Yeah, that's becoming really annoying for a lot of newer systems. One of the good things about the RPi and Beaglebone Black is that both of them have HDMI connectors for the video, uSDHC storage, and USB for other I/O (SATA would be nice as well, but USB gets the job done.)

The RPi's GPU may not be the top gaming rig out there, but it's fast enough to play 1080p television. For me, that's fast enough that sometime soon I'm going to get around to getting one and hooking it up to my TV, probably to run XBMC as well as using it as a home file server. The interesting alternative would have been the Beaglebone Black, but it looks like the BBB's GPU is more limited, and can only do 1080 at a really low frame rate. (And of course now the BBB seems to be sold out and backordered - it does have a better CPU.)

Bifocals would let you see either IR or regular colors. Add photo-sensitive gray to the regular part....

Cowards. They're not willing to call it what it is, because they're still the Establishment Media, and don't want to lose access to the government people who are their big information sources.

At least National Public Radio has the excuse that they're directly funded by the government (and "viewers like you", and grants from Exxon, Archer Daniels Midland, some recent movie, etc.) - it was 10 years after Gitmo before I first heard them use the T-word in a news story; before that it had only been guests on Terry Gross's interview shows (and Terry herself.)

Don't let the right-wingers tell you that either of these are "liberal" media.

Technically, "humans and other great apes" :-) But not other primates, even the lesser apes. This stuff is really recent, which makes its activities especially strange.

Yes, there's a Javascript slider widget moving itself next to the article. I don't have speakers connected to my office computer, and since it's April 1 I assume that if I do turn on the sound, I'll find that Slashdot is just playing a short audio clip of Rick Astley....

If you sell light bulbs, you'd rather make your profit on the part people are likely to replace soon than the part they don't change very often. People are much more willing to replace a light bulb themselves than a light fixture mounted on a wall (which might require an electrician in some places, might only get replaced during a decorating change such as repainting the bathroom, and which probably still works fine, as opposed to the old incandescent bulb that burned out.)

Yes, this adds a lot of complex control circuitry to your lightbulb - a microcontroller ($0.50 will get you 8-bit and 16-bit CPUs, and there are probably ARM CPUs for under $1 by now), and some kind of radio or sound or light sensor for signalling (also no more than a few bucks), and a 1/N share of the cost of the remote control (which only needs to cost more than $5 because a $200 home automation system needs a fancy GUI and lots of user interface development.)

I might very well want to set different light bulbs in different rooms to different colors, to coordinate with the paint colors and the lighting needs of the various activities we use those rooms for. I'm not in their target market demographic, but having recently had to pick paint colors for my living room and seen how radically any color we tried changed depending on the lighting (direct/indirect sunlight, different kinds of incandescents, compact fluorescents, and cheap LEDs) and even depending on the color of adjacent walls/furniture - human color vision is an amazingly weird and twisty system - I can see that some people might very well want to have their lighting change its behaviour based on time of day.

On the other hand, I'm definitely in the target market for a cheap LED replacement for 150-watt incandescents, and for that matter for 100-watt; most of the cheap LED market is still for the 40-to-60-watt incandescent replacement.

I've lost a light switch before. My apartment has a hallway with switches at both ends, one of which was at the natural location for a laundry-sorting table by the washing machine. Stuff gradually accumulated, hiding the switch that we didn't use much anyway. At one point, the light stopped working, and when replacing the bulb didn't help, I was getting ready to tear apart the switch box to replace that one and another that was occasionally flaky, and then I remembered the other switch - which had gotten pushed to an intermediate position between up and down.

It shouldn't be much of a surprise, but just because Silicon Valley is libertarian-leaning, that doesn't mean that the government-run airports in San Jose, San Francisco, or Oakland are libertarian. Of course, even if they were libertarian-run, they might still view taxi service to/from the airport as a profit center, but San Francisco airport in particular is much more likely to restrict access by services that compete with city-medallion taxis.

If it's too far-fetched to be from The Onion, it must be a real headline. Because comedy is supposed to make sense.

I'd strongly recommend that they start selling enough now to pay off their hardware and debts in the first couple of months. Maybe gamble on keeping half the take for future appreciation, but if they're mining it this fast they ought to nail down their initial stake quickly in case the Bitcoin ecosystem colllapses.

The Grinnell Beowulf A group of students at Grinnell College recently did a translation of Beowulf as a project. It's online, and worth reading, and has good notes along with their translation.

The first platforms I used with X Windows were a Sun-3 and a 386/25, usually with about 4MB of RAM (some of our Sun boxes had 8MB, and if you wanted to use NeWS instead of X you definitely needed 8. It's possible that the 386 had less RAM than that.)

Sure, the Feds also put a good bit of money into medicine and basic research and even social sciences, but the largest driver of US scientific research and development over the last five or more decades has been the military, either directly or indirectly (e.g. research into computers not only drives military use of computers, aircraft builders (for the military) and NASA (for the missile programs) funded a lot of computer and mathematical research.) We've gotten some useful spinoffs from it (like the internet and GPS and Tang freezedried orange juice), but it's taken a lot of scientists away from doing medical research, energy efficiency, or other things that should have been higher social priorities. Some of that airplane development has been dual-use, since a 747 to haul passengers is a lot like a military cargo plane or an older slower bomber, but a lot of it has diverted people and money that could have been making the world a better place into the military.