Never posted one of these before but it is the most insightful comment in the thread and deserves to be seen.

The NDA is definitely required as one of the three components necessary for access to classified information.

http://www.archives.gov/isoo/training/standard-form-312.html

This particular reference led me to an interesting section of US law I was unaware existed - Title 18, Section 793(e):

Whoever, having unauthorized possession of, access to, or control over any document... relating to the national defense, or information relating to the national defense which information the possessor has reason to believe could be used to the injury of the United States or to the advantage of any foreign nation, willfully communicates... or causes to be communicated... the same to any person not entitled to receive it, or willfully retains the same and fails to deliver it to the officer or employee of the United States entitled to receive it... [s]hall be fined not more than $10,000 or imprisoned not more than ten years, or both.
(take the widest possible definition of "communicate" because I deleted all the other similar words for clarity)

It's something of a corollary to the UK Official Secrets Act. I've no idea whether this is applicable to anyone subject to US law or just clearance holders (as I am too lazy to read the entire section of code). It would seem to me that all of the US newspaper editors collaborating with Wikileaks are in violation of this section. I'll reserve my personal opinions on that particular idea.

It is always amusing to see a person pointing out logical fallacies who then uses the same fallacy to argue the point. Anyhow, GP's point was that it is silly to cut essential things to save a few relative pennies, especially when cutting such things will cost more in the long term. For example, if you save money on vegetables and just feed the baby from McDonalds, her resulting health problems will cost a great deal later. Society (i.e. government, i.e. all of us) end up footing the bill.

At the same time it is essential to review all of our spending and figure out where we can cut it. I think we will have to eventually bite the bullet and swallow an austerity plan to balance our budget. The crushing costs of both funding nondiscretionary programs such as social security and medicare as well as discretionary programs such as two wars and I don't even know what - these expenses are too great for our current taxes. We must either cut spending or raise taxes, soon, or risk devaluation of our currency when everyone else finally accepts that we can't afford our current lifestyle. But nobody (including me) wants to accept that because it will hurt too much.

But a good start while the country grows to accept the inevitable is to look for the low-hanging fruit - cut or combine overlapping programs. Then cut programs which have minimal impact. If its cost is greater than its benefit, cut it. Assess programs from a complete financial perspective, and then consider the humanitarian impact of those financial decisions, and then decide. This YouCut thing could be a useful means of collecting perspectives on both. Too bad it's a partisan project.

By now this reply is long enough to have committed the cardinal sin of slashdot - I started by critiquing another and have no doubt committed the same sin I critiqued. Should have stopped before I got on my soapbox.

IAAEE and I do design work; I'm in my lab daily and helped design the current lab. My lab has two separate spaces, one for mech work and the other for EE work. The mech lab has a bandsaw, drill press, grinder, lathe and milling machine. For the space you have I'd say get the mill. You can use it to drill, cut and face a small workpiece. Look at Grizzly tools (basically Harbor Freight) for decent deals and ok quality equipment.

The EE lab has a lot of kit. You need at least one dual power supply for each station where you'll do electrical work (look at BK, they have several value items), as well as a soldering iron. For irons the near-instant heat types are truly awesome and IMO well worth the cost. We like Weller but as long as they get hot they'll work fine. One piece of advice - however many soldering stations you intend to have, you should buy them all at one time. Weller loves to keep redesigning the tips so I have to stock five different families of tips in my lab. Don't waste money on benchtop multimeters, for the cost of one great Agilent we got four Fluke 77's - sufficient for most work and more easily portable. You need at least two multimeters per EE station. You should also invest in scopes if you do anything analog. You must have at least one good scope in the lab for every two EE's, and you should also have a bad scope. We have some cheap Teks as well as one awesome MSO4000 series which has a 16 channel mini-LA - expensive but worth every penny. If you do much digital look at the USBee for a cheap LA. Also at least one good function generator is very useful; look at Agilent and SRS for good ones. You may need a spectrum analyzer depending on what you're doing, too.

Back to the basics, though. You can fit two 6' benches on each 15' wall with space between. Global Industries sells these at reasonable cost but Costco might have some near you for ~$150. A good bench will have a hutch shelf with a row of outlets on it (outlets you can see are really important, but you can also get a 6' industrial power strip instead if you need). I'd get two, and a stand for the mill, as well as storage. A good rolling tool rack (with ball bearing slides! don't skimp on that!) and a cabinet will use most of the other wall. Look at a good shelving cabinet like Akro Mills make if you will stock small parts. Expensive but an excellent way to store and organize your SMT parts or hardware. And think about how/where you'll store your scrap mechanical stock - you might still have room for a good open vertical shelf.

You will want all the storage you can fit in there. Think about a layer of shelves at 6.5' off the ground all the way around the room for rarely-used equipment. And your lab needs power and data. You should have a dedicated power circuit (or two) for the lab and more ethernet ports than usual (preferably two per work station or more). Finally since you are short on space you should try to get a laptop dedicated to lab use, and preferably one with a real db-9 serial port on it (or a base station with one).

That would be my Christmas list for your lab. Hope it helps.

When I used to work in the freight industry, just about everything got kicked or dropped once. A "Fragile" sticker meant kick twice.

In all seriousness, materials need to be packed to survive fairly brutal treatment. The only things we were particularly careful with were live animals, dead people (they want to get shipped home) and radioactive material. We were careful with live animals because they make enough noise already. No way in hell did I want to drive a fork through a dead guy's coffin (bad hoojoo). And the same goes for the hazmat, just for different reasons.

So you would get better treatment if you put a bunch of hazmat stickers on your material, but the associated paperwork would make it quite costly to ship. Pretty hard to masquerade as any of the other things. Best bet - pack your stuff correctly, even at the cost of increased weight or size (which we also charged for as "dimensional weight") if you want it to get there in one piece. If it's worth something to you, spend the time and money to pack it right.

There's a lot more detail in the symantec virus "dossier". A very interesting and detailed read.

QA is a process of verifying that the part performs to specs. Unless there is a spec which says that "this part will not install malware" they aren't going to look for it. QA is generally an overworked and underappreciated function of a large manufacturer and they don't have time to do extra.

In addition, in most any company large enough to have a real QA department, the QA folks operate under a strict regime of policies, procedures and audits to verify such. Which means they aren't really allowed to screw around looking for something else. And if the spec actually requires that the part not install malware, then you have the case which a sibling poster described... the malware must be crafted in such a way as to hide its presence. I can think of at least one pretty easy way to do that (only attempt to install malware after X power cycles or after running X time...) and there are likely plenty.

An insider capable of installing this capability in nascent hardware would likely be able to circumvent any QA protections.

If you are watching TV or texting or screwing your girlfriend while you're driving, you risk hurting yourself AND innocent other people who are following the rules.

If you are listening to your ipod while you run across a street, you risk [mostly] hurting just yourself. I always thought it was my responsibility to look both ways and pay attention to what I'm doing. But I guess I need laws to remind me of that. This way, after I get hit by a car, I could get a ticket to boot. Sweet.

I have a Roku Netflix Player (or whatever they call it these days, one was just on woot the other day for 50$). It is an network-connected device (wireless, ethernet and also USB in the new version) which can stream Netflix and Amazon and other junk. It is about an inch high and maybe 5 inches wide and makes no noise (no fan, no hard drive, just a couple A/V ports). But also...

You can install aftermarket applications on the box, in a manner of speaking, and Roku offers an API along with detailed examples which you can modify yourself. Several people have already done so. I use the Roksbox application, despite its developer's insistence on updating the live branch of code and occasionally breaking everything. It allows me to stream live video hosted on a local (or remote, I suppose) web server. I have an Ubuntu box in the basement I use for transcoding. It works well and the UI is pretty simple, and quite end-user controllable.

After building the necessary XML files by hand for a while I wrote a couple of scripts to parse everything out of IMDB, download posters and descriptions, etc., and that goes into the display code. So when I turn on the Roku box, it pretty much "just works", so long as the network is up and I haven't mangled the XML file. My wife and baby love it; I've got tons of Elmo on there and other cartoons she can see and recognize, so there's no more playing around with DVDs and scratching them up. And we have many movies and other content on there. It's very simple to use, but the backend can take a little work unless you're a Windows person (my server is not).

I've tried using a DNS-323 NAS box as the server, which seems to work well. I just haven't switched everything over. So in short, with a Roku box, a little additional software and a server/NAS to host the files, you're good.

I'm using these devices now for R&D work. We started with the Sheeva plug, now the Guru plug. The devices are okay. If you are looking for a COTS general purpose computer, the price, size and capability cannot be beaten. If you have more specific needs, particularly consumer needs where you can give up size as a constraint, there are many other cheaper alternatives.

That said, if you open up one of these devices, the thickness of the "wall wart" is half power supply, and a lot of the space is allocated to thermal design (heat sink, space for airflow). If you don't need their (crappy) power supply, replace it with a 5 V DC-DC converter and you can run it in your car or in your custom R&D device like we are. Very few low cost (small, low power) GigE devices exist now. These are just about the only ones. Downside is that there is NO support (oh, I'm sorry, "community support"... not okay for corporate use). You have to go it alone if you want to do something that nobody else has done.

Globalscale (makers of the Sheeva/Guru plugs) are supposed to be releasing a GuruPlug "Display" device which has an HDMI port. It sounds cool, but based on my experiences buying the "Server" version on spec, wait until it is not just vaporware. They said that the "Server" version would include some things that aren't actually pinned out (so if you want, say, an I2C interface, you have to be prepared to go digging around on the circuit board, then you might have to deal with building a custom kernel, then you might have to pray on your knees before the dark god of fab, etc.).

And forget about using this as a portable device. Power draw is low but it still sucks down the juice if you're using it do actually do anything. And the ARM5 core does not, as I recall, support floating point operations, so they're emulated (at reduced speed). And last but not least you're going to be cross-compiling everything, or hooking up a hard drive so you can install a precompiled gcc and making less-common things from source.

All in all, are these show-stoppers? No. I'm still using a few of these for various jobs, like one which is going to go get pelted around in the ocean, and they're great if you can withstand the negatives. I have $200 worth of batteries to run it and a custom kernel build (and a separate board for the I2C interface, thanks a lot you jerks at Globalscale)... took a while to get going but it mostly does the job.

This is the most interesting suggestion I have read, and I hadn't seen this elsewhere. I remember reading once that "B vitamins would give me more energy" so I tried it by taking a "B complex" vitamin. It did the opposite, plus turned my pee neon yellow (that was kind of fun), but it really made me logy in the AM. I just read a few things which supported what you suggest, but I'll have to do more research before trying that again.

My wife is like that. It's an interesting juxtaposition. She says she wakes up every hour, checks the time on the clock, and then goes back to sleep. She can fall asleep in seconds once she's relaxed so it doesn't trouble her. It seems to take me quite some time to go down. Unfortunately (well, fortunately at the moment) it seems the baby inherited my sleeping skills.

I have one - it doesn't work very well in the summertime! And it's so gradual (because it's trying to be nice) that it's not the kind of shock that I need. Instead what I need to do is, as the sibling suggests, get a heat lamp and hook it to a timer outlet. Or maybe just a regular lamp so I don't burn down the house.

That's an interesting point, actually, although it's one of only a small handful of such examples. Normally she says I don't even change my breathing.

I had an EEG when I was a kid. Went looking around for the few pages of it they gave me to see if I could notice any similarities between it and the excerpt shown in TFA. Although I doubt I could reliably make such a comparison, it would be interesting to look at again.

I wondered the same thing. Perhaps the benefits of greater memory consolidation (ability to remember dangerous situations/locations, places where food might be found) and higher IQ (potentially improved ability to obtain food, plan attacks and defenses) can outweigh the disadvantage of sleeping heavily (reduced ability to defend oneself when asleep).

Alternatively, perhaps this capability has evolved more recently, since we moved away from the hunter-gatherer lifestyle and into fixed civilizations. Obviously not too recently or it would not be widespread. And obviously, of course, I am an armchair evolutionary biologist, speaking entirely from my ass. Still fun to think about it though.