I wrote all the "C" code which controlled a robotic bone lengthening device. (Read up on the ilizarov procedure.) At the most basic, it is used to make your legs or arms longer, a tiny bit per day, just over an inch per month of growth. The doctors would break the bone, after having installed an external mechanical frame holding you together. They would slowly lengthen the mechanical frame by 1mm every day. They would use wrenches and do it four times a day, 1/4mm per lengthening. Our machine would do it once per minute (growing your bone at 604 nanometers additional length per minute.) I used a table in ROM of how many pulses to do, how often. A couple of the entries were wrong and resulted in the wrong amount of bone lengthening.

The LS3 Moves So Loud, We Could Have Shot It In The Dark

I thought they weren't going to fly over Compton/Los Angeles anymore at nighttime after the Soyuz-jackings last year?

> What will it be transmuted into?

We can run out of a material even though it is still firmly trapped in Earths gravity well. For example the element Bismuth (which is only twice as common as gold abundance wise) is used in large amounts in Pepto Bismol. Once this is eaten and excreted, it really becomes unrecoverable again.

Air Force has huge departments dedicated to space.
http://www.afspc.af.mil/units/index.asp

They manage GPS satellites as well as scan the skies and catalog 10's of thousands of pieces of space debris.

> Costs them more to bill you for the text message than they likely spend delivering it.

Yes, but only if you ignore the costs of -- Cell towers. Antennas. Radios. Packet Control Units. Amplifiers. Receivers. Transcoders. Mobile Switching Centers. Private Lines over SONET rings. Fiber optics equipment. Racks of GSM base station blades. Switch software licenses and support contracts to people like Ericsson. WAP headcount licenses. Software licenses. More software licenses. And also the salaries of network engineers, cellular engineers, trunking engineers, traffic analysts, operations staff, support engineers, and some management costs in there as well.

LOFAR will find a stream of information from an extraterrestrial source. When we decode it, we'll find that it's archives of extraterrestrial warez.

Order your Microcontrollers for $3-$4 from http://www.digikey.com/

Buy an ISP programmer from Pololu for $20 http://www.pololu.com/catalog/product/1300

Download AVR Studio 4 for free from Atmel
http://www.atmel.com/dyn/products/tools_card.asp?tool_id=2725

GO

That enough of their souls are still poured into these incredible, sleek products to maintain the extremely high level of magic and wonder we've become accustomed to finding in each amazingly designed box.

At least, this is what I see working with SNMP data coming off dumps from the cellular base transceiver stations attached to our towers.

Every 15 minutes, every GSM handset measures the perceived strength of the tower signal it is using, this is reported to the tower, and we record them all. Also every 15 minutes, the strength of the handset signal, from the perspective of the tower is sampled and recorded.

These readings go into buckets, for example if a reading showed a -78 dbm signal, it goes in the -78dbm bucket. Before long, a histogram can be generated with the datain the buckets, and we can see typical distribution for receive performance - for both handsets and the tower. Different towers have very different "signatures" in this data.

You may go around sampling receive performance, (which would be interesting) but I don't think you'll be able to map how well the cellular system is receiving from you.

> a filesystem for flash devices

here we go again, unless we stop supporting flash, Apple has refused to distribute dual-boot Linux enabled iPads

...700 feet into the air

1) pirates unaffected
2) legit consumers annoyed and prevented from seeing their movie