There is another option now: buy a Cyanogen phone. The best one is the OnePlus One and is very hard to come by, but it will get easier.

Cyanogen only lags behind mainline Android by weeks or a few months at most, and more than makes up for that with all the extra features you get. It's incredibly customizable and has lots of privacy enhancing tools. I hope we start seeing a lot more phones shipping with it.

A 9" Nook HD, with Google Play now included (without hacking) is $179.99. The older version with 16GB on-board flash can be had for about $50 less.

$35,000 was a decent Salary in 1980.
Lets inflate that 2% per year over 34 years. ( x 1.96)

Merely adjusted for inflation, that should be:
~$59,000 (from $30,000) to ~$69,000 (from $35,000)

$5/hr was also the median minimum wage for student-like jobs in 1980-85 (~10,500/yr). Over three decades later most States don't even have a minimum wage at $10 or above.

Think about it this way--

You have a system that does $FOO.

you arent sure how it does $FOO, exactly. You see that inputs go in, some magical process $BAR happens inside, and $FOO comes out.

Strong AI strives to reproduce this $FOO.

The issue, is that the process $BAR is very much dependent on what the system is built from. (In this case, complex organic molecules and saline ions). Understanding $BAR is insanely hard, because $BAR is carried out in a highly parallelized fashion, with many many subprocesses going on, many of which are highly dependent upon the method of construction of the system, and exist soley because of that method of construction.

So, you want to build an artificial system that takes the same imputs, does $BAR, and gets $FOO.

Do you:

1) Slavishly reimplement millions of models in the new medium's physical construction, to emulate the quirks and behaviors of the target system's physical construction, wasting huge amounts of energy and making a system that is actually *MORE* complex than the original....

OR

2) Deconstruct all the mechanisms at work in the physical system that currently performs $BAR to get $FOO, evaluate which of these are hardware dependent, and can be removed/adapted to high efficiency analouges in the new hardware platform-- and produce only the components needed for $BAR to be accomplished, to generate $FOO?

The former will most certainly get you $FOO, but is HORRIBLY INEFFICIENT, and does not really shed light on what is actually needed to get $FOO.

The latter is MUCH HARDER to do, as it requires actually understanding the process, $BAR, through which $FOO is attained. It will however, yeild the higher efficiency synthetic system, AND the means to prove that it is the best possible implementation.

Basically, it's the difference between building a rube-goldberg contraption, VS an efficient machine.

I know nothing about satellite receivers or equipment purchasing options for digital DVRs. Generic DVRs for years have included IR blasters to control a library of set top boxes including satellite receivers. A bit lame...

Cable cards are backwards compatible, have been around for a decade thus far and currently in no danger of going anywhere anytime soon.

SDV compliments rather than replacing cable card and still required to use SDV. For most people SDV means an additional box plugged into any available receiver/DVR USB port.

There is no prohibition against storage of PAN (e.g. card number) in the PCI-DSS. You are forbidden only from storing CVV2 and full track data from the mag stripe.

An SUV does NOT fill the role of a pickup truck unless you don't actually need a pickup truck. You need a pickup when you are toting things that you do not want to carry in the interior of a vehicle like loose dirt, stone, certain bulky supplies, trash, etc. Messy stuff. Very bulky stuff. If you can put what you are likely to carry in an SUV then you don' t actually need a pickup. My wife has an SUV which we use for plowing and I have a pickup which we use for transporting bulky stuff. Significant overlap but the use cases are not identical.

An SUV can fill the role of a station wagon or minivan depending on the specific use case and number of people you need to transport. If you get up towards 7 with lots of gear then you need either a minivan or a full sized van. If you are just transporting up to 4/5 people with some gear then an SUV or station wagon can serve adequately.

I kind of laugh when I hear people say they "need" a minivan. Amazing how those of us who predate minivans somehow managed to survive. They're a great tool but hardly a necessity. The car my family had when I was growing up was a sports coupe. We took all the family trips and got all our gear in it too.

Why would you "need" a commuter vehicle? The cost of any commuter vehicle is going to hugely outstrip any fuel savings you might possible generate.

You think there is a lack of a willing and capable workforce in Detroit Metro? You could not be more wrong. There are reasonable reasons to pick places other than Metro Detroit to build a factory but the blight in Detroit City and perceived lack of a workforce is not among them. Honestly I can't think of many better places to build a factory if you really look at the evidence. The opportunity is definitely there. You might find cheaper labor elsewhere but you aren't going to find a more capable labor force anywhere for manufacturing.

You bet. There is more manufacturing and engineering talent in Detroit metro than all but a handful of places in the US. Did you forget that GM has their headquarters in downtown Detroit? Where do you think they get their people from? Do you think it is by accident that almost every single car supplier of consequence has engineering operations somewhere near Detroit? Michigan ranks 4th in the nation in high tech jobs. Metro Detroit is the second largest source of tech jobs of any metro area in the US. If you want manufacturing talent you could do a lot worse than Michigan.

So yeah, the locals will do just fine.

If you think that properly describes all of Detroit then you aren't wanted there and you clearly know little about the area. Downtown Detroit near the Renaissance Center has actually seen a pretty nice revival. Not to say the city overall doesn't have a long way to go (it very much does) but there are big parts of it that are nothing like the hell hole you are describing. Guys like Dan Gilbert are buying up all kinds of property and businesses are setting up shop left and right. It's a hell of an economic opportunity if your investment horizon is sufficiently long term. There are three major stadiums, a convention center, a university, three casinos, GM, outstanding restaurants, Whole Foods, and lots more all downtown. You really think Whole Foods is going to set up shop in the middle of a blighted, drug infested area? I just had a relative open up an upscale coffee shop in Downtown Detroit and another relative of mine has a fast casual restaurant at the Renaissance Center.

Furthermore it doesn't have to be in Detroit City. The Detroit Metro area is genuinely nice. I live in Oakland County which is immediately to the north of Detroit City and is one of the ten wealthiest counties in the entire US, has a AAA credit rating and is a genuinely nice place to live. Washtenaw and McComb counties are equally nice places. The University of Michigan as well as several other excellent local universities provides an outstanding local talent pool.

Wouldn't you expect someone who runs privacy organizations to have already rooted his phone?

It sounds like the bloatware is his biggest problem, and I just got a Moto X for the same price as an LG Optimus. Vanilla Android and no bloatware.

Of course, the old Orion design has been significantly surpassed by a number of newer designs. Medusa, for example, is much better than Orion - the bombs explode in front of the craft behind a gigantic "parachute", which captures far more of the energy and the long cords on the parachute allow for a much longer, smoother acceleration pulse. The bombs are also able to be detonated much further from the craft, and the craft may be made a lot smaller.

Nuclear thermal - the first version that was being developed called Nerva - allows for "clean" (to varying degrees) fission propulsion from the surface. Or if what you want is high ISP in space, then a fission fragment rocket goes much higher than an Orion or Medusa design (and scales down a lot better)

Learning and entertainment are not exclusive to each other. Not everything has to be a firehose of education. I come to slashdot for entertainment as well but if I never learned anything the entertainment value would vanish rapidly.

Exactly my point. There are lessons to be learned from obsolete tech and sometimes it turns out to be not as obsolete as we think. You can even have fun while you do it. But I don't really understand pointless nostalgia. Learn from the past but live in the present.

Thank $diety. The Previa was one of the ugliest vehicles this side of a Pontiak Aztek. I've never seen a minivan I thought was remotely pleasant to look at but the Previa was ugly above and beyond the call of duty. I'm kind of astonished nobody has seemingly even tried to make a minivan that is better looking.

No.

What it MIGHT give you, eventually, is a set of observations on which to model the synhetic generation of nervous systems (and whole organisms if you have the CPU and memory to blow) within a computational model framework.

What can you do with an emulated nervous system?

Outside of medical research and drug candidate evaluations-- perhaps it could be useful for developing BCIs and the like-- but without a considerable amount more data than just what cells turn into what other cells, the model wont be useful for much.

Also, full nervous system emulation is about the worst possible way to approach strong AI. Just saying.

Models like these are useful for making inexpensive testbeds to test hypotheses against, after said models are vetted-- that's what they are for. They arent for doing non-science with.

You can buy a Ford E-Series van or Ford Transit van that will seat more than any minivan, tow more and is available for as little as $30,000. Only real downside is that the MPG kind of sucks.

The reason is that the old hardware they use in these things only gets support from the manufacturer for older versions of Android. They provide something called a Board Support Package, or BSP, that is basically drivers for the hardware but is also tied to certain versions of the OS.

Cyanogenmod normally doesn't have a problem with this and just ports the drivers to newer versions, or finds newer drivers from other vendors that are compatible. Cheap shitty phones don't exactly have the best people working on them or much motivation to even try and not be shit, so your only real hope is that Cyanogen helps you out.

Software isn't free, even if it's open source. If you want quality you do, unfortunately, have to pay for it. Pay for it in money (a higher end Android phone like a Nexus 5) or in time (fixing it yourself, installing Cyanogen etc.)

Cheap phones carry more crapware precisely because they are cheap. They money they didn't make on the hardware is clawed back through the crapware.