That's really not the same technology at all. That's an LCD screen. We're hoping for something that gets more than 8 hours of battery life, and something closer to the two months the Kindles can get.

Mission accomplished.

Etsy's been a fantastic exercise in home-grown projects that can turn into full-time work for yourself, or for a whole team of people, if you're lucky enough to get a lot of attention from the community. Etsy, like Pinterest, Facebook, or Reddit, is easy to get a lot of attention on if you've got a good product, as people are constantly combing Etsy for cool stuff to buy that doesn't exist anywhere else. I run a store that makes custom Kindle and iPad covers and enjoyed enough success building Neverending Story covers that it's enabled me to expand out, and find other people to help me meet the demand.

https://www.etsy.com/listing/95190935/neverending-story-ipad-tablet-cover

My team is about half and half guys and gals. The girls often have great ideas on improvements to the products, or a lot of input to make new geek things. The guys have proven to be good organizers and implementers of ideas that are more removed from what we do, and often prefer to work with completely different materials and mediums than the girls. It's proven to be a very fun and dynamic with a lot of creative energy, but overall I would say that the girls have a lot more distributed creativity and imagination that they can apply in many small ways, while the guys tend to focus on bigger, singular projects with their creativity. It's been interesting observing the difference between the genders in a crafting workshop, and seeing the balance it brings in furthering the company as a whole. There's a lot of crossover training that happens too though - the guys have engineering backgrounds, and teach the girls how to program Arduinos and work with laser cutters and workshop tools, while the girls teach us guys how to sew, book bind, and work in some of the more traditional mediums. If it's a fun environment and they've got access to people willing to teach, many people are far more willing to learn than if they're asked or expected to make the leap into something unfamiliar. There may be a lot fewer female engineers by numbers, but that's not to say that many of them don't have engineering skills or inclinations, even without the formal training.

How else could they stream Lindsey Stirling performances live to her millions of fans?

This. For the love of God, yes, this.

I just changed phones because my old phone tried to install Plants vs. Zombies from the Humble Bundle and literally bricked the system, to the point that it doesn't even charge any more and the techs are utterly baffled. I replaced it with a new phone that did away with every single physical button on the front. My previous phone had one tiny nub for navigating left and right. Now, when my phone auto-corrects something, I don't have even the little precision I was accustomed to. The touch-screen can only easily get precision within two characters in any direction, to my constant irritation. The trend away from physical feedback is annoying, and I really hope some of the tactile technologies catch up to give us a rough bar to work with...

Most helpful comment on Slashdot ever!

The British show Black Mirror episode The Entire History of You is a fantastic look at a personal application of the ability to recall video streams of everything that you've experienced. Highly recommended!

Yes, but there are *countless* scientific endeavors that are always vying for funding. It's not the amount in question, but rather that these projects are evaluated for expected gain/return. One of the commenters remarked that press is a big return, and he's very right. What are some of the other intended/hoped for results with this project that got it funded over the others? That's the question I'm asking, and something I'd really love the answer to, because I'm curious what it is that scientists want to learn from this, and what they have in mind for what to do with it once we *do* know.

I'm a die-hard space buff, and love hearing about projects like these. The developed world is often in a good position that people tend to give funding (however marginal) towards enginerds that want to push the limits of what we know, and I'm glad that we're seeing some increased awareness with the Kepler project.

I tried to explain to someone who was born after the trips to the moon (I am too) what the importance of space exploration is and how it benefits us all across the board, but he didn't personally see a purpose to pursuing the sciences, least of all the space program. It was too far away for him, or for his concerns. It got me thinking - this is probably the average tax payer. They enjoy the benefits of research and development and scientific endeavors, but they don't actively care about how it's done, and if questioned on the subject, would probably be easily convinced that their government shouldn't be spending money on "frivolities". Science brings tomorrow into today in a constantly rolling motion, but they just reap the benefits without caring where it comes from.

I love this project, and I get totally psyched at the idea of mapping out or galaxy with increasing precision and knowledge of what's out there. But $200 million is a fairly large chunk of change. Does it serve a practical use to people, that I can tell them when I encounter people like the one above in the future? We've had a lot of breakthroughs and projects that are successfully analyzing and discovering these exo-planets constantly - is this ever-increasing knowledge of stuff that's really, really far away likely to be put to use on more local projects? Having increasingly detailed maps of the universe is a great thing, but without a means to get there, is there valuable research we can do beyond just knowing what's there?

Of course, you can add a whole new layer of horror even to your iPad these days, it seems.

https://www.etsy.com/listing/119115231/necronomicon-ipad-ereader-cover?

Help these guys out to bring the cost of the "toner" for 3D printers down even cheaper :) http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/833191773/filastruder-a-robust-inexpensive-filament-extruder

What happens to all of the assets, models, and 3D work that was put into the film? Does it go into some massive archive for the studio, or some kind of common repository? Projects like that, it's easy for files to get lost and lose all of the work put into it. I'm curious to know what the life-cycle of the digital assets is once a movie is completed. Anyone got any light to shed on the subject?

Interesting story on documentation:

I have an uncle who works for NASA who said that his team was having difficulty solving a particular problem on the newer rockets. There had been so much experimental knowledge lost and not enough records kept that they had to reinvent the wheel, but they ultimately went to look at the rockets on display at the museum to see how the previous generation of engineers had solved the issue and take that information back to the lab to implement. Funny to think that such a monumental undertaking with so many lessons learned could atrophy in such a short span, but there's value in keeping the old stuff around.

You're welcome to start a company even a fraction as successful as Amazon and run things the way you see fit.

As much as you might complain about it, the fact that it works its way up to affect the rich people, who can afford to be outraged and can afford the publicity means that it becomes a lot bigger news than a victim from a less wealthy background. Stories like this slip through the cracks all the time, and they're publicized only on a local level, possibly to friends or family. When it affects someone of this kind of standing, he raises his buddies, lawyers up, and gathers a legal defense and a public outcry, and the government has to step down, hopefully for everybody. The government often has to take the response of the people into consideration, and the more publicity a story about a high-profile person receives, the higher the chance that it becomes a persistent or issue that requires addressing. So yes, it happens to everybody, and not much gets done about it. But the more people it affects and the more people complain, loudly, the more likely it is that powers could be rolled back, instead of quietly advanced.