We should have blown it up. Just for practice.,..

"Houston, this is Commander Mark E. Kelly reporting in over the crystal clear Verizon Communications Network. The launch was extremely smooth because of our Quaker State oil used used in our Rocketdyne engines. While we're sipping on our ice cold Red Bulls in celebration, we'd like to say we're looking forward to that frosty Budweiser beer when we get back to earth. We're sure those Goodyear Tires will help is in a smooth landing, and meanwhile we're using our Snap On tools to make the final adjustments to the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer. I'd like to thank our sponsors NAPA Auto Parts and Home Depot for the ExPRESS Logistics Carrier 3 we're going to deploy, and a big shout out to GEICO for insuring the trip..."

Joe Soucheray, A Minnesota journalist and radio talk show host, had an interesting New Year's Resolution a few years back. He resolved that every other book he read (he's a prolific reader, especially fiction) would be a biography/autobiography. I believe he kept the resolution as he talked about several of them throughout the year. I attempted to replicate it, but quickly fell into my yearly Terry Pratchett Discworld Marathon and never went back.

of what music will sound like in hell. I just sat there waiting for them to get to the part of the song that was pleasing to the ear, but it never came.

I put a 1M resistor between the scope probe and the ECG, and used a battery-powered scope. At that point, the danger from the scope is guaranteed less than the danger from the 12v power supply (also battery.)

Ok, if everything is battery-powered, you're good. However, as soon as mains power is involved anywhere, galvanic isolation is a must just in case there's some sort of short circuit. I was lucky (or prudent, don't know which) enough so far to avoid any encounters with mains voltage, however, as the firmware guy, I don't do quite as much poking around the internals of, say, power supplies as the hardware guys do. ;)

The other one takes those and handles the SPI for writing to a memory card.

Hm, an interesting dual-processor setup. Does it have any advantages power-wise compared to, say, using one of Atmels ARM chips? That's what I am working with right now. If you're planning to have the device running on batteries for a week, you're probably looking at an ever more limited power budget than I am.

I'd be *very* interested in hearing more about your design: anything online?

Since this is part of my job, I'm afraid I can't spill any corporate secrets. ;) My employer is one of the heavyweights in the patient monitoring market. I can answer any general ECG-related questions, though. My knowledge of hardware is somewhat limited and on the theoretical side, though, since I'm lucky enough to work with some excellent EE colleagues and rarely need to deal with hardware problems myself.

Computers now do what they are programmed to do when the user uses the specified input device in a specified way!

And I guess you didn't read my post.
It doesn't matter when google decides to refresh it's cache. You can still get an invalid entry, an entry they haven't cached, or an entry that is currently being refreshed.

Any DNS server can choose how frequently to refresh it's cache, whether it updates or purges during a refresh, and whether or not to return the stale result (be it stale according to the official TTL or stale according to your own refresh frequency) while refreshing.

Updating your cache 1 hour before it needs to be updated is not magic. They just use a higher standard for the expiration date, and pay a price for it.

Sorry, you can't yell fire in a crowded theater because it could potentially harm a large number of people. I think it is fair to say that a channel portraying itself as a News agency has to be held to a higher standard than a channel such as Comedy Central which clearly states that their news is fake. In many ways its false advertising but those laws don't apply to the press when really they should. The truth is not subjective and disseminating false information I believe does harm a population especially when you can disseminate it to millions.

While I agree that you should never trust 100% any one entity I also understand that the vast majority of the country doesn't want to try that hard to get news so they end up watching MSNBC if they are Democrat or Fox if they are Republican. After having watched both I can saw however that Fox actively works to distort reality such as using footage of older rallies with larger crowds and the outright lying about Jon Stewart's stance towards global warming. Some of their actions are truly atrocious and damaging to the political climate. Debate about issues is healthy but Fox isn't promoting discussion, they are actively promoting an agenda. If they didn't call themselves a news network no one would have a problem with this.

Shaw cable, in BC, Canada now sells "High speed" with"Powerboost" which means your connections are throttled after the first few seconds of connecting. It seems a good way to do it; people just surfing have a good experience, but torrenters still have fairly high (but not as high) speed access. Sadly, they market it as medium speed with boosting, not throttled high speed which it is.

The same can be said of The Times in the UK. One of Britain's longest running papers and holder of all sorts of semi-official roles (newspaper of record, for example) it was bought by Murdoch in the '80s. Many of it's best editors were replaced or quit (highly respected Robert Fisk, for example, resigned because of political censorship), and it's focus shifted onto more popular subjects (celebrities, sport, etc).

It has also always backed Murdoch's candidate-of-choice in elections; during his support for New Labour it made many attacks on the Tories, and since Murdoch started backing the Tories again their focus has swung back the other way (although they're more natural Tory supporters anyway, so at least we're back where we started).

And let's not even get started on The Sun...

An uncle once told me an odd story. He, his wife, and a group of friends went to Vegas on a mission. They took two hourly slots each, 24 hours, and played one machine. No - don't ask me why, it was just something "fun" to do. They even had other patrons cheering them on! When all players had taken their turn they calculated their winnings. To a hundredths percentage point it matched exactly what the casino said it payed out on slots. It was for the entertainment, not the winnings.