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The real question shouldn't be "who owns the data", but should we encourage webapp providers to create an easy mechanism for import and exporting data? For some webapps it's a no brainer, when it's only one individual's data and there's a great convenience in being able to move formats. But in other cases, such as Facebook, you have to weigh one individual's desire for privacy against others' convenience. That is, while people do share their e-mail address, IM contact info, and sometimes even cell phone numbers, it's hard to believe that they did so with the intention of being sold to marketers or ripped into some other database. That's why Facebook has put e-mail addresses into images for a long time -- it defeats some fraction of potential abusers. So where's the balance?

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Educational microcontroller kits for the digital generation.

Take a look at the different candidates on how much influence they want the government to have in your personal life. There is a huge spectrum, both within the Democrats and the Republicans. Video games is only the tip of the iceberg, but is representative of whether people think the federal government needs to act like a protective parent or not. Most of the "establishment" candidates are overwhelmingly tending toward YES on the need for the nanny state, but Clinton is probably the worst. There are alternatives out there. Think about personal liberties, but don't restrict yourself narrowly to the issue of video games.

Just because you might not let your 10-year-old play "Gears of War", does that imply that the government should regulate those games for everyone's "protection"? Or can we separate what we personally think is "right" from what the role of the government (coercive by nature) should be?

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Educational microcontroller kits for the digital generation.

Nintendo couldn't keep up with demand for the Wii... and it was like that for more than 9 months! Take a look at this article from Wired, but still there are few answers as to why it was so bad for so long. I'd like to vote for better supply chain management in 2008.

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Educational microcontroller kits for the digital generation.

They want to protect their intellectual property, which is understandable (although I'm sure some slashdotters will argue this point). But I think fundamentally we're going to have to accept one of two mechanisms by which they can do that. The first is DRM, and the problem is that it undermines lots of legitimate (fair, free) uses of the content. The second is lawsuits for civil or criminal copyright infringement, which have significant statuatory damages.

So I'm happy that people are waking up to the problems with DRM, and that companies are realizing it too. But realistically this means that more enforcement burden will be on legal action, which tends to be economically burdensome on individuals, although it is more likely to produce a socially acceptable result (allowing certain cases of fair use).

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Educational microcontroller kits for the digital generation.

Any system that does a thermal -> mechanical conversion is limited by the Carnot efficiency. This system would be limited by the temperatures of the hot side (sun's heating of the salt, balanced with losses from the pipes) and the cold side (presumably atmosphere or a cold river). In contrast, a solar cell directly rectifies electromagnetic field energy (light), so it doesn't obey the Carnot limit. That's why for a system like the one in this article, there's a need to push the operating hot-side temperature up as much as possible.

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Educational microcontroller kits for the digital generation.

What would really spur development is if we could get a software simulation environment (ala VMware, Bochs, etc) so that developers who don't have the hardware could play with stuff. Also the keyboard on the actual OLPC is tiny, which adds an extra challenge for (adult) developers.

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NerdKits: educational microcontroller kits for a digital generation.

I think the word "corporation" is making everyone think of the big mega-corps (Warner, Sony, etc), but you have to understand that there are millions of small businesses in the USA today. And these are also "corporations". This is the legal name for the business entity, and it itself shouldn't carry the kind of negative connotation that many seem to assign it. Corporations essentially are an agreement between a group of people and the state government, which allows those individuals to work together toward a certain end while guaranteeing certain group property rights (i.e. a corporate bank account, or corporate ownership of a building).

When you increase the fees for corporations, don't forget that you are increasingly punishing the small companies where those fees really hurt, while barely scratching the surface of large companies. This has happened in the field of patents, where it can routinely cost $15,000 or more to obtain a patent. This fee is "trivial" to a big billion-dollar company, but is a huge burden for an individual inventor or small group.

Anyway, I let out a big groan when someone suggests increasing fees as a way to disincentivize copyrights or patents.

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Microcontroller + LCD + gcc + instructions to help you learn electronics.

Ginko's exchange rates only made sense if inflation was high too. The economy was being manipulated and Linden Labs was "printing" more money. But given Wikipedia's description of what happened, it appears exactly like what happened in the US not too long ago. The "government" changed a law about the legality of internet gambling, and this instantly caused the deaths of several companies. It's actually kind of interesting to watch how a virtual currency behaves and how to create an economic system even within a game like this.

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Our microcontroller kit. Your gcc compiler. Learn digital electronics.

Correct. The big design concerns (and eventual failure points) in pumps, and even fans, are bearings and rotating seals. But there are already implantable heart pumps which rely on the principles of active magnetic levitation to remove the need for contact bearings. See this article for an example.

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Coder? Want to learn electronics? Microcontroller kits.

If you read the knowledge base article, you'll see that the default allowed old-version goes back to before even Word 95. PowerPoint 95, but not 97, is blocked. It's very likely that few documents exist in such old formats at this point.

However, I really have to question whether the enhanced security is worth it, since those old versions didn't allow too much of embedded scripting anyway. Are we just worried about buffer overflows, because those are still a symptom of their parser, not the format itself.

The software nanny continues to keep us from hurting ourselves... gee, thanks. (Hmm, anyone smell a similar trend in government lately?)

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Educational microcontroller kits for the digital generation.

We did it ourselves and saved >$100/month for a small business. Just use Asterisk (free and open source), buy some inexpensive but full-featured phones like the Grandstream GXP-2000 (about $80 each), and get a termination provider like VoicePulse Connect for Asterisk ($11/month for four simultaneous channels, free incoming, and below $0.01/min for most outgoing). It took some work to get it all set up and working properly, but now is actually more reliable than the analog phones ever were. (We had phone company issues every few months... just awful.)

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Educational microcontroller kits for the digital generation.

This new Windows XP should make a great gift!

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Educational microcontroller kits for the digital generation.

The NASDAQ exchange, which has always focused more on technology, is totally a Microsoft fanboy. Maybe that's because MSFT is the largest stock on the NASDAQ exchange.

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Educational microcontroller kits for the digital generation.

Sure, there are tasks that computers can't do so well at the moment, where giving the work parcels to humans would make the most sense. But can you imagine what micropayments might allow? It would enable a consistent set of trained, motivated workers to be stable over time, and dependable enough to use this kind of network for important activities.

Ultimately, humans get bored and computers don't. But humans can be delayed from boredom quite a bit by financial compensation.

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Educational microcontroller kits for the digital generation.

Lots of people seem to welcome AJAX, and it does provide a huge step in the interactivity of web interfaces without sacrificing platform compatibility or development time.

However, one thing that continues to surprise me is how willing most people are to having a third party store all of their data. All AJAX apps essentially require that you do not hold your own data -- it's held by the application provider. A big reason is because Javascript can't touch your local filesystem, but another is that Javascript isn't powerful enough to really be useful for all of the processing, so back to the server-side scripting it goes.

In fact, one of the things that scared me today was how excited a friend was to discover that Google's chat application logged all of their Jabber conversations -- even if they had been made with a 3rd party GUI client (Pidgin). This, to me, would just be scary.

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Educational microcontroller kits for the digital generation.

Denmark's Horns Rev wind farm, which I believe is the world's largest offshore wind farm, was built in 2002. They had incredible maintenance issues with the turbines and electronics, due to the harsh environment with salt water. In fact, they cite 75,000 maintenance trips -- each requiring an engineer to be lowered down from a helicopter onto a turbine's nacelle platform -- in the first 1.5 years of operation. That's a lot for 80 wind turbines. And that was very expensive. Hope they get this right in the UK.

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Educational microcontroller kits for the digital generation.

Just take a look at this recent opinion piece to MIT's newspaper. Here's a student who believes that "the free flow of information" (as he says twice) is the ultimate good. Lots of students still don't understand why copyright exists. In fact, some will even try to explain that physical property is the only kind that should have value. It's totally mind-boggling, even when these students are the ones who will be going out and making the next generation of intellectual works.

Even the GPL and all copyleft mechanisms rely on copyright laws. If people want their wishes as content creators to be respected (whether that is to allow some forms of redistribution, like CC-NC, or not, like "All rights reserved"), they need to respect copyright law and not subvert it.

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Educational microcontroller kits for the digital generation.

Dvorak is shortsighted, thinking that if we can pay for meals for starving kids, that we will stop hunger. That is simply not a sustainable way of thinking about the problem. Take a look at any of the big organizations working on the issue: for example The Hunger Project, or CARE. While it's convenient marketing to associate X dollars with providing Y meals (and they sometimes do this to encourage people to donate), these organizations readily admit that the real path to successfully beating the chronic problem of hunger is to empower locals to be self-sufficient.

There are concrete actions that we can take as members of the "developed" nations, and these include: subsidizing agricultural infrastructure, providing education about health and nutrition, education in general, helping to challenge laws / societal norms that restrict productivity, reducing sexism and racism, etc. But these hunger programs are specifically *not* about providing meals directly.

Chronic world hunger is a real issue (and is different from short-term famine relief, which our military and private organizations do a whole lot of), and there are things we can do to lead to a sustainable solution. Dvorak incorrectly assumes that because we can buy Y meals, we should do that instead of educating the next generation. In fact, the big organizations already tackling hunger know that empowering the locals is the key, and this is entirely consistent with OLPC's goals.

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Educational microcontroller kits for the digital generation.

It's not "paying a grand for a one dollar song"... it's paying as a punishment for illegally redistributing it, and as a deterrent to future piracy. While the value of the media does have relevance to the damages, there might have been hundreds of copies distributed illegally. And for each instance, there should be a greater than 1 to 1 fine so that it's actually a punishment and deterrent.

It only seems strange because she's the first one.

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Educational microcontroller kits for the digital generation.

They're talking about displacements of hundreds of micrometers... it's not clear that any silicon actually displaces that much under any sort of normal operation. Even in common MEMS parts like accelerometers (like those controlling your car airbag or Wiimote), the displacements are tiny -- typically on the order of one micrometer -- although they do happen hundreds of thousands of times per second.

Ever heard of plastic versus elastic deformation? Elastic is when it's small enough to come back to it's original state (no permanent effect). Plastic is when the material is permanently reorganized. They're at a huge displacement scale, so it's not clear how this applies to modern MEMS systems which are moving two orders of magnitude less.
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if(coder && wantToLearn(electronics)) click(here);

This is a good step, and I wish that more people would use encrypted messaging systems. This includes IM, e-mail, and voice.

However, while encryption can protect against "big brother", you can never eliminate the risk from the other end of the line. What happens if the person you are talking to has a rootkit, or prints out the conversation, or otherwise compromises the data? There's no real way to protect your entire conversation.

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Educational microcontroller kits for the digital generation -- great gift!

• encrypted SIP - would make sure the information about who you're calling stays encrypted
• secure RTP (SRTP) - would encrypt the actual call audio (and video)
• encrypted IAX - would do both, though only between Asterisk endpoints

DRM doesn't work effectively, because it makes legitimate users feel oppressed, violates their fair use rights, and is always possible to work around. But would you rather have lawsuits for discovery of infringment? Yes, I would. DRM stops people from doing illegal things (like sharing a song with 100 "P2P friends" online) which is good, but also stops people from doing legal fair-use things (like using that data on a different device, or editing it)... In contrast, lawsuits against suspected infringers really takes on only the suspected infringers -- definitely a step in the right direction. I hate making an example of anyone, and I think the justice system also doesn't like the concept of increasing someone's punishment for the sole reason of deterring others, the system-wide punishments could me made high enough that it acts as an effective deterrent.

Suggestion to the music industry: kill DRM, and aggressively pursue individual cases of infringement through the legal system.

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Educational microcontroller kits for the digital generation. Great gift!

While in general I think open-source and closed-source software can coexist, I think this is a pretty good example of why anything related to crypto should be open. All of public key cryptography relies on the secrecy of private keys, not on the secrecy of the algorithm itself. And while they might have faithfully implemented the algorithm, who knows what kinds of arguments/whatever to the crypto functions might cause undesired results -- it's just too hard to test.

In any case, the thing that surprised me most from the article was that Windows 2000 users would be left out in the cold: "Because the company has determined that the PRNG problem is not a security vulnerability, it is unlikely to provide a patch [for Win2K]." Wow. Especially when it's something this easy to fix. This bug also solves any attacker's problem of trying to sort valuable from non-valuable information, since presumably any valuable information (credit cards used online, etc) will use encryption. And while someone suggested that a program should use its own random number generator, there is a problem because, in general, your application (not running as Admin) shouldn't have access to nearly the same amount of entropy sources (like network activity, GUI inputs, etc).

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Educational microcontroller kits for the digital generation -- great gift!

Yeah, lots of addresses are off... but it seems like (for non-urban areas) it wouldn't be too hard to identify where buildings are (as compared to asphalt or grass). Couldn't they write something that moved the points to the nearest building location? Seems like that would work in a whole lot of cases.

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Educational microcontroller kits for the digital generation.

If the entire story is an ad, can the comments be ads too?

Maybe for a slightly older age range...
electronics kits updated for the digital generation

one Digg user commented:
"I wish I'd had one of these as a kid :) Heck, Christmas is coming up... I just might have to forward this link to my wife."

So, I understand that the legal process that the RIAA is trying to use is questionable at best, with ex-parte discovery and merging of multiple unrelated acts of infringement. But I fear that too many people are reading into your fight against the RIAA that the music industry should not be entitled to protect their intellectual property rights.

Maybe it's easier to take an example outside of the music industry. For example, say that I write a creative text, and publish it online as a PDF file that I sell, and that I do not grant the right to redistribute my work. If I later discover that someone who legally obtained my work is now hosting it online for others to obtain, and even have evidence that an actual unauthorized redistribution has taken place (i.e. someone linking to it with a comment suggesting they've downloaded it), do I not have a right to protect my intellectual property? Even if all I have is a time and IP address, shouldn't I be able to seek appropriate civil action against the infringing party?

There are lots of cases of genuine copyright infringement occurring, and while I understand and support your campaign to make sure the RIAA plays by the rules and isn't overly broad in their accusations, I also don't think it's right to let infringers go unpunished. I think too many people see the endgame as one where the RIAA "folds" and can't protect its interests, and where IP holders have no recourse against digital infringement. But when I read into your work, I think the endgame is really one where the RIAA just has to work a bit harder to present its case in the right way, and infringers are punished.

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Educational microcontroller kits for the digital generation.

We know that Microsoft claims to hold patents that Linux users are infringing... but they won't tell us which ones. What's new?

So there are two possibilities: either they've got a specific one or two that they're really able to show Kyocera that are troublesome, or they've just got this massive library of "probable" ones that Kyocera decided to give in to. What would be more interesting to know is who approached who about the deal. What does it permit? What did that cost?

Anyway, this is at the stage where it isn't using patent law, but is just using corporate risk expectations. Very dangerous... which is why MSFT doesn't want to show their hand.

Software patent lifetimes should probably get quite a bit shorter, too...

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Educational microcontroller kits for the digital generation.

Encryption can beat this, but should it have to? Now we've got to throw a lot of computing power at a problem just to get around our nominally "common carriers."

I think we can all agree that there's a problem: lots of illegal video transmission is happening online. And while some of the slashdot crowd consists of "information wants to be free" hippies, there is also a good community of people who reasonably understand the value of intellectual property rights. But I don't think anyone is excited about a solution like this, which clearly removes the user's fair use rights and common sense.

So where's the balance? Can a technical solution exist that will simultaneously stop the illegal pirating of movies and TV shows (which would be good), and allow other uses (even short clips, parodies, etc)? I think the answer is no. The determination of fair use relies heavily on intent, and no technical system will be able to determine that very effectively.

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NerdKits: Educational microcontroller kits for the digital generation.

In the article, the authors of XviD and FFMPEG, aren't too optimistic about speedups. If video encoding/decoding is the bottleneck, then why not start building motherboards with a dedicated chip specialized for this kind of work, instead of trying to cram extra instructions into an already bloated CISC CPU? Doesn't make sense to me.

Also, an earlier comment that may be useful in this discussion: Why smaller feature sizes (45nm) mean faster clock times.

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Educational microcontroller kits for the digital generation.

The article asserts that logging onto someone's AP without their permission is "breaking the law", but is that really clear? Do I have to explicitly ask for permission before I walk into a restaurant? Of course not -- there's a reasonable expectation that there are no barriers to my entry, so I'm allowed (even invited) in. But, while I think physical analogies to computer situations can be very misleading, in the real world entry becomes illegal when you've had to defeat some protection mechanism (a lock) to get in.

So, to summarize: I feel like cracking someone's WEP key to get on their net is pretty damn illegal. But I don't think hopping onto an open net is unsecured. In fact, the fact that it's open may be interpreted as a sign that the owner intends to allow open access!

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Educational microcontroller kits for the digital generation.

Take a look at this set of videos from MIT's 6.004 Computation Structures class. They basically walk through the design of a simple 32-bit CPU from transistors, to gates, to functional blocks, to a full processor.

Anyway, reading about how hard it was to recreate the source code from the 4004 makes me wonder how easily we could find source code for some apps from even a decade ago. Lots of companies have gone bankrupt / discontinued products / been sold / etc, and we all know that lots of people aren't good about backing up their code. It's neat to go to the Linux Kernel Archives and look at the Historic Linux sources.

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Educational microcontroller kits for the digital generation.

The real problem here isn't just that Comcast is doing the filtering. Who knows -- maybe it's really OK under their EULA and the law (which I doubt). But the most painful part of the problem to consumers is that the Comcast government-granted monopoly on the cable lines means that lots of consumers have no other alternative.

I think the antitrust laws might have something to say here, although it's a bit of a stretch. In any case, how can we codify the fact that providers with effective monopoly status should have an additional burden of service to their customers? I do wonder if this is bigger than limited net neutrality legislation.

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Educational microcontroller kits for a digital generation.

In Massachusetts, they are continually working on roads... I'd love to know the secret that makes them think that they'll be able to keep these strips around for more than a year or so. Beyond that, I'd think that it places greater stresses on the outermost pieces of tire, because of the uneven loading. Doesn't seem that smart to me...

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Educational microcontroller kits for the digital generation.

But again, because the electronics are distributed around the car, you'd need to shield the entire car.

A Faraday cage is only protective for wavelengths of electromagnetic radiation which are larger than the size of the gaps in the Faraday cage. The car's metal exterior has some pretty big gaps... and beyond that, the panels aren't even connected well to each other electrically. (RF people will put copper mesh down along all the edges of their devices to get everything.) For the microwave wavelengths, they'll come right in and induce all kinds of voltages on your car body.

Still, it's possible to defend against this kind of thing. I just think that the practical defense has more to do with optical isolation and circuit design rather than a Faraday cage shielding.

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Educational microcontroller kits for the digital generation.

I'd like to try to explain why their microwave design might work, and why the "faraday cage" argument isn't enough: Differential vs. Common-Mode Signals. It's because of all the devices connected to the car's central engine controller.

Lots of old school communications protocols are based on single-ended signaling, where one voltage represents a 0 or 1. This includes RS232, Parallel, and even ISA and PCI slots on your motherboard. However, almost everything new that's outside the computer is based on differential signaling -- reading the differential voltage between two wires. This includes 10/100/1000BaseT ethernet over twisted pair, USB, Firewire, etc.

Here's the key difference: when you get noise coupling onto your signal, whether it's a pulse from the engine ignition coil firing or from this car-stopping microwave device, it tends to be the case that the voltage of *both* of the differential wires is increased by the same amount -- so that when the voltages are subtracted, the effect of the noise cancels out.

However, this exploits the fact that no devices have an infinitely large common-mode range. That is, the average voltage of the differential pair must be within some predefined limit, or your circuit won't work. By putting in a big enough pulse, this microwave device might be able to move charges around on the outside of the car body (which happens to be the ground that most devices hook to) enough to move the voltages significantly. This would cause any devices (think an oxygen sensor or a tachometer) to act as though they were momentarily dead.

Thus, even with differential signaling (which cars already use), it's possible to break things by putting too much common-mode noise on top. See Wikipedia article.

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Can you code? Want to become a hardware hacker? Educational microcontroller kits for a digital generation.

The 80% figure is impressive. But beware of the efficiency numbers they quote. This isn't the full fuel cycle. You've still got to compress and distribute hydrogen, which takes a lot (gases take lots of work to compress). For a vehicle, burning it isn't too efficient maybe 30-40%, and fuel cells aren't quite there yet.

Additionally, with any kind of electrolytically-driven process like this one, there's a HUGE efficiency penalty once you increase the flow rates to be anything substantial. And you need to, because otherwise the amount of hydrogen produced per fuel cell area would be tiny. And then, at that point, you've got the problem of lots of carbon to dispose of. Guess what -- this working microbial fuel cell takes C,H,O in as vinegar or cellulose, and outputs H2 and CO2! Do you really call that 'carbon neutral' as a fuel source? It's still dumping CO2 into the atmosphere, just less of it per Joule of useful energy.

Still, this is a great direction for them to keep going... there are very interesting things you can do with hydrogen, even to extend existing liquid fuel stocks (i.e. crude oil to gasoline) by hydrogenation. (Much cheaper than building lots of fuel cells... but not carbon-neutral.)

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Educational microcontroller kits for the digital generation.

Original article (instead of Tomcat error)

In any case, the real judge is how they decide to act next time something like this happens...

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Educational microcontroller kits for the digital generation.

The problem is that individual municipalities have been selling cable monopolies for decades... and in the old days, it used to be the case that no one cable company would get all of a particular large city, to ensure at least some semblance of competition. These days, they've all merged into one (in Philadelphia, at least).

What I think might be interesting is to decouple the wire from the service provider. Think about electricity deregulation: the transmission is seperate from the generation, and while everyone has to pay for the transmission (since we don't want overly redundant infrastructure), individuals can choose their generation source. The disadvantage here, as seen in the electrical case, is that there are more places to nickel-and-dime consumers. However, done with cable systems, we might actually have enough diversity of service offerings that it makes sense.

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Educational microcontroller lab kits for the digital generation.

It seems like having all of your traffic on seven well-defined subnets is an easy way to make all of your activity really obvious.

But hey, at least these guys are being pursued and thwarted. There are way too many hackers and script kiddies out there who need to get their butts kicked one and become productive members of society with their skills. This is an important lesson and it comes at a price, but ultimately we need to convert these people to use their technical knowledge for good. By making it harder and harder for the underworld to survive, the economic benefits of that lifestyle become overshadowed by its risks. This will bring these people out into the light, and hopefully both reduce the economic pain they cause with their mischief, and also let them contribute constructively.

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Educational microcontroller kits for the digital generation.

In the community around me, I've seen a lot of growth in the use of Linux on the desktop just in the last year. But probably the most interesting trend is that I've seen a bunch of new Ubuntu users among the mechanical engineering students, who in general aren't particularly computer-nerdy, and even more amazingly, are actually dependent on Windows-only software for some of their CAD tools (i.e. Solidworks).

I think the Walmart results might be indicative of a growing trend where people are just about ready to make the leap themselves... particularly when it comes preinstalled like it does here. Another step in the right direction.

What I'd love to see, though, is how much previous computer experience all of those Walmart reviewers had -- for some, it seems like quite a bit.

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Electronics kits for the digital generation.

In a normal antenna, electrons in the metal slosh up and down, accelerated by the electromagnetic fields that it's receiving (or transmitting). In this case, I could use the same description: electrons slosh up and down, driven by the EM fields.

The idea that this could lead to a reconfigurable antenna is a bit farfetched, as it would require that the driving bias electrodes be able to totally float at RF frequencies. Just like a neon sign, or a fluorescent light, you're going to have to keep a large voltage across these to get them to light, so it'll be tricky to use it as a receiving antenna in particular.

Take a look at another project, Talking Lights. This uses conventional fluorescent lights (hey, a plasma!) with a modified ballast to transmit data at serial-link speeds.

The "jam-resistance" doesn't make any sense. If it can receive signals, it can receive signals, period. At the point of the antenna, the desired signal and the jamming signal have already been mixed. The antenna itself can't help you out. (Clever frequency-hopping or other schemes can, though.)

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Microcontroller kits for the digital generation.

But software will only take you so far. There's a lot of unique PC to human interactions that are possible, but this world needs more hardware hackers.

In any case, this is a neat demo. People have been doing this on a much bigger, 3D, expensive $$$ scale with something called a Vicon Motion Capture System. They basically take a whole bunch of those cameras, and a whole bunch of LED arrays, and strobe them so that they get a picture of little reflective points from many different angles. They then use some trigonometry to figure out where, in 3D space, a particular point is. Cool stuff -- good to see it's being brought closer to everyone's homes, rather than the tens of thousands of dollars that Vicon charges.

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Educational microcontroller kits for the digital generation.

The energy required to switch a capacitor from zero to Vdd volts is 1/2*C*Vdd^2.

Smaller logic sizes can operate faster because the physical gate area of the transistor is that much smaller, so there's less capacitance loading down the piece of logic before it (proportional to the square of the scaling, of course). However, it also tends to be the case that the operating voltages scale down too (because they adjust the semiconductor doping and the gate oxide thickness to match), so you get an even better effect on energy required. Thus, scaling helps both with speed and operating power.

The problem they're running into now is that at these smaller sizes, the off-state leakage currents are getting to be of the same magnitude as the actual switching (operating logic) currents! This happens because of the reduced threshold voltage when they scale down, so the transistor isn't as "off" as it used to be.

That's why Intel has to work extra hard to get the power consumption down as the sizes scale down.

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NerdKits: electronics kits for the digital generation.

STMs and AFMs are important because they let us see things much smaller than conventional optical microscopes can. Increasing the scan rate by a factor of 1000 might yield new applications, taking better STM movies, and elucidating mechanisms that run that much faster.

The only public data released on the RF STM stuff seems to be this one lonely chart. The gamma variable (on the Y axis) has to do with electrical reflections that come about because of impedance mismatches on transmission lines. For more information, take a look at these lecture notes (2.5MB PDF) which start from voltage and current, and end with the gamma plane.

In conventional (non-RF) STM, the tunneling current is exponentially related to the distance above the surface. This is a part of why control systems for STMs, which are supposed to keep the tip hovering a few nanometers or less above the surface, are challenging to get right. In general, the surface and scanning tip are kept at a constant bias voltage of a few volts, and there is a feedback loop which attempts to maintain a constant current (and thus constant height over the sample) by adjusting the displacement of the tip.

In this system, it appears that they've found that the small-signal impedance of the tunneling junction varies significantly enough to make a large impact on the reflection coefficient, and (more importantly) that that's a good way to go.

Considering they've released so little technical data, there's only one really obvious savings here to me: noise. If you're an electrical engineer, you'll know that most devices (and thus most circuits) have noise at all frequencies, but that things get particularly bad for low frequencies around DC. This is often called 1/f noise, and if you take f to zero (DC), you've clearly got a problem! Additionally, you get other nasty effects at DC, like drift related to temperature, etc, which tend to be much worse than at high frequencies. By designing their system to work with small signals at high frequencies, they're able to avoid 1/f noise yet still make the height measurement they want. Pretty smart.

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NerdKits: Educational microcontroller kits for the digital generation.