The restriction on civilian GPS receivers is that the receiver should be able to show a position higher than 11mi, or a velocity greater than 515m/s, but not both simultaneously. A number of GPS manufacturers, however, have implemented this in a somewhat slack fashion and used || instead of &&.

Where's the blame targeted at Verizon? Last I checked, they were the ones pushing the profits-over-neutrality angle.

If you don't like their business practices, don't do business with them. Simple as that. Businesses think in terms of dollars; it's the only way to send a clear message.

The flaw that most articles on biometric identification, be they fingerprints, retinal scans or other, is that you only have a limited number of immutable keys to choose from. While it may not be an issue in a school setting, if anyone is able to reconstruct the fingerprint or retina picture from the stored data, or at least a fake fingerprint/picture that is functionally equivalent to the real one, it's game over. You only have two eyeballs, and ten fingerprints.

I'd rather a system that allows me to change the key once in a while.

In a few years time, it may even be voted Psi-Scan of the Year, best budget model, 3 years running!

I'd strongly suggest that you do at least a basic level of looking into theory while you're creating "practical circuits" - it's quite helpful when you're debugging to know at least roughly what's meant to happen.

One source I can recommend is the MIT Open Courseware resources - the 6.002 course on Circuits and Electronics is a good place to start; I'm an embedded software engineer who's started to push into the hardware side of things, and that set of lectures helped me turn my vague understanding of electronics (being able to read a circuit and understand what's going on) into something practical (being able to design a circuit).

Sounds great to me. I'd extend it to blood donors, with quantity donated moving you further up.

I'd support this, provided we eliminated the discrimination present in various countries' blood donation rules. It's still legal for groups such as the Red Cross to discriminate against homosexuals, reinforcing the view of risk-taking sexual behaviour being prevalent only in the homosexual community, and not the populus at large.

Development of a single ECU (from inception through to production) takes in the order of USD$500k-20m.. I doubt you'll see manufacturers opening up their software investments to the public eye any time soon. Most MCUs have flags set after programming to disable readout of the flash over programming channels.

MISRA is one standard that is used, but it's not exactly an all-of-domain standard - it simply covers common fault modes in automotive/embedded software.

The EU is pushing to have ISO26262 ready in the next 6-12 months, which will set standards for functional safety in the system domain - not simply limited to software, and with requirements set by the criticality of the given part.

For example, devices that are deemed to be safety-critical (powertrain, lighting) are held to higher standards than those that are not (immobilisers, HVAC).

We're about to see this sort of thing in the next year or two; Europe has been pushing ASIL/Functional Safety (ISO 26262) fairly heavily as of late, and it's been in the works for a few years.

Formal verification and other methods are required for those devices in the highest ASIL category - usually those devices related to the powertrain, and essential lighting etc.

It's about time the automotive industry had a wake-up call to how critical some automotive embedded software can be..

The battery life sucks because the encoding and decoding is a hell of a lot more compute-heavy than GSM. The turbo codes that are used provide a significant leap in throughput and interference immunity, but as a tradeoff, require a lot more power to decode. Also, some of the earlier amplifiers used for W-CDMA signals were quite power hungry to provide acceptable performance.

I suspect that it's as usual with the release cycle - they might have expected it to be a smooth ride early on, but as the deadline neared, there were still too many things to be done, and not enough time. Especially since they're a new addition to this release, not incremental evolution of something that was there before.

IIRC, Don has already been saying the same thing about "open sourcing after VS2010 is out" since at least mid-2008, however, so the plan is seemingly stable for a while now.