And taking aim from somewhere across the internet.

Or at least have the US house and Senate host websites with a web service that lists sponsors and amounts for each member (and maybe even each candidate for election). That way instead of just seeing "Bob Fart (D, SC)" in a news story we can see the top few sponsors or more if we follow a link. Make it a felony not to update it within 48 hours.

All the BBC did was re-post some NASA images that won't be news to many here, but even this simple act was enough to make me think about aurora on other planets, what the difference between a star and a planet really is and gives me some idea of the scale of the features by comparing them to the size of the earth. That's pretty good for such a simple sequence of photos. Giving me reason to think about things outside the day-to-day routine like this is just what I want out of slashdot. Thanks.

No you crush the asteroid and leave the parts in a stable orbit then charge the government to clean up the mess. Or the government pays you to leave the debris field in the path of any ICBM launched from N Korea.

I don't think what's best for the equipment is generally best for the staff or vice versa.I would divide the room into two areas with some soundproofing and ideally glass in between.

Make the equipment side a bunch of shelves on racks with modular cabling into the staff area. Have commonly used infrastructure in the racks (KVMs, DHCP servers, power distribution file servers for images etc.) Make sure that there are plenty of well labeled/colored cables available and a means to store them conveniently. The equipment area needs to anti-static and drink/food free and well lit. The staff area may need to be warmer than the equipment area (arguments seem to rage over this) and permit snacks and sodas, have more friendly lighting.

Depending on what you will be doing you may want to consider a third, more secure area for whenever you need to impress a customer with your ability to keep their stuff separate, I would at least plan that the equipment area might be sub-divided by a cage later.

The kids seem to only use the sensors as a bare minimum (in this case they are specifically directed to use the light sensor to stay in the ring). I'd be far more impressed if the sensor use were to play a larger part, over and above whether the kids can make a "piece of cheese" shaped robot, or a tall, thin robot. Sure all these things are important for stability and wotnot. But really, it's the processing of sensory information that makes it a robot and not a pine car.

At last a way to cash in on my multiple personality disorder, we've hit paydirt.

He writes some easy to read, get to the basics books on physics and they're available to buy via lulu or free for download here.

Your sense of morality may have come from your religion, but your religion got it from a human, probably the parents of whoever made it up who got it from their parents and so on as humans developed it over time. I disagree with you and I think you will find that the vast majority of values you hold are shared with families and people of all faiths or the lack thereof, and that there is plenty we can agree upon to base a legal system without involving a deity.

If you're waiting for 100% agreement on anything you'll be waiting a long time, but I think you underestimate the proportion of people worldwide that would agree on whether murder, stealing, fraud, deception etc. should be subject to legal penalty, the broad circumstances under which the penalties should apply and the relative seriousness of crimes.

I just don't see how you can go through life with so little faith in the humanity of your fellow man.

I have not heard anything yet about the size or concealment of the IEDs used. Presumably they were quite large and had been in place for a short while, perhaps hidden in storm drains or garbage cans or mailboxes or backpacks. If so, then that's what the security team can look for, I believe they even have explosives sniffing dogs and presumably some kind of explosive sniffing technology could be developed. They could presumably also set up HD video cameras along the event route for a couple of weeks before the event and then take them down when the event is over.

This story is still unfolding it seems a shame that it has now scrolled to yesterdays news on slashdot. It would be good to be able to vote it back to being current and to be able to see the comments stacked in reverse cronology. I know everyone has their own favorite bitch about the slashdot UI, but this is a good example of a story that suffers from it.

Clarification of this law may not come soon. But there will be a lot of legal "clarification" going on when people run away with the idea that they can print a gun with the plastic from old yogurt pots, put a round in it and fire it. When the whole thing disintegrates and causes injury to anyone except the intended target.

It will turn out actually to be pop-up technology. They'll probably have to warn people not to watch Mike Tyson on it. But then that's good advice for 2D too,

So embed some random nonce into the executable and tell them it's their credit card data

I do like your idea of embedding malware and threatening to unleash it if theft is detected.

I'm only joking by the way, but this is fun...

have everyone pay by credit card and embed their credit card details in the executable steganographically (it has to be possible in code too !) and tell the buyers you've done it. It should stop them passing the .exe around anyway.

The other thing that the Rikomagic lacks is a large and growing community of users, vendors and educators. Hardware's fine and all that but creating a common basic platform for a broad community is much harder.
Besides the lack of GPIO/SPI/I2c is a huge deal, it cuts out a lot of hardware tinkering.