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I just read about the test a little bit and it sounds awful. The categories of software that will/may require a license are anything related to health, security, property, and life. That's... ridiculous. A food journal mobile app is related to health. That will need to be implemented by a licensed engineer? A webpage with a feed from a webcam is related to property and security. Another engineer-only job?

And don't think the government doesn't stretch definitions to their advantage. North Carolina, one of the states that expressed interest in the licensing program, recently shut down a diet blog since the blogger didn't have a nutrition license. The government in general is ridiculous whenever it can get away with it. Google for how many times tennis shoes have been considered deadly weapons in order to inflate charges.

I read an article by one of the test's developers and he makes some very poor arguments. He suggests rephrasing questions about the need for the license in terms of medical practice.

Or consider this question: “For years I have been developing the kinds of systems that would require a licensed professional engineer but without a license, and none have failed. So why do I need a license now?” Rephrasing this we get: “I have been doing surgery for years without a medical license and no patients have been harmed yet, so why do I need a license now?”

That's almost funny considering the dire state of health care in this country. People (not necessarily the government) want to move away from the model of having the most highly trained people do every little thing involving medicine simply because it costs so much. Nurse Practitioners are being given more and more power. People are pushing strongly for things like importing drugs from other countries. Many drugs that require prescriptions are eventually released OTC (allergy medicine for instance), and people want more drugs to be available without a doctor's visit.

But this joker compares software to one the most expensive, most difficult medical practices. That's... telling.

Software Engineering: n/a

The problem is that most states (and countries for that matter) aren't exactly in a rush to provide some sort of licensing process for software engineers either. IEEE has been working on a Principles and Practices Exam but until the state boards actually update their procedures to recognize software engineers and mandate some sort of license for critical systems development it is unlikely to gain much traction.

Trying to track down where in Africa minerals are mined will require massive spending on auditors and lawyers. Bribery and corruption is rife. A much more effective approach is to support refugees, wherever they may end up. Furthermore, population growth and AIDS are larger problems than the African civil wars. Rwanda's population is already larger that what is was before the genocide there.

Not really.

There are three minerals involved - tungsten, tantalum and tin. The electronics groups have gotten together to work on the first mineral, tantalum and have done it at the smelter scale. There are 45 smelters worldwide that process coltan into tantalum, and from there it's a lot easier.

http://spectrum.ieee.org/semiconductors/materials/cracking-down-on-conflict-minerals

The other two are next challenges (Tin is used for displays and touchscreens, tungsten in motors. Hrm... old style lightbulbs - conflict lightbulbs?)

http://spectrum.ieee.org/semiconductors/materials/cracking-down-on-conflict-minerals

Trying to track down where in Africa minerals are mined will require massive spending on auditors and lawyers. Bribery and corruption is rife. A much more effective approach is to support refugees, wherever they may end up. Furthermore, population growth and AIDS are larger problems than the African civil wars. Rwanda's population is already larger that what is was before the genocide there.

Not really.

There are three minerals involved - tungsten, tantalum and tin. The electronics groups have gotten together to work on the first mineral, tantalum and have done it at the smelter scale. There are 45 smelters worldwide that process coltan into tantalum, and from there it's a lot easier.

http://spectrum.ieee.org/semiconductors/materials/cracking-down-on-conflict-minerals

The other two are next challenges (Tin is used for displays and touchscreens, tungsten in motors. Hrm... old style lightbulbs - conflict lightbulbs?)

http://spectrum.ieee.org/semiconductors/materials/cracking-down-on-conflict-minerals

heh,

My name "Peter M Green" is on a paper that also has "Peter R Green" and "Peter N Green" in the authors list.

http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/login.jsp?tp=&arnumber=5488046&url=http%3A%2F%2Fieeexplore.ieee.org%2Fxpls%2Fabs_all.jsp%3Farnumber%3D5488046

Counter: http://spectrum.ieee.org/automaton/robotics/artificial-intelligence/lingodroid-robots-invent-new-words-for-time

They recently floated the idea of requiring backdoors be installed into such service, the way telecom hardware is legally required to support conventional wiretapping. that idea had no real support in technical or public circles.

For good reason, there is no such thing as a "secure back door" - just ask the prime minister of greece - they even ordered the equipment without the backdoor featureset, and they were still vulnerable.

They have a little wireless device sitting below the screen that supposedly can sense the position of individual fingers of a hand above it. That tells us something.

One interesting option is using the monitor's speakers for ultrasound and putting some microphones in the pickup. Now you have two emitters some distance apart, and some number of detectors close together. That configuration is powerful enough to image. See "One-handed gesture recognition using ultrasonic Doppler sonar" People have been fooling around with this sort of thing for years, but nobody has really nailed the problem yet. It's similar to the problem of emulating bat sonar. Part of the trick, I expect, is that the system measures both effects on the direct path from speaker to microphone and on the path which involves a reflection from the screen. That gives you the distance-from-screen information.

You probably could get 0.2mm of resolution if you sampled the microphones at 2MHz or so. Bats have roughly that resolution.

The Apple Thunderbolt monitor they're using has two high-frequency speakers, a subwoofer, a microphone, and a camera. It's not clear how much of that complement they're using for positional data.

Paper mail, as a business, is tanking.

And yet parcel (package) mail volume is increasing.
The funny thing is that UPS makes more money than everyone else in the package business combined,
but for rural deliveries, they (and FedEx) farm out the packages to USPS because it would cost to much to deliver it themselves.

That said, the United States Postal Service isn't really in financial trouble.
Their problem mostly has to do with a bad law that forces them to devote enormous amounts of cash to prefund pension plans

Actually, they are forced to prepay 75 years of health pension benefit in the next 10 years. Look at the pretty charts and you'll see the massive losses only started happening after the law was passed - before that they were doing fairly well - no big profits, no big losses, basically self-sufficient.

Even worse, they're prepaying health benefits for people who haven't joined USPS yet. Imagine paying for employee pensions for those who aren't even employees yet.

Following the second link of TFA, I saw the picture of the robot and it was somehow familiar... What could possibly go wrong?

Following the second link of TFA, I saw the picture of the robot and it was somehow familiar... What could possibly go wrong?

The primary mechanism of ultrasound perception seems to be bone conduction: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultrasonic_hearing and also see http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/iel5/5286202/5291232/05291285.pdf?arnumber=5291285 and there were some other related studies showing ultrasound that is not necessarily consciously perceptible does affect perception of music. In any case, for this article the 96 kHz thing is a red herring. The audible difference is due to the use of filters other than the usual symmetric FIR filters which cause preringing in reconstruction. Of course, Dolby is way late to the game here, as a few major semiconductor manufacturers added apodizing filters to their DAC chips years ago after people realized preringing was audible even outside of the usual audio band. See the paper on apodizing filters and preringing: http://www.aes.org/e-lib/browse.cfm?elib=12992

The ear operates both in the time and frequency domains, in a manner analogous to using a very short fourier transform window when calculating a waterfall plot. As for sound above 20 kHz not being audible, studies show 120 kHz is perceptible through bone conduction: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultrasonic_hearing and also see http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/iel5/5286202/5291232/05291285.pdf?arnumber=5291285 and other related studies showing ultrasound that is not necessarily consciously perceptible does affect perception of music.

...at the IEEE Get Program web site.

Organizationally unique identifier of Arcadyan Technology Corporation : http://standards.ieee.org/develop/regauth/oui/oui.txt (It's begining of the MAC address...)

It really isn't 6 bytes either. Since RuggedCom has two registered MAC OUIs (grep for "RuggedCom"), it's only 24 bits to brute-force over two possible 3-byte manufacturer prefixes.

Yeah. Fail-flavored failure-stuffed failure topped with fail gravy.

When you publish a paper, you are expected to transfer the copyright of that paper to the publisher. However, publishers like IEEE allow you to post the accepted version of your paper on your own website. See the full policy here. This is in contrast to the published version, which contains all the journal specific markup like headers and page numbers. IEEE also allows you to publish the accepted version of your paper to any funding agency repository to comply with free-access requirements. I don't know how it works in other disciplines, but in engineering, IEEE is the place to publish and it works like this in pretty much all our periodicals. I take an extra step and on my website and add a note that all articles posted are for timely dissemination of information and all work is the property of respective copyright holders and may not be reposted without explicit permission. But the links point straight to the fulltext of the research.

This policy is pretty permissive, and I've never seen the need to submit to an open access journal of lesser quality when I can submit to a top journal and be assured my research will be just as accessible.

To be sure that no misunderstands your post, RdRand doesn't just use noise in the general hardware, it has its own dedicated hardware to generate that noise and the subsequent random numbers.

From one of Intel's software blogs:

Mostly, Bull Mountain follows the Cascade Construction RNG model, using a processor resident entropy source to repeatedly seed a hardware-implemented CSPRNG. Unlike software approaches, it includes a high-quality entropy source implementation which can be sampled quickly to repeatedly seed the CSPRNG with high quality entropy. It represents a self-contained hardware module that is isolated from software attacks on its internal state resulting in a solution that achieves Random Number Generation objectives with considerable robustness: Statistical quality, highly unpredictable random number sequences, high performance, protection against attacks.

And an article (with pictures!) from IEEE Spectrum Magazine: Behind Intel's New Random-Number Generator They go through some of the history and theory of RNG including the lava lamp generator.

The seminal paper proposing the use of switched/routed interconnection networks on-chip (NoCs) was published by Dally and Towels 11 years ago in DAC'01: Route packets, not wires: On-chip interconnection networks. The idea of associating a router to each core and replicating it in "tiles" is not new either; Tilera was (IIRC) the first company to sell processors based on a tiled design, which was an evolution of the RAW research project. A related research project, the TRIPs, replicated functional units on each tile, rather than full cores. Intel has used a tiled design in the Polaris, SSC and MIC (which includes the forthcoming Knights Corner).

So no, the idea of using routed interconnects is not new at all. In fact, after reading the linked article, turns out that 2/3ths of the text are introducing the idea, and the last section details the contributions: Two ideas developed by the group of Li-Shiuan Peh seeking to improve performance (by using virtual bypassing, a form of routing precomputation) and reducing power consumption (using low-swing signaling).

Yes, the head writer / executive producer of Futurama, David Cohen, with two other friends wrote a compiler in MOS Tech 6502 assembly language for an invented language FLEET in high school. http://spectrum.ieee.org/semiconductors/processors/the-truth-about-benders-brain

The major point of failure was the management.

Ignoring the validity of the patent, IEEE was aware that it might be needed. http://standards.ieee.org/about/sasb/patcom/loa-802_11a-csiro-04Dec1998.pdf

. . .that it got done at all, Consider its' predecessor, the Virtual Case File. . . .. It was developed. or at least they TRIED to develop it, at the FBI "CJIS" Data Center in Clarksburg, WV. I know, I've worked there. One huge building, 15 interlocking directorates which overlap and routinely ignore each other.

What happened to the Virtual Case File ??? Death by Bureaucracy. Not to mention the lack of a requirements baseline on which to design and build. In the end, huge amounts of money was wasted. $170 million on software development alone, but that doesn't include the hardware buy, all of which was nearly obsolete when they pulled the plug in 2005, but was still mouldering in an underground storeroom at CJIS in early 2007.

Yes.

Absolutely agree. Basically, if it were possible to bring a plane down merely by using a cellphone, it would already have been done by now. Certain groups have an intense interest in doing just that. They haven't, so they can't. Q.E.D.

No, the plane won't stop flying. But you may find yourself annoying back at your departure airport because of someone's cellphone.

All reports of interference are anecdotal - there are simply too many variables (device model, age, production run, seat, navigation in use, etc) to properly and conclusively determine interference. There are known reports of certain Samsung cellphones causing GPS to lose lock, or PDAs causing nav instruments to deviate significantly. Of course, nothing scientific and conclusive.

It's more critical when things like GPS go down because increasingly airlines are using RNP approaches (required navigation performance - you need 3 GPSes, 3 autopilots, all of them in lock and synchonicity before RNP can be accomplished), because it gets you on the ground faster, and saves them fuel as it's a more direct flight (no having to fly over mountains when RNP can guide you through quite narrow canyons - it specifies the minimum performance standards of navigation equipment which lets you do much trickier approaches) and better chances of making it in as RNP approaches often have much reduced minimums. Of course, if a cellphone on board desyncs a GPS prior to RNP, it means the approach is aborted and the pilot has to go "the long way" or more often, not at all (if it's short haul, it can mean returning back to departure airport, or diverting to alternate and either waiting for a mechanic to fix (and try again), or another airplane).

No, a cellhone won't take down the airplane, nor your ipad. At worst, it'll be major inconveniences to everyone involved, though if you manage to screw up the RNP approach GPSes without being detected, it's possible to fly into a mountain or something.

IEEE had an article 6 years back where they tried to probe some of these claims. http://spectrum.ieee.org/aerospace/aviation/unsafe-at-any-airspeed

FYI - the FCC envelope for general consumer electronics is FAR more lenient than that for avionics.

Hmm... Here's the missing link:

IEEE Mosquito Laser

Feel free to debate the facts. If you can figure out how to slap 13 mm thick lead shielding onto an aerial drone small enough to manoeuvre in a tight hallway and get a wireless transmitter powerful enough to work under up to 700 mSv, I'm sure you'll be rewarded for your efforts lavishly in both government and private-sector contracts.

You are correct that a syncroscope is used to connect a generator. What you missed is GPS time is used to locate a fault on a line due to the time of propagation of a fault current from the fault to various substations. In a lightning storm a lightning storm and loss of GPS signal can result in bad fault location information. The line will trip out at both ends, but fail to re-energize the line due to a false indication of substations islanding. Re-connecting substations that have islanded is not automatic. The failure to re-connect can result in cascading failures.

http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/freeabs_all.jsp?arnumber=5542044

(I hope that no ship would reply solely on GPS, as the article seems to imply they may.)

Set sail for fail:

http://spectrum.ieee.org/computing/software/automated-to-death/3

Well, Tracje's thesis defence is next week; after that, it should appear online somewhere. I looked up the references in my copy, have a look:
Training students to steal: a practical assignment in computer security education (ACM, pdf also here or here).
Effectiveness of Physical, Social and Digital Mechanisms against Laptop Theft in Open Organizations (IEEE, pdf also here).

The official statement is probably very political in nature and may not reflect reality so much as spin.

Engineering is http://ieee.org/

Hacking is http://programming-motherfucker.com/

Dear afabbro,

You are largely correct. Most software has not sped up much since the 1970s, and it could even be argued that developers write such sloppy code these days that even our improved compilers can't compensate, especially in applications where performance is no longer critical.

On the other hand, since about 2006 there have been some tremendous advances in algorithms. One optimization problem I work on, Basis Pursuit Denoising http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basis_pursuit_denoising, has had on the order of a 10-fold increase in real-world speed on constant hardware every year for the past 5 years (see http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpls/abs_all.jsp?arnumber=5940245 for my contribution).

These advances are not just academic games; they are actually worth doing. They could eventually lead to computers with sensory processing routines that have a mote of common sense to them, able to perform some real-world tasks we currently need humans for.

While I agree that by and large, most software is getting fat and lazy, there are a few problems where today's algorithms on 2002 hardware mop the floor with 2002 algorithms on today's hardware.

Best,

LeDopore

As I said:

Tiny little steps, "we need more funding", and "maybe we'll get something in (this year+20)."

From "Fusion Is Not Free" in IEEE Spectrum:

Each time the ITER reactor has been reassessed, its estimated cost has expanded and its completion date has been nudged further out.

And so Penelope's tapestry continues.

Mod this up. Microsoft has achieved a marketing triumph by renaming its online optical camera pointed at you as a "sensor." Nobody would buy it if it was called a "Kinect camera."

Why mod up something that is factual incorrect? It is not just an optical camera. It is a combination of a camera and active IR depth sensor. From Wikipedia:

"The device features an "RGB camera, depth sensor and multi-array microphone running proprietary software",[34] which provide full-body 3D motion capture, facial recognition and voice recognition capabilities"
...
"The depth sensor consists of an infrared laser projector combined with a monochrome CMOS sensor, which captures video data in 3D under any ambient light conditions"

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dTKlNGSH9Po

And this is also the reason the robotic DIY scene have been all over Kinect. These projects aren't doing all the cool things they do with just an ordinary "renamed" camera. http://spectrum.ieee.org/automaton/robotics/diy/top-10-robotic-kinect-hacks

These have/are being looked into. See this review by Townsend from a few years ago: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/freeabs_all.jsp?arnumber=1559364

Nothing has really changed in the state of the art of active shielding. They all fail miserably at even the theory stage or practical engineering stage.

The latest I heard indicates that EUV is still having a tough time getting going. The light source isn't bright enough, so throughput is too low to be commercially viable. ASML may claim to have a source capable of exposing 69 wafers per hour, but it's not like those machines are rolling off the assembly line right now.

Some other people out there are investigating using free-electron lasers to produce EUV, either directly as the output of the FEL, or by using the FEL to stimulate EUV emission in some other medium. A major benefit of FEL's is that they are highly tunable: you can get a huge range of output frequencies, so theoretically one could use the same equipment to migrate from EUV to X-ray lasers as lithography technology advances. Although tabletop FELs exist, I wonder if it would make sense to consider having one really big one for an entire fab facility, and using it to stimulate the EUV at the level of each lithography machine. This would be not unlike how big particle accelerator or telescope facilities work (one source, multiple instruments).

IEEE Spectrum magazine annually puts out an international "Patent Power" scorecard for all the major industries to measure patent quality. In its most recent index published in November 2011, Apple was graded as having the powerful patent portfolio among the consumer electronics companies. Note that companies are listed in only one category, and Samsung is listed in the semiconductor industry, most likely because that is the domain where the majority of its patents are filed. IBM dwarfs all other companies; it is listed in the "Computer Systems" category. In the PDF file that has the actual metrics, the key value to look for is "adjusted pipeline power".

You can't really compare between categories in a meaningful way. Samsung may have twice Apple's score, but that doesn't mean they have twice as many innovations patented. Actually, I'd suggest that 90% of Apple's patents aren't innovative and shouldn't be patentable. I'm not sure what fraction of Samsung's are based on Apple-like (design, software, pretty colors) topics, but I suspect a lot of them are real innovations in fields like quantum mechanics. They certainly file a lot of innovative solid state physics patents.

IEEE Spectrum magazine annually puts out an international "Patent Power" scorecard for all the major industries to measure patent quality. In its most recent index published in November 2011, Apple was graded as having the powerful patent portfolio among the consumer electronics companies. Note that companies are listed in only one category, and Samsung is listed in the semiconductor industry, most likely because that is the domain where the majority of its patents are filed. IBM dwarfs all other companies; it is listed in the "Computer Systems" category. In the PDF file that has the actual metrics, the key value to look for is "adjusted pipeline power".

You can't really compare between categories in a meaningful way. Samsung may have twice Apple's score, but that doesn't mean they have twice as many innovations patented. Actually, I'd suggest that 90% of Apple's patents aren't innovative and shouldn't be patentable. I'm not sure what fraction of Samsung's are based on Apple-like (design, software, pretty colors) topics, but I suspect a lot of them are real innovations in fields like quantum mechanics. They certainly file a lot of innovative solid state physics patents.

IEEE Spectrum magazine annually puts out an international "Patent Power" scorecard for all the major industries to measure patent quality. In its most recent index published in November 2011, Apple was graded as having the powerful patent portfolio among the consumer electronics companies. Note that companies are listed in only one category, and Samsung is listed in the semiconductor industry, most likely because that is the domain where the majority of its patents are filed. IBM dwarfs all other companies; it is listed in the "Computer Systems" category. In the PDF file that has the actual metrics, the key value to look for is "adjusted pipeline power".

IEEE Spectrum magazine annually puts out an international "Patent Power" scorecard for all the major industries to measure patent quality. In its most recent index published in November 2011, Apple was graded as having the powerful patent portfolio among the consumer electronics companies. Note that companies are listed in only one category, and Samsung is listed in the semiconductor industry, most likely because that is the domain where the majority of its patents are filed. IBM dwarfs all other companies; it is listed in the "Computer Systems" category. In the PDF file that has the actual metrics, the key value to look for is "adjusted pipeline power".

'Non-profit' doesn't carry that much weight when a bunch of the employees are making exorbitant salaries in the $300K-$700K range (page 9).

Hmm, I would have thought that Google successfully having a fleet of autonomous vehicles roaming about in California without the public even noticing bests Watson.

Almost without the public noticing.

"But it was being driven manually," you say.

Yeah. Uh, huh. Right.

Hmm, I would have thought that Google successfully having a fleet of autonomous vehicles roaming about in California without the public even noticing bests Watson. Fast natural language search vs Self Driving Cars. Yeah, I'm going with the cars...

You have a good point about the IBEW, electrical codes and standards. The code and standards publishing bodies guard their products jealously. And they do chase down people who violate their copyrights aggressively. Sometimes too aggressively, if one assumes 'fair use' and quotes too extensively from their publications.

The NFPA, the publisher of various electrical, safety and fire codes also provides training and (at one time, maybe not anymore) offered a code interpretation service (which may have come dangerously close to providing engineering services without a license). As such, they are in direct competition with other training and engineering service providers. Armed with SOPA, they could pretty much shut down any competing services. Or at least drive them off the 'Net. The IEEE holds a similar position in that many ordinances simply cite their standards in statutes or regulations and expect anyone having to comply with said regulations to cough up $$$ to obtain a copy.

Obligatory bad car analogy: Think of a world where traffic laws just referred to some AAA driving handbook, available only to paying members.

I'm sure that there are many analogous examples in different professions where one quasi-official publisher could effectively control their industry given sufficient ammunition.

Mr Henry Reinecke seems to disagree. I've downloaded the paper and they do use current drivers and current mirrors to drive inputs and couple stages (including feedback from outputs to inputs), but the logic itself is all diodes. I've done a quick simulation of the most complex network he used in the multiplier, and with modern diodes and well laid out board you could probably run it at 10MHz. In the paper he shows that diode logic has dual representation -- one uses voltages as signals, another uses currents as signals. The voltage signal based logic is simply slower because various capacitances play a big role, but you can have exactly same logic done for voltage signals or current signals.

Do note that I think his logic could be running with an AC carrier (yep), and you could use transformers to couple stages, and it'd work without any passive devices for moderately sized networks. I'm thinking of prototyping such a thing just to show that his multiplier, even if impractical, can be done completely using diodes and passive devices.

Here's an abstract for ya. And this is nothing new: it's from work done in late 50s:

The realization of switching functions using current-operated diode logic gates, which employ the direction of current as the binary variable, is presented. Two realization methods are discussed. The dual method consists of a set of rules which are analogous to the procedures employed for the realization of voltage-operated circuits. The lattice method is based on the transmission characteristics of a lattice network of four series-connected diodes. Either method is capable of realizing any arbitrary transmission function, although the number of diodes required may be different. Hybrid networks, which combine the advantages of both methods, are described to illustrate the versatility of current-operated techniques. Practical design procedures are included to guide the designer in the application of the realization rules. A static multiplier, capable of simultaneously multiplying two 4-bit binary numbers, was designed and built to demonstrate the practicability of current-operated diode logic gates. Approximately 270 diodes were required to construct the twenty gates used in the static multiplier. Dynamic tests of the assembled system indicated a reliable capability of 333,000 multiplications per second.

If you can make a 300kHz 4x4 multiplier using diodes, then I'd say this is hardly some logic -- in my book, at least. The wikipedia article on diode logic, and most other intro-level articles I could find, really miss on how diode logic was (and is) used, and provide only some lame, almost useless examples.

You can't build logic from diodes.

You most definitely can, even complex logic like multipliers:

A static multiplier, capable of simultaneously multiplying two 4-bit binary numbers, was designed and built to demonstrate the practicability of current-operated diode logic gates. Approximately 270 diodes were required to construct the twenty gates used in the static multiplier. Dynamic tests of the assembled system indicated a reliable capability of 333,000 multiplications per second.

Just google for some ideas. You can even build voltage-controlled multiplexers using nothing but diodes -- quite good ones, even. Your basic high-frequency sampler (going up to tens of GHz) is nothing but a sampling capacitor in a sampling diode bridge. Such bridges maintain symmetry that preserves integrity of the sampled differential signal and are the simplest way to quite accurately sample a quickly changing signal. They have incredible bandwidth given their simplicity.

IEEE Spectrum Magazine: A highly accessible magazine for the lay person and well in front of technology issues: http://spectrum.ieee.org/

Machine Design Magazine: http://machinedesign.com/?p=1 (and coincidentally, first story is about 3D printers)

Another relatively inexpensive option is the IEEE.
http://www.ieee.org/

Although the IEEE is encouraging members to switch over to digital only to reduce costs and waste, IEEE Spectrum and many of the technical society journals are still available on paper for those who want them.

- The society journals can be quite technical and specialized, but IEEE Spectrum maintains a broader focus.
- The IEEE Computer Society (www.computer.org) is the largest society in the IEEE, with lots going on and lots of publications.
- Other groups that might be of interest include the communications society (http://www.comsoc.org/), the robotics and automation society (http://www.ieee-ras.org/), or the society on social implications of technology (http://www.ieeessit.org/).