I agree with you. It is still possible to get a lot of the 80's feel by playing with Arduinos and Raspberry Pi's. I will definietly look at the mbed thing.
A few eeks ago I helped my dad to keep an old SCO Unix program running that he has been using for 20 years. He could not us the terminal anymore because he could not get floppy disks to boot DOS for his special terminal program. So we looked into using a RaspPi with ckermit.

Any suggestions on that FPGA board?

Bender runs on 6502? THAT explains a lot!

Karlsruhe Institute of Technology. KIT?

There are 20 men for each girl at that place. Stay away :) That said, I know a woman who studied there.

Let's clarify something technical here.

Thermonuclear refers to the use of fusion to gain more energy. It can be used for two things:

a) To make a really humongous bomb. High-yield more than 5MT.
b) To boost a pure fission bomb to get the same amount of energy in a smaller package.

Almost all modern nuclear weapons are of the b) sort. They are all thermonuclear but they are small. A pure fission device (Little boy, for instance) is physically large for the boom you get.

That said, most of the weapons do not use thermonuclear energy as a main source. The thermonuclear reaction produces copious neutron which boosts the fission part. The weapon is still primary a boosted fission device.

Type (a) high-yield weapons are scarce things. The US, for one, does not have any, the Russians not many and they have a specific bunker-busting role. They are also physically large devices and hard to steal.

(b) type weapons are much more common. This is the threat, but they are still thermonuclear.

If the Iranians get one, I would be freaked because then the Saudis will buy a few from Pakistan.

When it comes to fanaticism the Persians are not even close to the Saudis. I would be freaked if they get a bomb.

Uhm, the US is a BIG country. The Iranians are probably capable of building maybe a 150-200kt device, if that. An EMP pulse would take out the power in mid-sized city for a few weeks at most. It would also cause major damage on the ground.

90% of the US population would not die from starvation. Maybe 0.1% would die from the blast itself.

Even if they had a 50's style high-yield multi-megaton thermonuclear device they could not make 90% of the US population starve.

Even the USSR at its high point would not have been able to kill 90% of the US population with massive missile strike.

Of course, after the Iranians made their point and killed 0.1% of US citizens they would face the music.

You really think that the Israelis are so stupid as to get the US to engage in a proxy war for them so that they can claim Arab land?
Really?

I disagree with Israelis and think the US should make peace with Persian ASAP, but the Israelis are acting out of fear. They live in a rough neighbourhood.

Suppose all guns came without safety catches. I now go and blame this technical oversight for the increase in people with blown-off heads.

You now claim that blaming the safety-catch-less badly designed guns for the casualties is asinine.

> It gets the job done quickly and easily,

So does a gun without a safety catch.

Uhuh

CSV is for p*ssies. Postgres can store BLOBs directly, right? All you need is a table with an integer id and a blob.

Hah. Slashdot breaks too! It is the Icelandic 'thorn' character http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T...

I once had a small Notes web thing running for a bunch of people in Scandinavia. The thing crashed every time when someone from Iceland worked with it. Ruend out that the icelandic character is not in some middle european character set (this was before UTF-8) and wasted Notes every time. That was a total bastard of a problem to find.

Once I had a fan short on a graphics card and the currency spike burnt a hole down the power wire and melted a hole into the PCI Express socket. Mobo was whacked, Ggraphics card was fine.

Shame, cause the Mobo was less than a week old. And the morons refused to replace it.

All successful 'open' and 'free' and 'democratic' systems (not just software) are run by a small dedicated old boys club.

Firewire, at least, was because of a huge user-base of FireWire video cameras and devices.

There was one model of MacBook where they took FW out, and because of user complaints it was back in the next generation.