Comment machines that exhibit the agency and awareness (Score 3, Informative) 455
Wrong. We've produced "...machines that exhibit the agency and awareness of..." a worm: http://www.smithsonianmag.com/...
Wrong. We've produced "...machines that exhibit the agency and awareness of..." a worm: http://www.smithsonianmag.com/...
Perhaps. IEEE Spectrum credits Maruska, as do several other histories of the subject.
http://spectrum.ieee.org/tech-...
Maruska seems to have made the first working violet LED. Some people claim that it doesn't qualify as a blue LED, but as far as I know there's no agreed-upon hard distinction between violet and blue. Maruska developed the right materials and process to make it, even if RCA pulled the plug before he had solved all of the problems necessary for commercialization.
$49 only gets you the Edison module, which is useless by itself. You also need a base board of some kind. The Edison module with the Arduino-compatible base board shown in the photos will set you back $99. Still a pretty good price. 3x more expensive than a Raspberry Pi, but it is a lot more capable.
I'd get more excited about a 64-bit ARM embedded board, but those aren't available yet, other than a $6000 development board from ARM.
I tell them to turn to the study of mathematics, for it is only there that they might escape the lusts of the flesh. -- Thomas Mann, "The Magic Mountain"