Funny, we just ran into this very situation at work today. Since we happened to have a band saw capable of cutting metal, someone just simply cut it right in half. Took about 30 seconds and it was rendered useless.

I'd rather have one of these: http://www.mbed.org/ I've been using these for personal projects and various tasks at work, and they've been a dream to work with, especially coming from the world of closed-source, proprietary PIC microcontrollers and the expensive compilers they require to get a decent high-level language working.

Having recently installed several more Linux boxes at work and home after being away from Linux for awhile, I am once again reminded how elegant and efficient the Linux OS really is. It was actually a fun project to install, configure, and add packages to these machines. Unlike installing a new Windows box where I need to reboot at least 3 times in order for it to pull down all the required updates, this was refreshing and reaffirmed my appreciation of the Linux OS. Linux isn't going away any time soon, sorry.

This isn't a "secret"... it's been in the iPhone (and iPod for that matter) for quite a long time. This same serial port is how 3rd party docks and cables control the device from the outside: http://www.adriangame.co.uk/ipod-acc-pro.html

I disagree. Look at images #3 and #4. The WebP versions are clearly sharper and more detailed than their JPEG counterparts. Other than that, the rest of the images are so close it's difficult to tell which is better. For a 39% size reduction, I think WebP has a clear advantage over JPEG. Some questions remaining are a) will companies actually adopt WebP and popularize it, or will it die a quiet death, and b) how CPU and memory-intensive is the algorithm to implement compared to JPEG, especially in mobile devices with limited resources and CPU power?

If you try the google search engine in Chrome right now, the RT search is working, and it's awesome!!! I tried FF3.5 and IE8 and they still show the old "static" search ATM.

I've done a lot of scripting for Windows in Python lately and I must say it's been a pure joy. There'a a TON of APIs and it's very easy to whip up something powerful quickly. You should be able to find an easy way to talk to the LAN printers (via sockets, etc.) and sending email from Python is also a breeze.