How about the (admittedly unlikely) case of a known bomb threat in a given region with a cell phone as its remote detonator? Or perhaps a known threat/disaster in an enclosed and highly crowded space where controlling information is necessary to prevent panic and facilitate an orderly evacuation?

The key is that such capabilities should only be exercised under extreme conditions where lives are in danger -- but never for mere political expediency (ie: impeding a legitimate protest).

My thoughts exactly. In fact, things would be far simpler if we actually had our homes wired up with DC power. Except for the appliances and legacy light fixtures, I doubt there's a single device left that's not using an AC->DC adapter of some form, though of course there's still quite a range of voltages coming out of those adapters.

I've recently started experimenting with various forms of the cheap LED strips myself. A single strip isn't quite as bright as a traditional fixture, but combining a few together and distributing them around the room can be quite effective.

My current project involves placing a strip on the inside of a wood trim that I mounted over my bar-counter (using custom brackets made on a friend's 3D printer). A single indirect strip provides adequate light for eating, and I suspect that will be enough to read by once I add the second direct-view strip. As a bonus, it looks great to - or at least it will once I finish hiding the power supply/cable.

For those that are interested, just search for "led strip" on Amazon. Average price is $35 for the RGB Kit (/w remote + power supply), or $15 for a single-color bright strips (power supply not included).

+1, though I was ~13 when I started learning Perl myself and it remains my favorite (if sometimes under-appreciated) language.

More important than the language though is the end goal. For me, I had no interest in Perl at that age, it was merely a means to an end-- in my case a login system for my Starcraft Clan.

Start by identifying what the kid is interested in and/or wants to build, then find the right tool that they can learn in order to achieve their goal.

Unfortunately that's one issue outside the scope of the mythtv project.

The HDHomeRun Prime technically does support CableCARD usage with Linux - but only for stations marked as "copy freely." If your cable provider decides to place any more restrictive copy flags on it (now or later), then your out of luck.

To make things even more annoying, even if you have an Xbox360 to use as a supplement for those premium channels, it can't tune the encrypted stations live without a Win7 box to serve as a pass-through.

Cable companies want above else for you to use their hardware and their services (DVR, cable box, etc) and are still fighting tooth and nail to cripple competing services on every front.

If they can send a firmware update to the phone, then they can brick it. All they'd need to do is push a special (invalid) update only to that one user, who would then need to be dumb enough to accept it if the update can't be remotely forced.

Realistically though, I think bricking is overkill in this case - by definition if its bricked, the phone should not be recoverable if there was a mistake.

All they need to do is log the phones unique ID, add it to a list shared by all carriers using compatible technology and prevent any such phone from being activated on their network. I believe the Europeans have already been doing this for years - with both smart and dumb phones. Some non-GSM US carriers will do this as well (except for the sharing-the-lists part).

Bonus points if they go to the effort of (with a court warrant) letting the phone on anyway as a type of "honeypot" while they remotely activate the GPS to track the thief.

I like that idea, though having it expire immediately upon changing hands would just prevent them from being sold in the first place. I think a far better solution (as in easier to get legislated) would be to impose a "half-life" on patents. Each time a Patent is sold/transferred the remaining time until the patent expires is cut in half. A win-win all around.

For that matter, such a rule would work nicely for copyrights to. Particularly if the half-life rules are crafted to apply to biological people and not corporations. So if an author/artist passes away and the copyright is passed on instead of entering the public domain, the remaining duration is at least cut in half.

Actually, Netflix Streaming does support 5.1 DD sound now. They added support to it for the PS3 early last year, and supposedly added it to the Xbox with the last major dashboard update (though I haven't actually tested that yet).

But yes - BD always looks better than Netflix streaming, even at its highest quality, and in theory can also give better sound quality if you have a 7.1 DTS-HD system. They'll match it eventually, but the bandwidth isn't there just yet. That said, some of their HD content is comparable to BD and you have to look very hard to notice a difference.

+1

If you just want to teach new developers command-line Unix tools, Cygwin is definitely the way to go. If you just want to give them a taste of Linux, distribute some VMs with a distro of choice on it. I've always preferred Ubuntu as the newbie distro of choice, but I haven't really taken a good look at the current state of distros from that perspective in a while.

Realistically for the average user, once you install the OS for them and choose a desktop environment, the choice of distribution is almost irrelevant. More importantly however, if you suspect you can turn a fair number of users in your company to Linux (and your company is large enough), get a site license for an enterprise-grade version to simplify support and management -- you know 'average' users will be asking questions, so better to standardize where possible.

And within a few months of its release the fine hackers at xda-developers.com unlocked the webtop to work as a fully-featured desktop operating system. Hence, this is not new. This is simply Canonical claiming credit for re-packaging what's already been done.

OT: Come to think of it, what has Canonical done in Ubuntu Desktop lately besides forcing Unity, adding an installer and a few configuration GUIs that isn't already in Debian? (Note: I do think Ubuntu does a great job of neatly packaging Linux for new users with user-friendly installers and such, but for myself I've been a lot happier since I switched over to Debian Squeeze.)

The selection of DRM-free books (and specifically Android-compatible audiobooks) is highly limited on OverDrive, but they otherwise have a reasonably large selection now.

While all of MD uses OverDrive though, the availability of books does vary based on county. You must register at your local library, and that gives you access only to those books licensed by that County's library system.

More importantly, the interface for actually sorting through the books on OverDrive is still horrible. In particular, it gets annoying when you browse through and find for example books 3 and 5 of some series (on different pages of results), but books 1 and 2 are not in the system. Or at least that's what I routinely find with the audiobooks (great for long drives), even when I include the Windows-only file formats.