?ew era, tfel ot thgir gnidaeR

Sorry that is 8-15 um.

Nope, the kinect uses near infrared (somewhere between 900 and 1400nm). So no body heat detection (that requires sensitivity to 8–15 m) and is fairly expensive, os I doubt it will be in a consumer product. In theory a photo made with near infrared paints should be able to fool the unit, depending whether or not it uses motion detection combined with a human movement model to actually detect a human.

I'm guessing the invocation of Godwin's law is inevitable for this article...

You're missing the point - this is to cover areas with broadband access that previously did not have access (or had really slow access because they are located so far from an exchange). This won't give you coverage in your garden (that is what WiFi is for), it is more to get a bigger internet pipe to your house so that you can get some decent speeds.

The local population probably wants to live next to a coal power plant even less. Power stations need to be built somewhere and people usually argues the NIMBY (not in my back yard) principle even though they want what the power station provides. Would you rather prefer developing countries build coal power stations? Because renewables are probably more than an order of magitude off from actually providing the type of power that a nuclear power station provides (GW vs tens of MW) and are typically unable to provide base load. I bet though, that if you poll the larger engeering populace that at least 80% of them will think that nuclear is our ONLY answer right now.

Actually, the spectrum was never intended for terrestrial use at all. Lightsquared applied for an exemption to apply the spectrum for terrestrial use, but they had to prove that it did not intefere with GPS. Most RF engineers would have told you that they where doomed from the start to fail, as the physics does not allow you to do this. All RF equipment have to contend with a thing call adjacent channel rejection - i.e. whilst tuned to its own channel a device must reject inteference from channels adjacent to its own by using a bandpass filter. Bandpass filters are not perfect (i.e. it is not a brickwall) and some interference always leaks through. The specific issue here is that the terrestrial signal would have been so large compared to the signal received from the GPS sattelite that the bandpass filters would have been unable to suppress the signal in the adjacent channel. This is akin to someone shouting in your ear, while you are trying to listing to someone whispering 20meters away.

So long as an API sticks to Init(), Get/Set/Execute/Calculate() and Deinit() it doesn't really matter, people will learn it sooner or later. What *does* matter, however, is that an API does not break "unwritten" conventions like always returning true even when the operation was unsuccessful (yes, I am looking at you Microsoft for that awful Windows Media Player COM interface - that was just evil!)

Don't forget the books. Stephen King is a mass murdered and must be stopped.

Education not just for the young ones, but cost effective continuous development for the older generation as well. Especially useful in rapidly evolving fields.

It is not the translation from lbs to kg that bothers me, it is the fact that the word tons has been used, which has several different meanings (including one in the metric world).

Five tons in this instance would be 10000 pounds? Otherwise it would be the same $%^$%^ that got you guys in trouble with the Mars Orbiter. Let's translate for the rest of the (metric) world: "...it is nearly 22,000kg heavier than the ~50,000kg GBU-43 MOAB surface bomb, sometimes called the 'mother of all bombs.' 'Our past test experience has shown that 4,400kg penetrators carrying 1100kg of high explosive are relatively ineffective against tunnels,..."

I agree, does this not rely on the developer actually specifying the contract? Also, would it not be possible to have bugs in the contract itself?

Not knowing how independant the Chinese press is from the Chinese government - has anyone verified this independantly? How about any photos (besides from the plastic model in the article)?

Did anyone else get the same hilarious Google ad with the article?:
Men- Treat Dark Circles - Combat Severe Dark Circles. New Eye Gel with Award Winning Technology. - www.manceuticals.co.uk
Black holes and concentric circles will get you there...