Pardon my ignorance, but why can't this sort of thing be done entirely in software? On consoles this wouldn't be possible, but for Windows can't you create a virtual USB driver which is a proxy to hardware USB device? It seems folks have been doing this sort of thing with Ethernet for a long time.

The CL 9 remote control (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CL_9) contained both an 8 bit CPU and a 4 bit CPU, and that was in 1985. Just imagine what Woz could have done with a dual-core 6502!

An electricity generator must sell their electricity to the market. A power plant may decide to sell forward 10 years of electricity in order to finance it's capital. It is then required to produce exactly the amount which it sold on each day. If it fails to produce this amount, the ISO will issue it large fines. Traditional PV solar is very unpredictable, as the sun can go behind a cloud and cut the power generated in half. This means it's very difficult to sell a contract to deliver a fixed amount of electricity. As such, large installations of solar PV have been rare in the US. However, most states have laws allowing for 'net metering'. This allows homes and small business to send small amounts of electricity back to the grid, without having to sell it to a power company in advance. In the US, coal and hydro cost less than $0.05/KWH. While I expect solar to continue to get less expensive, it's still by far the most costly way to generate electricity.

I've driven a Prius in both Australia and in the US. In Australia, the car reported in liters per 100km, as TFA reported, which kept be completely confused. I find the L/100km about as useful as a speed limit sign stating hours per 100 miles.

I study done a few months ago showed how one can easily deduce searches by looking at the size of the AJAX requests. http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2010/03/side-channel_at.html Yes, https should have been available a long time ago, and still isn't available for www.google.com.hk.

On Windows I install cygwin, so I can execute grep. I use the following bash function to help me search code:

ffind ()
{
find . -name ".svn" -prune -o -name "CVS" -prune -o -name ".hg" -prune -o -exec grep --color=auto "$@" {} +
}

For larger code bases, I use the command line version of glimpse to search through the code. While there are a few open source code search engines, I find glimpse with a few formatting scripts works just fine.

I managed to complete a post-graduate course using Open Office. Assignments were given as Word documents, and needed to be submitted as the same. I always saved in Word 2000 format and my professors never had a problem. If Word was offered at the same price as OO, I would buy Word. I've only used OO because I'm too cheap and don't using office apps enough at home to justify the price. I wish OO were better than MS Office, but it's far behind. When ever I try to format text Writer never does what I want. I've tried drawing diagrams in Draw but soon gave up due to the poor interface, and Impress, well that's the worst of the lot.

Do you know how much it costs to sell an $800 hammer? It's easy to sell a $10 hammer. For the $800 one, you need to hire a sales staff and lobbyists getting government contracts. You need to entertain your buyers, you may have to do trial runs, POC, RFP, provide 'free' training etc.. These things are all must be added into the cost of the product. I doubt Nintendo has sent salespeople to visit the doctors in the Melbourne, nor have they likely taken them out for dinner, provided them with equipment leasing options, or guaranteed a service and replacement contract. When I sent my Wii in for repair, it took six weeks and I lost all my data. You can't expect hospitals to get the same level of service as consumers.

Why not just get a government guarantee that if the company goes bankrupt, the government will come bail them out. Why should banks and car manufactures be the only ones getting bailed out?

./ seems biased against long URLs. When I try to paste one from http://iliil.com/ or http://011010.com/ I get: "Filter error: That's an awful long string of letters there."

Agreed - I like to carry a grid which looks like one of those word search puzzles. It's easy for me to find my passwords, but hard for someone to guess.

Simple, Cost-Effective, Multiroom - pick any two.

TCP does effectively limit throughput by means of the Sliding Window Protocol. Packet loss will decrease the size of the sliding window, but on a congested network, the window will be slow to increase. What TCP doesn't offer is different Quality of Service. uTP attempts to run TCP at a lower priority than existing TCP traffic. Allowing Skype or YouTube to run at a higher priority is advantageous to the users of those services.

Telstra also offers it's iPhone plans starting with 2.5MB of data per month. http://www.telstra.com.au/mobile/phones/iphone/pricing.html * Pay As You Go rate is $2 per MB

I've been awaiting a long time for Google to deliver on their Gmail Paper product. http://mail.google.com/mail/help/paper/more.html Now with their printers in place it should be easy for them to deliver my email in hard copy.