Yup. It's interesting, some of the things done in the name of "security" actually piss off a vocal minority of technically-oriented users. This vocal minority is often trusted by less-technical friends to make recommendations on what to buy.
As a result, a device that's locked-down from tinkerers is going to get less recommendations from "trusted friends". A device that's open to tinkerers might have those tinkerers rave about their device to their less-techie friends.
The problem is that a lot of routes used by tinkerers to bypass lockdown can also be used by malware. For example, the root exploits in Android were probably used 95%+ of the time for good (users rooting their own device), and 5% of the time for bad (malware installed by dumb people). In the case of iOS jailbreaks, it's probably 99/1. (Although from Apple's perspective, those 99% are in the "bad" category.)
The problem is that the routes that allow methane to enter your well water allow other stuff from the drill pipe to enter the water, such as: 1) Fracking fluid leftovers. Fun chemicals in there like benzene 2) That reservoir isn't 100% pure natural gas - even before injecting the toxic frack fluid down, there's a lot of less savory substances down there.
They seem to forget that the drill pipe goes right through the groundwater. I'm fairly certain a lot of these contamination incidents result from improper cementing jobs of the well casing.
1) The light-your-water-on-fire incidents were in Colorado and PA. In both cases they were proven to be connected to drilling. In the case of Colorado, the state-level EPA (which has multiple high-level employees with financial ties to the gas industry) ruled that it was biogenic. The federal-level EPA reviewed this and concluded that the methane was NOT biogenic and matched shale gas in isotopic content.
2) They reached out to a member of the gas industry and he said he had "no recollection" - it's just more gas industry "sweep it under the rug" tactics.
They keep claiming biogenic methane was the cause.
1) In the case of some of the Colorado incidents, the state EPA was apparently receiving funds from the oil companies. Eventually the federal EPA came in and tested - the conclusion was that the methane was NOT biogenic in nature but matched the shale gas in isotopic content. 2) Do you really expect me to believe that multiple wells which have provided clean water for decades suddenly become contaminated with biogenic methane within a year or to, if not only months, after drilling commences?
Yup. 5-10 years of fracking has sickened more people than the entire history of civilian nuclear power. Maybe even pseudo-civilian power which lets you count Chernobyl.
The big difference here is: Gas industry - "We have no problems. We are 100% safe. That contamination didn't happen. We're 100% safe." - In the past 5-10 years we have seen ZERO improvements to their operational techniques to improve safety and eliminate underground blowouts and spills.
Nuclear industry - "If we fuck up, bad shit's going to happen. Let's go to great lengths to prevent it from happening, and if we have a close call we'll immediately modify other plants to address it." - Even before Fukushima happened, plant designers decided that it COULD happen, as unlikely as it was, and addressed its failure modes in modern plant designs.
There's a constant evolution of safety in the nuclear industry, with core damage probabilities constantly moving downwards. There is no such evolution in the gas industry.
Drilling near me - HELL NO. Nuke plant upriver from me on the Susquehanna? - Sure, if it means no drilling and no coal plants!
I'll take living a mile from a nuke plant (especially a modernized one like an AP1000 or ESBWR) over 5 from a coal plant and anywhere downriver of a gas drilling site any day.
Simple - all but one of the members of this panel had proven ties to the gas industry.
I support gas drilling if it can be done responsibly and safely. The problem is that right now, there is no evidence that it is possible to do it responsibly and safely.
It isn't a technical problem, it's a political/management one - If the gas drilling companies said, "OK, we just fucked up, here's what we are doing to prevent it from happening again." - I'd be willing to give them the benefit of the doubt after a few screwups.
The problem is that their attitude is, "Nothing wrong ever happened. The contamination is not our fault... Some bacteria crawled into your well that had been clean for decades at around the same time we started drilling. No, there isn't any connection. Drilling is safe!" - They refuse to acknowledge their problems and mistakes and take responsibility for them, and as a result, those mistakes keep getting made over and over again.
If New York approves gas drilling, I'm seriously considering moving elsewhere. The uncertainty of hydrofracking is why I haven't bought a house yet - I'm screwed if house values around here plummet due to hydrofracturing.
It's just like Linux - you need root privileges to do some things. This is one of them.
Unfortunately most phones do not provide users with root access. With the exception of Tivoized devices (MOTOROLA!), Android is far more open than iOS - the amount of things you are permitted to do without root on Android is FAR more than what you can do without jailbreak on iOS.
Obviously in the case of the Israeli device, using a launcher that soliders are likely already carrying around is a good thing, and that's why they would be willing to deal with the disadvantages of grenade launchers for something like this. (Anything combustion-powered causes very high shocks to whatever is being launched - not a big problem for grenades but more of a problem for cameras.)
If you're no longer assuming "launcher the user probably already has", then things get simpler - a pneumatic launcher would be FAR more readily available and easier to work with than a 37mm flare gun. Look at all the work that's been done with potato cannons and the Pumpkin Chunkin' contest - Significantly higher muzzle velocities can be achieved with far lower barrel pressures and shocks on the projectile with air pressure than combustion. (Pneumatic spudguns universally outclass combustion ones, and no one even tries combustion pumpkin launchers because they always pie long before they can match the big pneumatics in range.)
If it's running Sense, it's not supported. If it's running an AOSP-derived build (such as Cyanogenmod), it should be supported.
Similarly, "newer" Samsung devices isn't correct.
If it came with TouchWiz, it's not supported. If it came with AOSP (basically, the Nexus S and no other Samsung device), it's supported. If it's a Samsung device with a Cyanogenmod port, it's supported under Cyanogenmod.
This is because HTC and Samsung broke their Bluetooth stacks.
Exception: Non-Touchwiz Galaxy Tab 10.1s work well. Don't know about the new Touchwiz update, whether it introduced Bluetooth regressions that seem to accompany Touchwiz.
Also, PS3 controllers have been supported as wired controllers for devices with USB Host functionality for a while (sometimes requires a custom kernel, but compiling in hid-sony is a LOT easier than fixing an entire broken BT stack), the big news here is support for PS3 controllers via Bluetooth.
1) Modern nuclear plants have vast improvements in safety compared to the old clunkers in Fukushima. Judging nuclear safety based on Chernobyl and Fukushima is like judging modern highway safety based on highway safety in the 1970s including how well Ford Pintos handled getting rear-ended. 2) The disaster that triggered Fukushima killed at least 26,000 people outright and wiped entire towns off of the map. That's significantly more than the entire tally of deaths from the full history of nuclear power generation. The actual number of people sickened by Fukushima is a tiny fraction of the death toll of the disaster required to trigger it. If one of the oldest reactors on the planet performed as it did in such a disaster, imagine what a reactor with modernized safety could do in an area that ISN'T near a megathrust fault.
The one issue there is - US power reactor designs weren't designed for weapons purposes. There has historically been a fairly clear division between civilian and military nuclear reactors in this country. However, while designs have evolved significantly in terms of safety since the old clunkers at Fukushima, those designs have only been built internationally. All of the failure modes experienced at Fukushima have ALREADY been addressed in modern designs such as the ESBWR and AP1000.
This is in stark contrast to Chernobyl - in Russia, the division between civilian power generation and military weapons generation was less clear. While I don't believe Chernobyl's reactor was used for weapons generation, it was designed to allow that - and that design choice led to significant compromises in safety. The RBMK is a fundamentally unstable and dangerous reactor design, and I believe the only graphite-moderated water-cooled reactor design ever used for power generation. (Magnox reactors in the UK were graphite-moderated gas-cooled AND were that way to facilitate weapons production, and I think they have all been decommissioned in favor of safer designs.)
I have mixed feelings on some of the breeder reactors. They clearly solve our fuel problems, but have unique engineering issues that could prove to be significant safety challenges. (Sodium = nasty...)
Another place I hope to see more development is in subcritical reactors and hybrid fission/fusion reactors. I think we'd be a LOT farther with fusion power if there weren't so much focus on a "purist" approach of fusion only, instead using fusion as a neutron source to drive a subcritical fission reactor. One of the nice things about fusion-sourced neutrons is that they can actually directly fission U-238, so you could run such a hybrid reactor using depleted uranium or spent fuel from traditional reactors.
7 inch dual core - would that be the Huawei MediaPad? That's the first 7 inch dual-core Honeycomb tablet I'm aware of, and Huawei has an awful track record when it comes to product support and GPL compliance. They also have a bad habit of releasing buggy software.
Many of the other units you are referencing such as the G Tablet are running Froyo/Gingerbread - Honeycomb DOES make a significant difference for tablets.
The Transformer at $400 seems great until you read about the quality control issues (screen bleed, hinge issues) they have been having, and also look and see that their special charge cable is not yet available from third-party sources and is unobtainium from Asus. (Or at least this was the case 2-3 weeks ago when I bought my Tab 10.1). It's actually part of Asus' stated strategy - sell the tab almost at cost and make profit on the accessories. A charger and cable is $50!!!!
Meanwhile, the Tab 10.1 is compatible with most of the original 7" Tab's accessories - as a result there are lots of third-party cables and chargers on the market, and you can even order a bare dock connector for $5 and solder up something yourself (good for those who want to do something customized, like a combo charger and USB host adapter.)
The only things I have to criticize Samsung on as far as the Tab 10.1 are: 1) They're a bit slower than other Honeycomb vendors with updates. However, unlike with phones, update release deltas seem to be weeks and not months. I think Google is forcing vendors to be timely with updates if they want to play. 2) They remove a bunch of features from their kernels which have no business being removed (such as Xbox360 pad support and Sony HID support, aka PS3 controller support) 3) They are randomly shipping them with locked bootloaders. There seems to be no pattern to locked vs. unlocked.
Yup. Screw with North Korea and you piss off China.
Also, North Korea has enough conventional artillery aimed at Seoul to do SERIOUS damage even without a single nuke. There's a reason that they've been getting away with so much crap even before they had any nuclear capability. (And it's doubtful whether they even have it now - The 2006 test was a fizzle, the 2009 test was a limited success.
But if anything, NK having nukes is going to make the US MORE likely to mess with them than less. They don't have enough capability to be more dangerous than their conventional troops, but there is now incentive to stop them from going any further.
I don't remember for sure, but Bob Zei sounds somewhat familiar...
I had Haz for Astronomy and Mike Brandstein for DIGI. DIGI went WAY downhill after Brandstein left. As I understand it, Haz left the program a few years after I had him, he was one of those "If you are having trouble deciding on a course, take that one!" instructors, so it's unfortunate that he's gone.
The Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1 seems to be doing pretty well so far - it has only been available in the US for a few weeks.
It's priced higher than the Eee Pad, but then when you look at accessory pricing and availability, the Samsung starts looking better. (In some ways this is not surprising, I think in one case Asus has explicitly said the Pad itself is almost at-cost and they plan on profiting from accessory sales.)
The problem is that the Eee Pad's USB cable was, as of 2-3 weeks ago, still backordered everywhere. So if your single cable failed for whatever reason, you were screwed.
The Samsung, on the other hand, already has plenty of third-party USB cables and chargers available. There's even a company selling bare dock connectors for it for those that want to DIY a cable. That's why I eventually paid the $100 extra.
"Never attribute to malice that which can be attributed to stupidity."
I applaud Google on trying to push a "use your real name" approach. However, I think it should be understood that some people are widely known by another name on the Internet.
I think the solution would be to have a Profile field for "Also known as/nicknames".
So for example, Ladyada would be Limor Fried, and Ladyada would be listed as an "Also known as" name. Probably there needs to be some way to determine how prominently a nickname/alias is presented on a profile. For some they may not want their aliases/nicks too prominently featured, while others would want something like "Limor (Ladyada) Fried" or "Limor Fried a.k.a. Ladyada".
Three words: Eee Pad Transformer. It would be interesting to see its share of the Android tab market, but you know that with the exception of maybe a few days of delay, shipping share equaled sales share for a few months. It was not until the past few weeks that Transformer backordering and price scalping ended.
I went to Lancaster for four summers (six sessions total) as a student. The program changed my life. Like you, it was my first opportunity meeting kids "like me". I'm not sure if I would have made it through high school without keeping in touch with the friends that I met during those four summers. Geology '93, Digital Logic '94, Genetics and Fast-Paced Math '95, Astronomy and Physics '96.
During my last summer of graduate school (2005), I had the opportunity to return to Lancaster as a TA. It was both the most stressful and rewarding job of my life. (Lesson learned - I do NOT have what it takes to be a teacher.) I still remember when I first was moving in as a TA - I chose not to bring any wine/beer/alcohol of any sort because the pamphlet said "don't let the kids even catch a HINT of alcohol". I moved in and one of the guys in my suite had three cases of Lancaster Strawberry Wheat. I quickly learned that "milk and cookies" meant "beer and wings at Doc Holliday's".:)
There's nothing about the Xilinx bitstream encryption that prevents you from loading in an unencrypted bitstream, or a new bitstream with a new key.
Unfortunately it means that it's easier to compromise/clone/tamper with FPGA designs. FPGA cloning/tampering has been a big problem for Cisco as I understand it (counterfeit Cisco products).
Yup - BT4.0 and NFC address completely different problem spaces.
And not including NFC will potentially cripple Apple, since in this particular case it's not just about what their competitors support - it's what retailers/other point-of-sale venues support. "I support NFC already - you want me to add something else that only works with YOUR devices?"
Slashdot Mirror
Yup. It's interesting, some of the things done in the name of "security" actually piss off a vocal minority of technically-oriented users. This vocal minority is often trusted by less-technical friends to make recommendations on what to buy.
As a result, a device that's locked-down from tinkerers is going to get less recommendations from "trusted friends". A device that's open to tinkerers might have those tinkerers rave about their device to their less-techie friends.
The problem is that a lot of routes used by tinkerers to bypass lockdown can also be used by malware. For example, the root exploits in Android were probably used 95%+ of the time for good (users rooting their own device), and 5% of the time for bad (malware installed by dumb people). In the case of iOS jailbreaks, it's probably 99/1. (Although from Apple's perspective, those 99% are in the "bad" category.)
It's bad because it causes things to happen like water wells exploding.
In Dimock, PA, a water well explosion sent a heavy concrete pad a few tens of feet. Fortunately no one was nearby.
The problem is that the routes that allow methane to enter your well water allow other stuff from the drill pipe to enter the water, such as:
1) Fracking fluid leftovers. Fun chemicals in there like benzene
2) That reservoir isn't 100% pure natural gas - even before injecting the toxic frack fluid down, there's a lot of less savory substances down there.
They seem to forget that the drill pipe goes right through the groundwater. I'm fairly certain a lot of these contamination incidents result from improper cementing jobs of the well casing.
1) The light-your-water-on-fire incidents were in Colorado and PA. In both cases they were proven to be connected to drilling. In the case of Colorado, the state-level EPA (which has multiple high-level employees with financial ties to the gas industry) ruled that it was biogenic. The federal-level EPA reviewed this and concluded that the methane was NOT biogenic and matched shale gas in isotopic content.
2) They reached out to a member of the gas industry and he said he had "no recollection" - it's just more gas industry "sweep it under the rug" tactics.
This is why no one trusts the gas industry.
They keep claiming biogenic methane was the cause.
1) In the case of some of the Colorado incidents, the state EPA was apparently receiving funds from the oil companies. Eventually the federal EPA came in and tested - the conclusion was that the methane was NOT biogenic in nature but matched the shale gas in isotopic content.
2) Do you really expect me to believe that multiple wells which have provided clean water for decades suddenly become contaminated with biogenic methane within a year or to, if not only months, after drilling commences?
We're worrying about it now because the way it is being used has changed, and it has become FAR more widespread.
As a result - contamination is happening left and right.
Yup. 5-10 years of fracking has sickened more people than the entire history of civilian nuclear power. Maybe even pseudo-civilian power which lets you count Chernobyl.
The big difference here is:
Gas industry - "We have no problems. We are 100% safe. That contamination didn't happen. We're 100% safe." - In the past 5-10 years we have seen ZERO improvements to their operational techniques to improve safety and eliminate underground blowouts and spills.
Nuclear industry - "If we fuck up, bad shit's going to happen. Let's go to great lengths to prevent it from happening, and if we have a close call we'll immediately modify other plants to address it." - Even before Fukushima happened, plant designers decided that it COULD happen, as unlikely as it was, and addressed its failure modes in modern plant designs.
There's a constant evolution of safety in the nuclear industry, with core damage probabilities constantly moving downwards. There is no such evolution in the gas industry.
Drilling near me - HELL NO. Nuke plant upriver from me on the Susquehanna? - Sure, if it means no drilling and no coal plants!
I'll take living a mile from a nuke plant (especially a modernized one like an AP1000 or ESBWR) over 5 from a coal plant and anywhere downriver of a gas drilling site any day.
Simple - all but one of the members of this panel had proven ties to the gas industry.
I support gas drilling if it can be done responsibly and safely. The problem is that right now, there is no evidence that it is possible to do it responsibly and safely.
It isn't a technical problem, it's a political/management one - If the gas drilling companies said, "OK, we just fucked up, here's what we are doing to prevent it from happening again." - I'd be willing to give them the benefit of the doubt after a few screwups.
The problem is that their attitude is, "Nothing wrong ever happened. The contamination is not our fault... Some bacteria crawled into your well that had been clean for decades at around the same time we started drilling. No, there isn't any connection. Drilling is safe!" - They refuse to acknowledge their problems and mistakes and take responsibility for them, and as a result, those mistakes keep getting made over and over again.
If New York approves gas drilling, I'm seriously considering moving elsewhere. The uncertainty of hydrofracking is why I haven't bought a house yet - I'm screwed if house values around here plummet due to hydrofracturing.
You LOST me there.
It's just like Linux - you need root privileges to do some things. This is one of them.
Unfortunately most phones do not provide users with root access. With the exception of Tivoized devices (MOTOROLA!), Android is far more open than iOS - the amount of things you are permitted to do without root on Android is FAR more than what you can do without jailbreak on iOS.
That only has the GPL components - all of the Apache-licensed components (90% of userland) is missing.
Obviously in the case of the Israeli device, using a launcher that soliders are likely already carrying around is a good thing, and that's why they would be willing to deal with the disadvantages of grenade launchers for something like this. (Anything combustion-powered causes very high shocks to whatever is being launched - not a big problem for grenades but more of a problem for cameras.)
If you're no longer assuming "launcher the user probably already has", then things get simpler - a pneumatic launcher would be FAR more readily available and easier to work with than a 37mm flare gun. Look at all the work that's been done with potato cannons and the Pumpkin Chunkin' contest - Significantly higher muzzle velocities can be achieved with far lower barrel pressures and shocks on the projectile with air pressure than combustion. (Pneumatic spudguns universally outclass combustion ones, and no one even tries combustion pumpkin launchers because they always pie long before they can match the big pneumatics in range.)
If it's running Sense, it's not supported. If it's running an AOSP-derived build (such as Cyanogenmod), it should be supported.
Similarly, "newer" Samsung devices isn't correct.
If it came with TouchWiz, it's not supported. If it came with AOSP (basically, the Nexus S and no other Samsung device), it's supported. If it's a Samsung device with a Cyanogenmod port, it's supported under Cyanogenmod.
This is because HTC and Samsung broke their Bluetooth stacks.
Exception: Non-Touchwiz Galaxy Tab 10.1s work well. Don't know about the new Touchwiz update, whether it introduced Bluetooth regressions that seem to accompany Touchwiz.
Also, PS3 controllers have been supported as wired controllers for devices with USB Host functionality for a while (sometimes requires a custom kernel, but compiling in hid-sony is a LOT easier than fixing an entire broken BT stack), the big news here is support for PS3 controllers via Bluetooth.
1) Modern nuclear plants have vast improvements in safety compared to the old clunkers in Fukushima. Judging nuclear safety based on Chernobyl and Fukushima is like judging modern highway safety based on highway safety in the 1970s including how well Ford Pintos handled getting rear-ended.
2) The disaster that triggered Fukushima killed at least 26,000 people outright and wiped entire towns off of the map. That's significantly more than the entire tally of deaths from the full history of nuclear power generation. The actual number of people sickened by Fukushima is a tiny fraction of the death toll of the disaster required to trigger it. If one of the oldest reactors on the planet performed as it did in such a disaster, imagine what a reactor with modernized safety could do in an area that ISN'T near a megathrust fault.
The one issue there is - US power reactor designs weren't designed for weapons purposes. There has historically been a fairly clear division between civilian and military nuclear reactors in this country. However, while designs have evolved significantly in terms of safety since the old clunkers at Fukushima, those designs have only been built internationally. All of the failure modes experienced at Fukushima have ALREADY been addressed in modern designs such as the ESBWR and AP1000.
This is in stark contrast to Chernobyl - in Russia, the division between civilian power generation and military weapons generation was less clear. While I don't believe Chernobyl's reactor was used for weapons generation, it was designed to allow that - and that design choice led to significant compromises in safety. The RBMK is a fundamentally unstable and dangerous reactor design, and I believe the only graphite-moderated water-cooled reactor design ever used for power generation. (Magnox reactors in the UK were graphite-moderated gas-cooled AND were that way to facilitate weapons production, and I think they have all been decommissioned in favor of safer designs.)
I have mixed feelings on some of the breeder reactors. They clearly solve our fuel problems, but have unique engineering issues that could prove to be significant safety challenges. (Sodium = nasty...)
Another place I hope to see more development is in subcritical reactors and hybrid fission/fusion reactors. I think we'd be a LOT farther with fusion power if there weren't so much focus on a "purist" approach of fusion only, instead using fusion as a neutron source to drive a subcritical fission reactor. One of the nice things about fusion-sourced neutrons is that they can actually directly fission U-238, so you could run such a hybrid reactor using depleted uranium or spent fuel from traditional reactors.
7 inch dual core - would that be the Huawei MediaPad? That's the first 7 inch dual-core Honeycomb tablet I'm aware of, and Huawei has an awful track record when it comes to product support and GPL compliance. They also have a bad habit of releasing buggy software.
Many of the other units you are referencing such as the G Tablet are running Froyo/Gingerbread - Honeycomb DOES make a significant difference for tablets.
The Transformer at $400 seems great until you read about the quality control issues (screen bleed, hinge issues) they have been having, and also look and see that their special charge cable is not yet available from third-party sources and is unobtainium from Asus. (Or at least this was the case 2-3 weeks ago when I bought my Tab 10.1). It's actually part of Asus' stated strategy - sell the tab almost at cost and make profit on the accessories. A charger and cable is $50!!!!
Meanwhile, the Tab 10.1 is compatible with most of the original 7" Tab's accessories - as a result there are lots of third-party cables and chargers on the market, and you can even order a bare dock connector for $5 and solder up something yourself (good for those who want to do something customized, like a combo charger and USB host adapter.)
The only things I have to criticize Samsung on as far as the Tab 10.1 are:
1) They're a bit slower than other Honeycomb vendors with updates. However, unlike with phones, update release deltas seem to be weeks and not months. I think Google is forcing vendors to be timely with updates if they want to play.
2) They remove a bunch of features from their kernels which have no business being removed (such as Xbox360 pad support and Sony HID support, aka PS3 controller support)
3) They are randomly shipping them with locked bootloaders. There seems to be no pattern to locked vs. unlocked.
Yup. Screw with North Korea and you piss off China.
Also, North Korea has enough conventional artillery aimed at Seoul to do SERIOUS damage even without a single nuke. There's a reason that they've been getting away with so much crap even before they had any nuclear capability. (And it's doubtful whether they even have it now - The 2006 test was a fizzle, the 2009 test was a limited success.
But if anything, NK having nukes is going to make the US MORE likely to mess with them than less. They don't have enough capability to be more dangerous than their conventional troops, but there is now incentive to stop them from going any further.
I don't remember for sure, but Bob Zei sounds somewhat familiar...
I had Haz for Astronomy and Mike Brandstein for DIGI. DIGI went WAY downhill after Brandstein left. As I understand it, Haz left the program a few years after I had him, he was one of those "If you are having trouble deciding on a course, take that one!" instructors, so it's unfortunate that he's gone.
The Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1 seems to be doing pretty well so far - it has only been available in the US for a few weeks.
It's priced higher than the Eee Pad, but then when you look at accessory pricing and availability, the Samsung starts looking better. (In some ways this is not surprising, I think in one case Asus has explicitly said the Pad itself is almost at-cost and they plan on profiting from accessory sales.)
The problem is that the Eee Pad's USB cable was, as of 2-3 weeks ago, still backordered everywhere. So if your single cable failed for whatever reason, you were screwed.
The Samsung, on the other hand, already has plenty of third-party USB cables and chargers available. There's even a company selling bare dock connectors for it for those that want to DIY a cable. That's why I eventually paid the $100 extra.
"Never attribute to malice that which can be attributed to stupidity."
I applaud Google on trying to push a "use your real name" approach. However, I think it should be understood that some people are widely known by another name on the Internet.
I think the solution would be to have a Profile field for "Also known as/nicknames".
So for example, Ladyada would be Limor Fried, and Ladyada would be listed as an "Also known as" name. Probably there needs to be some way to determine how prominently a nickname/alias is presented on a profile. For some they may not want their aliases/nicks too prominently featured, while others would want something like "Limor (Ladyada) Fried" or "Limor Fried a.k.a. Ladyada".
Three words: Eee Pad Transformer. It would be interesting to see its share of the Android tab market, but you know that with the exception of maybe a few days of delay, shipping share equaled sales share for a few months. It was not until the past few weeks that Transformer backordering and price scalping ended.
I went to Lancaster for four summers (six sessions total) as a student. The program changed my life. Like you, it was my first opportunity meeting kids "like me". I'm not sure if I would have made it through high school without keeping in touch with the friends that I met during those four summers. Geology '93, Digital Logic '94, Genetics and Fast-Paced Math '95, Astronomy and Physics '96.
During my last summer of graduate school (2005), I had the opportunity to return to Lancaster as a TA. It was both the most stressful and rewarding job of my life. (Lesson learned - I do NOT have what it takes to be a teacher.) I still remember when I first was moving in as a TA - I chose not to bring any wine/beer/alcohol of any sort because the pamphlet said "don't let the kids even catch a HINT of alcohol". I moved in and one of the guys in my suite had three cases of Lancaster Strawberry Wheat. I quickly learned that "milk and cookies" meant "beer and wings at Doc Holliday's". :)
There's nothing about the Xilinx bitstream encryption that prevents you from loading in an unencrypted bitstream, or a new bitstream with a new key.
Unfortunately it means that it's easier to compromise/clone/tamper with FPGA designs. FPGA cloning/tampering has been a big problem for Cisco as I understand it (counterfeit Cisco products).
Yup - BT4.0 and NFC address completely different problem spaces.
And not including NFC will potentially cripple Apple, since in this particular case it's not just about what their competitors support - it's what retailers/other point-of-sale venues support. "I support NFC already - you want me to add something else that only works with YOUR devices?"