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They are both advertised as IP67 dust- and water-resistant.

Google's marketing claims they're even safe to wear while showering:
https://play.google.com/store/...
https://play.google.com/store/...

Not sure I'd do that if I got one...

Get back on your choo choo train and quit yer bitching.

+5 Funny also on the mark.

These affectations of language have their origin in entertainment and activities for young children that include a special 'vocational adult hat' to wear. Latent memories of this technique emerge later on as iconography, such as the cute Sherlock Holmes hat (with Cavendish pipe) or graduation mortarboard cap beside extra credit puzzles.

This Wears A Special Hat trick is used to titillate the news media, which is locked in a state of perpetual childhood.

So Mr. and Ms. Whale, I hope you have fun wearing your Very Special Hats.

https://www.google.com/search?...

I have some products for you to try Cures everything from cancer to kidney disease

Maybe they stumbled on the killer-robots.txt control file and thought that, if Google are taking precautions, the menace must be real?

$120 + to make something that doesn't play game boy games but looks like a gameboy
when you could buy a much more capable 7 inch tablet

https://www.google.com/search?...|7%247,vw:l,p_ord:p&tbm=shop&ei=i6G4U4XNGcedyATo_4GoAg&ved=0CKQEELsNKAI

for as little as $30 ?

DUAL_EC_DRBG was a random number generation algorithm that only its mother could love. It's slow, complex not provably more random than other algos, and comes with magic, unexplained constants, which are the last thing you want to see in an ostensible entropy generator based on asymmetric crypto... and if you want FIPS certification you have to use the given constants. Why did NSA want it in there so badly? Why, after a potential flaw was found and corrected, did NSA personnel "suggest" a change that, in retrospect, only made that putative flaw more reliably exploitable? Cryptologists explain.

On the hardware side, Theodore T'so observed that Intel was very eager to have RDRAND be the exclusive source of entropy for the kernel's RNG, as was one goofball at Red Hat who tried to introduce a kernel parameter to do the same thing. He fought them both off, thankfully.

In general, see also ProPublica on the SIGINT Enabling Project.

No problem :) I first did my own research, then met up with the president of the Icelandic Concrete Association, who's pretty excited about the project, to discuss it further. The project is going to be unusual in quite a few ways, for example, it's going to be what's called an "umbrella earth home", and we're going for a natural cave/steampunk look to it (based on an idea that the concrete guy had, we're going to use high pressure water on the interior after the concrete sets to remove the outer layers of cement from the gravel, leaving it looking like rough rock on the inside). It may not be a first in the world, but it'll be a first for Iceland. :)

I've been thinking about the long term on everything with the project. For example, instead of drilling a well to pump from, I'm having the cold water come from a persistent natural spring up on the mountainside about half a kilometer away, naturally filtered through gravel and sand (my excavator operator is working on it as we speak, actually), so it takes no power to run and should last very well. Wells are standard where I am but I found I could get water from the spring for about the same price, maybe even less.

Wrong, at least at the moment. You can turn off the google national redirect by simply appending "/ncr" to the url, i.e. http://www.google.com/ncr will take you to the USA site even if you are in Europe. However whether Google is forced to take that option away given some of these stupid EU and national court rulings is another matter.

Try www.google.com/ncr

It's not the greatest example, but here is YouTube's policy on counter-notices (to get content put back up)
https://support.google.com/you...

It basically says, if the DMCA takedown is filed on behalf of one of the major media companies, Google is contractually required to deny all counter-claims. If you want your content re-instated, you have to sue whoever made the DMCA complaint.

Any kind of unusual light seems to work. I've written a small app (Better Bike Light) to use my cell phone as a rear light. When I use it, cars are considerably more considerate when bypassing me. I'm not sure if they're more careful when encountering something unfamiliar or are just curious, but it seems to work.

What's wrong with that? Lots of amusing things come up when you Google that. Hell, Google auto completed the search for me, suggesting "recipes" after I had typed in "human meat".

Incidentally, I'm not much of a whiz in the kitchen, but I suspect human flesh would work pretty well in a red sauce or curry. The bigger problem of course would be the cost of obtaining it, followed by the difficulty of obtaining lean cuts, particularly if you reside in the first world....

You say "the human body has enzymes that break it down harmlessly (it is present in small amounts in the body normally). As long as those enzymes aren't overwhelmed" ; yes, the human body has enzymes that can process H2S, "as long as they're not overwhelmed." Problem is, that overwhelming happens many times that the enzyme molecule encounters a hydrosulphide ion, leaving the cytochrome enzyme literally plugged and resulting in a back-up of un-processed hydroxide free radicals. If that sounds like good news to you, then we've got different understandings of "good news". That said, though there has been some work done looking for post-exposure (to H2S) cancers and other sequels to the oxidative damage, with no strong effect noticed. (Caveat : vintage mid-1990s, and this is an under-researched area.)

This happened 30 years ago. If there was going to be a problem, it would have shown by now.

There are programmes following up people after such periods, though mostly (AFAICT) in the paper pulp industry. The exposure of some hundred thousand of people in Edmonton to several ppm for several days after a blowout ... sorry, I've forgotten the location ; about 1981, some hundred kilometres upwind from Edmonton ... Lodgepole blowout ... has produced a considerable cohort for a longitudinal study. Getting funding to actually perform such studies seems to have been difficult - probably because it would be politically inconvenient, and partly because - well, everyone knows that H2S is do-not-fuck-with stuff, so to stop fucking with it seems a pretty good start to management.

used in trauma to induce a deep hibernation like state

Yeah, I saw those reports. And I thought that sounded like pogo-sticking across really thin ice above a pool of hungry sharks. With lasers on their heads. I do understand the mechanisms they're proposing for preventing apoptosis (well, IANA metabolism researcher ; but I've forgotten more biochemistry and chemistry than most people), but that really doesn't encourage me to be on the receiving end of such treatments. I'd rather plan to avoid such injuries instead.

On a complete aside, I just discovered New Zealand's favourite part of Central Europe : Bad Aussee.

Forbidden - BBC
www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/thereporters/.../2007/10/.../index.htm...Tõlgi see leht
29.10.2007 - All weekend, wave after wave of schadenfreude has been crashing on the head of Stan O'Neal, the chairman of Merrill Lynch. After Merrill ... BBC News - Have Your Say

When clicking on this title (http://www.google.ee/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=2&cad=rja&uact=8&ved=0CCQQFjAB&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.bbc.co.uk%2Fblogs%2Fthereporters%2Frobertpeston%2F2007%2F10%2F29%2Findex.html&ei=IeG0U5O0NYa0PL-BgbgJ&usg=AFQjCNEfFXYrZu2W1GwPGwaq9Z19g_171Q&bvm=bv.70138588,d.ZWU ), the original article appears! So, effectively Google displays the result, but says it is forbidden to read it? I'm baffled.

Slashdot has gone to a sad place. You are honestly asking if it's safe to work and live in a building made of cement? Is that a real question that is actually being posted on a website who's tagline is supposed to be "news for nerds, stuff that matters"?
https://www.google.com/search?...
Look at all those poor poor people living in cement buildings. I hope they don't get the cancer. But I kind of hope you DO.

ARMv8 (64-bit ARM)

So it's time for Google to step up to the plate. How long will it be until we get v8 for the v8?

I haven't been on line. I'm still connected only with my phone. https://plus.google.com/111463...

Next up! A web browser written in Javascript.

No need to wait, it's already here.

Mayonnaise is also one of earth's nastiest substances

This is only true about factory-made mayonnaise. The original recipe is drastically different — but can not be stored for more than a few days. If you are willing to deal with such quickly-expiring product, you can make your own at home. Recipes abound.

For the random people that use Orkut like others use Facebook, it really is not a lot of time to figure out what to do with potentially gigabytes of information. That holds particularly true for anyone that is not technically savvy.

How long does it take to slide over to Google Takeout and download all of your data?

A few minutes? An hour?

When Goog crushed Wave, I downloaded all my stuff in a matter of minutes. Couldn't really do much with it, but it lowered my White Hot Rage down to Red.

TBH I think C++ is very overlooked as a web development system. If you're any good with it (ie not some n00b who thinks PHP is the best, or a javascript dev who thinks its the only language there is) then you can do very well in it.

There are many web servers written in C++ that are designed to run the server code as well (often used for embedded systems to provide a GUI, but strangely always get hammered in benchmarks to show how fast they are - maybe its an efficiency thing for small devices, but has a side-effect of being very fast for larger-scale systems).

Sure, there's no built-in code for handling common web use-cases, but there's many a library for everything in C/C++ land.

If not, you can still write a service in C++ and call it from any web serve front-end, that's the way you get scalability and security and everyone should do it (after all those cases of hacked webservers allowing the attacker to dump all passwords from the database - wtf did the web server have any access to the DB server.. oh yeah, lazy architecture choices)

I'd have a look at Mongoose for an example. Trivially easy to code a web site with - I used it to embed a web server in existing code that needed to serve a new GUI.

and then EASE came along on top of PHP allowing those same web content creators to do much more powerful content creation without any DB administration or form handling code... i've been working with EASE for a while now and find it extremely powerful.

here is the open source repo that links to a few Build Acceptance Test apps showing lots of sample code

Dave Barry described this in some 'detail' (from Bad Habits):

What we are in is a recession. The key economic indicator of a recession is that government economists go around announcing that the economy is improving. The truth, of course, is that government economists don't have the slightest notion what the economy is doing; if they did, they would have decent jobs. But they keep trying. Every few days they come out with some economic statistic and attempt to explain it, using charts and pointers, to the news media:

["press release" omitted]

Government economists are always hopeful, for two reasons:

1. They have jobs.
2. If they aren't hopeful, the President wil fire them.

So government economists go around with big smiles on their faces all the time. For the past thirty years, presidents increased spending and deficits like clockwork, and the government economists smiled. Then Ronald Reagan said he was against big spending and deficits, and the government economists smiled. Now it turns out that spending and deficits are still going up, and the government economists are still smiling. Phyllis George would be a good government economist.

Google won't let you opt out of their wi-fi location database without changing your SSID. So I'm the one who has to change my network and every connected device if I don't want to be part of their geolocation efforts. Because an opt-out by MAC address would be sooooooo difficult to implement.

Actually, I have the utmost respect for Hypocrites. Unless they are also a Southpaw. I am hugely racist towards Southpaws.

Lefties are the Devil's minions.

https://www.google.com/url?sa=...

For the record, that video shows him walking casually into the room, not "sneaking" into it. You might see something nefarious going on, but I don't.

I suggest that you e-mail the 784,000 web pages that say Aaron Swartz snuck into the closet, and inform them they're using the English language wrong:
https://www.google.com/search?...

"sneaking" indicates that he made deliberate attempts not to be caught doing the action. It does not imply that he wore a trenchcoat and a stocking cap.

He could have downloaded the data from his own desk in his own office. Instead he went to the library and entered a wiring closet that was clearly not supposed to be open to the public.

If you were going to download a lot of data, would you choose a node with many hops to the server or just a few? I would pick the one closest to the server.

Nice rationalization, but his first few attempts at scraping the database was by downloading via the MIT wifi network, so it's clear that speed of access wasn't his main objective here. It was only after he was repeatedly blocked from doing that by wireless access (being blocked should have been a clue to him) that he snuck into the closet.

OOoooh. Did he sneak in on his belly like a cobra or on tippy-toes like the spy-vs-spy cartoon? Seems like that would just draw undo attention. Or maybe he just walked in, and you are making shit up.

Uh, since you don't seem to know anything about the case, why are you commenting?

Here are the first couple of links from a google search

The Washington Post: Jan 12, 2013 - "When MIT cut off access to its wireless network, Swartz snuck into an MIT network closet and plugged his laptop directly into the campus ..."

What Aaron Swartz did at MIT - Daily Kos
Jan 13, 2013 - Between November and December 2010, Aaron Swartz accessed this room ...... The closet he snuck his laptop in turned out..."

Why We Should Remember Aaron Swartz - Businessweek Jan 13, 2013 - "It also has people like Aaron Swartz, whose work makes empires ... He snuck into a closet at Massachusetts Institute of Technology and used ..."

Swartz Caught in a Closet (Update) | Simple Justice Jul 20, 2011 - "Aaron Swartz, a 24-year-old programmer and online political activist, has ... on copies of JSTORs content without having to sneak into a closet, ..."

And the video is online: https://www.google.com/search?...

Thing is, you don't have to shave metal from the coin unless you're stupid, lazy, and/or in a big hurry.

Coins of precious metal wear down with use. Metal gets rubbed off the high points of the coin. A heavily worn silver dime can lose as much as 20% of its weight, and still be recognizable as a dime. Where does the metal go? All over the place -- bits of it are left as dust or markings at every point where the coin moves across a surface. In the days of circulating PMs, when coins wore down too far, they were returned to the government, which would melt them down and recycle their metal into new coins. The government absorbed the losses due to circulation.

If you're an enterprising individual, you can get a bunch of silver or gold coins, put them in a dust-tight bag, tumble that bag for a few days, and collect the dust. You're left with worn, but still perfectly legal, coins; they are, in fact, circulated, just not among multiple entities. It's called sweating, and can be done chemically as well, although that method is easier to detect.

So, if you're on a gold or silver standard, your "hard currency" still loses value over time, but you have the power to capture that "lost value" yourself if you so choose. If a state or nation proposed to issue silver or gold coins for circulation today, you can be sure people would use the full power of twenty-first century technology to chisel their cut off the top. There's no way any entity would volunteer to be on the hook for circulation losses, especially when it's so easy for another entity to accelerate and capture those losses.

The problem there is they might try start forcing more people in such prisons in order to make money for the government, claim "we are fixing this country" and everyone will cheer.

Do you not have private prisons in the UK? If not, I suppose it's only a matter of time. We have them in the US, and some judges are already rotting in prison for exactly the sort of thing you were imagining. They were sentencing juveniles with petty offenses to long term detention, in exchange for multi-million dollar kickbacks from the private detention facility. When imprisoning people becomes a profitable enterprise, abuse is guaranteed to follow.

Yeah Chris Grayling is indeed pushing DoJ that way, have friends involved in this mess who are leaving careers because of whole fiasco. They are trying to do that to the whole system not just 1 or 2 private prisons and judges here wont get put in such prisons for it since it'll be the system that is bent not just a few backhanders and dodgy practices which the met already specialises in getting away with to fluff arrest records to meet the projected figures the politicians want for that year. Basically everyone but the 1%club get shafted and they wreck our whole justice infrastructure, waste extraordinary sums on converting to a profit system that clearly wont work and can't be changed back once broken. I'm a reasonable guy who respects most but I don't consider tories sentient life nor valuable in any way for a reason

Perhaps they looked at this page
https://www.google.com/search?...

And thought, 'Hey that's a great idea, lets copy these cool things.'

I have a stereo viewer that dates from the day of glass slides (1910)

https://www.google.com/search?...

My proposals: https://www.changemakers.com/m...
https://www.newschallenge.org/...

And also advice to Larry from that my own individual sensemaking from 2012:
"Larry Page & Sergey Brin hopefully getting enough sunlight and vegetables?"
https://groups.google.com/foru...

your information is outdated, as is that Wikipedia entry. I'll try to update it after this post.

The quote below is from "Nuclear Development, June 2011, http://www.oecd-nea.org/"

"Modern nuclear plants with light water reactors are designed to have strong maneuvering capabilities. Nuclear power plants in France and in Germany operate in load-following mode, i.e. they participate in the primary and secondary frequency control, and some units follow a variable load programme with one or two large power changes per day.

The minimum requirements for the maneuverability capabilities of modern reactors are defined by the utilities requirements that are based on the requirements of the grid operators. For example, according to the current version of the European Utilities Requirements (EUR) the NPP must at least be capable of daily load cycling operation between 50% and 100% of its rated power Pr, with a rate change of electric output of 3-5% of Pr per minute.

Most of the modern designs implement even higher maneuverability capabilities, with the possibility of planned and unplanned load-following fast power modulations in the frequency regulation mode with ramps of several percent of the rated power per second, but in a narrow band around the rated power level."

the above excerpt is just a small portion of http://www.google.com/url?sa=t...

I'm not sure why the URL has to be so god awful long to work, I tried to shorten it manually but it killed the link. I suppose if I could find a direct link from http://www.oecd-nea.org/ it might be shorter but I'm not in the mood to dig for it.

Do it yourself: http://www.google.com/

Instead of asking Slashdot such a silly question you could also just google getting a gsm sim card in the us.

Lo and behold!

#1) "The best Prepaid SIM Cards"
#2) "SIM Cards - Best Buy"

It's been trivial to do this for about a decade and 5 seconds of googling got me the answer. This is one of the stupidest ask slashdots ever, and they are almost all incredibly stupid. I'm not looking and I'm going to guess tImothy put this story up.
checks the top of the page
Yup. Fuck timothy.

More people need to get pissed at these "security" checks. I see it happening at more and more venues: football games, art museums, etc... At least the metal detectors in the courthouse came as a response to actual shootings. But come on, who is going to bother with a terrorist attack on the Duct Tape Museum of Greater Bumfuck? At some point the security measures cost more than what you're actually preventing.

To be fair, security checks at some football stadiums also came as a response to actual violence at said stadiums. See: Raiders fans.

Every Smalltalk programmer programs in the class browser, and its good friend, the live debugger. So there's a definite link there. Except for the GNU Smalltalk people who are weird and program in Vim or Emacs.

Every Smalltalk programmer programs in the class browser, and its good friend, the live debugger. So there's a definite link there. Except for the GNU Smalltalk people who are weird and program in Vim or Emacs.

No, because America has long held it acceptable to bomb "military and economic" targets. Guess what the Pentagon and the WTC are? Guess what makes makes those who died on that day?

Umm, well, again, if they are AIMING for an economic target, then it's not collateral damage. What are you not understanding here? I think you need a dictionary.

Do I have to paint you a literal picture in addition to the verbal one? WTC = economic target, Slick.

So you're okay with all those that died in the planes and on the towers, since they weren't on any battlefield either. Bloodthirsty sociopaths of a feather....

Not only were they not on a battlefield, they were not terrorists.

More handholding? The people attending those weddings weren't terrorists, either. Nor the people minding their own business in cafes, or apartments, or farms.

How sorry were you that the notorious terrorist Richard Jewell wasn't shot on sight after the 1996 Atlanta Games bombing?

Huh? Not sorry? Or is this a trick question?

Dropped on the head as a child? The obvious point here is that just because someone is accused of being a terrorist, doesn't mean they're a terrorist. And maybe you should make sure they're actually guilty before you bomb their ass, otherwise you are the terrorist.

Killing terrorists is good.

So you ARE disappointed that Richard Jewell wasn't shot on sight. Good to know.

That was kind of my point, like the OP I was referring to the subset of present-day libertarians that advocate laissez-faire capitalism and who advocate this kind of crap.

It really defies belief how you can attempt to blame the policies of a Democratic supermajority in Massachusetts on libertarians.

What is happening in Massachusetts is what Democrats do. It is precisely "this kind of crap" that libertarians are opposed to. And it is libertarian opposition to "this kind of crap" that is the reason why the Democratic establishment heaps such vitriol on libertarians.

Laissez-faire capitalists will cheer along as these privatised forces morph into corporate armies until they them selves are being targeted.

The Massachusetts SWAT teams aren't "privatized" in the sense of laissez-faire capitalism; they don't operate independently of government, they don't provide a service in a free market, they are a government monopoly, and they aren't subject to civil lawsuits. Massachusetts SWAT teams are "privatized" in the way fascists and progressives "privatize" things: government subsidized and regulated monopolies exempted from market forces and liability, and even exempted from government accountability. That is exactly the kinds of abuse of power that libertarians are strongly opposed to.

Do some reading:

http://www.cato-unbound.org/20...

In a sweeping essay, Sheldon Richman explains why private property and free competition are superior to state-provided goods and services. He warns against granting “private” corporate monopolies, which are not true privatizations, but act as arms of the state. He adds that for many state activities, the best way to privatize is not to provide the service at all — as in the case of punishing victimless crimes, which no one should do. For legitimate services, he recommends a “homesteading” approach, in which stakeholders in a public service, such as a school, would receive shares in a new, independent corporation.

Here's some more on SWAT teams:

http://www.cato.org/raidmap

https://www.google.com/search?...

I cited Niemöller quite deliberately precisely because he cheered along with the Nazis until they got around to targeting him.

Yes, and my point is that Niemöller never actually changed or understood where is moral failure was: he always stayed a totalitarian at heart and always remained opposed to individual liberties. He simply shifted allegiances as it was politically expedient and to assuage his guilty conscience.

Using a bunch of sample points to represent a function is fundamental to computational physics. Stress Analysis, Colorful oops Computational Fluid Dynamics, Computational Electro Magnetics etc etc. Solution adaptive meshing is a very popular technique in these algorithms. Make a crude mesh and compute a crude solution, use the gradients in the function to determine where the "cells" are too large or the representation is too poor. From there we go to "p" refinement where we jack up the order of mode shapes in the finite element, or "h" refinement where we refine the mesh by adding points, or "r" refinement where we move the mesh points from less important regions to more important regions.

In the "h" refinement technique one would insert points based on cell-centroid, cell-circumcenter or longest-edge-bisection etc.

This work, which seems to be 2D, these techniques are first published back in 1980s, and it was extended to 3D in 1990s.

The commercial CEM package made by Ansoft to solve 2D electromagnetics called Maxwell was using the Voronoi polygon based refinement of 2D meshes. It shipped in 1990. They were doing 3D Voronoi polyhedron based solution adaptive refinement of sample points in 1993 version of their 3D product HFSS.

http://www.google.com/search?q...

Actually I didn't see anything outrageously scammy in this incident, neither the linked reports were whitewash and bad science any more then the "excellent dissection" of the claims.

So the "dissector" did some back-of-the-envelop order-of-magnitude calculation and found that 1 minute "rope" function cannot be sustained unless the tag is within 50cm of a router. I thought the matter of fact here is not 1 minute "rope", but 5 minute "rope", which would supposedly require 5 times less energy and can be placed 2 times further away. Using the same number the dissecting article uses, their tag in 5 minute rope uses just about 2-3 microW of power, as much as the counter article itself calculates is available at 4 m distance.

What more, the second linked report openly shows how tag can sort off maintain its energy at 1-2 m from emitters, but looses charge at 3m, which maybe very sloppy experiment, have to give it that, but IN NO WAY CONTRADICTS with anything the "critics" say, actually.

I can agree that 1-2m range in lowest ping mode is not practical, as the critics seized upon, however, people THIS IS A PROTOTYPE not a final product. If they had already polished and awesome device, why the fk would they need a kickstarter campaign???

That said, I can see a ton of ways they can try and improve their product to be more practical after collecting the funding: they can try to further reduce power consumption of the circuit, if they just used off-the-shelf components now, the possibility of this is quite quite plausible; they can try to work out some software tricks, such as remembering the location of the tag the last time it handshake'd; they can try to register a freq band and sell dedicated RF charging stations for charging their tags at home; they can ask people to re-charge their tags every two weeks by placing them in 1-2m radius of a wifi router -- any one of these is better than having a batteried device that needs change of battery or be plugged into a charger every time.

As for Dr Paul McArthur identity, it is clearly stated that he is a research professor at U of Utah, and he may not in fact have a sizable footprint on the "internet". I know a ton of professors who do not use LinkedIn or FB, or even if they do have such account, keep in nominally. That's because these people are too busy with teaching, advising students, doing research, and managing universities to also deal with the self-masturbation called social networking. Besides, they already have an outlet to connect to the people they need, it is called peer-reviewed journals and academic publications. So it is quite possible the guy wouldn't have a ton of blogs, twitter streams and yada yada. Where his footprint should be searched is in academic journals and patent office, where he does have hits as some people here already pointed out.

I agree that the project description is overly optimistic and may not quite correspond the final product they will be able to put out, but to call it a complete scam it is just another mass hysteria driven by know-it-all nerds feeling empowered by self-published blogs and modern social networking, who think they know it all but but really don't know shit.

Actually I didn't see anything outrageously scammy in this incident, neither the linked reports were whitewash and bad science any more then the "excellent dissection" of the claims.

So the "dissector" did some back-of-the-envelop order-of-magnitude calculation and found that 1 minute "rope" function cannot be sustained unless the tag is within 50cm of a router. I thought the matter of fact here is not 1 minute "rope", but 5 minute "rope", which would supposedly require 5 times less energy and can be placed 2 times further away. Using the same number the dissecting article uses, their tag in 5 minute rope uses just about 2-3 microW of power, as much as the counter article itself calculates is available at 4 m distance.

What more, the second linked report openly shows how tag can sort off maintain its energy at 1-2 m from emitters, but looses charge at 3m, which maybe very sloppy experiment, have to give it that, but IN NO WAY CONTRADICTS with anything the "critics" say, actually.

I can agree that 1-2m range in lowest ping mode is not practical, as the critics seized upon, however, people THIS IS A PROTOTYPE not a final product. If they had already polished and awesome device, why the fk would they need a kickstarter campaign???

That said, I can see a ton of ways they can try and improve their product to be more practical after collecting the funding: they can try to further reduce power consumption of the circuit, if they just used off-the-shelf components now, the possibility of this is quite quite plausible; they can try to work out some software tricks, such as remembering the location of the tag the last time it handshake'd; they can try to register a freq band and sell dedicated RF charging stations for charging their tags at home; they can ask people to re-charge their tags every two weeks by placing them in 1-2m radius of a wifi router -- any one of these is better than having a batteried device that needs change of battery or be plugged into a charger every time.

As for Dr Paul McArthur identity, it is clearly stated that he is a research professor at U of Utah, and he may not in fact have a sizable footprint on the "internet". I know a ton of professors who do not use LinkedIn or FB, or even if they do have such account, keep in nominally. That's because these people are too busy with teaching, advising students, doing research, and managing universities to also deal with the self-masturbation called social networking. Besides, they already have an outlet to connect to the people they need, it is called peer-reviewed journals and academic publications. So it is quite possible the guy wouldn't have a ton of blogs, twitter streams and yada yada. Where his footprint should be searched is in academic journals and patent office, where he does have hits as some people here already pointed out.

I agree that the project description is overly optimistic and may not quite correspond the final product they will be able to put out, but to call it a complete scam it is just another mass hysteria driven by know-it-all nerds feeling empowered by self-published blogs and modern social networking, who think they know it all but but really don't know shit.

According to google, they've used that text before: google: "This is a message from Kickstarter's Trust & Safety team" -iFind

According to google, they've used that text before: google: "This is a message from Kickstarter's Trust & Safety team" -iFind

The problem there is they might try start forcing more people in such prisons in order to make money for the government, claim "we are fixing this country" and everyone will cheer.

Do you not have private prisons in the UK? If not, I suppose it's only a matter of time. We have them in the US, and some judges are already rotting in prison for exactly the sort of thing you were imagining. They were sentencing juveniles with petty offenses to long term detention, in exchange for multi-million dollar kickbacks from the private detention facility. When imprisoning people becomes a profitable enterprise, abuse is guaranteed to follow.

The concept is plausible. Just not under the conditions that they were supposedly going to operate under.
Rather than try to reinvent the wheel, I invite you to read this thorough explanation of why *the iFInd* won't work
https://docs.google.com/docume...

And we all know Keith commands 7 figure fees from bankers because of his cybersecurity savvy. Yeah. Right. That's it.

Dunno why he always reminds me of the Agent Richard Gill character from Hackers (1) I'm WHAT?!

You're a boner, Keith. Snowden sends his regards.

Not sure about the x86 issue.
DosBox runs just fine on Android and RaspberryPi.
Indeed, I've tested several ol'times masterpieces on the former, and it worked all very well (with Genuine Tears(TM)).