I have a Kindle 3G and, although I love the device, it is not nearly as robust as parent suggests. Even with a [thin] protective device, the screen driver has died on me twice. Once while in a remote location where I had literally nothing else to read but tech manuals, and the other time it fell off my dresser. Both times I was seriously annoyed. Amazon is very reasonable about replacements, and the first was free, the second was half price. I am still in love with my Kindle but recommend a spare e-reader at minimum and strongly suggest a few lengthy printed tomes as backup, something you don't mind reading twice (perhaps a classic, a compendium of fiction, etc.).

I had a ReplayTV years ago that did this, which used to be a competitor for Tivo until they lost the pricing war (didn't take long!). Actually until a few months ago I still used it regularly to tape standard def TV shows, but then my "lifetime" subscription ran out... (let THAT be a lesson to you)

Anyway they had two incredible features on these boxes, from around 2003 until the service shut down. The first was commercial skipping, which worked reasonably well. The second was the ability to share recorded shows. Several communities sprung up around this capability, so you could request a show that you had missed from someone else who had taped it.

Predictably they were sued and that did not help their already troubled business model. But it's not such a new thing for commercial skip to be available in COTS consumer devices. And man I miss it!

Receptionists, POS terminals, all kinds of good uses. This is the way I set up my computers at home - good desktop, cheap laptop with RDP. I could use one. Unfortunately no idea of the price. At $200 these will sell like crazy. At $400, may as well just get a big netbook. Knowing HP, they'll sell at $450.

This is one reason why I rarely update anything on my Android tablet. I have a number of kids' games on there which never had many privileges when I installed them, so there's little security worry (plus it's only connected to my WLAN). What could "Draw by Numbers" possibly need to update to work better? The only "upgrade" I expect is them to remove pictures. My 3 year old is thrilled with the 10 or 20 different things she can draw on there, and that probably is limiting sales.

I only upgrade OS items now and disable the automatic upgrade checking for everything else. I'm sure I'll hear about why that's bad here. I think years of free and truly beneficial MS updates have confused a lot of us into thinking that an upgrade actually means what the word is defined to mean. Much like "gender" replaced "sex" I think the true meaning of the word "upgrade" is being replaced by something. Something not good.

Touche, AC, and I agree with you, but as you point out (and I neglected to) the interaction between the RF generated by a microwave and water is a thermal reaction.

How is a signal with a wavelength of 5" (wifi is around 2.4 GHz, 2.4E9/3E8*39.37in/m=4.9") supposed to interact with a human sperm, which, according to wikipedia, is comprised of a head 5 um long and a tail 41 um long, all of which total 0.002 inches. These arguments never ever make any sense to me.

Parent is exactly right. In the defense-sciencey world, there is a whole class of problems often called DARPA-hard. I think the term is one DARPA itself uses. My company recently missed out on an opportunity to bid a project for DARPA because we had an approach based on current technology which could be fielded very quickly. DARPA doesn't do that. DARPA does crazy, hard projects with the goal of advancing technology. This is definitely an area ripe for DARPA - it is a high risk, high payoff application.

Suppose this works - the cost of putting a new bird in orbit drops significantly. Rather than destroying a satellite that isn't working quite right, you could salvage it for parts the way we do a car. So first, you haven't wasted these space-qualified and tested components, but even better, you don't have to fly new ones up there. That's not just money, it's also time. You might be able to extend the effective lifetimes of various satellite constellations, such as GPS, Iridium and GLONASS, and thus improve reliability of such systems.

There's a fairly obvious flipside, as well - I don't know if there is international law on satellite ownership, but the law of salvaging seagoing vessels is quite clear - finders keepers. You sink a boat and I find it first, it's mine to sell - including its cargo. I don't know how this applies to space, but there is a pretty obvious (to me) parallel between a sunk boat and a grossly nonfunctional satellite. To clearly state my point: suppose a Russian spy satellite breaks, and we have this capability - we could take it and break it apart and do as we like to it. Of course if not done covertly the Russians would simply destroy one of ours, but it is interesting to consider the possibilities.

Most dishwashers are held in place with exactly two screws. Wood screws are nicer than typical - most of the time I see drywall screws.

Otherwise you're absolutely right, you get exactly what you pay for. If you don't know enough to assess the property on your own, or you don't pay a qualified inspector (and even more rare - an honest and knowledgeable one) to tell you about the house and heed his warnings, you're stupid. Quality of materials and workmanship is not that hard to inspect by eye.

I don't think it's the cost of the materials to perform degaussing - a bunch of wire, a rectifier and a variac along with a field sensor ought to be sufficient. It's the knowledge of what you have to do, which most people don't have (present readers possibly excluded from the definition of "most"). More importantly it's the damage you might have to do to the house to get access to the beam. Suppose the beam is in a finished area? No way you can pay a contractor to open the entire length of the house and then close it back up for less than 5k, plus you may not be able to live in the house at the time. If you want to replace the beam that's easily another 10-20k, depending on way more factors than I am aware of.

If I remember correctly the palladium irreversably changes phase when you cram enough hydrogen into it. Palladium hydride has an alpha phase at room temperature and low hydrogen content. When sufficient hydrogen is absorbed by the palladium the crystal structure is permanently distorted. So you could detect that the palladium had been preloaded with hydrogen you ought to be able to detect it by measuring the resistance of the palladium after the test.

When I have signed contracts to purchase things, I have had to sign waivers limiting liability. Those waivers certainly covered reasonable expectations and disclaimed certain possible defects. This is a terrible problem for both sides, because it is just completely unexpected. I have never before heard of a steel beam's magnetization causing such difficulty. TFA is pretty slim on the real effects they are experiencing. I wonder if this is just one of those pseudo-scientific problems (magnetism = evil?) or if it is a real problem, or if it's just my reading comprehension. It would be interesting to see what the field measurements actually looked like. You'd need a very strong magnet to affect a TV from any significant distance.

At least with smaller pieces of metal you can whack them a few times to re-randomize the magnetic domains. I don't know if that actually works for something large enough to support a building (you might have to hit it hard enough to damage it or the structure it supports). Depending on the alignment of the magnetic field it might be possible to form an electromagnet to cancel its field ("degauss" it). Or the structural members can be replaced and removed (I've done this in my house). Most of these options are pretty expensive (except for the first one where you hit it a lot with a hammer).

It seems unfair for me, as a homebuyer, to get stuck dealing with a house which was built with nonstandard components (in the form of a magnetic structural support). From the builder's perspective it seems like this would be something that they would have to eat and then go after the material seller for their losses, if they can prove when the magnetization occurred.

In answer to OP's question, I suspect that the movie mafia are going after downloaders at large ISPs because the payoff is bigger - they get one process going through one legal department, and a number of names and addresses of suspected downloaders is produced, after which they send out ransom letters. At smaller ISPs, there are fewer targets to send letters to, so the cost is proportionally higher per target.

So in a sense, you could say that customers at smaller ISPs are safer, depending on the movie organizations' intent - if they want to make money off people and get a lot of big settlements to make news, they would focus on large ISPs and their customers. If they want to thoroughly scare people, they'll go after everyone, independent of the cost of doing so.

As of right now the largest FLASH I can find is a 512 Gb unit from Micron (MT29F512G08CUCABH3-12) in a 100 ball LBGA. Couldn't find that package description but maybe a similar one is 9x15.5mm dimension. You'll need more than 32 of these to get to 2 TB, plus a couple of controller ICs.

In short, with tomorrow's technology (what Micron is still developing), you will need a 6" long stick, covered with ICs on both sides. This will not be an inexpensive device for at least a few years.

Hi Kurtis - or anyone else who has spent more time looking -

Is there a schematic or parts list available for the hardware? I looked over the paper but it was pretty high level. I've been wanting to play with exactly this sort of thing for some time. Sorry if I haven't googled enough...

I've been to a few smaller PCB fabs a few years ago, before the days of 4PCB and PCBExpress and the like - mail order, nearly overnight, you fit it into their process flow shops. Anyway, this is back when a 4 layer board run was a $2k/2 week kind of deal rather than the $500 or so you can get now (or cheaper if you can wait). Those places were FILTHY and smelled like all kinds of hell. Nasty business. It's amazing how far these guys have come.

The value is so much better now too. Ten years ago, to get an overnight board we used to mill out two layer boards using a piece of prepreg with copper on either side. A guy would machine off all the copper we didn't want, then drill holes where we needed vias to connect from one side or the other. Then I had to fill the vias with little pieces of wire and solder each side, then stuff the board, then test and debug it; over repeated rework cycles the board would start to peel apart. On top of that, if you get the board hot enough, the vias (wires) would fall out and that was pretty hard to figure out. It was gravity assisted current limit.

Now, you finish your board design and ship it off to one of these guys. During the time you used to spend getting to square 1 with the milled board, you could order parts and then the board shows up from one of these guys like 4PCB here. A 2 day turn on a 4 layer board is no problem and just a few hundred bucks. The time I spent soldering vias into the milled board cost more than the real PCB I can get now. It's amazing. The way they get the price down is a combination of two things - first, you fit into their process flow, as I mentioned earlier. That means that they don't look at your board, they don't think about your board, they just cram it on a panel with some other guys' boards. If you want slots made in the board, you don't get 'em; if you want internal routs cut out of your board you don't get 'em. You get what their process says it does, and so does everyone else. This leads to the second way they get price down - volume. Lots of guys now order from a couple big shops, rather than these little (pretty dirty, as I mentioned) little mom-n-pop PCB houses. And we all order the same process.

It's amazing to see how some of these basic market principals have worked in the past ten years, and it has made a huge change in the R&D industry. It's much easier to do a pilot run of a board, it's much easier and cheaper to make a limited run, and since you are risking less you can order more and try things out. Truly awesome for an electrical guy.