More here including the promise of video later this week.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-24331860

Elon Musk @elonmusk

Rocket booster relit twice (supersonic retro & landing), but spun up due to aero torque, so fuel centrifuged & we flamed out

Elon Musk @elonmusk

Between this flight & Grasshopper tests, I think we now have all the pieces of the puzzle to bring the rocket back home.

Yes that does seem to be the case

FPGAs are now out of date. ASIC mining is here now: http://launch.avalon-asics.com/ with more coming: http://www.butterflylabs.com/

Bad Astronomer has done a good hatchet job on this story:
http://www.slate.com/blogs/bad_astronomy/2013/03/11/meteorite_life_claims_of_fossils_in_a_meteorite_are_still_wrong.html

Then again... http://www.raspberrypi.org/archives/1139

The wings were driven by electrical powered motors controlled via Wii remotes. Movement of the guys arms made the wings move the same way. So not human powered at all.

(Ok, ok, CGI electric motors)

Tell that to the 350% efficient (measured) heat pump I have in the shed....

No it isn't fiddling with numbers. You are missing the heat pump bit.

The device is taking X amount of energy from the electricity supply and X * 1.3 of energy as thermal and converting this to X * 2.3 as light. i.e. it is 230% efficient when comparing light output to electrical input. Equally, it is 100% efficient when comparing light output to electrical and heat energy input combined.

This does take a little bit of thinking to get your head around but I have a more common example in the shed outside. It contains a heat pump which is 350% efficient. It takes 2kW from the electricity supply and outputs 7kW of heat energy to heat my house. The missing 5kW comes from the pipes in the garden as heat energy. The result being that the garden is slowly being cooled. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heat_pump

I guess because you didn't study properly at school... ;-)

I disagree with the first part of this. Ethernet works off differential signals and the transformer does a good job of removing the common mode signals (non differential) coming down the wire. Without the magnetics the common mode signals (such as DC, mains interference, Radio 2 transmissions) picked up by a potentially long ethernet lead will turn up at the input to the ethernet phy (receiver) chip. This may or may not be enough to stop it from working depending on the interference received. The lack of correct voltage biasing (also done via the magnetics) will very likely stop it from working though. Even so the RX and TX won't be shorted.

Show me a double blind experiment which shows prayers work? Properly conducted double blind experiments has shown that prayer does not work. The experiments which do show a result, the patient knows that they are being prayed for and/or are doing the praying themselves. Sure it may help these people but this is due to the ritual causing the person to self heal. No super power is involved at all.

If you disagree and think prayer does work in the double blind, go and speak to http://www.randi.org/site/index.php/1m-challenge.html and he will give you $1million when you succeed.

I wish I had mod points for this and your other posts. Well put.

44pin Quad Flat Pack are trivial to remove and replace with the right tools - which basically means a hot air gun with the small nozzle. A couple of weeks ago I removed and replaced two 144 pin quad flat pack devices with 0.6mm pitch legs in about 10 mins. It isn't something I want to do for production boards but it is fine for the development boards I was using.

Screen printing solder using solder masks + ovens are easily within the hobbiest market now. You can get a custom PCB + solder stencil made for £40 (100mm^2) and I use a £50 oven to melt the solder. Gives good results too (though I still do the sub 1mm pitch pins by hand as I get too many shorts otherwise).

I've not attempted BGAs as I could see that the success rate might not be too high.