Not everybody was bashing you know. I remember looking at the Nokia Internet Tablets like the N770 and wishing they had a bigger screen.
Or even looking at the iPod touch and wishing it had a bigger screen...

I guess it just means that form factors are "obvious" and at the same time not so easy to design and sell. I am still in the same situation as the OP.

After hesitating to get an Archos 7, an Archos 101 (hard to get) or a Nook Color, I am still not sure what I can compromise on without being too disappointed afterwards:
  - screen size
  - RAM?
  - camera?
  - microphone
  - touch screen quality?

Also, waiting is not so pointless this month as the iPad 2 is probably less than 2 months away and the best android tablets are just being released... After that I would predict 6 or 8 quiet months (only one iPad a year).

The Makerbot and other are about 750$.
And the plastic seems to be 15$ a pound if I remember well.
That's starting to look very affordable already.
There was a guy who made a replacement part for his dishwasher on the Make blog or instructables. One or 2 hacks like that and the machine pays for itself...

I received one and I am not even a citizen!

Well indeed the military and not just them have invested a lot in such radio technology.
An RFID reader is very similar to a radar. There are 2 important classes of radar and both type kind of apply:
1) primary radars: blast a lot of energy as radio waves towards a target, the target reflects some of the energy in the radar's direction with is then received and amplified (big antenna, amplifiers and signal processing)
2) secondary radars: send signals to a cooperative transponder on plane the transponder (which has batteries) decodes the signal and transmits a response back. The radar then receives and decodes the message.

If you combine both types of systems for RFID long distance reading you can:
- beam energy to the RFID over a long distance (antenna with narrow beam, emit kilowatts of power with appropriate characteristics to provide power to RFID tag). Primary radars can send megawatts in beams that have a 1 degree width
- send signal/message over long distance to get the RFID to respond
- receive RFID response thanks to highly sensitive receivers (primary radars have required a lot of work in that area since the targets don't cooperate and might even use stealth technology). Primary radars can typically receive picowatts of energy and recognize the target.

If you add this all together, you can track RFID tags miles away and know where they are with some precision (100 feet maybe).

Also, criminals may really like RFID too: Kidnapping mafia in poor countries could detect passports in cars going on a road, kidnap all Americans (or Europeans) as they are likely to bring a good ransom. Apparently the equipment to do that is dirt cheap. And the security of the RFID tags is lame as there were people who managed to clone RFID tags of passport and such. And if your passport were secure you might still have kept the tag on your bible, DVD, laptop etc.

Overall, I am not surprised that even Skymall sells wallets that block RFID...

Of course, one can argue that cell phones are much worse. So you might need quite a bit of tinfoil in the coming years...

Or that the app was available on Android first? I mean that's not really a cool message for the leading platform...

They are using H.264 to do the encoding. I think they are using the free trial and that might be why they are buying On2. They want so be sure that Youtube can free itself from H.264 some day.

There is a proprietary port, so there is a business opportunity to make an adapter and sell it for 100$ ;-)

What do you mean? How do you enable multiple desktops on Windows without 3rd party software?
The OP is not talking about spreading the desktop over multiple screens which is what most distributions do.
He want to combine multiple screens and multiple desktops in a way that is not common. I personally like the OP's suggestion but apparently we must be in the minority since only Enlightenment does it that way...

That said, multiple screens have a long history of being harder on Linux due to driver issues. I believe people are usually quite successful using the NVIDIA drivers and tools. I got decent results with my EEE PC 701 and a TV. But I don't use it much so it does not really count.

I guess these robots are getting everybody to see them a bit like people.
Normally you should just think they are things are are redundant and it's really cool that one is still going even though the other one will soon stop functioning.
But people are concerned Spirit will "die", they mention rescue missions and they would want the other rover to come and help Spirit.

All this emotion is really interesting. I suppose it's really good for robotic missions as it means people can care about things happening to a little robot far away and hopefully more science will come out of this public interest.

Myself, I really wish they could find a solution for Spirit...

That's a bit extreme I agree, but at the same time, it's pretty manageable with Debian:
  - install software the same way : check (apt-get install)
  - browse web : check (firefox, html and javascript and no freaking ActiveX to require a specific arch)
  - write you own architecture independent programs : check (shell scripts, python, perl, javascript)
  - word processing/spreadsheet: check (gnumeric and abiword for instance)

I have done real work on much slower hardware and I don't think the architecture really matters that much. It could be an issue for large installs (say a school district) but for individuals with little money and a lot of time it doesn't seem like an issue.

Also, please note that the DIY potential is pretty good (USB master, CPU, screen, small size etc.) and even American DIYers might welcome this. It's the price of 2 Arduinos and much cheaper than a buglabs main unit.

Finally, the site is slashdotted, so it really looks like a great marketting idea ;-)
 

I believe he was on topic as he was explaining that it's a matter of priorities to find 1 billion dollars in the federal budget for NASA.
His priorities obviously differ from yours but he clearly identified a big source of spending (6%) and noted that the amount considered was small compared to that big source of spending.

Really, it's like profiling code, if nobody has ever profiled some code you are going to see big misuses of resource (like 70% of time spent recomputing the same value etc.). But after some people have looked at profiles, you get down to a point where a 6% figure is a big target. I am pretty sure you are not the first one to look at the federal budget so it's likely that 6% is a big juicy target when trying to optimize the federal budget.

So your rhetoric does not really help as the other 14/15ths are composed of hundreds of items that are probably just as hard to assess, prioritize and possibly remove from the budget. the Parent was really just putting the 1 billion in perspective.

Personally I think that spending a billion on NASA is a rather good use of the money as they spend the money on cool stuff (electronics, getting bright people to work together, Linux etc.) and produce cool images, discoveries, stories that really make my days brighter.

The satellite only has enough cryogen to keep cool for 1.5 sky surveys. Hence the summary.
I wonder if the satellite can still work without cryogen... I suppose it's going to be much noisier, but how much?

You don't have to do amazing things you know. Create a linkedin profile, facebook, post questions on some mailing lists for tools you use and that should be higher than some random and old reference.
I thought my names was rare but I have a couple homonyms on linkedin. After that you can see a couple of posts to some Open Source software mailing lists. I suppose the guy could achieve the same result easily.
I am not sure how thorough people are when Googling candidates but I guess after 2 or 3 pages of posts on mailing lists I would be quite satisfied and would not see the textfiles references that the OP is worried about.