I this on Facebook, and I can NOT confirm these claims. Nothing prevents me from setting the Search result privacy setting to "everyone" while setting my "About Me" privacy setting to "Friends Only", for example

Printers and scanners are excellent sources of scavenged parts for robot projects. They contain motors, stepper-motors, pulleys, belts, gears and all sorts of other useful bits.

The couple of times I looked into Gears, the main feature touted by Google was the ability to use your web apps when you're not connected to the internet. This was reason enough for me not to spend a lot of energy on Gears, as in practice, in this day and age, I never find a computer that is NOT connected to the internet.

So in short, I've never had a need for Gears.

Good point.

Even worse, contacts do not remain at the same spot on the retina. They move about a little bit with each eye-movement and blink. This is ok for a simple lens as long as the actual pupil remains fully covered, but for a screen it would be catastrophic. Imagine your monitor slamming down when you blink, and then slowly work its way back up (which is what a contact does).

I'm glad I'm not the only one wondering about this

Can anyone shed some light on how the optics of a contact-lens display would work? After all, when all is said and done, this is going to be a display that is not simply "close" to your eye, but ON TOP of it, and I don't know about others, but my eyes are unable to focus on anything closer than 5 cm (2") or so.

There are mirror/lens systems in VR-helmets and those fancy spectacle-like, wearable displays that create a virtual display some distance away from the viewer, but I don't see how that could be replicated in a contact lens.

It's slow, but bearable, and unlike your EPIA 5000 it's i686.

Yeah, the CPU is the reason I want to switch to a Jetway or Intel Atom board. The 5000 suffices for what it currently does, but _everything_ is CPU-bound. Now that I'm thinking of also running Asterisk on my home-server, it's really becoming a problem.

Still, if low power-usage is your overriding consideration, and you can live with some limitations on what you can run, the EPIA 5000 is a winner.

Second that. My home server runs FreeNAS on an EPIA 5000. Including a gigabit ethernet card, 4-port SATA card and four 1 TB drives, this system draws about 35 watts. When the drives spin down, power usage drops to
One downside is that the EPIA 5000 is too light-weight to do software RAID (even JBOD), which I found out the hard way (by losing data!), so I am now running the HD's as plain, separate partitions.

This is very much like the FEI Phenom microscope, which my company wrote the software for. The Phenom has been on the market for several years already. It's cheaper too, if I'm not mistaken.

It's of course a myth that products today are specifically engineered to fail right after the warranty expires. In this particular case, the more likely explanation is that the Russians simply accept a larger risk-factor than the other partners. Due to the politics involved, organizations like NASA and ESA are simply not allowed to fail, and so they will rather scuttle a module than squeeze the longest life possible out of it.

That, and the fact that NASA and ESA simply don't have the funds available to continue operating the ISS after 2015 or so.

This would be interesting for the treatment of tumors as well. A number of low-power X-ray laser beams converging on a tumor would create a very small, and precisely controllable, spot of high-intensity x-ray radiation.

While this is the first "hard" X-Ray laser, there have been lasers producing (softer) x-rays far longer.

When I was in college studying physics, we went on a field-trip to the FOM institute near Utrecht, the Netherlands. Even back then, they had a FEL operational that they told could produce coherent light in a large range of wavelengths. If I remember correctly, this range extended into the soft x-ray range.

The first office of my startup was in a shed in the back yard of a house owned by a former hippie in Berkeley, CA. It got extremely hot in there, but what made it worth mentioning here was that the land-lady was a little wacky.

At one point, we heard horrible screams coming from the house. Upon rushing in, we found the land-lady completely unharmed but with a self-help "screaming therapy" manual.

Later, a wasp-nest appeared under the roof of the patio, which we had to pass to reach the bathroom. When we asked the land-lady to remove it, she told us she couldn't until she had consulted her "healer", who was on vacation and wouldn't be back for another two weeks. The healer eventually advised the use of fly-paper.

CFL's are pretty much obsolete on arrival. At least here in the Netherlands, shelf-space is already shifting from CFL's to LED light-bulbs for the lower wattage models (Brighter bulbs are expected by the end of this year). LED bulbs consume even less power than CFL's: Most models are in the 1, 2 or 3 watt range (equivalent to 20-40 watt incandescent bulbs).

>Now we just need to work out a way to remotely
>ask a computer if the printer cable is properly
>plugged in

Or the power cable, but that might be more problematic.