The beautiful thing about this is that while such certification and testing may be required of manufacturers and distributors of such products, there is nothing that can be done to stop you from building one yourself or with a few friends.

There are others who have also traveled this path, and a number of open source designs available for anyone to have a go at: Robohand @ Thingiverse, Prosthetics @ Thingiverse

Whenever I hear the 'free money from taxpayers' argument, I feel compelled to point to the following: The true cost of the Royal family explained. Regardless of whether the stuff the article at the end of that link says about how much money they bring in for the UK is true or not, I'd still be quite happy paying the 65p per year to have a monarchy.

Brit here.

To answer this, let us first consider what the American President does: on the one hand there is a bunch of PR work and flag waving, on the other a bunch of keeping up with what's going on in the country,authorizing things and politicing.

In essence, the Queen handles most of the PR and flag waving, while the Prime Minister (a simplification in this case) handles most of the keeping up on things, authorizing and politicing.

Of course, the PM also does a bunch of flag waving and PR. The Queen also spends hours every day keeping up on what's going on in the country (and has done so for the past 60 years or so) so that she can discuss this with the PM in their weekly meetings. While the Queen may not have much recognized power anymore, a discrete comment of 'do you really think that is such a good idea?' from her will carry considerable weight.

Naturally, this is an over-simplification which glosses over things, and applies mostly to the UK rather than the other countries of which she is Queen.

More along the lines of "Hi Dr Barash, I'm Dr. Smith. We met at that conference in Florida on terrifyingly deadly diseases last year... No, my colleague Dr Jones was the one who fell in the pool. Anyway, I saw your article on Clostridium botulinum in J. Infect Dis. and have a few ideas; would you be willing to meet and discuss a possible collaboration?".

You realize this is about the paper. There is nothing to stop his colleagues - who he happens to know have a suitable lab and skills - from calling up and asking for the info. This just lets him choose who gets this dangerous piece of knowledge

This guy is right, by keeping the DNA Sequence out of the paper it prevent ye-random-crazy from having a go at synthesizing some. On the other hand, it doesn't stop research into cures, because any legitimate researchers can just email or phone the guy.

For those of you who haven't been in academia; part of your job is knowing who the leading guys in your field are. This new stuff is nasty, so it makes sense to secure it behind a 'have I heard of this guy' and 'what has he done lately' check, if only to make sure you don't have an accidental outbreak.

Back in ye olden days currency was backed by gold, or other goods. In this modern age of fiat currency currency is backed by the economy of the society which issued it. That is to say, the value of the GBP is that with about six of them (£6) you can get a relatively unskilled minimum wage worker to do an hour's worth of work for you. With £10-20 of them you can get the same hour or so's work from a range of increasingly skilled professionals.

If you are interested in this, then you might want to read Making Money by Terry Pratchett

"the system compiler will still be clang"

Or the Onionequse version: FreeBSD's move to revolutionary new swording system adds a whole new meaning to compiling

Out of interest, do you have a way of automatically failing over to a self hosted version of the scripts if google is for some reason unavailable?

The trouble is that Google that what you see as Google's services is only the tip of the iceberg. To most people Google is search, Gmail, Youtube, etc. What they don't see is the GoogleAPI javascript stuff they host which is used by hundreds of sites all over the net. Try surfing with noscript for a while and see what effect it would have on you.

"Here is a unicycle. You will ride it wherever you go."

Yes! That! The right technology in the right place, rather than just because it's shiny.

For basic typing, which is only one specific case, swype comes close to being suitable. However, swype is still limited. It guesses what you are typing based on a weighted dictionary of common words. While it may be fairly accurate it is still only a guess. Add to that it will not be able to handle uncommon words or symbols as well.

In other words: programming on one of those is a pain. Accurately entering lots of numbers is a pain. Playing Doom would be a pain.

To sum it up: swype may be good for inputting basic text on capacitive touchscreen devices - and this may be enough for 90% of people - but it doesn't hold a candle to a keyboard in many other areas.

All that said, that was still only one case: text input/keyboarding. Don't forget all the others.

People keep coming up with these nice shiny user interface devices, but they always seem to forget how important tactile feedback is.

Sure I can type on a touchscreen keyboard, but it takes twice as long, because I have to actually look at the screen and check that a) it has noticed I am typing, and b) it has correctly recognised what I had intended to type. With a proper physical keyboard I can pick up such information purely by proprioception, audio and tactile feedback.

The same sort of issue applies with any sort of hand waving interface: there is a much greater potential for the computer getting it wrong, and it takes longer to recognise & fix it when it occurs.

Untill these things can be made as reliable as a physical push button I think people should be a lot more careful where and what they use them for.

Only in the naive combinations case, when we discard the priors.

In other words, the probablility of 1234 being the password is not just 1/num_possible_combinations, but also the probability of 1234 being the default chapter AND the default password not having been changed.