A small thought experiment:
If we define an operational terrorist as being, on average, one year from carrying out an attack then looking at the number of attacks will tell us how many there are. If terrorists are literally "one in a million" then we would expect one attack per day. At 50 or so one attack per week.
How many do we get?
Durring 2004-2013: anywhere from 5-24 per year (Global Terrorism Database). About one or two a month, on average. Most of those don't actually kill anyone, like eco-terrorists setting fire to a car dealership. Under two dozen lethal events over a 10 year span, about a dozen mass injury, and two mass fatality.
So how many bloodthirsty, lethal, capable terrorists are there here at any one time? A couple dozen maybe? Probably less. In a country of 318 million.
The good news is the odds of being killed by a terrorist is astonishingly small.
The bad news is that a million-plus names on a watchlist is a REALY big haystack for a very small number of needles.
Mickey Mouse will never enter the public domain. Disney will always get a retroactive extension to copyright that includes it through congress before that happens. You can argue that this is bad/unfair/unconstitutional/great/etc but that is the practical reality. Any practical proposal for a reform of the copyright system has to take this into account.
Under the current system this means that anything from that era forward also stays out of the public domain forever, including “orphan works”. The loss of these “orphan works” that are long out of print and with no clear owner is the one thing that (almost) everyone can agree is a Bad Thing. So, any reform that has any chance of passing must improve the situation with those items while preserving the interests of politically powerful copyright holders (Disney, Sony, etc). I can see some options that could do it, though in any real world implementations would reveal some flaws.
Opt-in renewal is the one we hear tossed around the most. This sets forgotten material into the public domain but preserves the copyright on anything the owner finds worthy of a nominal renewal fee. It has the added bonus of registering who you can license the publishing rights from.
Letting works fall into the public domain after being out of print for X years could also accomplish the above goals. It would also have the added bonus of encouraging publishers to keep a work available/in-print to preserve their rights.
Lastly we could instead create a special extension for trademarks, franchises, and corporate identifiers. Things strongly associated with an ongoing business could be protected for a longer period. DC would keep Superman and Disney would keep Mickey, but an out of print science article would not get the new extension and would eventually enter the public domain.
None of these proposals would satisfy copyleft purists or “hands off my copyright!” paranoids but they could be a reasonable starting point for compromise.
My big problem with CarrierIQ has not been concerns over privacy (I just assume the carrier can see anything I send over their network) but the fact that it is both buggy and unstoppable. I was in the middle of nowhere when I noticed that my Atrix 2 was nearly dead (I had charged it that morning). Checking the battery monitor showed that "Device Health Applicaton" had sucked down 80% of my battery, and had been using GPS for 6 hours strait. Of course you can not force it to quit, que stream of [explative-deleted]. I was able to stop the bleeding by switching off GPS, and a cold boot restored functionality. Still, having an application that can murder performance, but that you can not kill or remove, seems like bad form at the very least.
It is about more than just having the correct number of wires. You have to look at the impedance of the lines. One company was able to do a demo with 100baseT over barbed wire seperated by several inches of air, but only because that width of free space matches the impedance of cat5 UTP.
Unfortunatly Cat5 is 100ohm and RG6 is 75ohm. Every incidance of impedance mismatch causes a reflection. Going from 100ohm to 75ohm gives a negative reflection, and the reverse causes a positive one. Realy short mismatches (like a conector) largely cancel out but long cable runs...
The short answer is that for a reliable high bandwidth solution you are probably better off ignoring the coax. 802.11n should give you all the wireless bandwidth you need, g tends to have a real throughput of around 20Mb but n claims 100Mb (DVD rate about 5Mbps, broadcast DTV up to 19.4Mbps, BlueRay up to 40Mbps). Or you could future proof yourself and run Cat5e, works with Gigabit ethernet.
Mickey Mouse will never enter the public domain. Disney will always get a retroactive extension to copyright that includes it through congress before that happens. You can argue that this is bad/unfair/unconstitutional/great/etc but that is the practical reality. Any practical proposal for a reform of the copyright system has to take this into account.
Under the current system this means that anything from that era forward also stays out of the public domain forever, including “orphan works”. The loss of these “orphan works” that are long out of print and with no clear owner is the one thing that (almost) everyone can agree is a Bad Thing. So, any reform that has any chance of passing must improve the situation with those items while preserving the interests of politically powerful copyright holders (Disney, Sony, etc). I can see some options that could do it, though in any real world implementations would reveal some flaws.
Opt-in renewal is the one we hear tossed around the most. This sets forgotten material into the public domain but preserves the copyright on anything the owner finds worthy of a nominal renewal fee. It has the added bonus of registering who you can license the publishing rights from.
Letting works fall into the public domain after being out of print for X years could also accomplish the above goals. It would also have the added bonus of encouraging publishers to keep a work available/in-print to preserve their rights.
Lastly we could instead create a special extension for trademarks, franchises, and corporate identifiers. Things strongly associated with an ongoing business could be protected for a longer period. DC would keep Superman and Disney would keep Mickey, but an out of print science article would not get the new extension and would eventually enter the public domain.
None of these proposals would satisfy copyleft purists or “hands off my copyright!” paranoids but they could be a reasonable starting point for compromise.
I lived through a cricket plague as a kid on a farm in rurral CA (different species). One morning I looked out the window and the lawn was black... and moving. They came into the house through every crack and crevice. The road was carpeted with them to the point that the school threatened to stop sending the bus. They showed up en mass a couple of other years but never again that bad.
A side note: I guess that LZ and the Stones now qualify as Weapons Grade Music.
Here is what I have been able to glean from various articles:
It requres that games disply age ratings. Of course all comercialy available games already display an ESRB rating so nothing changes there.
New consoles must have parental lockouts. Of course all consoles already have lockouts, and have done so for years. So no benifit there.
Establishes a comission to evaluate (suposed) links between real world violence and playing Missle Command. [sarcasm] I am sure that we can trust that the conclusions from a politicaly created body will be far more objective and fact based that academic studies.[/sarcasm]
All in all this has the smell of election year posturing. It was sped through at the end of a legislative session, so that the sponsors could claim to voters that they voted to "protect the children." In reality it will do nothing for NY other than sticking the tax payers with a big legal bill defending against costitutional challanges.
It is an atempt to convince voters that crime is not related to lawmakers failures to handle law enforcement, economics or eduction. It was Mario who stole your hubcaps.
What I used on the robot for my EE senior project was a serial LCD from seetron.com
It took the serial port data form a 16bit microcontroller and displayed it on screen. We used it mostly for text feedback but also used the low end graphics to display a graph of what our analog sensors saw in real time.
Probably low end for what you want but still a good option for embedded hardware hackers out there, as they could run it off of a pic or Basic Stamp. Will except TTL or RS232 voltage levels.
I actualy don't doubt your results (depending on what you mean by "violent behavior") but I hope that you went beond what other studies did.
The study that I am most familiar with went something like this.
It compared what people were like after playing two different games. It did show an increase in "arousal" in the group playing the violent (shooter) game immediatly after, but the description of changes sounded a lot like adrenaline rather than some sinister corruptive force. And the "Control" game? Myst. Yes they were playing a glorified slide show.
So what that study told you was: *Playing a fast paced and exciting game will leave you with more adrenaline right after than a PowerPoint presentation
Not very suprising
What did it NOT tell you: *If you got a different respose from a shooter/fighter vs another fast paced game such as a racing or sports *Is there a difference between playing a violent game vs watching boxing, an action film, or high school football *Is there a cathartic effect on someone who was angry BEFORE playing the game *If the measurable effects fade in under an hour, does that mean we don't need to worry about long term effects
I would find answers to those questions much more interesting.
Any conclusion can be drawn from a sufficiently complex data set. The correlary to that is that it becomes harder to PROVE any one conclusion as the data set becoms more complex, exponentialy so. Add in centuries of signal degridation and you are, basicaly, screwed.
Just look at how scollars argue not only about what Shakespear was trying to say, but if he actualy wrote the plays in the first place. Untill someone invents a time machine so we can go back and ask the artists what they were thinking, looking for "secret knowledge" in old works is folly. It's more Rorschach test than search for truth. Either put a print on the wall and enjoy it or pick up a paint brush and figure out what YOU have to say.
If I remember correctly (say a 50/50 chance at best) Joss had signed a development deal with Fox and owed them 2 more series after Firefly. If so then if he wanted to do TV he might have to go back to FOX (right of first refusal perhaps).
Yes he does have good reson to be wary. They put his baby in the Fri-8pm time slot of death, showed it out of order, pre empted or moved it so often you never know when it was on, then canned it.
Fox has earned a reputation for quickly canceling genre shows. A lot of this seems to stem from a tendancy to greenlight plenty of unusual fare and then cancel it if it does not expode quikly, both the good (Firefly, Brimstone) and the "what were they thinking?" (Drive, lots of things no one remembers). Throw everything at the wall and see what sticks.
Of course with the writers stike everything is on hold, and after the colapse of "Heros" clones it may never see daylight at all.
A tax on old style bulbs may seem like a more sensable and less heavy handed option, but may not be posible in this case. Why? Under California law a new tax or tax increase requires a 2/3 majority, but a ban would only rejuire a simple 50%+1 vote. As our squabling legislators can't seem to agree that the sky is blue, and "no new taxes" is a religious mantra to this blue state's conservative minority, getting to 66% is slightly more difficult than a moon landing. The wild card? I imagine that Hollywood would object to an outright ban as directors (and stars) insist on the most flattering lighting available. Look for a Governator veto. So a conservative initiative (prop 13) makes a ban more likely, and Hollywierd make one less so. My head hurts.
My ideal fuel cell would be able to run off of a solution of alcohol and water, and be able to cope with a few impurities. That way if I wanted to use my device in flight I could simply tell the flight attendant "I'll have a Coke, and my laptop will have a vodka." The down side to this would be that if you saw empty bottles of everclear around someone's desk you wouldn't be able to tell if they were a lush, or were just overclocking their machine. That, and everyone would name their computer "Bender."
Aside from the listing in the original article there are a few more
Several posts have listed voice recognition and speech synthesis. This is great for the blind, disabled, or those of us with carpel tunnel and eye strain. Combined with translation software it can provide a great advantage to communications, and even has military applications. Google "Phraselator". Troops use it to translate a limited number of phrases into Arabic or whatever. Definitely a field where better software and more computing power could make a difference.
Gesture is another input interface where you don't need to be tied to a keyboard. The Sony Eye Toy is a crude version of this. Advances in machine vision are needed to move this foreword. Existing "VR glove" versions are unlikely to break into the main stream.
Biofeedback is an interesting case. The idea of manipulating a device just by "thinking" does have its appeal. The military has looked into this partially because a fighter jet already has too many buttons and switches.
Sound positioning is another one the military looked at for similar reasons. Games can already use surround sound to let you know that the monster is behind you.
3D displays have been worked on for a long time. Most still require goggles or have to be viewed from a specific angle. Electronics manufacturers develop systems for gamers and other consumers, universities want to model complex molecules in 3D.
Another immersive environment is being surrounded by screens. Look for articles on the CAVE virtual environment.
A heads up display (HUD) overlays computer data on the real world. The main down sides are that it tends to obstruct view and the wearable versions make you look like a dork.
I'm an ex Stapler myself (Red Swinglne). Yes, Service Plans were a Big Deal. There was no commission on hardware, but there was a bonus for every service plan you sold. Ditto for cell phone plans. Embarised to say that I was the king of service plan sales. Forgive me, I was weak and in school and needed the money for Ranmen noodles and tripple lattes.
As for restocking fees, we had them on laptops and projectors. I assume it ws so that you could not come into town and "rent" a projector for your presentation for free.
We had a few real scammers. One guy would buy a palmtop then come in the next day and return a broken palmtop. He did this several times. The suspision was that he got some broken ones cheep and was "returning" then and selling the good ones at a profit.
Below is a link to a small web server design, compleate with CF to IDE example http://www.ant-computing.com/index.html?o ldurl=/
An old laptop may be your best bet, even if the screen, keyboard and battery are all crap.
Moving parts are of the devil, so I would avoid a fan and HDD if possible. Unfortunatly NAND flash is not the best medium for lots of write/erase cycles (over 10k) so you may need a hard drive for storage. Also NEVER use flash for a swap partition unless you want to find out how fast you can reach the wear out limit of your CF card.
My opinions are no those of my employer, more's the pity.
Am I the only one that wishes the Justices would read "Melencholy Elephants" by Spider Robinson? It s a short story about the hazards of copywrite extention. The title comes from the idea that elephants never smile because they never forget.
Myself and too other guys did this as our Sr project for electrical engineering. It is more complicated than it sounds. We buildt six EM sensors. I built a motor control system to maximise power delivery. There was a 16 bit microcontroller board from P&E Micro, and a serial grafical LCD from Scott Edwards (thanks guys). We had a GUI running on the microcontrtoller so we could change settings and see what the sensors saw. My partners fabed an analog ASIC. Took two simesters.
The old rule of thumb was that power consumption in a digital CMOS chip was proportional to C*f*V^2, or total capacitance times frequency times voltage squared. Halve the size or clock speed, halve the power (and heat). Halve the voltage, cut the power by one fourth! Problem is that model becomes less realistic as you go down in geometries. As you get down to these ultra deep sub micron circuits (say.1 micron) leakage current becomes a big issue. This means that a section of the chip may draw an unacceptable amount of current even when the clock is turned off! Ugh. Makes me glad I got out of back end chip design.
Unlike those looking for a boot/repair or router distro I need something to play MP3s on minimal hardware. I have an embedded 486 ISA board that I want to stick in my car along with an old sound card, so I need it to run headless and on very littl CPU power. Any ideas?
Slashdot Mirror
A small thought experiment: If we define an operational terrorist as being, on average, one year from carrying out an attack then looking at the number of attacks will tell us how many there are. If terrorists are literally "one in a million" then we would expect one attack per day. At 50 or so one attack per week. How many do we get? Durring 2004-2013: anywhere from 5-24 per year (Global Terrorism Database). About one or two a month, on average. Most of those don't actually kill anyone, like eco-terrorists setting fire to a car dealership. Under two dozen lethal events over a 10 year span, about a dozen mass injury, and two mass fatality. So how many bloodthirsty, lethal, capable terrorists are there here at any one time? A couple dozen maybe? Probably less. In a country of 318 million. The good news is the odds of being killed by a terrorist is astonishingly small. The bad news is that a million-plus names on a watchlist is a REALY big haystack for a very small number of needles.
Mickey Mouse will never enter the public domain. Disney will always get a retroactive extension to copyright that includes it through congress before that happens. You can argue that this is bad/unfair/unconstitutional/great/etc but that is the practical reality. Any practical proposal for a reform of the copyright system has to take this into account.
Under the current system this means that anything from that era forward also stays out of the public domain forever, including “orphan works”. The loss of these “orphan works” that are long out of print and with no clear owner is the one thing that (almost) everyone can agree is a Bad Thing. So, any reform that has any chance of passing must improve the situation with those items while preserving the interests of politically powerful copyright holders (Disney, Sony, etc). I can see some options that could do it, though in any real world implementations would reveal some flaws.
Opt-in renewal is the one we hear tossed around the most. This sets forgotten material into the public domain but preserves the copyright on anything the owner finds worthy of a nominal renewal fee. It has the added bonus of registering who you can license the publishing rights from.
Letting works fall into the public domain after being out of print for X years could also accomplish the above goals. It would also have the added bonus of encouraging publishers to keep a work available/in-print to preserve their rights.
Lastly we could instead create a special extension for trademarks, franchises, and corporate identifiers. Things strongly associated with an ongoing business could be protected for a longer period. DC would keep Superman and Disney would keep Mickey, but an out of print science article would not get the new extension and would eventually enter the public domain.
None of these proposals would satisfy copyleft purists or “hands off my copyright!” paranoids but they could be a reasonable starting point for compromise.
My big problem with CarrierIQ has not been concerns over privacy (I just assume the carrier can see anything I send over their network) but the fact that it is both buggy and unstoppable. I was in the middle of nowhere when I noticed that my Atrix 2 was nearly dead (I had charged it that morning). Checking the battery monitor showed that "Device Health Applicaton" had sucked down 80% of my battery, and had been using GPS for 6 hours strait. Of course you can not force it to quit, que stream of [explative-deleted]. I was able to stop the bleeding by switching off GPS, and a cold boot restored functionality. Still, having an application that can murder performance, but that you can not kill or remove, seems like bad form at the very least.
The main ingredient in "TruBlood" revealed!
Rice farms devistated by vampire bat infestation.
Rice-pudding and blood-pudding, now in the same bowl!
Monsanto sues Dracula for theft of intelectual property.
"June-Fest!"
I like chimichury flank steak better then sourkrout anyway.
Press Ctrl-Alt-Kryptonite
It is about more than just having the correct number of wires. You have to look at the impedance of the lines. One company was able to do a demo with 100baseT over barbed wire seperated by several inches of air, but only because that width of free space matches the impedance of cat5 UTP.
Unfortunatly Cat5 is 100ohm and RG6 is 75ohm. Every incidance of impedance mismatch causes a reflection. Going from 100ohm to 75ohm gives a negative reflection, and the reverse causes a positive one. Realy short mismatches (like a conector) largely cancel out but long cable runs...
The short answer is that for a reliable high bandwidth solution you are probably better off ignoring the coax. 802.11n should give you all the wireless bandwidth you need, g tends to have a real throughput of around 20Mb but n claims 100Mb (DVD rate about 5Mbps, broadcast DTV up to 19.4Mbps, BlueRay up to 40Mbps). Or you could future proof yourself and run Cat5e, works with Gigabit ethernet.
And yes, IAAEE (I Am An Electrical Engineer)
Mickey Mouse will never enter the public domain. Disney will always get a retroactive extension to copyright that includes it through congress before that happens. You can argue that this is bad/unfair/unconstitutional/great/etc but that is the practical reality. Any practical proposal for a reform of the copyright system has to take this into account.
Under the current system this means that anything from that era forward also stays out of the public domain forever, including “orphan works”. The loss of these “orphan works” that are long out of print and with no clear owner is the one thing that (almost) everyone can agree is a Bad Thing. So, any reform that has any chance of passing must improve the situation with those items while preserving the interests of politically powerful copyright holders (Disney, Sony, etc). I can see some options that could do it, though in any real world implementations would reveal some flaws.
Opt-in renewal is the one we hear tossed around the most. This sets forgotten material into the public domain but preserves the copyright on anything the owner finds worthy of a nominal renewal fee. It has the added bonus of registering who you can license the publishing rights from.
Letting works fall into the public domain after being out of print for X years could also accomplish the above goals. It would also have the added bonus of encouraging publishers to keep a work available/in-print to preserve their rights.
Lastly we could instead create a special extension for trademarks, franchises, and corporate identifiers. Things strongly associated with an ongoing business could be protected for a longer period. DC would keep Superman and Disney would keep Mickey, but an out of print science article would not get the new extension and would eventually enter the public domain.
None of these proposals would satisfy copyleft purists or “hands off my copyright!” paranoids but they could be a reasonable starting point for compromise.
I lived through a cricket plague as a kid on a farm in rurral CA (different species). One morning I looked out the window and the lawn was black... and moving. They came into the house through every crack and crevice. The road was carpeted with them to the point that the school threatened to stop sending the bus. They showed up en mass a couple of other years but never again that bad.
A side note: I guess that LZ and the Stones now qualify as Weapons Grade Music.
Here is what I have been able to glean from various articles:
It requres that games disply age ratings. Of course all comercialy available games already display an ESRB rating so nothing changes there.
New consoles must have parental lockouts. Of course all consoles already have lockouts, and have done so for years. So no benifit there.
Establishes a comission to evaluate (suposed) links between real world violence and playing Missle Command. [sarcasm] I am sure that we can trust that the conclusions from a politicaly created body will be far more objective and fact based that academic studies.[/sarcasm]
All in all this has the smell of election year posturing. It was sped through at the end of a legislative session, so that the sponsors could claim to voters that they voted to "protect the children." In reality it will do nothing for NY other than sticking the tax payers with a big legal bill defending against costitutional challanges.
It is an atempt to convince voters that crime is not related to lawmakers failures to handle law enforcement, economics or eduction. It was Mario who stole your hubcaps.
What I used on the robot for my EE senior project was a serial LCD from seetron.com
It took the serial port data form a 16bit microcontroller and displayed it on screen. We used it mostly for text feedback but also used the low end graphics to display a graph of what our analog sensors saw in real time.
Probably low end for what you want but still a good option for embedded hardware hackers out there, as they could run it off of a pic or Basic Stamp. Will except TTL or RS232 voltage levels.
I actualy don't doubt your results (depending on what you mean by "violent behavior") but I hope that you went beond what other studies did.
The study that I am most familiar with went something like this.
It compared what people were like after playing two different games. It did show an increase in "arousal" in the group playing the violent (shooter) game immediatly after, but the description of changes sounded a lot like adrenaline rather than some sinister corruptive force. And the "Control" game? Myst. Yes they were playing a glorified slide show.
So what that study told you was:
*Playing a fast paced and exciting game will leave you with more adrenaline right after than a PowerPoint presentation
Not very suprising
What did it NOT tell you:
*If you got a different respose from a shooter/fighter vs another fast paced game such as a racing or sports
*Is there a difference between playing a violent game vs watching boxing, an action film, or high school football
*Is there a cathartic effect on someone who was angry BEFORE playing the game
*If the measurable effects fade in under an hour, does that mean we don't need to worry about long term effects
I would find answers to those questions much more interesting.
Any conclusion can be drawn from a sufficiently complex data set. The correlary to that is that it becomes harder to PROVE any one conclusion as the data set becoms more complex, exponentialy so. Add in centuries of signal degridation and you are, basicaly, screwed.
Just look at how scollars argue not only about what Shakespear was trying to say, but if he actualy wrote the plays in the first place. Untill someone invents a time machine so we can go back and ask the artists what they were thinking, looking for "secret knowledge" in old works is folly. It's more Rorschach test than search for truth. Either put a print on the wall and enjoy it or pick up a paint brush and figure out what YOU have to say.
If I remember correctly (say a 50/50 chance at best) Joss had signed a development deal with Fox and owed them 2 more series after Firefly. If so then if he wanted to do TV he might have to go back to FOX (right of first refusal perhaps).
Yes he does have good reson to be wary. They put his baby in the Fri-8pm time slot of death, showed it out of order, pre empted or moved it so often you never know when it was on, then canned it.
Fox has earned a reputation for quickly canceling genre shows. A lot of this seems to stem from a tendancy to greenlight plenty of unusual fare and then cancel it if it does not expode quikly, both the good (Firefly, Brimstone) and the "what were they thinking?" (Drive, lots of things no one remembers). Throw everything at the wall and see what sticks.
Of course with the writers stike everything is on hold, and after the colapse of "Heros" clones it may never see daylight at all.
A tax on old style bulbs may seem like a more sensable and less heavy handed option, but may not be posible in this case. Why? Under California law a new tax or tax increase requires a 2/3 majority, but a ban would only rejuire a simple 50%+1 vote. As our squabling legislators can't seem to agree that the sky is blue, and "no new taxes" is a religious mantra to this blue state's conservative minority, getting to 66% is slightly more difficult than a moon landing.
The wild card? I imagine that Hollywood would object to an outright ban as directors (and stars) insist on the most flattering lighting available. Look for a Governator veto.
So a conservative initiative (prop 13) makes a ban more likely, and Hollywierd make one less so. My head hurts.
Take a pair of bolt cutters to the network cable.
---
Or the Aliens option: "Bug out, nuke the site from orbit. Only way to be sure"
My ideal fuel cell would be able to run off of a solution of alcohol and water, and be able to cope with a few impurities. That way if I wanted to use my device in flight I could simply tell the flight attendant "I'll have a Coke, and my laptop will have a vodka." The down side to this would be that if you saw empty bottles of everclear around someone's desk you wouldn't be able to tell if they were a lush, or were just overclocking their machine.
That, and everyone would name their computer "Bender."
Aside from the listing in the original article there are a few more
Several posts have listed voice recognition and speech synthesis. This is great for the blind, disabled, or those of us with carpel tunnel and eye strain. Combined with translation software it can provide a great advantage to communications, and even has military applications. Google "Phraselator". Troops use it to translate a limited number of phrases into Arabic or whatever. Definitely a field where better software and more computing power could make a difference.
Gesture is another input interface where you don't need to be tied to a keyboard. The Sony Eye Toy is a crude version of this. Advances in machine vision are needed to move this foreword. Existing "VR glove" versions are unlikely to break into the main stream.
Biofeedback is an interesting case. The idea of manipulating a device just by "thinking" does have its appeal. The military has looked into this partially because a fighter jet already has too many buttons and switches.
Sound positioning is another one the military looked at for similar reasons. Games can already use surround sound to let you know that the monster is behind you.
3D displays have been worked on for a long time. Most still require goggles or have to be viewed from a specific angle. Electronics manufacturers develop systems for gamers and other consumers, universities want to model complex molecules in 3D.
Another immersive environment is being surrounded by screens. Look for articles on the CAVE virtual environment.
A heads up display (HUD) overlays computer data on the real world. The main down sides are that it tends to obstruct view and the wearable versions make you look like a dork.
I'm an ex Stapler myself (Red Swinglne). Yes, Service Plans were a Big Deal. There was no commission on hardware, but there was a bonus for every service plan you sold. Ditto for cell phone plans. Embarised to say that I was the king of service plan sales. Forgive me, I was weak and in school and needed the money for Ranmen noodles and tripple lattes.
As for restocking fees, we had them on laptops and projectors. I assume it ws so that you could not come into town and "rent" a projector for your presentation for free.
We had a few real scammers. One guy would buy a palmtop then come in the next day and return a broken palmtop. He did this several times. The suspision was that he got some broken ones cheep and was "returning" then and selling the good ones at a profit.
Below is a link to a small web server design, compleate with CF to IDE exampleo ldurl=/
http://www.ant-computing.com/index.html?
An old laptop may be your best bet, even if the screen, keyboard and battery are all crap.
Moving parts are of the devil, so I would avoid a fan and HDD if possible. Unfortunatly NAND flash is not the best medium for lots of write/erase cycles (over 10k) so you may need a hard drive for storage. Also NEVER use flash for a swap partition unless you want to find out how fast you can reach the wear out limit of your CF card.
My opinions are no those of my employer, more's the pity.
Worked in the door, lighting(480V) and alarm control rooms in Corcran State Prison. Its where they keep Charles Manson and the like. 'Nuf said.
Am I the only one that wishes the Justices would read "Melencholy Elephants" by Spider Robinson? It s a short story about the hazards of copywrite extention. The title comes from the idea that elephants never smile because they never forget.
Myself and too other guys did this as our Sr project for electrical engineering. It is more complicated than it sounds. We buildt six EM sensors. I built a motor control system to maximise power delivery. There was a 16 bit microcontroller board from P&E Micro, and a serial grafical LCD from Scott Edwards (thanks guys). We had a GUI running on the microcontrtoller so we could change settings and see what the sensors saw. My partners fabed an analog ASIC. Took two simesters.
The old rule of thumb was that power consumption in a digital CMOS chip was proportional to C*f*V^2, or total capacitance times frequency times voltage squared. Halve the size or clock speed, halve the power (and heat). Halve the voltage, cut the power by one fourth! Problem is that model becomes less realistic as you go down in geometries. As you get down to these ultra deep sub micron circuits (say .1 micron) leakage current becomes a big issue. This means that a section of the chip may draw an unacceptable amount of current even when the clock is turned off! Ugh. Makes me glad I got out of back end chip design.
Unlike those looking for a boot/repair or router distro I need something to play MP3s on minimal hardware. I have an embedded 486 ISA board that I want to stick in my car along with an old sound card, so I need it to run headless and on very littl CPU power. Any ideas?