Mounting things to light poles is 10,000 times more practical.

For years, we have had a cut-out in ITAR 121 that applies to Open Source, it is due to a lawsuit that Phil Karn brought against the Federal Government. Thus, you can implement with impunity, and export to anywhere, as long as it's Open Source.

Rather than an encryption gateway, having your email client handle encryption avoids the problem of man-in-the-middle attacks between the gateway and the client.

I don't have much reason to encrypt, but Thunderbird has my certificate installed and does my digital signing. This is not unusual for a modern email client.

Yes, the German one looks a lot more impressive, with a real person in it (piloting using the remote control) rather than a mannequin.

I had a customer who thought I was crazy for suggesting that all they really needed was chroot for their particular task. In the face of VMs people don't realize that simplicity often works better.

Xen's biggest obstacle right now is KVM. I am no VM expert, but I've been impressed with how well KVM runs, supporting non-VM-aware versions of Microsoft Windows among other things. It's really fun to put that Windows screen on the face of someone's iPad and watch them freak out when they see it's not a screenshot, somehow their iPad got Windows 7 installed on it!

Although I have not installed CyanogenMod on my Nexus 4, as I have on my Asus Transformer Infinity tf700, the option is available and I will probably eventually do so. I am installing nightlies every other day on the Transformer. I have the option not to use Google's services since I have control over the OS. IMO Google is selling the unit at parts cost, that's why it's from the Play store rather than another retailer. Obviously, not being locked in is always considered in my choice of hardware.

I bought an LG / Google Nexus 4 a while back. They're less than half the price of other top-end smartphones, unlocked and with no contract. I put a Platinumtel SIM in it with the $10 for 60 days GSM plan, and set it to restrict background data. The network is T-Mobile. After a month I'm still on the first $10, having of course made extensive use of wifi.

As far as I can tell, I have all of the smartphone benefits without much of the cost.

First-semester physics and you can't quickly produce the basic equations for acceleration, momentum, kinetic energy? Learning to do symbolic differentiation and don't know the product rule? I think you likely have a problem.

Point taken that you don't necessarily have to sit down and memorize them (I never did), though I think there's no harm in doing that and it might help. I'd agree that not knowing them is more a symptom than a cause. But it's a potentially serious symptom: if you're approaching the exam and don't know the product rule, I'd rather the message be "you've got a problem and need a lot more practice", not "don't worry, you can look it up someplace".

But again the real problem with internet-connected devices in exams isn't their use as a reference but as a person-to-person communication device. The exam *does* need to test the student, not somebody else....

I've taught introductory calculus and we definitely didn't reuse exams.

There are some things you need to be able to have at your fingertips without having to google for them each time.

But even that aside, my big worry wouldn't be that they didn't memorize the quadratic formula or something, it'd be that they paid somebody to go sit on the other side of a chat session and coach them through the test. At that point we're really not testing the student any more.

Memorizing formulas is the easy part of learning anything, I don't know why that's the thing some students obsess about, and as a teacher I'd be concerned about students not memorizing things they probably should, but it's not the end of the world.

It's when they start trying to message someone to get help that I'd get really worried.... It's not likely to work as well as they think it will, but I still wouldn't want to have to deal with it.

We used them when I was teaching introductory calculus as a grad student in the 90's.

A smartphone's certainly capable enough, but I can still think of a number of advantages to a special-purpose calculator:

• If you're using it an hour at a time in class, something with dedicated calculator buttons is probably going to be more comfortable than the touchscreen interface.
• There's less to go wrong. In a class with 30 students, I'd be afraid one of them would always have a dead phone battery or a crash or.... (Or worse, I would while I'm trying to demonstrate something.)
• They're generally No wireless networking, so you can give test problems that might require calculators without having to deal with the whole "how do I know you aren't texting with someone during the test" problem.

But sure maybe some day it will make sense to require everyone to have a phone and standardize on some single calculator app.

Actually, if you look at Fox over the past few weeks, they've run a series of anti-solar articles. I guess somebody wants to sell more oil.

I'd want single-eye correction. The uncorrected eye will see spectra that are filtered by this lens.

By the way, I've been told by doctors for at least 20 years that a magenta tint sometimes helps. This isn't really new art.

If I understand it correctly, the defective sensor is sensitive at a spectral peak that is different from the value in normal individuals. It is through mutations to this sensor that color vision evolves. Theoretically, some rare women have four operative spectral bands rather than three.