has also said that the digital ebook library would feature older titles
If I wanted an old book, why not download it legally or otherwise? To subscribe I have to play games comparing the average price of a years worth of downloads to the annual price of the service. Also I'd feel locked in to only reading stuff from the paid service to maximize my "profit" rather than reading what I actually want to read.
I'd rather subscribe to a (new) book of the month club. They already have subscription infrastructure, it would all be marketing. Simply offer "Baen New Releases Magazine" for perhaps $5/month and I'm in. More than publishers and marketers, I would like to pay money to subscribe to a favored author, or perhaps a themed trusted editor ("Lovecraftian Subscription", or whatever). Nathan Lowell here's a buck a month, now write me a new book. Or John Ringo or whoever.
The problem is that much electrical potential will NOT get rid of the "risk". if you short a high capacity battery no matter what it is made of, it will get really hot. they are not going to eliminate the burning battery syndrome. Better QC does that.
Internal resistance depends on the combination of battery chemistry and manufacturing technology. If you don't believe me, try shorting out comparable voltage / capacity ancient carbon zinc AA (good luck getting over a couple hundred mA, ask the model rocket guys from the 80s) vs a brand new Nicad (easily dump 50 amps, at least for a very short while, ask the RC car guys about melting connectors).
There is no inherent chemical or physical reason why you couldn't design/build a high internal resistance and high capacity lithium battery. There are inherent engineering/mechanical/manufacturing/economic reasons why you can not. Think about the electrodes being so thin they practically have to be vapor deposited like a telescope mirror, and then how do you make them structurally stable without wasting most of your weight and volume (and capacity) on structure? If you could build them in orbit, and guarantee to never experience more than a zillionth of a G of acceleration, and guarantee they'd never be moved or touched...
Unfortunately, this invention does not replace the liquid electrolyte. The "jelly" is a polymer soaked in the liquid electrolyte, which definitely is immobilized (thus protecting against leaks) but it's probably not fireproof (I could not find a reference to a research article).
Very much like how a "gel cell" lead acid battery still contains H2SO4 it just won't pour out as fast if the case cracks.
I have accidentally cracked gel cells in old UPSes, etc. Its just as corrosive as plain battery acid, it merely doesn't pour out as fast.
I just chatted with him and it is was total failure, it kept changing subject and it never answered any of my question. Those 59.3% techies from India must have been really dumb.
You see, if you were talking about a tortoise on its back, Cleverbot would have got the reference and assumed you were trying to test it, or maybe continued to roleplay and quote from the movie
Nahh. I've tried this and first of all its a tortoise not a turtle, and secondly I have first hand experience that people who have not seen the movie really don't respond very well... Especially girls. Would definitely not advise as a "quirky" pickup line. In that regard Cleverbot's response is not too far off the mark.
Sure. But the Turing test is a piece of garbage too. I have a deep respect for Allan Turing, and all that he has done for science. But the Turing test was death to AI the moment he proposed it. It MUST be forgotten and burried, and maybe incidents like these can help us achieve that!
Eh, its more of a thought experiment. Its like making fun of Heisenberg because you want experimental proof of quantum dot technology LEDs, not dead/undead cats in a box with a source and a geiger counter. Einstein had some legendarily weird thought experiments too.
Its value is in making you think of contrived, yet vaguely familiar situations in a really strange problem space. Not much value in an experiment design engineering planning review meeting.
As part of a previous job I occasionally got involved as an engineering contact in telco service monitoring situations. You know, like every time we call long distance I hear echo, that type of thing. Trust me, most human to human conversations are pretty F-ing unintelligent, so I think an Artificial Intelligence would not be challenged in outperforming them. PHBs talk meaningless buzzwords to each other, not just to peons, for example.
So basically, you just replaced your Cable Company with an online only service, giving you 50 hi def channels for cheap. That is a GOOD thing, since it takes the LOCAL Monopoly out of TV.
(oh, and how many houses only have 1 computer ?)
Our house only has 4 people and 3 TVs, all with mythtv frontends. I could watch live TV on my computer, making 4 streams. It would be very challenging to find 80 megabits of live HDTV to watch simultaneously... Not the "find a signal" but the "worth watching" critera... Assuming its possible, that leaves the other 920 megabits of my "gig" service unused.
I am uninterested in sports, but I once ate lunch at a sports-bar that could probably make use of a large fraction of a gig, if they showed different streams instead of just the same ball game on all the TVs.
My guess is we will see "gigabit" service marketed soon with a little asterisk next to the claim that they guarantee it could be up to a gig, guaranteed to never be over a gig. The transport stream will of course only be a couple megs.
Do they want to just bury the signal in noise, or are they trying to send false data to lure US and ROK units into NK air and sea space?
Explain why it has to be binary. If I were running the op in N.K., I'd have a modest yet respectable and noticeable jammer doing mission #1, and a whopping boom-car monster of a jammer doing mission #2. So, they steer out of range of mission #1, trust their instruments, and therefore fly into the side of a mountain because of mission #2. Insert N.K. version of simpsons "ha ha" voice. Don't get all moralistic as if we wouldn't do the same to a nation that had air superiority over us...
The other reason not to fly is its WAY too tempting to the pilots to fly right at the boundary of "GPS works" in other words proving the jammer works against our machinery at a specific exact range. Why participate in an intel gathering activity against our own guys? We can try to work around that by intentionally flying into the jamming and pretending our GPS works, but they have perfectly good tracking radars that can see our behavior is somewhat different when being jammed (perhaps we only approach while VFR rules apply and we only do mostly level flight?) It becomes the codebreaker problem of them knowing that we know that they know that we know endlessly.
The other thing is the plane probably costs way more than a million times what the jammer costs, and the jammer might have a 1 in a million chance of making the plane crash into a cloud shrouded mountain or another plane, so if there is no specific mission to accomplish, just warmongering for the sake of warmongering, then there is no economic point in flying under those conditions. The way to "win" is to let the N.K. waste their electricity and labor.
OK for "national strategic resources". I don't necessarily agree, but I mean OK as in I understand your idea. So what do you do with "inter-national strategic resources" like the corrupt world banking system, or corrupt CAs? "inter-nationalize" them? What would that even mean? The UN owns them? The UN is just a gang of thugs, literally. The IETF? The NANOG emailing list and its cabal?
but in the USA its completely unregulated, at least WRT "being a CA".
As I said, I am my own CA... If I issued some certs to you, either barter or for cash, then I'd have all the usual financial / tax / zoning / liability laws that any business follows or pays money to get out of following, but absolutely no laws are specifically CA related.
Its easy to govt license physical things like nuclear material or firearm receivers, but I think you'd find govt licensing of openssl software to be a bit problematic.
If you don't believe me, try to disprove me by setting up the software, and being unable to issue certs without some sort of govt license...
Its like talking to people who thought you needed a license to install a webserver... Stockholm syndrome that us little people could not possibly be permitted to have that power, so it must be illegal or something, etc.
Analysis of meteors strongly indicates we've sent stuff there and they've sent stuff here and nothing has really happened either here or there.
We're not facing a 17th century scenario of old world meets new world for the first time and catastrophe mostly kills off the new world residents. Its going to be much more like north dakota football team plays south dakota football team in the 20th century and nothing terribly newsworthy happens.
Still fails, because if mars and earth life are compatible (admittedly unlikely) how do you know it didn't arrive on earth from mars to begin with billions of years ago, and now we're sending it back?
Standard/. car analogy is you take your imported VW bug to Germany and drive around looking for car parts, to prove there are or are not autos in Germany. You see parts just like your VWs, laying about in a junkyard, and some/. poster assumes your VW contaminated Germany with VW parts thus we'll never be able to prove there were autos in Germany before you arrived. However, the actual scenario is your VW originally came from there decades ago, so no great surprise there's other old beetle engines laying in the scrapyard.
The marketing release implies most of the power is being dropped resistively in the leads instead of in the dies. Just doesn't work that way.
Think about it for a second... The voltage on the die is only a tiny bit less than the voltage on the bus... You know the bus impedance too so that gives away current flow. Do a little ohms law on that tiny little drop and the tiny little current and compare it to what the die drops.
Or look at it from a thermal engineering perspective... they put heatsinks on the dies, not on the leads...
Now there will be some savings, probably lower capacitance and inductance and all that makes life easier for the bus drivers. But you're still gonna roast the dies in the middle of the sandwich. So you got three charcoal bbqs stacked on top of each other. No matter how fancy you make the cooking grate the burgers in the middle are gonna fry even if the guys on the end are raw...
The ones we got are simply not fit for the job and the govt needs to revoke their license.
What license? I suppose it depends on the country, but none is necessary here. If one was necessary, "they" contribute tens of thousands to re-election campaigns of multiple politicians, and "you" probably do not. Wonder how thats gonna turn out.
I run my own CA. Its not hard. I certainly needed no license. (Note: I guarantee my root cert is not in your browser). Reason why is some apps like fetchmail, dovecot imap, dovecot POP3, and a couple others, are easier run over SSL than thru shared SSH keys. Also, it was remarkably easy.
CAs should be limited to sets of domains, and this enforced in browsers. Country-level CAs should be limited to the country in which they operate. Government CAs should be limited to their domain (".gov", "mil.uk", etc.).
CAs for the open domains should have to post a big bond, which can obtained through a bonding agency if necessary, with a value of at least $10 million, to back up their "relying party agreement".
That's what "corporate responsibility" means - third party bonding.
Well, theres one thing I guarantee we are not going to do. Lets look at the american experience:
1) I trust my employer to give me a job for life in return for my loyalty. Whoops 2) I trust my bank to only loan me a mortgage I can pay off. Whoops 3) I trust my health insurance company to be there for me when I'm sick. Whoops 4) I trust my car insurance company to help me with my claim. Whoops. 5) I trust my hardware store (and China) not to sell me poisonous drywall. Whoops. 6) I trust my food store not to baby food full of melamine. Whoops. 7) I trust my toy store not to sell kids toys covered in lead paint. Whoops 8) I trust my gas station to sell gas that is free of sand and water. Whoops 9) I trust my govt not to sell me out for campaign contributions. Whoops 10) I trust my higher educational institution to train and/or educate me for a good paying job, so I can pay off spectacular student loans. Whoops 11) I trust my CA to operate securely. Hmm... I wonder how thats gonna turn out? Whoops
The business model of america for the past generation or so, is to find a trust, break it for profit, and move on to the next area.
If you're trusting a corporation, thats a pretty strong indication you're doin' it wrong. Come up with a different design.
The idea of a.kids domain is it would be "approved" for K-12 viewing. Cue the lawsuits when some atheist or islamic organization is forced off the 'whitelist'. Cue the lawsuits when some sex education organization is forced off the 'whitelist'. Cue the lawsuits when some political campaign site is forced off the 'whitelist'.
The whole idea that there exists one single objectively true "categorization" is about as stupid as thinking there exists one single objectively true "religion". And similarly the world is full of completely misguided morons who believe it despite it obviously being wrong.
Hey Eben are you collecting project ideas to distribute with the gadget?
If you can wedge in two USB ethernets, make a cool little firewall/router for not much more cost than linksys and infinitely more versatile Beowulf cluster in a lunchbox Wearable computing / gargoyle thingy Make your own hand held GPS with your own UI. Maybe a dedicated geocaching appliance? Embedded webserver inside a... model railroad, stuffed animal, who knows Misterhouse on a really really small scale (misterhouse - in - a - doll - house?) Homemade digital ultra-big-screen digital picture frame (I have no idea where to buy a 5 inch monitor, but I can buy all the 19 inch monitors I want for like a hundred bucks) Control theory demo like a balancing on two wheels thingy MP3 player / mp3 jukebox with UI of your own design mythtv frontend ?
Does the problem somehow revolve around your H.264 decoder hardware and/or firmware? If so could you release the design without those very specific details?
A realtime Linux would also be nice to add into the mix. Some A2Ds would also be nice to add but you can do that with SPI.
Yikes I just realized with RT linux support, if I could compile EMC2 on it, I could almost replace my desktop CNC milling machine controller with this $25 board.
It's rather hard to source parts in some cases, and a kit with all the major semis might be interesting to those of us who would like to take the raspberry pi, and make it smaller, or bring out a different set of peripherals. The design risk if it was possible to take the pi, and edit the PCB design, to eliminate connectors, or add connectors is attractive, even though the cost of a several-off PCB isn't.
It would make it a tool for the education of electronic designers that aren't quite up to sourcing and designing a full linux system yet.
A good university level "senior project" would be modify the pi to handle a gig or two of ram instead of just 128 megs.
But I have heard that you would need to get Oracle involved if you wanted a Java SE JDK since the RPi is Arm based.
I heard openjdk "just works" on ARM since 2008 in a quickie google search. Heard otherwise?
For educational purposes I think giving kids Java is going to terrify them slightly worse than Intercal (which is available in Debian) or forcing them to read the Cthulhu mythos, so I'm not entirely certain its a good idea to try it. As HPL said "don't call up what ye can't put down" and all that.
Slashdot Mirror
has also said that the digital ebook library would feature older titles
If I wanted an old book, why not download it legally or otherwise? To subscribe I have to play games comparing the average price of a years worth of downloads to the annual price of the service. Also I'd feel locked in to only reading stuff from the paid service to maximize my "profit" rather than reading what I actually want to read.
I'd rather subscribe to a (new) book of the month club. They already have subscription infrastructure, it would all be marketing. Simply offer "Baen New Releases Magazine" for perhaps $5/month and I'm in. More than publishers and marketers, I would like to pay money to subscribe to a favored author, or perhaps a themed trusted editor ("Lovecraftian Subscription", or whatever). Nathan Lowell here's a buck a month, now write me a new book. Or John Ringo or whoever.
The problem is that much electrical potential will NOT get rid of the "risk". if you short a high capacity battery no matter what it is made of, it will get really hot. they are not going to eliminate the burning battery syndrome. Better QC does that.
Internal resistance depends on the combination of battery chemistry and manufacturing technology. If you don't believe me, try shorting out comparable voltage / capacity ancient carbon zinc AA (good luck getting over a couple hundred mA, ask the model rocket guys from the 80s) vs a brand new Nicad (easily dump 50 amps, at least for a very short while, ask the RC car guys about melting connectors).
There is no inherent chemical or physical reason why you couldn't design/build a high internal resistance and high capacity lithium battery. There are inherent engineering/mechanical/manufacturing/economic reasons why you can not. Think about the electrodes being so thin they practically have to be vapor deposited like a telescope mirror, and then how do you make them structurally stable without wasting most of your weight and volume (and capacity) on structure? If you could build them in orbit, and guarantee to never experience more than a zillionth of a G of acceleration, and guarantee they'd never be moved or touched...
Unfortunately, this invention does not replace the liquid electrolyte. The "jelly" is a polymer soaked in the liquid electrolyte, which definitely is immobilized (thus protecting against leaks) but it's probably not fireproof (I could not find a reference to a research article).
Very much like how a "gel cell" lead acid battery still contains H2SO4 it just won't pour out as fast if the case cracks.
I have accidentally cracked gel cells in old UPSes, etc. Its just as corrosive as plain battery acid, it merely doesn't pour out as fast.
I just chatted with him and it is was total failure, it kept changing subject and it never answered any of my question. Those 59.3% techies from India must have been really dumb.
Did cleverbot ask you to reinstall windows?
You see, if you were talking about a tortoise on its back, Cleverbot would have got the reference and assumed you were trying to test it, or maybe continued to roleplay and quote from the movie
Nahh. I've tried this and first of all its a tortoise not a turtle, and secondly I have first hand experience that people who have not seen the movie really don't respond very well... Especially girls. Would definitely not advise as a "quirky" pickup line. In that regard Cleverbot's response is not too far off the mark.
Sure. But the Turing test is a piece of garbage too. I have a deep respect for Allan Turing, and all that he has done for science. But the Turing test was death to AI the moment he proposed it. It MUST be forgotten and burried, and maybe incidents like these can help us achieve that!
Eh, its more of a thought experiment. Its like making fun of Heisenberg because you want experimental proof of quantum dot technology LEDs, not dead/undead cats in a box with a source and a geiger counter. Einstein had some legendarily weird thought experiments too.
Its value is in making you think of contrived, yet vaguely familiar situations in a really strange problem space. Not much value in an experiment design engineering planning review meeting.
As part of a previous job I occasionally got involved as an engineering contact in telco service monitoring situations. You know, like every time we call long distance I hear echo, that type of thing. Trust me, most human to human conversations are pretty F-ing unintelligent, so I think an Artificial Intelligence would not be challenged in outperforming them. PHBs talk meaningless buzzwords to each other, not just to peons, for example.
So basically, you just replaced your Cable Company with an online only service, giving you 50 hi def channels for cheap. That is a GOOD thing, since it takes the LOCAL Monopoly out of TV.
(oh, and how many houses only have 1 computer ?)
Our house only has 4 people and 3 TVs, all with mythtv frontends. I could watch live TV on my computer, making 4 streams. It would be very challenging to find 80 megabits of live HDTV to watch simultaneously... Not the "find a signal" but the "worth watching" critera... Assuming its possible, that leaves the other 920 megabits of my "gig" service unused.
I am uninterested in sports, but I once ate lunch at a sports-bar that could probably make use of a large fraction of a gig, if they showed different streams instead of just the same ball game on all the TVs.
My guess is we will see "gigabit" service marketed soon with a little asterisk next to the claim that they guarantee it could be up to a gig, guaranteed to never be over a gig. The transport stream will of course only be a couple megs.
Plus, few applications need those speeds.
That, I can agree with. How many high def uncompressed live video feeds can a household watch?
For example, ATSC "over the air HDTV" is only 20 megabits/sec, so I could watch 50 HDTV channels simultaneously...
Do they want to just bury the signal in noise, or are they trying to send false data to lure US and ROK units into NK air and sea space?
Explain why it has to be binary. If I were running the op in N.K., I'd have a modest yet respectable and noticeable jammer doing mission #1, and a whopping boom-car monster of a jammer doing mission #2. So, they steer out of range of mission #1, trust their instruments, and therefore fly into the side of a mountain because of mission #2. Insert N.K. version of simpsons "ha ha" voice. Don't get all moralistic as if we wouldn't do the same to a nation that had air superiority over us...
The other reason not to fly is its WAY too tempting to the pilots to fly right at the boundary of "GPS works" in other words proving the jammer works against our machinery at a specific exact range. Why participate in an intel gathering activity against our own guys? We can try to work around that by intentionally flying into the jamming and pretending our GPS works, but they have perfectly good tracking radars that can see our behavior is somewhat different when being jammed (perhaps we only approach while VFR rules apply and we only do mostly level flight?) It becomes the codebreaker problem of them knowing that we know that they know that we know endlessly.
The other thing is the plane probably costs way more than a million times what the jammer costs, and the jammer might have a 1 in a million chance of making the plane crash into a cloud shrouded mountain or another plane, so if there is no specific mission to accomplish, just warmongering for the sake of warmongering, then there is no economic point in flying under those conditions. The way to "win" is to let the N.K. waste their electricity and labor.
should be nationalized.
OK for "national strategic resources". I don't necessarily agree, but I mean OK as in I understand your idea. So what do you do with "inter-national strategic resources" like the corrupt world banking system, or corrupt CAs? "inter-nationalize" them? What would that even mean? The UN owns them? The UN is just a gang of thugs, literally. The IETF? The NANOG emailing list and its cabal?
Like my disclaimer says
I suppose it depends on the country
but in the USA its completely unregulated, at least WRT "being a CA".
As I said, I am my own CA ... If I issued some certs to you, either barter or for cash, then I'd have all the usual financial / tax / zoning / liability laws that any business follows or pays money to get out of following, but absolutely no laws are specifically CA related.
Its easy to govt license physical things like nuclear material or firearm receivers, but I think you'd find govt licensing of openssl software to be a bit problematic.
If you don't believe me, try to disprove me by setting up the software, and being unable to issue certs without some sort of govt license...
Its like talking to people who thought you needed a license to install a webserver... Stockholm syndrome that us little people could not possibly be permitted to have that power, so it must be illegal or something, etc.
not something we left there.
Who's this "we", the lander or meteorite ejecta?
Analysis of meteors strongly indicates we've sent stuff there and they've sent stuff here and nothing has really happened either here or there.
We're not facing a 17th century scenario of old world meets new world for the first time and catastrophe mostly kills off the new world residents. Its going to be much more like north dakota football team plays south dakota football team in the 20th century and nothing terribly newsworthy happens.
Still fails, because if mars and earth life are compatible (admittedly unlikely) how do you know it didn't arrive on earth from mars to begin with billions of years ago, and now we're sending it back?
Standard /. car analogy is you take your imported VW bug to Germany and drive around looking for car parts, to prove there are or are not autos in Germany. You see parts just like your VWs, laying about in a junkyard, and some /. poster assumes your VW contaminated Germany with VW parts thus we'll never be able to prove there were autos in Germany before you arrived. However, the actual scenario is your VW originally came from there decades ago, so no great surprise there's other old beetle engines laying in the scrapyard.
The marketing release implies most of the power is being dropped resistively in the leads instead of in the dies. Just doesn't work that way.
Think about it for a second... The voltage on the die is only a tiny bit less than the voltage on the bus... You know the bus impedance too so that gives away current flow. Do a little ohms law on that tiny little drop and the tiny little current and compare it to what the die drops.
Or look at it from a thermal engineering perspective... they put heatsinks on the dies, not on the leads...
Now there will be some savings, probably lower capacitance and inductance and all that makes life easier for the bus drivers. But you're still gonna roast the dies in the middle of the sandwich. So you got three charcoal bbqs stacked on top of each other. No matter how fancy you make the cooking grate the burgers in the middle are gonna fry even if the guys on the end are raw ...
The ones we got are simply not fit for the job and the govt needs to revoke their license.
What license? I suppose it depends on the country, but none is necessary here. If one was necessary, "they" contribute tens of thousands to re-election campaigns of multiple politicians, and "you" probably do not. Wonder how thats gonna turn out.
I run my own CA. Its not hard. I certainly needed no license. (Note: I guarantee my root cert is not in your browser). Reason why is some apps like fetchmail, dovecot imap, dovecot POP3, and a couple others, are easier run over SSL than thru shared SSH keys. Also, it was remarkably easy.
CAs should be limited to sets of domains, and this enforced in browsers. Country-level CAs should be limited to the country in which they operate. Government CAs should be limited to their domain (".gov", "mil.uk", etc.).
CAs for the open domains should have to post a big bond, which can obtained through a bonding agency if necessary, with a value of at least $10 million, to back up their "relying party agreement".
That's what "corporate responsibility" means - third party bonding.
Well, theres one thing I guarantee we are not going to do. Lets look at the american experience:
1) I trust my employer to give me a job for life in return for my loyalty. Whoops
2) I trust my bank to only loan me a mortgage I can pay off. Whoops
3) I trust my health insurance company to be there for me when I'm sick. Whoops
4) I trust my car insurance company to help me with my claim. Whoops.
5) I trust my hardware store (and China) not to sell me poisonous drywall. Whoops.
6) I trust my food store not to baby food full of melamine. Whoops.
7) I trust my toy store not to sell kids toys covered in lead paint. Whoops
8) I trust my gas station to sell gas that is free of sand and water. Whoops
9) I trust my govt not to sell me out for campaign contributions. Whoops
10) I trust my higher educational institution to train and/or educate me for a good paying job, so I can pay off spectacular student loans. Whoops
11) I trust my CA to operate securely. Hmm... I wonder how thats gonna turn out? Whoops
The business model of america for the past generation or so, is to find a trust, break it for profit, and move on to the next area.
If you're trusting a corporation, thats a pretty strong indication you're doin' it wrong. Come up with a different design.
So... you're saying he's qualified to run a CA? LOL
We shouldn't have CAs at all, they have proven themselves irrelevant, untrustworthy and insecure.
... and highly profitable, which is why we'll never get rid of them, unfortunately.
The idea of a .kids domain is it would be "approved" for K-12 viewing.
Cue the lawsuits when some atheist or islamic organization is forced off the 'whitelist'.
Cue the lawsuits when some sex education organization is forced off the 'whitelist'.
Cue the lawsuits when some political campaign site is forced off the 'whitelist'.
The whole idea that there exists one single objectively true "categorization" is about as stupid as thinking there exists one single objectively true "religion". And similarly the world is full of completely misguided morons who believe it despite it obviously being wrong.
Hey Eben are you collecting project ideas to distribute with the gadget?
If you can wedge in two USB ethernets, make a cool little firewall/router for not much more cost than linksys and infinitely more versatile ... model railroad, stuffed animal, who knows
Beowulf cluster in a lunchbox
Wearable computing / gargoyle thingy
Make your own hand held GPS with your own UI. Maybe a dedicated geocaching appliance?
Embedded webserver inside a
Misterhouse on a really really small scale (misterhouse - in - a - doll - house?)
Homemade digital ultra-big-screen digital picture frame (I have no idea where to buy a 5 inch monitor, but I can buy all the 19 inch monitors I want for like a hundred bucks)
Control theory demo like a balancing on two wheels thingy
MP3 player / mp3 jukebox with UI of your own design
mythtv frontend ?
Does the problem somehow revolve around your H.264 decoder hardware and/or firmware? If so could you release the design without those very specific details?
A realtime Linux would also be nice to add into the mix. Some A2Ds would also be nice to add but you can do that with SPI.
Yikes I just realized with RT linux support, if I could compile EMC2 on it, I could almost replace my desktop CNC milling machine controller with this $25 board.
It's rather hard to source parts in some cases, and a kit with all the major semis might be interesting to those of us who would like to take the raspberry pi, and make it smaller, or bring out a different set of peripherals.
The design risk if it was possible to take the pi, and edit the PCB design, to eliminate connectors, or add connectors is attractive, even though the cost of a several-off PCB isn't.
It would make it a tool for the education of electronic designers that aren't quite up to sourcing and designing a full linux system yet.
A good university level "senior project" would be modify the pi to handle a gig or two of ram instead of just 128 megs.
But I have heard that you would need to get Oracle involved if you wanted a Java SE JDK since the RPi is Arm based.
I heard openjdk "just works" on ARM since 2008 in a quickie google search. Heard otherwise?
For educational purposes I think giving kids Java is going to terrify them slightly worse than Intercal (which is available in Debian) or forcing them to read the Cthulhu mythos, so I'm not entirely certain its a good idea to try it. As HPL said "don't call up what ye can't put down" and all that.