+1 to this. Dvorak was laid out by a guy using only single character occurrence frequencies, and a hunch that alternating hands is a good idea. In modern times, we have computers to rapidly search through key layouts to maximize much better designed objective functions. If you're really serious about this you can probably design an objective function that optimizes your key layout for speed, and computationally determine a layout that is fastest on the data set they use for records testing.

E-ink itself is pretty damn rugged:

http://www.eink.com/rugged.html

I wonder if my Nook Simple Touch has laminated glass for the touchscreen later; it feels like plastic...

You can drop an e-reader on the floor without it breaking.

...will be a worthy challenge.

Wind turbines that operate well above the ground most emphatically ARE being built, and I'm surprised this fact hasn't more thoroughly penetrated the slashdot consciousness given how "sexy" this tech is. I have biases because I work in this field and have met most of the major players, but IMHO the two companies that are marching most rapidly towards utility scale aerial wind power are Makani power and Ampyx power:

http://www.makanipower.com/
http://www.ampyxpower.com/

In particular, Makani power's 30kW Wing 7b (same as wing 7a but with more aerodynamic turbine cowlings) is hitting their predicted power curve perfectly, and they're already working on their next wing. Ampyx is also using (way more efficient) rigid wings, but they do their power generation on the ground, which has a bunch of advantages and disadvantages. I'm not sure which design will ultimately be more efficient/practical (and this may depend on scale), but at the rate they're going it will certainly be hard to beat Makani to market. Also, for better or worse, national differences in the way airspace is regulated may play an accidental role in preventing the industry from rapidly standardizing on one design. Currently the FAA is (tentatively) regulating Makani's turbines as structures, and the govt. in the Netherlands is (tentatively) regulating Ampyx's turbines as aircraft. Note that there are a bunch of other start-ups working on AWE as well; the above two are just the ones I consider most promising for utility scale power.

I live in Leuven, Belgium, where Group T is based, and they were showing off this car yesterday on the street. I didn't stop to look more closely since I've seen similar cars before, but I did wonder how the hell they made the patterned nose cone. It looked to me like it was injection molded, which seemed odd since a mold that big would be insanely expensive. Now I know better!

The cluster that runs Slashdot ~is CoyboyNeal's oven!

It leans in turns.

yes.

Standardized representations of coordinate frames and tools for manipulating them is indeed one of the features provided in most robotics frameworks.

They have those. One brand is called LabJack. The downside is that you're paying extra for what amounts to an arduino that you can't (as?) easily re-program and/or embed into a gadget.

You win!

I would not be so quick to accuse people of writing poor code when you know very little about the problem they're working on. And remember, ~most code runs faster on CPUs. If you read some of Vasily Volkov's papers (he's the guy who wrote the early versions of CUBLAS), it is very clear that you might as well not bother with the GPU if you're mostly doing blas level 1-2 stuff, since the arithmetic intensity isn't high enough. For our application we had some specific operations we could combine and tricks we could use to reduce bandwidth, but they turned out to not be enough. This was a Ph.D. project that took several years; many parallelization strategies were tried on both CPU and GPU, and I got lots of feedback from colleagues working on gpu compiler tools.