This is what they say on the Kickstarter page:

Isn't the Smithsonian federally funded? Good question! Federal appropriations provide the foundation of the Smithsonian's operating budget and support core functions, such as building operations and maintenance, research, and safeguarding the collections. Projects like Reboot the Suit aren't covered by our federal appropriations, which means we can only undertake them if we can fund them some other way. In other words, we won't be able to do this project without the participation of Kickstarter backers.

Actually I wonder why 'piquancy' or 'pungency' (like in pepper) is not considered a sixth taste. It is sensed by a specific receptor and it is triggered by a variety of compounds: various capsainoids from peppers and compuonds in black pepper, mustard/wasabi, raw garlic, and so on.

"miniscule compared to the toxic stuff released during the generation of the extra electricity required for the incandescent bulb."

That depends on the type of exhaust scrubbers fitted to the coal power plant and the type of coal used. I'd wager that technology exists and is actually being used to make the exhaust pretty much free of toxic stuff. The sulfur is converted to gypsum (used in drywall), the ashes are an additive to concrete, etc..

What cannot be suppressed is the (nontoxic) CO2 emission. It would be good to quantify things beyond "a lot" and "much more". Electricity can be converted to electricity to electricity at 1 to 2 kWh/kg depending on who you believe (can't be bothered to find out why different values exist). Assumie a CFK lasts 3000 h (actually they should last 6x longer, but it seems to be too optimistic for many use cases) and an incandescent 1000 h. A 60 W incandescent will use 180 kWh over 3000 h, i.e. 90 to 180 kg of coal. The CO2 emission is about 3.5 times that weight.

$200 for an 80x80 FLIR camera? Which model is that? I'm looking at the FLIR selection, but the only one that comes close is an IR plugin for an iPhone, 80x60 pixels. At a 9 Hz frame rate, I don't think that sensor would be suitable for analyzing road obstacles while driving, never mind the resolution.

You don't use high-resolution cameras for this job. You use a highly sensitive normal camera and then you use the thermo camera right next to it for object detection and for gain control on the primary camera.

That would sound plausible, except that the image that they show in the video clip (0:28) is a fairly high-resolution fully thermal image without blending with a visible-light image.

It's thermal infrared cameras. The color of the clothes doesn't matter. Except maybe if they cover themselves in aluminum foil, which would appear to be very close to the temperature of the environment.

I was going to rant about how this thing is going to dazzle pedestrians, but fortunately, the video shows that it will mainly lighten up their legs. Wheelchair riders beware, though.

Anyway, the system as described uses thermal IR cameras. I'd say that technology is way too expensive even for high end cars. Thermographic cameras capable of around 200x150 pixels are commercially available for around 5 kEUR and I suspect that that resolution is still too low to recognize a pedestrian at 50 m distance and at the same time have a reasonably wide field of view. You can get 80x80-resolution systems for around 1 kEUR, but those will definitely be useless for the present purpose.

There's a big difference between how you treat your desktops and your servers.

I wanted a change of pace and moved from embedded stuff on Linux to iOS development. So my desktop is basically always the latest OS X version.

I still have Linux servers running for OwnCloud and my personal website, and that's all Debian Stable. But given that it's Stable, I always update to the latest.

"no real attempt to move the launch platform up to 80,000 feet or so using gas balloon technology. I would have thought this would be feasible, and could result in a substantial fuel saving."

The fuel cost of a launch to low orbits is not for the altitude, but for gaining enough speed to stay in orbit, i.e. about 8 km/s. The gravitational energy becomes significant if you need altitudes comparable to the earth radius (6400 km).

Amen. I've been visiting this site around user ID 110.000 or so, and I've actually never experienced a full blackout. Static version every now and then, that's all.

Couldn't they have come up with some ridging or some pattern of grooves?

I bet some stupid manipulative marketing asshole/bitch just made that up.

It tried to RTFA, but it was in Japanese! I thought Japanese didn't have a word for "no":

Japanese also lacks words for yes and no. The words "hai" and "iie" are mistaken by English speakers for equivalents to yes and no, but they actually signify agreement or disagreement with the proposition put by the question: "That's right." or "That's not right.

Our first flight didn't end well due to another reason. The next balloon flight, the electronics engineer just removed enough insulation to keep it cosy at the height where the balloon would mostly stay. He then added a small additional battery pack connected to a heating element. A colleague coded a PID algorithm to keep the big pack warm at the start of the flight.

I've seen this up close. I'm a software engineer and I've worked for a scientific institute in the past. One of the project involved putting a camera on a helium-filled balloon. The electronics and PC equipment (a PC104-sized Linux box) were powered from a big pack of lithium batteries.

The problem is basically that lithium batteries perform best in a certain temperature range, say from 10 to 25 degrees Celsius (50 to 65 F). But that's rather difficult.When you lift off, it might be cold and you want the batteries to have a decent temperature. Otherwise they can't deliver enough power. So you insulate them and they stay warm by themselves, because when you draw power, they get warm.

But then the higher you lift off into the air, the thinner the air gets. Thus convection will be less and less. You can shed heat via radiation (into the infrared spectrum) but that's only half of the heat or so. And then the insulation can overheat the battery packs.

There's all sorts of tricks, for example copper-strapping the packs to a large piece of black metal so you increase the heat radiation. But if you automate that (or the insulation), you also get additional possible failures.

What it comes down to, is some calculation but also some experience.

studying an encryption scheme that is widely considered completely and irreparably broken?

All known issues with RC4 have to do with statistical biases in the first bytes of the key stream, in particular the first 256 bytes (this paper also mentions a significant bias at byte 258). As far as we know, all issues with RC4 are avoided in protocols that simply discard the first kilobyte of key stream before starting to apply the key stream on the plaintext. SSH does this (discarding the first 1.5 kiB IIRC). For WPA I can imagine that this workaround would have an unacceptable performance penalty on small data packets. For some reason, this approach was never implemented for TLS/HTTPS or WPA.

So why would one be interested in RC4? It's significantly faster than AES when run on processors that do not have hardware AES support. If I use scp and rsync-over-ssh to copy files to devices like a Raspberry Pi or my home server which runs on a low-power VIA processor, it's a big difference (aes versus arcfour), something like 4 MB/s versus 8 MB/s. Here are some benchmarks: openSSH cipher benchmarks.

I keep my eyes open for papers like this, in particular I check whether they make statements on weaknesses after the first kilobyte of key stream.