Reasonably priced LED light bulbs that put out enough light to be useful for room lighting are a pretty new thing. I haven't seen =$10 bulbs with lumens equivalent to 60-watt incandescents until last year, though it's possible they've been around slightly longer, and I'm still waiting to see cheap LED bulbs that are equivalent to 100 or 150-watt incandescents. And yes, CFLs have been around for a while, and have probably been cheap for 4-5 years, and most of the hard-to-reach light fixtures in my ceilings have them, and sometimes they burn out. These days, if they do, I replace them with LEDs.

That's efficiency. Energy saving really is the watts; whether the amount of light the choices put out is enough, not enough, or more than enough is a separate question. For night-lights, not much is still usually enough.

I haven't owned any of the current generation of cellphone-accessory smartwatches. The ones I have owned:

-- Casio GPS watch - It was a gift from my wife, back before GPSs had taken over the world. It was big and clunky, got me all kinds of geek cred at work, didn't work very well as a GPS but the fact that it worked at all was amazing.

-- TI EZ430-Chronos watch - programmable, using their MSP430 microprocessor set, had a reasonably flexible display. It didn't have a lot of sensors, and I didn't end up hacking it very much, but it was a lot of fun. It had a low-power radio link that let it connect to a heartbeat monitor band, so you could use it for things like watching your heart rate while jogging.

-- Watches with various other functions built in, like moon phase, tides tables for surfing, that kind of thing. One of them had a screen saver for entirely no good reason, just because it could.

In practice, I find that almost all of the time I'm either in front of a computer screen with a clock display in the corner, or in an environment with clocks around, or carrying a cellphone with a clock display on the main screen, or in an environment that's not very friendly to watches, or in a social environment where I don't really care what time the clock says it is, so I've stopped wearing watches most of the time.

When smart-watches get smart enough to be the phone instead of being a peripheral display for the phone, maybe. But is a smart-watch phone that needs a Bluetooth headset and needs reading glasses to use more convenient than a cellphone with big text that can use a wired headset? For me, it's really not.

And Iron Dome hasn't been doing anything to protect the Palestinians from missile attacks.

Mira Grant sleeps with a machete under her bed, and highly suggests you do the same.

It's not the cold that kills you - it's the cure for the common cold. And not everybody dies. Or stays dead.

I didn't express any hate for the people using the illegal explosives. As a friend of mine says, on a holiday celebrating the overthrow of a government, the question of whether your fireworks are legal or not really just shouldn't come up.

not really. The best thing that he can do is pull manufacturing from China. Seriously, at this time, Apple can build their own robotics plant here in America and bring it home.

and yet, Germany knew that we were in fact, spying on their citizens and giving German gov. information. For starters, we have stopped several AQ attacks on them because of that.
What they DID NOT know, was the spying on their gov, which I have to say was surprising.

We need to re-define patents. It should remain for hardware, but not software. Basically, we need to drop that method patent.

I will say that I have long thought that USPO should start offering vetted keys. Just as they do passports, they would be ideal for doing state IDs and vetted keys. If more govs. offered up such things, then it would make it possible for publications and other groups to require a truly vetted key.

No, he is teaching at Taiwan. There are many Chinese natives that teach at Taiwan (and elsewhere for that matter).

Actually, that is a good idea. BUT, you have to have vetted signers.

Seriously, we read many stories here in which big deals are made of them, but as soon as I check that it has lead by Chinese Academicians (even if they are now working in the USA), I discount it. WHy? Because over and over, I see fraud in the publications, and here, I notice that many of these stories are being pushed by ACs. In a nutshell, these ppl are putting together fraudulent publications (generally, leaving out the negatives that they came across), and then marketing them to make themselves look good.

Yes, some of you will scream that I am racists, and yet, over and over and over, this occurs.

One of the cool things about the Beaglebone Black and the Raspberry Pi is that they've got GPUs powerful enough to drive an HDMI display, and give you 1080p graphics if you make sure there's enough electric power and not too much interference (my RPi was a bit wonky on the last display I tried), so you can drive a decent monitor for programming or use it as a TV video player.

But if you don't need that, because you're doing X windows or just doing a bunch of ssh terminal sessions, you've got more potential choices, possibly lower power, possibly more memory. It depends a lot on what the target platform for your development is going to be, and on how much effort you plan to spend getting things set up, compared to just taking the BBB or RPi and calling it a day.