Dear Slashdot, this has been known for almost 200 years.

And I wouldn't be surprised if Newton also knew this 350 years go but forgot to write it down.

The HAT sounds very much like it would become very, very useful. Automatically installed avanced I/O cards under Linux.

Easier than Groove or similar under Arduino.

I can't complain.

(I currently use two Raspberry - one Razberry and one Raspbmc. One for controlling LED strips would be great.)

Gnome3, systemd, wayland, pulseaudio etc might (or might not) be good ideas. But they should probably not be introduced before they are completely bug-free -- or at least more bug-free then the thing they will replace. (And they should be better designed than the thing they are trying to replace.)

This has not always been the case. Actually, this has rarely been the case. They have been introduced as the new hip thing despite bugs and design flaws.

And considering that the *ix world is full of people who don't like change - it's one of the main selling points - changing things because it's hip, doesn't solve the problem, introduces new bugs and introduces the well known problem of update-your-legacy-system-or-don't-update-your-machine-ever-again doesn't really sit well with everyone.

I want my smart home to be clever.

For instance, I have my tea kettle turn on when I usually get up (different depending if it's a workday or not). It also turns on when I approach home from leaving it a longer time. Of course it's still stupid and all that's controlled (and measured) is the power, so I still have to fill it with water and turn off the relay. But the rest is scripted using razberry, linux and android stuff.

I have lights coming on on motion sensors. Which lights turn on depends on the ambient light level (they don't turn on if the room is in bright sunlight). They don't turn off if I just pushed the button to keep them off, and they don't turn off quickly if I used the button to turn them on (60 minutes timeout before resuming normality).

I have a radiator maintaining the bedroom temperature within ±0.1C. It was quite tricky to get that slow feedback system to work properly, but fun. Which temperature is the goal temperature vary over the day and my sleep cycle.

I have a XMBC, a receiver and a TV where the two later ones are turned on and off depending on the screensaver state of the XMBC. The subwoofer/bass level is lowered on a timer to not to disturb neighbours. I will hook that into the lighting as well, but haven't done that yet.

I wanted to install a door and motion sensor so the system would know when noone was home, but the daft sensor from Philio didn't work with neither the razberry nor the aeon labs stick. That's for some other day.

What I mainly want from a smart home is
1. scriptability (duh)
2. security. Neither z-wave nor tellstick/nexa is secure. Anyone could easily control or read anything. A little trickier with z-wave, but not very.
3. privacy. I don't do "live" or "net" stuff. My stuff stays here.
4. expandability. I want everything to be able to trigger everything. The location of my phone should be able to be scripted to trigger the kettle. The temperature in the living room can alter the state of the rice cooker. The moisture level of my strawberry plant can trigger a warning SMS. The motion detector in the kitchen can raise the bar for when the smoke detector in the kitchen goes off. But everything would need to talk, and they should talk in all ways they can talk.

5. reliability. Things that need to work should work without the network. The smoke detector settings could be altered from the network, but if the network isn't there it still needs to go off. Timer-relays should still trigger on the time set by the network. Thermostats should still trigger on the temperature set by the network. And above all, things shouldn't randomly hang and not do what they are supposed to do. (I haven't had a single digital thing that hasn't hanged at some point. That include frost guard thermostats and timers. Every single piece of z-wave equipment has hanged at some point. Not smart.)

How environmental it is is up to the user.

I miss jobs all the time because of "IT Recruitment Firm" - I don't have a degree, I never finished my MSc. I do any programming language with 30+ years of experience or programming (started at 9) and I'm focused on C - I've done a lot of embedded. I can learn any new language and/or library and/or framework (at least if it's not completely stupid) in a few weeks.

I never have the right things on my resume. The people with the correct courses on their CV that doesn't know the difference between recursive and JIT-compiler gets the job.

So far I've only been getting jobs by contacts in the companies pushing from the other direction. Good, well-paying jobs where everyone is happy - but not and never through "IT Recruitment Firm".

The "IT recruitment firm" usually really have no clue whatsoever. My recommendation for big companies is not to use them, it's better to take a few random CVs from the pile and let your devs interview them.

The moon wasn't worth going for. We don't really need to put satellites in space. Books gives the wrong ideas and kill people. How did the discovery of the fire help us closer to mars? That's completely the wrong thing, and so many people have died in fires.

You can't say that whatever virgin galactic is developing isn't bringing us closer to space, or making civilization a little bit better. Obviously their goal is to make space flight cheap enough for space tourists to use. How can you think that cheap space flight wouldn't have side effects for space flight in general?

Besides, it's the same thing that Orbital and SpaceX is trying to achieve - cheap space flight. Although they try to go for "commercial" level of cheap, not "tourism" level of cheap.

And the side effects might not be Mars. It might be a new material for clothes. Or a new type of energy storage for your car. It's not that easy to predict all the useful things you get from pouring down billions into research to solve really strange problems.

I don't mind if you still want to live in a perfect version of the 50s and not bring civilization forward from that point. But please stop being loud about it. Just stay in your gated community and stop using the internet, for the sake of the rest of us.

Can we have some crash test dummies reflecting taller people too? *NCAP tests with 180cm/6' dolls (I asked them).
I want to know which cars will kill me because the ceiling is too low for a 6'4" (193cm).

Is this an attempt from mathematicians to try to tell engineers they have been doing it wrong?

This seems to be a very easy conclusion if you don't have to think of all the other things you need to think of when you do things in the real world.

And I can't see any problems solved with the conclusion of this paper.

I'm guessing they blasted the screens with several kW in the spectrum that is around radar and wi-fi, and they blanked out?

It's probably a problem being directly in front of a radar transmitter, but wifi is just in the right spectrum, much much weaker...

If you fixed the laws instead, so it would be a different level for crimes on the internet, there wouldn't be many people breaking the law. Make it legal to download and share intellectual property between individuals. No problem, no lawbreakers that you need to check up on.

It's like introducing a law that you can't go out between 12:00 and 12:01 every day and then say that you need to tighten down the streets with gates and armed guards, and have automatic locks on all doors that doesn't open outwards starting at 11:30, to protect people from breaking the laws.

Sadly, England might not be far from introducing license-only websites. (Scotland, why didn't you run while there were time?)

So they couldn't do this from satellite fotos from Google or Bing? Or just normal, you know, the photos taken anyway from flights for planning?
What is the benefit of drones, better pictures of the topless people at the pools? (Pay your taxes, or our drone photos will hit the internet!)

It's not FIXED in countless of devices (phones, modems, routers) that will not receive an update.

How do android/ios run DHCP?

How do cheap all-in-one ADSL modems run DHCP?

I think that will tell us how bad this is. That's where the worms will live.

Are you sure the /. system have a good reputation system? It seems to me it's really hard to come in as a new user and get good enough reputation to actually be listened to these days. Stack Overflow seems to have these problems too. Early adopter with good reputation, on the other hand, will not have any problems.

Two restaurants I visited in Berlin did not have a Tripadvisor post. When I asked about this, they asked to please not add them to Tripadvisor because of extortion.

This is why we can't have nice things.