http://www.hohsen.co.jp/en/products/edlc/index4.ht ml http://ecnmag.com/article/CA202159.html It's good to know that all the stuff I learned designing one of the damned devices for four months for my senior design course is finally proving useful.

• Douglas' PC/104
• Controlled.com PC/104
• PC/104 Buyer's Guide
• BSI computers
• JENLOGIX SBC
• ECN July 1998 special

Also don't forget the wearable technology. The MIT Wearables and Yahoo:Wearables pages are good starting points. (I don't know where wearables.ml.org went to when DNS failed...)

The Wearable technology often uses PCMCIA-sized motherboards. Those pages have links to most of those boards. VGA/LCD, IDE, and the usual other interfaces are all on that one tiny card. Haven't seen sound on one yet.