The report I read was that the neural net which distinguishes phonemes is trained up to the age of around 10-14.

Out of the 110 (approx) (IIRC) human phonemes, most languages use no more than 85 (approx) (IIRC), sometimes far fewer.

The classic Japanese/English "L"/"R" problem is an symptom of this, where for a Japanese person who hasn't been exposed to the "L" sound regularly at a young age, it is mapped to an "R" sound.

Note also, that the single "R" sounds that the Japanese-language person is making instead of "L" and "R" may not be the "R" sounds that the English-language person is hearing. Different "L" and "R" sounds may spoken by Japanese-language person, but the English-language person may only hear them as a single "R" sound. Since there's no common frame of reference, the phoneme corruption could be happening in either or both directions for any phoneme mapping.

I recall reading somewhere else that the French language has three different sounds which map to the English "R" sound. That's my excuse for scraping high-school French, anyway.

There are people who are exceptions to the rule, of course, and there's also the possibility of learning to speak a language correctly by an external feedback loop. All you need is to make different sounds until a person who can hear the difference confirms when the sound is correct, and use that mouth/larynx shape when appropriate. Easy!

Forget flying, these ones worked out how to weave a net.

http://www.ozanimals.com/Spider/Net-casting-Spider/Deinopis/subrufa.html

Here's a video: http://izismile.com/2012/08/01/nature_why_you_so_scary_netcasting_spider.html

My parents have them in the plants around their house, and on the balcony.

eBay?

The intent may be to introduce a delay in the other consoles' UI responses.

When a non-tech user buys a competing console in a year or so, and it's easier for them to daisy-chain it through the xbox than hunt around behind the TV, it may be enough that they tend to play the xbox more than the new console because it's more responsive and gives a better gameplay experience.

Too paranoid? Check out the cryptographically signed charging cables from Apple, and then try to persuade me otherwise with a straight face. <sardonic grin>

The head would probably be a better grip, so the exit would naturally be the ... other end.

Worried about exposed sshd? Install pam-abl and watch the brute force attackers waste their time. With my config, three failures from any IP address in an hour (or 6 per day) and that IP is locked out for a week through PAM. They can still try, of course, but even if they somehow guess the correct password, it must be in their first three guesses each week.

There's no indication to the attacker that pam-abl is there, and there's very little chance of a DOS attack against legitimate logins.

Oh, and you've denied root logins from the internet, haven't you?

Warning: Source tarball, but if I debian-ized it, then anyone can.

and a few other species

Best Typo Ever!

I was allowed to order (and pay for) mine in June, after the initial bait-and-switch and then a shipping hike of more than the cost of the board itself. I finally got an order number in the low 80 thousands with a nine week shipping estimate.

Still no shipping notification, and no more updates on where they're up to in the list.

Yet, the people claiming to be in charge of this train wreck are giving boards away as prizes. Unbelievable.

A maximum of 12fps is not video speed.

I wonder if all the options of all the extensions will be part of the spec, or is this another embrace, extend, extinguish?

To be fair, they state that they've changed their opinion on the repairability, and why, in the actual teardown:

Repair score: 2 out of 10

While the new iPad's design is essentially the same as the iPad 2, which we gave a repairability score of 4, we've learned a lot about the design since then. We've spent the last year trying to repair the iPad 2 with mixed success. We are awarding the new iPad an abysmal 2 out of 10, and retroactively dropping the repairability score of the iPad 2 to a 2 as well. The adhesive on the front is extremely difficult to remove without damaging the glass, making repair and end-of-life recycling very difficult.

That said, we were able to disassemble this iPad without breaking the glass - something that we did not accomplish with our iPad 2 teardown. A year of practice has made us proficient, but schools deploying the iPad for their students are going to be in for a lot of repair technician training.

The iPad is repairable, just extremely difficult. We've written a repair manual for the iPad 2 here, and repairing the new iPad will be very similar.

I can confirm this. I bought a secondhand 2004 Commodore VZ a few years ago and tested it on both regular petrol and e85. The economy was absolutely horrible on e85 - 15% to 20% worse with only a 1.5% price saving.

The real surprise was when the engine started running rough and fuel economy dropped a further 30%.It turned out that the deposits on the fuel lines (aka varnish) had been partially dissolved and flakes and chunks had started breaking loose, blocking several injectors. That wouldn't have been too bad, but it took some time to track down the actual fault(electrical? manifold? ECU? plugs? coils?) and a couple of the injectors were blocked open, with fuel making it's way through the engine unburnt and destroying the oxygen sensors. In the end it cost over $2k to find and fix it, including labor and parts.

With the tiny price differential between regular unleaded and e85 and my rate of use, it would take roughly 1000 years to make back the cost saving of the fuel for the repair bill, and I'd still have worse economy and no horsepower.

Not the same spec.
When it was first announced, I was delighted. The detachable keyboard made it the perfect combination of tablet and netbook for me.
When it went on sale, there was no mention of it's mobile capabilities. Dual band, quad band, locked? No problem I thought, I'll go down to the local JB store and have a fondle, the spec will be on the box.
No, it wasn't. This wonderful device, thoughtfully designed to fit ALL my needs is WiFi only.
So, after I confirmed there was no 3G model coming, I bought a Xoom, and I've been perfectly happy with it.

Yes, I was running ./crayon in the correct directory. The issue is that they included several libraries in the lib32 directory but relied on most of the libraries being loaded from the host system. Run "ldd crayon" and "ldd launcher" to see that.

Unfortunately, they only included *some* of the libraries. For the most part it's not a problem, as things like libm and libcurl are fairly standalone. When they included Qt libraries, however, they didn't include *all* the Qt libraries, and the ones they included have a different version to the ones in most other systems, including mine. Qt is smart enough to detect this and complain because it's likely that the two libraries will be slightly incompatible.

This problem is due to the developer making assumptions about the target host system or not doing basic testing. Compiling a static binary is a possible solution but is sometimes not practical or technically possible.

In the end, the fix was (for me) simple and now one person has worked it out it's simple for everyone with the same problem.

I paid US$30 (AU$28.xx), twice as much as I paid for HB2 as I intend to play all of these games - the FPS in HB2 don't interest me.

BTW, Crayon Physics fails on Debian Squeeze. My fix was to move the bundled lib32 directory to lib32.o and apt-get the standard system packages for the few libraries it then complains are missing, which are mostly SDL related. All that was left was an incompatible system libstdc++, so I re-created lib32 and copied the old version from lib32.o back. So far, it runs fine and is great fun.