The stuff about "disaster relief" is entirely bogus. They are asking people to work on an entirely military application for very little gain...

People in Israel still had to go to the shelters on a regular basis. Some of the rockets got through. The system would of been successful if everyone could of just sat and watched the war on TV.

The Palestinians don't need to actually hurt or kill anyone with their rockets. To achieve a positive political end all they need to do is create a situation where people in Israel can never be completely safe. This serves as an argument against the current policy where the Palestinians are being forced into a small area and then walled in. The rockets mean that even if the policy is taken to it's logical conclusion it will never bring total security.

Why would anyone want to know the actual location of speed signs? Normally people want to know the speed of a particular road at a particular place. We already have a fairly popular version of that that in a Wiki form:

OpenStreetMap

If you wanted to know where Air Force One was wouldn't it be easier just to turn on the news?

Knowing where an aircraft is doesn't really help you if it is at 30000 feet. Anyone trying to assassinate the president will wait until it is approaching or leaving an airport before letting off the shoulder fired missile.

RGB LED lighting is made. Colour matching is a bother but getting the right balance with the phosphor is hard as well. One problem is that RGB LED lights can not pass the Colour Rendering Index (CRI) test at all. It turns out that there is a colour used in the test that just won't work with the wavelengths used in such lamps (it is apparently just a bunch of colour blobs printed on paper). The RGB lighting people feel that the test is not useful for comparing phosphor and RGB lights.

Some supporters of RGB LEDs managed to get a group of people to prefer the RGB based lights in a test so all hope is not lost...

There isn't really any way to deny *anyone* secure tactical communications these days. Just get everyone a push to talk app for their smart phone and a bluetooth headset. You can even encrypt the messages if anyone actually cares (the police wouldn't).

What, there is some standard way to do video chat over 4G? Or will this only work with other Onstar subscribers?

Er, no. There is an actual technical issue here. If you make a passive filter with sharper skirts you end up with more loss to the desired signal. GPS (like all things that transmit from space) is quite power limited. As a result the signal is just above the noise (pretty much all downlinks). So just adding a better filter in front of the receiver will significantly degrade things.

There is stuff that you can do here but it would be expensive and possibly power hungry (some GPS receivers have to run off of batteries).

Normally this issue is resolved by placing guard bands around downlink bands where terrestrial transmitters are not allowed. By not doing this in a reasonable way, the FCC has simply messed up.

Isn't he just rediscovering the smartbook with this? I have a cheesy ARM based smartbook that you can buy these days for $200 that has 6+ hours of battery life (EFIKA MX). It runs Ubuntu.

How is his expensive thing better than my cheap thing?

It is hard to make windows that both insulate really well and provide a large apeture when open. My house (which coincidentally is also in Winnipeg) has laughably small window openings. Modern insulated windows are better but it is still a tradeoff. The uninsulated windows that originally came with the house were much better in the summer than anything I would install today (triple pane R5+).

I can overcome this to some extent with a powerful fan but I have to live with a lot of noise at night...

VDSL2 only gives good speed if you have short high quality loops to a cabinet. You end up with lots of cabinets attached to a fiber network. All the effort to achieve this is better spent extending the fiber the last little bit to the building which allows for fewer and better placed cabinets. As a result VDSL2 is only good for things like apartment buildings with no provision to add fiber. It is more or less a stillborn technology.

That is interesting in that it seems to fail basic philosophy. A description of something is not the thing itself.

Whatever. I doubt I will ever be able to think like a lawyer. That might not be a bad thing...

The things mentioned are just programs ... a description of a process. Wouldn't they have to sue the individual users? After all, you can't be sued for having a copy of a patent. You have to have some sort of implementation to infringe.

Some do. Interference from FM transmitters is a known issue in Europe. Again it is the instrument landing system that is affected. I remember that was a reason for people to want to build the microwave landing system back in the day... Another common ground based cause of interference to aircraft stuff is leaky cable TV systems.

In general AC at the 110/220V used for residential power is way more dangerous than DC at the same voltages. That is because the 50/60Hz used in these systems is close to the optimal frequency that can cause your heart to go into fibrillation. A nice solid zap with DC current can fix this (defibrillator) but most people do not have access to such a current source at home. The AC current required to mess up your heart can be quite low. I have heard 10mA quoted as a lower limit. The trick is to not get the AC current through your chest. That is what the suggestion that you should put one hand in your pocket when you are messing with the guts of something that is plugged in is based on. During the AC vs DC wars the DC faction used to like to show how easy it was to electrocute animals with AC. Edison once famously electrocuted an elephant with AC current and filmed the result.