Ha, thanks, awesome insight coming from "Ungrounded Lightning"!

On some of the systems we put a neutral current eliminator to try to "fix" the 60Hz buzz coming off of improperly grounded computers. I think it was overkill for what we were doing, because by that point we had given up trying to use internal audio cards for some of our rackmount computers and were using SoundBlaster Live! USB audio dongles where we couldn't use digital audio, which made most of our system noise problems go away. But it would be nice to have an affordable NCE for some applications, like being able to run amplified speakers from my phone or laptop while they're charging.

In my car I get alternator noise if I try to charge my phone while it's playing music to the aux input. I can make it go away by using a Qi wireless charger instead of plugging in the USB directly... with the added bonus that I'm not fiddling with trying to plug my phone in while I'm driving. Another way to make the alternator noise go away is paradoxically plugging an inverter into the accessory port and using a standard 120V AC wall wart USB charger with the phone. (shrug). Next car will probably have a bluetooth head unit, which I'm sure brings on another set of annoyances.

Heh, I used to do multi-conference room / theater AV integration for large defense companies. The number 1 problem was always audio.

1. Test. Test test test. You can get almost any cheap thing working well if you bother to test and tune everything BEFORE the meeting. The most expensive thing can fail for silly reasons if you don't bother to test everything BEFORE the meeting (usually because some executive schlupp dials into both the audio bridge and VTC MCU at the last minute). Then freeze the configuration. Yeah, good luck freezing the configuration with engineers and tinkerers running around.

2. POTS sucks. Maybe some telephony devices are able to negotiate better than 8kHz 8-bit audio sampling if their codecs match up, but you're better off going with something with VTC-quality audio using H323. Most VoIP teleconferencing lines don't bother trying to beat POTS audio quality. So even if you have a nice Polycom phone that does good AEC and NC, you're still going to strain to hear what's going on.

3. Speakerphones suck. Most of them don't bother doing good AEC and NC. Get a good bluetooth or USB headset. Gaming teamspeak headsets are relatively cheap. As long as it's digital, so they don't introduce any analog amp noise from the system.

4. PC/laptop microphones suck. I don't know why no one bothers to test them to the same level as your average cheap dumbphone speakerphone. They pick up all kinds of system electrical noise, and rely on software to do any AEC or NC, which adds more latency. About a quarter of the people in our daily standup have laptop microphone fails on Google Hangouts or Skype each day. Most end up dialing back in from their smartphone when that happens.

Anyway, all that said, our current standup room setup consists of a Google Hangouts room on a permanently-fixed Mac mini with a $50 "Blue Snowball USB Condenser Microphone" and Logitech USB camera attached to it (the USB audio coming in from the Logitech camera was deemed insufficient, even for the small room we had it in.). For remote participants, I've had good experiences with extended use of the $200+ Jabra PRO 9470 Mono Wireless Headset, which is switchable between PC and POTS/VoIP phone use, but a simpler/cheaper bluetooth headset would probably work just as well paired with smartphone/PC.

And set up an echo server for everyone to test their setups. https://support.google.com/cha... . Or at least go to http://www.onlinemictest.com/ or something. Did I mention you should test?

I'm also looking forward to someday playing with Amazon's Echo thingy someday, since for $200 it seems to have a lot of the technical audio features of more expensive audio conferencing systems:
http://www.amazon.com/oc/echo/
assuming it will be able to act as a simple bluetooth speakerphone instead of only for all of the other AI junk they're cramming into it.

Oh, looks like I skimmed some other summary of this WSJ article from 3/1 that made it sound more definite
http://www.wsj.com/articles/hi...

Yes, this. Actually, we already have that right now. Minecraft for XBox is already full of licensed DLC for XBox, Dr. Who, etc.
http://www.cinemablend.com/gam...

Minecraft as a cash cow is complete, there's no need to do any more development. It's all business dealings from here on out.

Some Slashdotter put it best a few months back... "Microsoft didn't buy a game, they bought a generation"

Oh, she just uses her own domain, which someone registered for her the week before she was sworn in as Sec of State. clintonemail.com

whois clintonemail.com | grep "Registrant Name"
Registrant Name: PERFECT PRIVACY, LLC

Hey, LOOK everybody, Clinton supports PRIVACY rights from the prying eyes of the NSA!

nmap clintonemail.com

Starting Nmap 6.47 ( http://nmap.org/ ) at 2015-03-03 07:50 PST
Nmap scan report for clintonemail.com (208.91.197.27)
Host is up (0.083s latency).
Not shown: 996 filtered ports
PORT STATE SERVICE
53/tcp open domain
80/tcp open http
554/tcp open rtsp
7070/tcp open realserver
... and ... transparency through old video streaming technology.

curl -vi clintonemail.com ... says it's an apache server, so there's that.

So you're saying Clinton should maybe be fined for something other than violating recordkeeping policy?

(from the Valerie Plame wikipedia article)

Just out of curiosity, what email systems does she use? Hopefully not Yahoo mail, that was the one that the Alaska governess had gotten hacked with, right?

I assume her official US government email would have been similar to the system I used while working for a DoD contractor: Outlook / Exchange, where you had to use your smartcard + PIN to encrypt or at least digitally sign every email sent, and there was a 50MB limit on your server-side inbox, 2MB limit on attachments, and no zip files or Office documents or anything else the virus scanner couldn't recognize. And accidentally hitting Ctrl-Enter-Enter would automagically send your mail off prematurely unless you were permitted to change that option.

Plus, they've known that Clinton's been doing this since the Benghazi investigation, when Clinton staffers rifled through those personal email accounts to provide 50,000 messages for the investigation team. That this issue makes headline news now, the day after she officially announces her presidential election campaign, is pure politics to control the narrative.

Yeah, not really possible to put politics aside for the moment, since that's exactly what this is.

I would put down Java as a good language for learning how to do OOP stuff in the most verbose way possible. But at least it works as documented, and is well-documented. I find myself spending less time fighting the compiler and obscure memory allocation problems, and more time fighting the shear volume of code. That isn't necessarily a bad thing.

Otherwise, I think I'd have more fun doing something in Python, with some modules implemented in C++ to optimize the performance-critical parts.

In Japan I heard you could pay for things all day wearing nothing but a cellphone.

Also kinda suspicious about how big the Disney MagicBand + Apple Pay announcement last year was, considering you could already do do pretty much the same thing at any sizable Korean sauna with your locker key wristband.

The U.S. doesn't even really have to wait to see if any particular technology system will "win". It's all just business dealings from here on out.

It's all theory :P And even then the 100Mbps ethernet is assumed to be the main bottleneck.

Experiment with the oDroid-c1 , which is also $35 but packs a 1000TX ethernet port, and also has faster onboard eMMC flash options.
http://www.unhappyghost.com/20...

Oh, I'm not trying to blame anything on the U.S. ... I love this country, and just enjoy taking notes on how it works in case I ever find myself in charge of a fantasy island somewhere.

Yeah, the European imperialists have a long history of causing turmoil by running in and carving arbitrary boundaries, like in Africa. http://peterslarson.com/2011/0...

Keeping your opponents locked in regional wars is a great way to be left alone so you can get ahead in Civilization. I'm kinda surprised they haven't added those kinds of territorial boundaries meddling to the gameplay yet, though I guess gifting weapons to the "independent" NPC city-states in Civ V so they can grief your enemies probably does the job just fine.