SD card slot, Microcontroller chip, Radio chip. Viola, low power, moderate bitrate and range wireless data storage device for $5. Development costs furnished by the Indian tax payers.

Even if you get the patent without doing the actual fabrication, it should have to be relatively specific. So the group that actually does the fabrication and fills in all of the details you left out can just apply for their own patent and site you as prior art. And they'll patent all of the hardware needed to actually perform the process.

Don't we already have that?

Linux Home Basic - Ubuntu
Linux Home Premium - Fedora
Linux Business - RHEL/CentOS
Linux Starter Edition - Xandros
Linux Ultimate - Slackware

Everyone knows that the Michigan Daily has a list of the most clueless people on campus which they call up whenever they need quotes for an article. I wouldn't put much stock in two anecdotes.

I wrote the DAQ I use for my research using the GnuRadio framework (which is written in python and c++). It is relatively easy to write custom C++ modules for high speed computation. There is also a graphical programming utility called GRC for simple LabView style "programming". Unfortunately, the code still isn't very mature, but it is under very active development. It is difficult to argue with the simplicity of labview for a quick interface to NI hardware, but once you leave the academic world where licenses and hardware cost real money, the appeal is quickly lost.

When I get time, I'll play with comedi and the comedi module for gnuradio for working with NI DAQ cards.

Or, the pretty girl next door just doesn't know that the tin can is in her room. Along with the web camera and transmitter.

According to the benchmarks, exFAT. If you trust it not to die a horrible death and to be readable anywhere else.

Sounds like bill of materials (BOM) plus a decent profit margin for an electronics device. It could be a reasonable estimate, especially since they're already building them for around $200 without economies of scale.

Ah yes, the good old days when people turned on their fireplace or oven, didn't realize it had blown out, and then died of asphyxiation. The fireplaces without electric starters use a pilot light. If the pilot light blows out, the valves automatically close.

I'm not sure about idiot, but I hope you aren't a safety engineer.

I'll probably be putting in a gas fireplace later this spring and possibly a gas generator later. For the fireplace though, some of them do require electricity to start and those seem to be the cheaper ones.

Lost power when Commander Taco did, but it was only out for about 12 hours. It happens every other month or so though.

My advisor has a 24" cinema display set to 1024x768 resolution. It makes me cry each time I see it.

It is a side effect of some designs which give good efficiency at high power without requiring massive transformers. I wouldn't use a supply more than twice the suggested current unless it was a high quality linear transformer (those are the really heavy ones, most of the multi-voltage universal supplies are like this because they are designed for a wide range of currents).

Exercise some care when using power supplies rated at much higher currents than your device. Some DC converter designs will ramp up in voltage if the current draw is too low (computer power supplies do this actually). This is of course more of a problem when you're trying to use something like a switching supply rated for 10A on a device that draws 100mA maximum.

When you consider that the coils they're using are ~3 feet in diameter, that number doesn't seem so odd. The efficiency of inductive coupling is roughly proportional to (diameter/distance)**3 assuming the coils are well matched, the frequency is ideal and a few other things. Anyway, with reasonable sized coils for a small portable device the effective range drops to a few inches (laptop) to under an inch (cellphone).

I'm out of mod points, so I'll just thank you for the clear and reasonable explanation.