Check out Children's Technology Workshop, AKA iCamp, http://www.ctworkshop.com/

The teach basic animation, stop motion animation, video game design, basic video editing, and probably some other stuff. They use all freeware tools on Windows laptops. Looking at their website, they seem to be actively exporting their stuff to other countries. Definitely worth a look.

Good points. Another thing that makes the S1200 similar to Atom & different from Core is the S1200 doesn't do out-of-order execution. Core chips have something like a 50 instruction re-order buffer, and that helps Core execute an average of 1.5 instructions per clock per thread (at the cost of greatly increased complexity). Atom on the other hand, so far, does no re-ordering, which makes it much simpler and a bit slower.

Yeah, I've heard of offline GPS. But the excellence of Google Maps led me to some false conclusions about smartphone maps in general.

Almost eight years ago, we did some extensive driving in Italy with a Garmin Quest of that era. Every night I would have to connect it to the laptop and swap in a new set of maps for the next day's drive. And sometimes it led us astray -- roads that didn't go through; dead ends that shouldn't have been, etc (not to mention construction detours). But it was still far better than trying to navigate city centers with paper maps.

Since then I've used a newer fancier Garmin and a couple cars with built-in GPSs. They frequently don't find the optimal route, and occasionally they have a few roads wrong or the GPS "destination" is a 100 yards from the true destination. When I got an Android phone, I was blown away by how much better the route quality was than my prior GPSs. Even if the Google maps had only been equal to my older Garmins, the traffic info is so good you don't want to leave home without it.

But my point is this: all along, we have been learning what kinds of errors to expect from our GPS devices. We've learned that minor errors are common. We've learned to be alert when we encounter detours. We've learned that newer devices work better. But errors of seventy kilometers? for multiple cities? I mean, that's so far outside my eight years experience with GPS devices that I wouldn't have believed it. And to think that Apple replaced Google maps with this crap? The quality of Apple maps is so far below the quality of any other GPS device I have ever used that Apple doesn't belong in the same category as the other devices.

At long last, Apple, have you no sense of decency? .

Ummm ... the so called '604 patent that sparked the ban of the Galaxy Nexus is a utility patent. It's a patent about the utility of unified search and spoken results on a smartphone.

I find it rather amusing to read all this libertarian commentary treating the patent system as some form of "government regulation" as if it were some afterthought tacked on by politicians not as wise as the Founding Fathers.

The fact is patents championed by Thomas Jefferson http://cti.itc.virginia.edu/~meg3c/classes/tcc313/200Rprojs/jefferson_invent/patent.html and enshrined in Article I Sec. 8 of the U.S. Constitution. It may or may not be wise to eradicate patents, but doing so will require a Constitutional Amendment.

Regulations, on the other hand, are generally understood to be created by the bureaucracy without having been voted on by Congress nor signed by the President. Sorry, but if patents are a government regulation then so is the Second Amendment.

There are some secondary characteristics of the mirror that may be less than perfect for optical astronomy. The Hubble mirror was ground smooth enough to focus the Lyman Alpha spectral lines of neutral hydrogen (best way to see H2 gas clouds). These wavelengths are in the UV. Presumably an earth-looking satellite won't have much use for UV, but it might be better at IR, which is also useful in astronomy. Also in service of the short wavelength goal, the Hubble primary mirror was made of a very exotic glass with near zero thermal coefficient of expansion. The mirror has glass stiffening braces in back that were *welded* on; no annealing necessary. Presumably spy satellites rarely have multi-hour exposure times, so thermal stability may not be so necessary. On the other hand, it sounds like the spy satellite secondary mirrors are adaptive optics. This is good for correcting for atmospheric distortion, but it needs a bright source (earth based scopes with AO use lasers to create a bright source high in the atmosphere for distortion correction). Perhaps the AO can be used to correct for thermal changes to the primary; I don't know...

> 2. Test Score Growth: Any single score can be socioeconomics, but growth is due to the school.

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So would you rather send your kids to a school that raises kids from the 10th to the 25th percentile (a raise of 25%) or a school that merely raises kids from the 70th to the 75th percentile? Or what about a school that simply maintains its students at the 90th percentile?

Seems to me that 10th to 25th percentile school is most likely to graduate kids on the 25th percentile. Not what I'm looking for. If my kids can fit in at the zero raise 90th percentile school, I think I'd be pretty satisfied with it.

I own a Lumix DMC FZ100 and I think it's great. Zoom range is 24X (25mm - 600mm equiv.) so there's not too many occasions when you'd even want to change lenses. It's not a shirt-pocket camera like the ZS10, but on the other hand, it shoots good 1080P video and does bursts at full resolution up to 11 frames/sec. Last night I was taking pix for my son's cooking project, hand held at 1/10 and 1/8 sec under natural kitchen incandescent lighting and they were almost as sharp as daylight photos.

The downside of all the small sensor cameras is low light shooting. You'll just have to accept that in low light your camera is not a full 12 or 14 megapixels. What I do is force the ISO to be 100 all the time. If the ISO climbs to 200 I can see noise I don't like at full resolution; either that or noise reduction artifacts that are also annoying. So I shoot at ISO 100 and either underexpose and/or reduce the effective pixel count. Underexposure can be adjusted in post-processing; reduced pixel count is just a fact of life in low light - 3.5 megapixels is still decent for many purposes.

If you're going to do this you need something called "royal icing." Ordinary icing stays soft and goey. Royal icing hardens up almost like hard candy overnight.

Here's a decent recipe: http://www.foodnetwork.com/recipes/alton-brown/royal-icing-recipe/index.html . The reason it calls for pasturized egg whites is there's no cooking involved and raw eggs are risky. We have used powdered egg whites http://www.google.com/search?q=powdered+egg+whites&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8 (reconstituted according to directions) to good effect.

Ever wonder how a device like an ipad Touch, with no GPS, can locate itself in urban and suburban areas?

The answer is Skyhook, a company that war-drives our neighborhoods, collects WiFi info without permission, associates WiFi MACs or other identifying info with Lat. & Long. coordinates and sells a service that can tell WiFi receivers where they are.

So if it's evil for Google to war-drive and collect WiFi identifiers, shouldn't it also be evil for Skyhook?

Disclosure: I don't work for Google but a couple friends do...

> Algorithms are unpatentable subject matter under 35 USC 101, so both scenarios are inapplicable. Oh really? What about SIFT (Scale Invariant Feature Transform), US patent number 6711293 ahref=http://www.google.com/patents?vid=6711293rel=url2html-21763http://www.google.com/patents?vid=6711293> The SIFT patent cites of patents including computing the Laplacian, finding contour features, and blur difference encodings. Here's what happened -- someone invented the silicon compiler. Suddenly an algorithm and an apparatus are the same thing. boom!

Nice straw man. Sure, comments like this pass for "reason" on Rush Limbaugh, but I thought slashdot was slightly higher caliber.

The purpose of screening is deterrence. Let me repeat that: the screening is there to deter, not capture, terrorists. Take for example the famous "underwear bomber" of last Xmas. Even Bruce Schneier, vocal critic of the TSA, admits that airport security helped foil the underwear bomber.

From the link: "In order to get through airport security, Abdulmutallab -- or, more precisely, whoever built the bomb -- had to construct a far less reliable bomb than he would have otherwise; he had to resort to a much more ineffective detonation mechanism. And, as we've learned, detonating PETN is actually very hard."

Admittedly, it's easier to count angels on the head of a pin than deterred terrorists, but the underwear bomber was truly foiled by airport security, and his failure surely adds to the deterrence power of airport security.

Can you even buy a netbook without windows?

True. However, the Book of Revelations does refer to Satan's realm as Hades. The early Christians carried a lot of baggage from ancient Rome and thereby from ancient Greece. The Roman god of the underworld, Pluto (Greek = Hades) was frequently depicted carrying a bident - a two pronged staff. As any reader of the Percy Jackson series knows, the trident is carried by Hades' brother, the god of the sea (Roman name = Neptune, Greek = Poseidon).

Since Pluto/Hades was the god of the underworld, he became associated with Satan in many early Christians' minds, and the Book of Revelations referred to the underworld as Hades. At some point, for reasons unknown to me, some depictions of Pluto/Hades began to carry the trident. I guess it's cooler. Or maybe crueler. Hence the Satan - trident connection.

"Its rider was named Death, and Hades was following close behind him." Revelation 6:8, New International Version, also New American Bible.

"Then death and Hades were thrown into the lake of fire. The lake of fire is the second death." Revelation 20:14, New International Version, also New American Bible.

For another fine example of the early Christians inheriting from the ancient Romans and Greeks, take a look at the 1633 trial of Galileo for heresy for suggesting that his observations prove the Earth revolves around the Sun. The bible never says explicitly that the Sun revolves around the Earth (though the creation story is implicitly terracentric), but the Church, through its tradition of Scholasticism, was at the time still committed to many of the theories of Aristotle who explicitly supported the implicit terracentrism of the bible. Aristotle/Scholasticism won the early rounds, but today Galileo and the scientific method are the heavyweight tag-team champs, and the Catholic church has admitted is error vis-a-vis Galileo.