Or at least I remember having is "Engineer's Notebook" with all the cool stuff about a whole pile of different ICs (back when I was interested in electronics). I even came up with a few ideas (that never went anywhere) like building a set of "traffic lights" for a really really busy staircase at school using various logic gates and chips and stuff (this was in the days when "adding a microprocessor to a circuit" meant using a 4MHz Z80, some sort of programmable ROM chip and a super-expensive and hard-to-use programmer to program the chip)

It seems to me that this CPU would be the perfect choice for a MAME setup being that MAME is one of the few things out there these days that is genuinely CPU bound.

No, the Australians bought into (and bought) the F-35 under previous governments. The announcement from Abbot was that they were going to buy MORE F-35s.

Plenty of countries are drinking the US (and Lockheed Martin) cool-aid and buying into the F-35 without even considering any possible alternatives. Australia has just ordered a bunch more (at a time when we supposedly have a "budget crisis" and when the chances of Australia actually needing to fly those F-35s in an actual conflict seem to be quite low given the current threat landscape)

5) The device works great but if the bad guys get the info, it will tell the bad guys how to tell if they are being monitored/tracked/etc by it (so they can make sure they dont do anything incriminating in a way that it would be captured with these devices)

The answer is simple, just introduce a small (0.001% maybe) tax on every financial transaction carried out on the things being traded in these HFT markets (be they stocks, bonds, commodities whatever). Everyone (whether they hold the stocks for 5 seconds or 50 years) pays the tax when they sell (the 0.001% comes out of the total sale price, not any capital gains).

Shuts down the HFT engine and the money flowing around it (which then means the owners of that money have to find something different and hopefully more useful to do with it) but with the tax rate being so low, it has little impact on anyone buying these assets to hold them longer term.

I can think of times when I have been using my card to buy stuff and when I have had no phone service (e.g. been down in the basement of a store or somewhere where my phone cant get a signal or been out in the middle of nowhere at a roadhouse/service station/whatever and buying food etc), how does the AT&T system handle that?
Or what about if your phone is turned off for some reason? (e.g. you are flying on an airplane that takes credit cards for payment for in-flight purchases or you are in a hospital and need to turn off the phone but you are using your card)

With an election due later in the year, this guy is presumably up for re-election. Is there anyone here who can comment on how hard it would be to vote him out? Anyone know who his opponent is and what their position on net neutrality is?

The other possibility is that the last active developer no longer wanted to work on the project and rather than leave a release with unknown security issues, they decided to shutter the project.

The problem is not just that the NSA is spying on Americans but also that the NSA is spying on countries and individuals that are absolutely no threat to the USA. And its also that the NSA have made the digital world a lot less secure in the process.

I don't have an issue if the NSA or any other spy agency is spying on the Iranian nuclear program or the North Koreans or any other genuine threat to the USA. I DO have an issue if the NSA is intentionally weakening computer software, standards, protocols and cryptography in order to do it and I DO have an issue if the NSA is gaining (or attempting to gain) back door access to computers, systems and networks owned by innocent parties in order to make that happen. (instead of going in through the front door with a properly obtained warrant to get the information they need)

As someone who lives in prime cane toad territory here in QLD I can say that even if you could sell cane toads a $100 each, it wouldn't make a dent in the population, there are just too many of them.

The question is not "can we produce an alternative fuel that doesn't require fossil fuels in its production" but "which of the feed-stocks for alternatives to gasoline require the least fossil fuels to produce"

Corn ethanol requires MORE fossil fuels as input to produce it than it displaces as output.

Things like hemp and switchgrass on the other hand are much better, you dont need anywhere near as much fossil fuel inputs in order to produce ethanol from those plants which is why the US (if it was serious about reducing its dependance on foreign energy sources instead of just making the big agribusiness companies that support the corn industry even richer) should be growing these things for fuel instead of corn.

I would be willing to bet money that, for any field anywhere in the US where corn is being grown for ethanol, its possible to grow some other plant (hemp, switchgrass, whatever) on the same field and get more ethanol for less input gasoline required.

What I want to know is just how much money Monsanto is spending in order to keep these alternatives to corn for ethanol from being widely grown...

Occam's Razor suggests that the simplest explanation is usually the right one.

The former head of the TSA has said publicly that when he became head of the TSA he wanted to end a lot of the post-9/11 security crap (liquid bans, shoe removal etc). But when he took up the position, he was shown examples of actual threats that those security measures were stopping (or could stop) and that removing them would increase the risks.

My guess is that Obama when he took up office was shown examples by the intelligence people of things that had been detected or identified thanks to the wholesale spying (and remember we aren't just talking about terrorists, we know from the leaks that the wholesale spying is being used to catch drug dealers and organized crime figures too) and as such realized that shutting it down WOULD make the world less safe.

I used to be an avid Diablo 2 player and LOVED that game.

The problem with Diablo 3 (in addition to the always-on DRM and various general bad things Activision Blizzard have done) was that they took too many of the good things out and kept too many of the bad things in (e.g. the way they changed how potions and healing and such worked so that you couldn't just go into town and buy 50 healing potions before tackling the next big monster)

I ended up switching to The Elder Scrolls and have found Oblivion to be a better game than anything Blizzard ever made.
Plus, Bethesda (even counting the Occulus Rift lawsuit) has a long way to go before they are as evil and bad as Activision Blizzard.