Here's some info on VASIMR that estimates Isp of 30,000... it gives some thrust info but I didn't find the system weight info in my quick glance through this so I couldn't really attach meaning to the thrust numbers... anyway here's the link:
Anyway, the technically feasiblity or infeasibility of systems such as VASIMR isn't really relevent to my original point that IEC fusion systems are very promising in their potential uses as propulsion systems.
Yeah, these systems need really high electric field densities, but every advanced technology has kinks to work out or else someone would have built them by now.
IEC Fusion offers very high thrust to weight levels and very high Isps... some estmates I've read give thrust to wieght of abut 30x and Isps from 5000-15000. Obviously such engines haven't been developed yet or else i'd be writing this from Mars right now:)
Tokomak type fusion will not be good for propulsion unless some sort of materials breakthrough significantly reduces the weight of the confinement apperatus. Such engines seem viable only for battlestar galactica type spacecraft.
Hall thrusters are low thrust only... I looked up VASIMR, but I can't find anything estimating thrust levels or Isp. VASIMR looks like a scheme to get higher thrust levels out of a Hall thruster... however, I doubt that such a device could be constructed out of any materials available on the near horizon... and it looks heavy with all of the magnets... but like I said, I couldn't find any estimtes of Isp or T/W.
Once you've moved away from chemical propellants, one of the big questions is: where are you going to get your power for the propulsion system? For a chemical rocket, the energy is largely liberated from the reactants themselves.
And the best you'll get out of a chemical system is maybe 400 secs of Isp... and that will be with very dangerous and very toxic propellent. If you use a low molecular weight fuel like hydrogen and provide energy to it from another source you can get much, much higher Isps (800-30000 sec). The power can be from solar thermal, solar electric, beamed energy, nuclear fission, nuclear fusion, antimatter, etc.
I think an IEC fusion device might be able to be combined synegistically with a fusion device to provide very, very hot hydrogen... without the radioactive exhaust of nuclear-thermal rockets like NIRVA. And if an IEC fusion device could produce a breakeven fusion reaction, then it will be a much better choice for a fusion engine than a tokomak.
Nonsense. A fusion reactor in space is a power source for the rocket. If it can't even equal the input power (from some other power source), why bother to have it at all? Just use that other source to directly power some kind of ion or plasma engine.
ion engines are low thrust and would have to be battlestar galactica sized to get higher thrust. I'm not sure of what you mean by a plasma engine - ion engines use plasma.
You can get power from a fission reactor or from solar power or beamed energy... propellent mass you have to carry with you. Although power is a serious limitation, propellent mass is a much larger limitation. IEC Fusion can achieve very high temperatures and very high fuel efficiencies at high thrust levels. In theory, IEC fusion engines could offer spectacular performance.
A load sensor would be really cool. Imagine the computer's case glowing red hot, then white hot, then blue hot as its load increases.... now imagine a server farm or a Beowulf cluster of these:)
Okay. I stand by those statements though I should have elaborated on the Lawson criteria. It would have better exaplained about the "confining" issue. The fusing ions aren't trapped and since the plasma density is low, the vast majority fusion capable ions (which took much energy to make in the first place) zip right though the plasma without doing anything useful.
Ahhh... but as a propulsion device, hot Ions are very useful. I think the real promise of IEC is for light weight fusion reactors that can accelerate low molecular weight molecules to very high speeds. For propulsion, break-even is nice but not required. High specific impulse is what you need.
Why should I care more about you loosing a cushy job than somebody starving in Zimbabwe? Hey I got my job and I'm gonna keep my job. Why should I care about you?
Read John Locke.... labor adds value to objects. A pentium chip is worth way more than the raw materials that went into making the chip... same with a can of coke.
The more people who are working, the more total value there is in the economy. The only way to beat poverty is to get more people working and adding value to the economy.
If you had a country of poor people, then no-one could really buy your expensive product, and you would never have a mass market. Thus it was in his long term interest to pay his workers well...... [snip, snip]...The SeeSaw of Economic forces may take centuries to balance out. In the meantime, all we have is the great sucking sound of jobs getting sucked out over seas.
Most of the world lives in dreadful poverty. Imagine what is possible if all of these unemployed or underemployed masses could be put to productive work making good wages.
If more people overseas work, then I have a chance to make money by selling them stuff. Eventually more work gets done worldwide and we're all wealthier.
Even if everyone in the USA is reduced to flipping burgers at McDonalds, such jobs are still waaay better than what most of the world faces. Although its tough to raise a family working minimum wages it is still possible and your kids can still get an education and a chance at a better life. Compare that to the lot of most people in places like afghanistan, zimbabwe, DROC, etc.
"With the advent of cyberspace, we've had to evolve these policies," Farr said. "Somewhere between First Amendment rights and total repression there is a practical middle ground."
It's one thing to enforce NDA's that an employee willfully signed its another thing to find some "middle-ground" with rights in the first amendment. The whole point of calling something a right is to say that there is no middle ground.... a "right" is an absolute... otherwise we would call it first amendment privileges.
If you don't voluntarily sign away a right with an NDA, you should have complete freedom to exercise that right. I think Madison and Jefferson would back me up here.
Too often management types think they can freely bend the rules in order to make their job easier and they never really worry about what the long term negative effect on society of reducing the rights of employees to speak their minds.
Just look at how the ITAR restrictions on academic speech are killing the American Aerospace Industry, and how DMCA is killing research into encryption.
If you read the script with more care, you will find that the opposite is true. GNU-Darwin does not overwrite any Apple distributed files.
And Clinton didn't have sex with M.L....
It copies the Apple binaries to/tmp where they will eventually be deleted. It has the same end effect.... It's like saying copying a flie to the Trash doesn't delete the file!
It's hard to pick authors for my papers because so much analysis depends on analysis done by other people on the team. You can't put everyone who worked on a project on the paper, because its considered bad form to have more than 4 authors (some journals limit you to six authors). So the authors are usually just the people stuck with doing the write-up and everyone else is put into the acknowledgements.
On the flip side, I've had some scientist cooleagues want to add me as an author on a paper that I had nothing to do with and I had to find a polite way to get them to take me off of the author list. (Hey, I'm trying to build a reputation for my own work I don't want my name tied to a paper I don't have any say on).
skynet.google.com / whining about HeUnique
on
Google's new toys
·
· Score: 2
Playing with Google Sets made me wonder if Google might eventually become sentient... watch out for skynet.google.com
That joke will make this post just half off-topic:) But I really want to complain about HeUnique...
I usually don't grouse when my submissions are rejected and someone else submits the same story which is then accepted... thems the breaks... but this time an Editor rejected my submission and then posted the same story reworded... yeah my wording wasn't as good (I was tired), but still if Editors will post a story without attributing the submitter it takes all of the fun out of digging around on the web for a good story.
And be sure to link/. as a favorite technical website on you resume:
Another thing is to include your favorite technical Web site list in your online resume or personal Web site. I'll look for people who specialize in a certain area -- if they also have a list of favorite Web sites that show their interest in the top Web sites in a certain area, I'll notice that.
But then again, telling a potential employer that you read a lot of slashdot might not be a good thing:)
Facts aren't covered by copyright law. Trying to use coyright law to keep prices secret is like trying to use copyright law to keep measurmetns from an experiment secret.... or a casino trying to use copyright to keep their security system secret... none of this is remotely copyrightable.
They shoud go after the individuals who relased their trade secrets under trade secret law... not after websites publishing information using copright law. That's like suing a newspaper for publishing leaked information.... plain silly, and very destructive.
Steve Jobs (CEO of Pixar) was a childhood friend of woz... I hear they even went into business together selling phone phreaking equipment... They also did some other business selling fruit out of their garage...
Hey, where are the nits about Woz not really being a co-founder of wOz but more of a founder because the other guys are all VC's?:) I mean, can a VC really be a co-founder? I wonder about that..
The goal of a protest is to 1) get people to listen to your message 2) get them to understand your message. After that they will make up their own minds.
Stunts get attention. The point of a stunt isn't to 'punish' the stores, but to do something out of the ordinary that will get noticed by the audiences that you want to get your message to.
It's a lot like marketing and guerilla advertising like IBM did with the sidewalk chalking and Microsoft and the butterflies.
The stunts get attention of the 1) customers 2) the media 3) the management. If the media understands the issues they might report it. If the customers understand the issues they might complain. If the management understands they might change the policy.... any pressure from customers and the media might also help management to decide to make a change.
Picket lines of just five people are pathetic. If you hand out fliers, most people will be annoyed and ignore you....If you do a funny puppet show on the DMCA in the parking lot people will be curious, come up to you, and ask "What's the DMCA?". Just be there with some short and easy to understand fliers with ways to get more information. Be prepared to answer questions and explain your position. Don't be combative and don't exaggerate. Let them make up their own minds, your goal is just to inform.
Also, protests can be a lot of work... they should be fun to get people to show up and help you out. Handing out fliers while holding some home-made 'DMCA Sucks' sign isn't fun. Puppet shows are fun. Fake non-disclosure agreements (that are clearly parodies) are fun.
I don't think the EFF will organize a protest of this... it doesn't seem to be there style. They seem to be more into big speeches and big lawsuits not grassroots organizing.
Good tips: but red taping might be carrying this too far.
you're probably right... tape would be vandalism... maybe some sort of plastic that was held on by static cling and easily removed would be good (like microsoft's butterflys).
I think its best to be creative so as to grab attention with only a few people, not to try and 'hurt' the stores directly. If you get people to notice, hopefully they'll look into the issue and agree with you.
People/want/ to fight it, they just can't. Try going up against Wal Mart, Best Buy, Target...you can't. You don't have the money. They can tie you up in court until your financing runs out, then your lawyer says "buh-bye" and you effectively lose.
There's a fun and easy way to fight it...
Here are the stores that sent the DMCA threats: Wal*Mart, Target, Best Buy, Staples
Some of you may be screaming boycott... but that won't work. There aren't enough people who even know what the DMCA is to make a dent in the sales of these companies... besides, they would just chalk it up to the bad economy and ask for a government bail-out.
I think guerrilla protests are the best way... especially since most of us have the friday after thanksgiving off... Just get a few friends together and have fun...
a few ideas:
1. Go to a store and cover up their prices with red tape. This would be especially effective at stores where the prices are on the shelves and not on the items.
2. Go to a store and have customers sign a non-disclosure agreement before they look at the prices. Explain that the prices are copyrighted and they can't tell anyone else what they paid for what they buy. After the store kicks you out go outside in the parking lot. After the cops ask you to leave go to another store.
3. Guerrilla theater. Perform mini DMCA plays in the offending stores... this one can be a lot of fun.
Be sure to have fliers explaining the DMCA and what these stores did and hand them out to the curious. Be creative.
Don't worry about getting arrested... just leave when they ask you to leave and go on to another store. It doesn't matter if your mini-protest lasts only five minutes before they kick you out... the store manager will still tell his district manager about your stunt, and maybe the store might change its policy.
Too bad there isn't a geeky activist group to organize such a thing. If this were organized to be across several cities, small groups of five or six people in each city would be very effective.
I did a few protests back in college:) You'd be suprised at how effective small groups of people can be once they get noticed by the higher managment of these places. If your stunt has entertainment value, local papers and tv stations will probably cover it if you tell them ahead of time... there's not much news on a holiday weekend anyway.
also from the article: But Mac choices for file swapping are severely limited compared to options for the PC. Two of the most popular services--Kazaa and Morpheus--do not support the Mac in their latest versions.
so the article is saying that there will be no movies for mac because there's no DRM on mac, and people could copy the movies, burn them to DVDs, upload them onto a windows machine, and put them on P2P networks??
My baby loves to listen to music and watch the visualizations in iTunes.. it calms him down when he's screaming and puts him to sleep when he's tired. Also all babies like to look at pictures of themselves and other babies... so the iPhoto slide show also works to calm him down.
Seriously, my iMac is the easiest way to put my baby to sleep... making it a wonderful investment!
Of course, he likes the light on the optical mouse and is always reaching for it and trying to chew on it... which is not a good thing.
I think it would be nice to have a simple rugged PDA type computer to use as a baby toy... it could play music with bright colors.. and run simple little games for toddlers.
Slashdot Mirror
Here's some info on VASIMR that estimates Isp of 30,000... it gives some thrust info but I didn't find the system weight info in my quick glance through this so I couldn't really attach meaning to the thrust numbers... anyway here's the link:
n .p df
http://dma.ing.uniroma1.it/users/bruno/Petro.pr
Anyway, the technically feasiblity or infeasibility of systems such as VASIMR isn't really relevent to my original point that IEC fusion systems are very promising in their potential uses as propulsion systems.
Yeah, these systems need really high electric field densities, but every advanced technology has kinks to work out or else someone would have built them by now.
IEC Fusion offers very high thrust to weight levels and very high Isps... some estmates I've read give thrust to wieght of abut 30x and Isps from 5000-15000. Obviously such engines haven't been developed yet or else i'd be writing this from Mars right now :)
Tokomak type fusion will not be good for propulsion unless some sort of materials breakthrough significantly reduces the weight of the confinement apperatus. Such engines seem viable only for battlestar galactica type spacecraft.
Hall thrusters are low thrust only... I looked up VASIMR, but I can't find anything estimating thrust levels or Isp. VASIMR looks like a scheme to get higher thrust levels out of a Hall thruster... however, I doubt that such a device could be constructed out of any materials available on the near horizon... and it looks heavy with all of the magnets... but like I said, I couldn't find any estimtes of Isp or T/W.
Once you've moved away from chemical propellants, one of the big questions is: where are you going to get your power for the propulsion system? For a chemical rocket, the energy is largely liberated from the reactants themselves.
And the best you'll get out of a chemical system is maybe 400 secs of Isp... and that will be with very dangerous and very toxic propellent. If you use a low molecular weight fuel like hydrogen and provide energy to it from another source you can get much, much higher Isps (800-30000 sec). The power can be from solar thermal, solar electric, beamed energy, nuclear fission, nuclear fusion, antimatter, etc.
I think an IEC fusion device might be able to be combined synegistically with a fusion device to provide very, very hot hydrogen... without the radioactive exhaust of nuclear-thermal rockets like NIRVA. And if an IEC fusion device could produce a breakeven fusion reaction, then it will be a much better choice for a fusion engine than a tokomak.
Nonsense. A fusion reactor in space is a power source for the rocket. If it can't even equal the input power (from some other power source), why bother to have it at all? Just use that other source to directly power some kind of ion or plasma engine.
ion engines are low thrust and would have to be battlestar galactica sized to get higher thrust. I'm not sure of what you mean by a plasma engine - ion engines use plasma.
You can get power from a fission reactor or from solar power or beamed energy... propellent mass you have to carry with you. Although power is a serious limitation, propellent mass is a much larger limitation.
IEC Fusion can achieve very high temperatures and very high fuel efficiencies at high thrust levels. In theory, IEC fusion engines could offer spectacular performance.
how about just a load sensor
:)
A load sensor would be really cool. Imagine the computer's case glowing red hot, then white hot, then blue hot as its load increases.... now imagine a server farm or a Beowulf cluster of these
Okay. I stand by those statements though I should have elaborated on the Lawson criteria. It would have better exaplained about the "confining" issue. The fusing ions aren't trapped and since the plasma density is low, the vast majority fusion capable ions (which took much energy to make in the first place) zip right though the plasma without doing anything useful.
Ahhh... but as a propulsion device, hot Ions are very useful. I think the real promise of IEC is for light weight fusion reactors that can accelerate low molecular weight molecules to very high speeds. For propulsion, break-even is nice but not required. High specific impulse is what you need.
There's been some work on inertial confinement fusion done at university of Illinois... I'm too lazy to google for any names right now.
IEC is very promising for space propulsion. Tokomaks are way to heavy to carry on board your spaceship.
Why should I care more about you loosing a cushy job than somebody starving in Zimbabwe? Hey I got my job and I'm gonna keep my job. Why should I care about you?
Read John Locke.... labor adds value to objects. A pentium chip is worth way more than the raw materials that went into making the chip... same with a can of coke.
The more people who are working, the more total value there is in the economy. The only way to beat poverty is to get more people working and adding value to the economy.
If you had a country of poor people, then no-one could really buy your expensive product, and you would never have a mass market. Thus it was in his long term interest to pay his workers well...... [snip, snip] ...The SeeSaw of Economic forces may take centuries to balance out. In the meantime, all we have is the great sucking sound of jobs getting sucked out over seas.
Most of the world lives in dreadful poverty. Imagine what is possible if all of these unemployed or underemployed masses could be put to productive work making good wages.
If more people overseas work, then I have a chance to make money by selling them stuff. Eventually more work gets done worldwide and we're all wealthier.
Even if everyone in the USA is reduced to flipping burgers at McDonalds, such jobs are still waaay better than what most of the world faces. Although its tough to raise a family working minimum wages it is still possible and your kids can still get an education and a chance at a better life. Compare that to the lot of most people in places like afghanistan, zimbabwe, DROC, etc.
An interesting quote from the article:
"With the advent of cyberspace, we've had to evolve these policies," Farr said. "Somewhere between First Amendment rights and total repression there is a practical middle ground."
It's one thing to enforce NDA's that an employee willfully signed its another thing to find some "middle-ground" with rights in the first amendment. The whole point of calling something a right is to say that there is no middle ground.... a "right" is an absolute... otherwise we would call it first amendment privileges.
If you don't voluntarily sign away a right with an NDA, you should have complete freedom to exercise that right. I think Madison and Jefferson would back me up here.
Too often management types think they can freely bend the rules in order to make their job easier and they never really worry about what the long term negative effect on society of reducing the rights of employees to speak their minds.
Just look at how the ITAR restrictions on academic speech are killing the American Aerospace Industry, and how DMCA is killing research into encryption.
If you read the script with more care, you will find that the opposite is true. GNU-Darwin does not overwrite any Apple distributed files.
/tmp where they will eventually be deleted. It has the same end effect.... It's like saying copying a flie to the Trash doesn't delete the file!
And Clinton didn't have sex with M.L....
It copies the Apple binaries to
Here's some details about the fix. They isolated the problem to a bad LED, and ran current through it to melt away the damage... pretty cool.
It's hard to pick authors for my papers because so much analysis depends on analysis done by other people on the team. You can't put everyone who worked on a project on the paper, because its considered bad form to have more than 4 authors (some journals limit you to six authors). So the authors are usually just the people stuck with doing the write-up and everyone else is put into the acknowledgements.
On the flip side, I've had some scientist cooleagues want to add me as an author on a paper that I had nothing to do with and I had to find a polite way to get them to take me off of the author list. (Hey, I'm trying to build a reputation for my own work I don't want my name tied to a paper I don't have any say on).
Playing with Google Sets made me wonder if Google might eventually become sentient... watch out for skynet.google.com
:) But I really want to complain about HeUnique...
That joke will make this post just half off-topic
I usually don't grouse when my submissions are rejected and someone else submits the same story which is then accepted... thems the breaks... but this time an Editor rejected my submission and then posted the same story reworded... yeah my wording wasn't as good (I was tired), but still if Editors will post a story without attributing the submitter it takes all of the fun out of digging around on the web for a good story.
I don't know Eiffel, but I've heard of it... here's some useful links that I've found:
Why Eiffel: http://www.elj.com/eiffel/why-eiffel/
Other lins (including tutorials): http://www.cetus-links.org/oo_eiffel.html
I wonder what is meant by all of this "Design by Contract" stuff... I'm not sure yet if this is something useful, or just more buzz-buzz.
And be sure to link /. as a favorite technical website on you resume:
:)
Another thing is to include your favorite technical Web site list in your online resume or personal Web site. I'll look for people who specialize in a certain area -- if they also have a list of favorite Web sites that show their interest in the top Web sites in a certain area, I'll notice that.
But then again, telling a potential employer that you read a lot of slashdot might not be a good thing
Facts aren't covered by copyright law. Trying to use coyright law to keep prices secret is like trying to use copyright law to keep measurmetns from an experiment secret.... or a casino trying to use copyright to keep their security system secret... none of this is remotely copyrightable.
They shoud go after the individuals who relased their trade secrets under trade secret law... not after websites publishing information using copright law. That's like suing a newspaper for publishing leaked information.... plain silly, and very destructive.
Steve Jobs (CEO of Pixar) was a childhood friend of woz... I hear they even went into business together selling phone phreaking equipment... They also did some other business selling fruit out of their garage...
:) I mean, can a VC really be a co-founder? I wonder about that..
Hey, where are the nits about Woz not really being a co-founder of wOz but more of a founder because the other guys are all VC's?
Then why are they using the DMCA and legal intimidation? If it's about trade secrets than use trade secret law.
Do you honestly think their claim about the prices being copyrighted would hold up in court if this ever made it to court?
The goal of a protest is to 1) get people to listen to your message 2) get them to understand your message. After that they will make up their own minds.
...If you do a funny puppet show on the DMCA in the parking lot people will be curious, come up to you, and ask "What's the DMCA?". Just be there with some short and easy to understand fliers with ways to get more information. Be prepared to answer questions and explain your position. Don't be combative and don't exaggerate. Let them make up their own minds, your goal is just to inform.
Stunts get attention. The point of a stunt isn't to 'punish' the stores, but to do something out of the ordinary that will get noticed by the audiences that you want to get your message to.
It's a lot like marketing and guerilla advertising like IBM did with the sidewalk chalking and Microsoft and the butterflies.
The stunts get attention of the 1) customers 2) the media 3) the management. If the media understands the issues they might report it. If the customers understand the issues they might complain. If the management understands they might change the policy.... any pressure from customers and the media might also help management to decide to make a change.
Picket lines of just five people are pathetic. If you hand out fliers, most people will be annoyed and ignore you.
Also, protests can be a lot of work... they should be fun to get people to show up and help you out. Handing out fliers while holding some home-made 'DMCA Sucks' sign isn't fun. Puppet shows are fun. Fake non-disclosure agreements (that are clearly parodies) are fun.
Be creative, not destructive. Educate and inform.
The EFF etc leap to the mind.
I don't think the EFF will organize a protest of this... it doesn't seem to be there style. They seem to be more into big speeches and big lawsuits not grassroots organizing.
Good tips: but red taping might be carrying this too far.
you're probably right... tape would be vandalism... maybe some sort of plastic that was held on by static cling and easily removed would be good (like microsoft's butterflys).
I think its best to be creative so as to grab attention with only a few people, not to try and 'hurt' the stores directly. If you get people to notice, hopefully they'll look into the issue and agree with you.
People /want/ to fight it, they just can't. Try going up against Wal Mart, Best Buy, Target...you can't. You don't have the money. They can tie you up in court until your financing runs out, then your lawyer says "buh-bye" and you effectively lose.
:) You'd be suprised at how effective small groups of people can be once they get noticed by the higher managment of these places. If your stunt has entertainment value, local papers and tv stations will probably cover it if you tell them ahead of time... there's not much news on a holiday weekend anyway.
There's a fun and easy way to fight it...
Here are the stores that sent the DMCA threats: Wal*Mart, Target, Best Buy, Staples
Some of you may be screaming boycott... but that won't work. There aren't enough people who even know what the DMCA is to make a dent in the sales of these companies... besides, they would just chalk it up to the bad economy and ask for a government bail-out.
I think guerrilla protests are the best way... especially since most of us have the friday after thanksgiving off... Just get a few friends together and have fun...
a few ideas:
1. Go to a store and cover up their prices with red tape. This would be especially effective at stores where the prices are on the shelves and not on the items.
2. Go to a store and have customers sign a non-disclosure agreement before they look at the prices. Explain that the prices are copyrighted and they can't tell anyone else what they paid for what they buy. After the store kicks you out go outside in the parking lot. After the cops ask you to leave go to another store.
3. Guerrilla theater. Perform mini DMCA plays in the offending stores... this one can be a lot of fun.
Be sure to have fliers explaining the DMCA and what these stores did and hand them out to the curious. Be creative.
Don't worry about getting arrested... just leave when they ask you to leave and go on to another store. It doesn't matter if your mini-protest lasts only five minutes before they kick you out... the store manager will still tell his district manager about your stunt, and maybe the store might change its policy.
Too bad there isn't a geeky activist group to organize such a thing. If this were organized to be across several cities, small groups of five or six people in each city would be very effective.
I did a few protests back in college
I keep the mouse away from him, but the problem is that he reaches for it, and would love to destroy it... usb mice aren't cheap :)
also from the article: But Mac choices for file swapping are severely limited compared to options for the PC. Two of the most popular services--Kazaa and Morpheus--do not support the Mac in their latest versions.
so the article is saying that there will be no movies for mac because there's no DRM on mac, and people could copy the movies, burn them to DVDs, upload them onto a windows machine, and put them on P2P networks??
silly hollywood.
My baby loves to listen to music and watch the visualizations in iTunes.. it calms him down when he's screaming and puts him to sleep when he's tired. Also all babies like to look at pictures of themselves and other babies... so the iPhoto slide show also works to calm him down.
Seriously, my iMac is the easiest way to put my baby to sleep... making it a wonderful investment!
Of course, he likes the light on the optical mouse and is always reaching for it and trying to chew on it... which is not a good thing.
I think it would be nice to have a simple rugged PDA type computer to use as a baby toy... it could play music with bright colors.. and run simple little games for toddlers.