Standards are (or should be) created by a consortium... The last time I checked W3C there wasn't much mention of the Flash standard... Though far from a standard yet, it appears that both W3C and WHATWG are indicating that VP8 / WebM have some potential to become part of the HTML5 standard (http://news.cnet.com/8301-30685_3-20005466-264.html).

One Fit sighs all

About two weeks ago, Google, The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, and the Consumer Electronics Association sponsored an event hosted by Public Knowledge: The 1st Annual World's Fair Use Day (WFUD), which kicked off at Google's DC offices with a talk on ACTA. The following day was at the Newseum, also in Washington DC. Details at http://worldsfairuseday.org/

Meanwhile a machine in Redmond expects to complete the task sometime around the year 2518... (After 8 years it is now out to 15 places after the decimal.)

I attended the Microcontroller Monday classes at the local hackerspace, HacDC (http://hacdc.org/) where we worked from plans found on Lady Ada's sites (http://www.ladyada.net/make/usbtinyisp/ and http://www.adafruit.com/).

The other thing to do is get started with US FIRST Robotics (http://www.usfirst.org/) established by the inventor of the Segway, Dean Kamen to "inspire young people to be science and technology leaders, by engaging them in exciting mentor-based programs that build science, engineering and technology skills, that inspire innovation, and that foster well-rounded life capabilities including self-confidence, communication, and leadership." according to the web site.