Not sure what happened: MÃf¼nich should be Munich (left out the special character, maybe Slashdot has a problem with UTF8 :) ).

Actually, the only real problem was a replacement for Exchange and Outlook, and the new release of Kolab combined with Kontact seems to cover this pretty well (I wish there was a version of Kontact for OSX, seems to be an abandoned project).

As for which desktop, well, *there* I can see some challenges. 2 years ago I would have said Ubuntu, but they screwed up badly so I think Linux Mint may be worth a shot. The fun bit is that Microsoft has just set a development budget: as long as they stay under 43 Million they make a profit.

And with 43 Million even *I* can get a decent platform out. They've shown it in Münich and (less well known) in the Extremadura region of Spain. As a matter of fact, knowing what I know of that project, that project would be the best place to start, because it goes beyond school and enterprise straight into governance.

Of those 100 travelers in a busy public space, about 8 are farting at any given moment.

Finally, the smoking bans make sense ..

Actually, you're right. Shows you how long ago it was since I looked at this.

I can recall that it took a lot of careful work for the guys who built this stuff to get it right so they didn't get too much reflection. I was only a curious observer (I know the general principles) - I designed studios. My main worry was to make sure that the earthing was 100% correct or none of it would work - the mast was less than 50 meters away.

Come to think of it, given how much noise everyone now makes about mobile phone masts we must have been almost glowing in the dark - we were so close to the thing..

When I started working with LEDs they just introduced the LM3909 oscillator - it allowed an LED (only red in those days) to blink for an entire year on a single D cell.

What keeps amazing me about LEDs is just how little energy they need to start lighting up. I'm not really into electronics anymore (was only tinkering with it since I was 11), but I recall that by using a FET for constant current meant you could be pretty flexible about the supply voltage (within limits, of course, the dissipation has to go somewhere), and by researching what it was (been a while) I came across other interesting ideas.

As a single, simple component, I find LEDs are about the most interesting ones to experiment with (and LDRs, and NTCs, and .. :) ). They are nice to introduce children to electronics because they instantly do something visible..

There is a trick to using high power transmittors, it's called a low pass filter.

You will *always* have harmonics, and they can screw up lots of things. I had friends at the local airport where I lived, so I know just how dangerous a pirate radio station could be and some of the ones we had in our area weren't happy with 6W, they pushed out 400W over 4 aerials..

Exactly my opinion. They have had DECADES to get 2D the way it is now, with screenwriters, actors, directors, cameramen - just everyone, really - familiar with how a scene made it into a movie. In contrast, 3D has only been with us a couple of years, it's simply too new to be used effectively so it tends to sway between accidentally good use and overkill to show off 3D.

It's actually identical to when stereo was introduced to the music scene. The first few recordings had no sound stage, they had a LEFT and a RIGHT (an example is how "Play that funky music" starts, by Wild Cherry). It took years before we moved to a soundscape where instruments and singers were more distributed. I see 3D follow more or less the same path.

Incidentally, what amuses me is that everyone overlooks the biggest change to film theaters since the introduction of sound to movies, which was driven by 3D but had been brewing for a loooong time: moving to electronic film projection. When you watch a 3D movie, you're actually looking at the output of what you could call a massive LightPro, hooked up to a fat hard disk. There has never been less of a technical reason not to launch a movie in many countries at once..

To me, that was a bigger revolution than moving to 3D because that has been tried so often in the past that I thought they'd given up on it..

At last, a screen wide enough to give Windows 8 users enough delay to successfully play pong..

Hmm, what makes you so confident you will even get on a plane with something like that?

I had to abandon a perfectly functional Samsonite briefcase for travel because it had a digital lock - it was guaranteed to get me selected for screening because it had batteries and electronics.

It was a shame, because that lock was so good it managed to withstand an entire weekend of London's hacker weekend "Access All Areas" a good decade ago (mainly because the person who patiently tried entering "0000" to "9999" based his attempts on a flawed assumption, but I digress) despite it having a very basic flaw..

the laptop battery goes critical on bootup

Nah. Dell tried that already..

.. once they work out that they can open the loos of the opposite sex.

You'll never see a more popular game of swap-the-tag then, that is, if they are the normal kind of teenager I know.

A tag can have benefits, but this is plain vanilla tracking. Expect the sales of foil packed crisps to go through the roof there, because I'd wrap the tag as soon as I was past a door. (and fire regulations say you cannot bar an exit).

There is a very important issue at stake here: transparency.

The ability to breach your privacy is a privilege granted to law enforcement for the purpose of fighting crime, but it is a privilege. The use of that privilege has to have just cause, which is what the whole warrant system is supposed to check.

The UK already has a problem with warrantless intercept based on a combination of RIPA 2000 and the magic word "terrorist", and from what I hear it is abused with gay abandon. Don't go there..

The development I am looking at is about 20 years old, but suffered a severe setback exactly because some idiots got their hands on a couple of amazing results and immediately started flogging it as a cure all. Naturally, it didn't take long for those to be discredited, but it took down the technique's credibility with it.

This is why I won't go public until I can ensure I have control over it - especially because of the benefit to children it is too important to allow such a screwup to happen again. It is indeed a provably neurological problem - that is indeed also what the solution addresses.

As for evidence - after almost a year worth of research and talking to the foremost experts in my country I decided I could risk a low impact test. There was a reason I started this research - and that reason benefitted in a fairly spectacular way.

This was not unexpected as a number of double blind tests had already shown the potential, but there are factors which inhibit this working for everyone - about 30% of people with ADHD are not sensitive to the approach. The effectiveness goes down with age, for example, but there are more factors and the diagnostic process must be improved and simplified first.

However, I wouldn't be still working on this if I hadn't seen the results with my own eyes. It's rather cool to be able to help someone against all odds..

I actually worked on some of this myself.

There are other ways to address ADHD that do not lead to a life long dependency on speed, sorry, Ritalin and that resolve the issue permanently . If I had any money right now I'd set it up as an organisation, as it also helps with those so-called "difficult" kids who are basically undiagnosed and get kicked into a corner - this can be done at a sensible price but still make good money.

The problem is that it takes someone with cojones to fund it, because despite being based on solid research you'll still have a fight on your hands as the revenue from Ritalin is MASSIVE and pharma is not going to take it lying down that you nuke 70% of their income - and they fight *dirty*.