Nokia is a 150 years old company that happened to rule the mobile phone space for 15 of those years - forever in technological scale. They've also been close to bankrupt several times during this time. This is undeniably a dark chapter for them, but as much as many people seem to so wish, it is not (as of yet) their darkest hour, and there is every reason to expect they will go on and survive in some way or form.
(Then again, times have changed, and Nokia of today is certainly heavily entrenched and invested on being the leader in mobile phones, making it questionable if they can or if it indeed makes business sense to continue without that, so this is not financial advice. Just a viewpoint to all the "Finally it's over, good riddance" people.)

Actually, the sensor in the pen reacts to carbon, hence what you need is a black & white laser. A color-laser comes useful in that since color-printing doesn't disrupt the pattern recognition, you can print whatever else you want on the paper in color. This will mainly come useful for making forms etc. with boxes to fill, but for note taking, just laser-printer is enough. Photocopies did not work; the copy is not exact enough. Also one of the features of the system is that each page can be unique such that you can recognize which page it was written on. Thus generating and printing new ones may come handy.

Also strictly speaking no ink on the pen is required. It comes extremely extremely helpful, as it can be hard to write when you don't see what you've written. But with practice it's possible to re-use the papers, even without ink. Depending what your needs are.

Now my problem with this product is, first of all, for note-taking I don't understand what's the big difference between this and jotting down your notes on notepad and then taking the notepad to a flatbed scanner. I can see many other use-cases for it, but writing down pages and pages of notes isn't one of these. Either take the notes down with a keyboard or if that's not possible write and scan notes.

The other major issue is that there's no open spec on the protocol, and thus no Linux support. In fact the driver situation is tough overall. There's been a few of these pens, some of them only have drivers for Windows 95 etc. so that with any Windows release you may be left hanging. The companies in charge also seem to be tightening the noose all the time so that I fully expect in a year or two you will only be able to access your notes through a DRM:ed pay-per-view service.

The provision to REALLY spread the wealth around is the rule "Can be shared by any number of people;". Ie. a research team with 12 members could easily get it. And why limit yourself to research teams? Presumably only nominations are the limit, so why not nominate "Everybody graduated from Berkeley" or "Everybody with letter E in their full name". Granted, the award would then be quite little, and think of the bureaucracy... They're supposed to accept online nominations, however.

There were some posts about whether it were to be annual or what... just to clarify, according to their news release, the US$3 million Fundamental Physics Prize is going to be awarded (at least) every year. It's only the first year that they awarded that prize to nine people each. I can not determine from the web-site how often or how many New Horizons in Physics prizes they're planning to grant, and I also think the provision of awarding "special main prize" in addition to the annual waters down the significance of the prize... but we'll see, it's still hell of a lot of money.

Another reservation I have on how it is arranged is the "previous winners choose new ones" system. At least all the recipients ought to be exceptional individuals, but I'm still quite worried it will either turn into a clique rewarding like-thinking conformists, or get boggled down in internal disagreements and inability to choose new recipients depending on how the voting progress is arranged. Of course I have no doubt the backing millionaire has specific provisions for over-riding in the fine print, but it still seems tricky.

I particularly loved the quote from TFA from BCC saying 'the chairman of the Power Grid Corporation of India said the exact cause of the power cut was unclear, he said, but that it appeared to be due to the "interconnection of grids".' That sounds a lot like the "series of tubes" speech...

But at least they've got this things under control and are honing on the root cause, they've already managed reproducibility of the bug!
'After Monday's cut, engineers managed to restore electricity to the northern grid by the evening, but at 13:05 (07:35 GMT) on Tuesday, it collapsed again.'

Wait, no, according to a NY times article, another electric company chief executive clarifies: '“We have one of the most robust, smart grids operating” in the world, he said. It would “not be wise” to give an assessment of what happened at this time, he added.'

Okay, that's settled then. Just keep replugging it, one of these times it's bound to work.

For those seriously suggesting dd, and assuming leaving the computer inoperable and none of the data is critical, how about instead doing:
sudo hdparm --user-master u --security-set-pass xxxxxxxx /dev/sdx
sudo hdparm --user-master u --security-erase xxxxxxxx /dev/sdx

This is rated as the highest security erase short of physically destroying the hard-drive. It will wipe all areas of the hard-drive, including relocated and spare blocks and such, unlike dd. And most importantly, it'll do it FAST. It will do only single pass erase however; Bradley Manning's chatlogs linking him to Wikileaks were reputedly recovered from a single overwrite wipe. If you require this level of security, then you shouldn't even need to ask, nuking it from the orbit is the only way to be sure.

However, I'm personally going to go with the people who note that as it's a work computer that's property of the workplace, rendering it inoperable and/or deleting work-related data on it are probably not approved use. And if the workplace/employee had any sense, all of the data on the computer are already backed up or even initially located on company fileservers, after which it is really anyone's guess who all have access to the super-seekrit stuff on it. In the best case all the work related data is backed up or on company servers and the private data exists only on the workstation, in which case the Security Erase methods is valid, but the odds of this distinction having held are slim at best.

Ooh, a snarky comment! Your car-analogy is bit lacking though, software user-interface is more akin to the "body" or case than the innards, indeed this is what we mean by the logic or computing engine of a program. So this means you'll actually be replacing all the rest while leaving engine, transmission and wheels into your car. Duh.
On a more serious note, I realize this is not always trivial, but as Qt and GTK are the only two Linux UI-frameworks usually considered, much Linux software already has a Qt UI of some sort. The rest, if they are of any value, tend to be programmed so the UI is clearly separated from the engine or backend for maintenance and portability reasons. Even when this is not the case, the UI porting is generally not a hopeless endeavour, though there are considerable advantages from re-designing such an application. In either case we're not talking about something a casual end-user would do over the weekend, of course, but a Linux developer might.
This is also why I'm saying high-end games are an exception, the UI in those tends to be so complex, specialized and tied-in with program logic (not to mention expecting desktop performance) that the effort would most likely be wasted. Of course, the first thing I did when I got hand of the original development hardware and tried to decide where to start was naturally to get Linux-DOOM running on it, using SVGAlib (and no graphics acceleration). It was... almost playable. Didn't play nicely with the windowing system, of course. But with little work they could be swapped between.

Apps are, of course, preferable way unless you're an unix admin. But on Maemo and MeeGo both, the underlying system is fairly complete "desktop" Linux. My N9's /usr, /usr/bin, /sbin and /usr/sbin directories have 1015 commands total, so I won't list everything that is included. Fully featured busybox build with ifconfig is included though. For N9, "developer mode" comes as standard option you can turn on from configuration menu, which will among other things add a console app to the device, as well as opening VNC or ssh connection to the device over USB or WLAN. What is annoying, and a slight warning for the home-hacker, is that N9 comes with kernel-backed Aegis security system, which means that unless you change the kernel or take other measures, changing ANY system files will brick the device so that a full re-flash over USB is needed. It's possible to disable, and allows installing uncertified apps, but a pain in the ass.

As one of the people who developed the MeeGo predecessor Maemo, I feel I have to point out that there are currently 1723 applications on my-meego.com MeeGo Harmattan software catalog. I consider this fairly well for OS where only single phone has been publically released, and has been orphaned since the get-go. Most of them are not fart-generators either, although there's a fairly high number of what are essentially custom RSS feed-readers for private feeds (there's an RSS reader built-in which feeds straight to one of the home screens).

Of course the beautiful thing as far as software ecosystem is concerned is MeeGo is pretty much full featured Linux desktop, so that almost any Linux desktop software (minus high-end games of course) can be ported to MeeGo, usually at most requiring porting the UI to Qt and touch-friendly. (Of course it's nice to see lot more thought put to integrating most apps into the MeeGo system).

It is possible. If you read the article in question, you would've seen that National Science Foundation (running the Antarctic Research Program) received bids in the range of $100 million to $500 million for satellite broadband. So not only is it possible, NFS has sought bids on it, and we know the projected price. No word on whether this is within the NFS budget for this task, however.

Personally I would assume it is not worth it. And hence enters this plan, as Polar Broadband Ltd. believes they can salvage the satellite into Antarctic service for as little as $20 million. It may still be more than NSF is willing to spend, especially considered the risks and reduced lifetime on the satellite and the fact the satellite was never planned for this use so is not going to be optimal solution.

Actually, while its possible to design a system to be "virtually" fault-tolerant, in engineering that always comes down the a cost-benefit analysis. Also this naturally does not entirely eliminate so-called "human error" and other freak incidences, but with enough resources tossed into it, you can get very close. It's obvious the safety-requirement and thus allowed cost for manned mission is set much higher; for an unmanned probe it will be accepted some of them will inevitably be lost and accepted, and design target set to for example 1 unrecoverable failure out of 100 missions (pulled that example out of my ass, and in practice Russia of course has 100% failure rate on Mars-probes, which I'm sure is nowhere near design target).
Also we do not know the number of redundant processors of the kind that were in Phobos-Grunt. If there are three and a monitoring unit, going into "safe-mode" in case two of the processors failed at the same time would be entirely reasonable response - there would be no redundant processor left to compare the results to. But only Roscosmos knows the design for sure, I'm even guessing the redundancy just from the reported facts that there were (at least) two identifcal and both booting at the same time was somehow a problem.
It is of course kind of confirmation bias as that's generally the main way a redundant system can fail, but the way there stories generally seem to go there is some unthought issue causing all redundant units to fail at the same time, and the control logic responds in some unexpected way that makes matters worse because nobody ever thought the redundant systems could fail at the same time let alone bothered to test it. I work in automotive industry, and we have unwritten in-house rule that whenever an engineer says "But just what are the odds that..." we HAVE to make the design hardened against just that possibility.
RAID is actually a good example of the redundancy failure. You may be led to assume that with 100,000 hours MTBF per drive the odds of losing two drives at the same time are practically non-existent. In practice, as the hard-drives are from the same manufacturing batch and subject to identical operating-conditions and usage patterns (including external dangers like somebody dropping it etc.), it will actually be unlikely for the hard-drives to fail at significantly different times. If it were up to me, I'd randomly swap around drives between RAID arrays, preferably acquired at different times, for just that reason.

What we gleam from this, rather old article, together with other common knowledge... apparently the flight-control computer had two identical processors, presumably for redundancy, that according to Roskmos both rebooted at the same time, possibly due to "heavy particles" in space. This is not unthinkable, especially as the rebooting of such robust processors could take significant time, during which another one could encounter failure.

There is also reference to a watchdog procedure, which muddles waters somewhat - I'm wondering if the watchdog procedures could have triggered on some other condition than total unresponsiveness of the unit in question, and if it could have led to rebooting them both at the same time, for example due to checking them at the same time on an interval. Regardless, after both redundant processors booted at the same time, the probe interrupted flight program, and - quite correctly - entered into "safe mode" awaiting further instructions and diagnostics.

Then comes up the further engineering SNAFU, and where a software-specification error most likely comes into play: In safe-mode, the probe switched to its X-band radio, which was never intended to be operated on orbit, but only in deep space on way to Mars. The problem with this was two-fold. First of all, the bulky Russian deep space antennas could not track the probe at orbital speeds long enough to receive let alone transmit data. And secondly, as the probe was orbiting Earth it was spending long times with its solar panels in Earth's shadow, while the high power interplanetary radio was draining its batteries. And so the probe was doomed.

Skimming the actual report, the number in there is predictably "500Mbits", it seems to be Wired who got that mixed with megabytes. Still as some earlier posters point out one needs to go no further than Wikipedia to find out that number is still likely off by a magnitude as the real figure seems to be 50Mbps. I assume the 500Mbits figure came from people trying to get funding for more bandwidth, and may be based on theoretical maximum, such as the capability of the link installed on them.
The report in question does, however, warn that "The finite bandwidth that currently exists for all military aircraft, and the resulting competition for existing bandwidth, may render the expansion of UAS applications infeasible and leave many platforms grounded". This sounds slightly dubious, as the report itself notes that moern UAV's are autonomous-capable, and all the bandwidth is basically for sensors, which can be switched on and off on the basis of need. Unless there is need for 24h uninterrupted surveillance, the bandwidth isn't such a limiting factor.
From a satellite bandwidth link we learn the supposed total bandwidth available is somewhere in the ballbark of 12Gbps. This would mean a single Global Hawk uses 1/240th of the total available bandwidth when ran over satellite. Granted, that may seem bit of a andwidth hog, but it's important to notice there's no difference between that and a manned airplane running with equivalent sensors forwarding data. As such it's hard to see this as a "drawback".
If one looks for a drawback from the report in question, it's their reliability, as according to the report in 2005 Global Hawk for example had 13 times as high "Class A Mishap" rate as U-2 spy-planes. On the other hand, the report claims that in 2009 Predator-drones reached a lower mishap rate than small single-engine private airplanes in the USA.

Besides 500MB/s being slightly dubious... so what? They're reconnaissance planes, their primary purpose is gathering intelligence. So they're gathering it, at 500MB/s. So their downside is that they're good at what they're doing?
This would be an issue if we were told "They use 20% of the total available bandwidth for military applications per plane just to stay in air", but I do not believe this to be the case or we would be told that. So what exactly is the downside?