Here's a list. In my experience, only Dragon is worth trying, with the following caveats:

• It helps to spend ten minutes training it for each voice
• It will still only get 99% accuracy
• You need a high quality (low noise) recording with a good microphone

On the plus side, correction is easy -- read the document, and select words that look wrong to hear what they sounded like.

Most of the other programs are aimed at very small vocabularies (i.e. 100 words) for accessibility applications (controlling a computer).

Slashdot has eaten my unicode. All those "m"s should be micrometers.

The needles are conical, about 200m diameter by 650m long, with 10m radius of curvature at the tip. They are made from a biocompatible polymer, polyvinylpyrrolidone, and mostly dissolve after about five minutes (they are highly water-soluble). The manufacturing process can be done at 23C (using a mold), avoiding damage to sensitive biological molecules. Each patch held 3 g of vaccine.

For comparison purposes, human hair ranges in diameter from 20-200m.

Here's the article, with some low-res pictures even for non-subscribers.

The Asus RT-N16 has been great for us. The wifi signal is stronger than the one you suggested. It's also $92 (maybe $150 with a hard drive -- it has two USB ports for hard drives) compared to your minimum $299.

No, America is trying to strengthen copyright law so that it can make more money.

Multimedia is one of America's biggest exports. It is economically obvious (at least in the short term) that those who look after the country should strengthen copyright law.

It's up to other countries to flip the bird or extract economically equivalent concessions in return.

IANA (I am not American.)

One of the properties of subatomic particles is referred to as colour. The particles are not coloured (they are far smaller than the wavelengths of light that give colour), but it is a simple system of classifying particles, similar to resistor colour codes or the "terrorist" alert system.

The study of the colour properties is called "chromodynamics", and I guess "chameleon" must be a similar extension of the metaphor.

I disagree. Flash memory erases whole blocks in one go (with a high-voltage pulse). It should be simple enough to check that the whole block got properly erased during the erase part of the write cycle. If not, that is a worn-out sector, and can be marked as such with no loss of data.

Getting stuck in the programmed state is a good thing, it makes the check easier (check for all zeroed before writing instead of checking for a correct write afterwards) and possibly faster.

Correcting some other inaccuracies I noticed during this discussion, flash memory is a specific type of EEPROM (electrically erasable programmable read-only memory). The main failure mode occurs because charge builds up in the gate oxide (the insulator between the floating gate and the substrate).

They did it using an atomic force microscope (very sharp needle) to make room for the phosphorus atoms on the silicon surface (removing the hydrogen termination in certain places). Phosphene gas PH_3 then places phosphorus atoms in the vacated holes, and finally silicon is grown over the top using a low-temperature CVD process. It's a beautiful technique that took them several years to get right.

16km, while impressive, is not the record. The summary is completely wrong. Ursin et. al. did it over 144km in 2006, and have plans to do it via satellite (with interesting implications about whether it works through a changing gravity well, and so on).

I hope Scientology never gets a turn...

Here's an interesting thing: older computer chips are more susceptible to bit-flipping by cosmic rays, because they are thicker. The increased thickness gives the cosmic ray more chance of interacting with the chip (rather than passing straight through), scattering charge all over the place, and stuffing things up. IBM had a serious modelling project in the 80s that culminated in SRIM (free download), but apparently it's not much of a problem for modern computer chips. SRIM has since gone on to bigger and better things.

The summary states it is 1000s of times faster *for a certain problem*, which is quite possible.

I did work experience at a large broker once, and spent a day watching the actual traders (there were only two, even for that large company, on text-based terminals). They say that quite regularly traders at other firms enter the price wrong, e.g. leaving the zero off the end of the price of a large sell order, which eats through all the buy orders and reduces the price quite significantly... they said that most of the traders were pretty good about reversing such transactions.

So things something like the OP describes can and do happen.

Yeah, that and MIT is good at publicity.

Oh wow I hope there's a Linux version.

Even if it is through Steam.