A label maker designed to make cable labels. That means it's designed to use wide tape and print on it sideways, and it will take flexible vinyl tape. The best ones print on "self-laminating" labels that are opaque where the label is printed, but clear at the end, so the overlap protects the printing.

At least one, and preferably two, USB 2.0 to IDE/SATA converters. There are plenty of ways in which you can find yourself with a bare drive you need data from, and no good way to plug it in. Also, in a pinch, a bare CD-ROM can become an external drive for a server with no drive. These things are cheap, and when you need one, you REALLY need one right now.

You must be trolling; surely you're not so thick as to not grasp the meaning of "No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States"?

The First Amendment guarantees your right of freedom of speech. The Fourteenth Amendment, as quoted above, says no state can pass a law that takes away rights granted by the United States Constitution. Being part of the United States, New York, like the other 49 states, is bound by the United States Constitution, including the Fourteenth Amendment... and thus, by extension, the First Amendment. QED.

And you have to realize that Kodak Park, back then, was big enough to have its own fire department. Not a fire engine. Not a fire house. A fire department with multiple stations throughout the Park, all trained to handle utterly massive hazmat incidents and fires. Kodak Park was the biggest chemical-processing facility this side of the Mississippi... which, of course, includes all of New Jersey. When local fire departments needed hazmat training, they went to Kodak. I worked there; trust me, three kilograms of uranium was probably one of the smallest disaster risks inherent in the operation. Miles of pipelines carrying acids and solvents, massive steam works from a power plant big enough to run a small city... Every day I drove past this gleaming stainless steel tank, think a milk tanker stood on end, labelled "LIQUID NITROGEN—NOT COMPATIBLE WITH LIFE". That was fun on windy days when it would sway, and images from Terminator 2 unavoidably came to mind.

Kodak has its problems and warts, but anyone accusing Kodak of disdain for Rochester is exhibiting an utter ignorance of the histories of Rochester, Kodak, and George Eastman. I'd frankly be hard-pressed to come up with an example of a company that's done more for their community. (Recent run-into-the-ground years excepted...)

Except that's not true.

In "duty to flee" states, you must run from a conflict if you are sure it is safe to do so. In most cases where you would need to use force in self-defense legitimately, it is not clearly safe to run away. In duty-to-flee states, if you're cornered, you're free to use as much force as necessary in self-defense.

The problem with Florida's law is that it takes self-defense from being a defense against a charge of homicide, and turns it into utter immunity from arrest or prosecution for anyone with even a barely-plausible claim of self-defense. The police can't investigate, because it could lead to violating that immunity. The previous law, which still protected you from legitimately shooting first in self-defense, at least let the police detain you to make sure your story was legit and collect evidence to back it up. Not so with the new law.

Plus, there IS a direct link to Google's core businesses. Google pays people to drive cars around the world taking photographs for Street View, and collecting WiFi data for geolocation services. To keep that information up-to-date, they have to keep driving those cars around. If they can figure out how to automate those cars, they can reduce the cost of acquiring that data: no driver to pay, no human limits on the hours driven... Yes, the whole program will cost a lot, and it would take forever to recoup the costs from the savings... but if you look at it from a "what will we spend this year" standpoint, you could see a potential benefit in a reasonable time.

In the meantime, they're learning how to make high-powered servers run in a low-power environment that doesn't have the ability to support super-exotic cooling infrastructure. Want to bet that pays off in future generations of custom-built server farms that have DC power from solar panels?

I have no idea if these things are true, but they're plausible. The folks who wrote this article didn't try too hard to figure out the synergies.

I agree, and I've been there and done that.

I had a Philips Pronto remote control, one of the early ones. The great thing was that you could program its touchscreen with anything you wanted, down to a pixel level if you wanted to take the time. So, it could emulate any remote. Sounds great... but in practice, it sucked. The thing had hard buttons for channel up/down, volume up/down, and mute. There were two additional programmable hard buttons. For anything else, you'd have to hit the button on the side to turn on the backlight (if it was dark in the room at all), look down at the screen, possibly scroll through a number of pages, find the button, and press it. Trying to use a TiVo was an exercise in frustration; you simply cannot target taps on a touchscreen accurately without looking.

The Pronto quickly became the device we used to turn the A/V system on and off, and change modes... a macro device. For actually watching TV, we used the TiVo peanut, because it could be operated by touch while you were looking elsewhere.

I tried using various iPad apps to control the TiVo. They suffer from the same problem. The official TiVo app is a little better; it offers gesture-based control as an option, but it's not compelling. Besides, I want to be doing other things on my iPad while I'm watching TV, not using it as an outrageously expensive yet awkward remote. The few things the apps are good for are text entry and browsing the program guide without interrupting the current program.

I've since upgraded from the Pronto to a Logitech Harmony One. It's not perfect, and it's not as customizable as the old Pronto, but it's pretty good. It has enough hard buttons to control everything without looking. It supports macros to turn stuff on and off and change settings. It has a touchscreen to accommodate those few functions that don't have hard buttons. Of course, any time you have to use the touchscreen, it's the same problem: you have to look down and find the button.

The solution isn't making the tablet a remote, or making the tablet the TV and the TV a remote display. I'm not sure what the solution is, but part of it would be some way to simply "flick" what I'm watching from tablet to TV and back again, without locking the tablet into feeding the TV or vice-versa.

I'm a professional UNIX admin. I've worked extensively with both FreeBSD and Solaris for years. Most of my recent work experience has been with Solaris 10, but I've run FreeBSD at home for years.

I recently needed to stand up a new application server at home. I considered using Linux, using OpenSolaris, or using FreeBSD.

I considered Fedora because the handwriting is on the wall where I work: the company will not permit new Solaris installations, in large part because it's not clear that Sun will still be a viable concern in a year or two. The corporate direction is to move to Red Hat. However, I quickly became infuriated with the poor quality of Fedora's documentation. I couldn't find clear answers to setup questions. This wasn't a problem with either FreeBSD or OpenSolaris. This took Fedora out of the running for me.

I decided to try OpenSolaris, because I know Solaris 10 and it might be useful to have the extra practice system at home. But OpenSolaris isn't Solaris 10. It doesn't have the driver support.

What really caused me to wipe out my OpenSolaris install and go with FreeBSD, however, was learning that Sun doesn't even supply security patches for OpenSolaris. If a security issue arises, you either have to wait for the next OpenSolaris release, or go about rebuilding from source. If you want prompt security patches, you have to pay for a Sun support contract -- and pay just as much as you'd pay for the "commercially supported" Solaris 10.

This astounded me. On Solaris 10, Sun provides critical security patches free of charge. Why does the "commerical" package provide free security patches, but the "open source" package doesn't?

There are features in OpenSolaris and Solaris 10 that FreeBSD doesn't have. But, speaking as a certified Solaris admin, I have to say that FreeBSD is more supportable if you can't afford the Sun support contract.

So, I would, and did, go with FreeBSD. It works great, it's solid, it's well supported, it runs well on all sorts of hardware, and it's likely to be around for a while. If the European Union drags out the Oracle/Sun deal much longer, I don't know that Sun will be able to avoid liquidation. Even if the deal goes through, Sun has a big challenge; a lot of their best customers have pulled away because of the uncertainty -- and the decline in support quality over the past year or two. I don't think that Solaris experience means quite as much as it used to on a resume.

LIDAR requires that the officer be stationary, have their window rolled down, be parked such that they are shooting LIDAR as close to parallel with the flow of traffic as possible, and not have any weather conditions that would obstruct the laser (or make life really miserable for the officer, as the window is down). The officer has to actively aim the device at each car he wishes to clock.

On the New York State Thruway, most of the traffic enforcement still uses Ka-band radar. The radar units are permanently installed on the cars and don't require exposure to the elements. They can provide accurate readings while the car is in motion, allowing the officer to patrol while still checking speed. Many cars have dual fore-and-aft antennas so they can clock cars ahead of and behind them. They can park the car and leave the radar on, not only slowing down traffic that has radar detectors, but letting them work on other things while waiting for the radar's "too fast" alarm to go off.

I'm not surprised NYS Troopers don't use LIDAR as often -- it's much more of a hassle for them to use.

As for detecting LIDAR: If you have a dark-colored car without a lot of reflective chrome or a front license plate, and you leave your headlights on, it is possible to detect LIDAR before it locks on to you, at least some of the time. Car and Driver tested this several years ago and found that, while it's difficult to beat LIDAR, it's not impossible.

As for "instant-on" radar: Yes, it exists, but there's that convenience issue again. Rarely do I ever see officers using it on the highway. Should one wish to speed while using their radar detector, the safe thing is to only do so when there's at least a few cars visible ahead of you. That way, your detector will be set off when the officer uses their "instant-on" to clock the cars ahead of you.