Let's see - I've got at least acetic acid, citric acid, malic acid, tartaric acid, sodium chloride, sodium bicarbonate, ammonium chloride, fructose, sucrose, maltodextrin, and monosodium glutamate. I might order in some sodium nitrite too, one of these days. Then there's ethanol, Iron (III) chloride, hydrogen peroxide and sodium hydroxide and, AHA! some fertilizer. Then of course there's the precision scales and an improvised dragee pan - can't do without those for the good stuff, obviously.

Point in case - I happen to be a rather passionate amateur cook (thinking I should try making my own smarties one of these days). Most of the above chemicals are just cooking ingredients. Also, occasionally I like to grow my own veg. Peppers, tomatoes, that kind of stuff. And when I'm not cooking, sometimes I play around with electronics and make my own circuit boards.

Extremely suspicious, I'm sure.

Can we stop the "AAAAH!! TERRORISTS!" bullshit already, please, and get on with our lives?

You're in danger the second you step into Iran. Don't do business there, don't visit there.

There's obviously a different perception about what "justice" means there compared to in the United States. Frankly, I think the meaning of justice is distorted in both places; in one place by religion (and if you don't happen to believe the same as they do, death is deemed appropriate), in the other by money (and you'll rot in jail or at the very least be financially ruined for life if you step on the toes of big megacorporations). The message is the same. Conform to those in power, or be doomed. As long as *that* is the message of justice, we can't have true justice.

Every three months? At 900 dollars you can get 900 silicone keyboard protectors which will give you a clean keyboard every DAY for nearly the next 3 YEARS. And here's an other crazy idea: Silicone is more heat resistant than bacteria. Perhaps you don't want to toss away those silicone covers in the bin after a day, but sterilize them and re-use them.

When my father died we went through all his drives. None of the stuff was encrypted so we could get to everything, including the source code of the accounting program that had fed us for a decade. Documentation was poor or lacking. Most of it obsolete by then. It was originally written in QuickBasic and nobody had heard of object-oriented programming at the time. My father was self-taught and frankly it's amazing how well he did. When this program was written, open source libraries were hard to come by (internet? what's that?) and so most of it was written from scratch: user interfaces, b-tree database engine, everything. To make a long story short, the source code was pretty much useless to anyone without the original author maintaining it.

Yes, it must have been an honest mistake. "Sorry, I thought I wrote this stolen code myself". Happens to me all the time!

"Google's inconsistent standards are adversely affecting our ability to counter violent Islamist extremism online." They're not inconsistent standards. By default, Google just index bloody everything. Mr. Liebermann says he wants to counter terrorism but continues to define that as violent Islamist extremism. Apparently other forms of violent extremism (KKK) are tolerable. Who's being inconsistent here? Also, free speech yada yada yada. Now, I don't have to agree with a viewpoint to defend people's right to express it. I do think that mr. Liebermann got one thing right- Sure, add a label to the search result, but don't block the result itself. As long as there's no tracking going on to see who's visiting labeled results, I'm fine with that. Just because I'm reading a page written by a suspected terrorist, that doesn't make me one too.

Many people have already pointed you to prefab solutions like you asked for, but some of them are a bit pricey; If you are going to have "lots of knobs" and the phidgets encoder gives you a single USB knob at 20 bucks, you might want to considering building your own or contacting an Arduino enthusiast who can pull off a custom model. As you can see, There are plenty of AVR based USB projects out there. A single ATMega has 6 a/d converters which you can use for rotary knobs, and at least 8 binary inputs which can be used for switches.

Unblurring without having any additional information has been done by academic software before using a process called blind deconvolution, look it up for some interesting pictures and videos.

It's a rather "expensive" (cpu-intensive) operation, and indeed having sensor data about how the camera has shaken during exposure would significantly help in restoring the image. Interestingly, even cheap smart phones with crappy cameras will often already have movement sensor on-board, so there are some possibilities to improve image quality right after taking a picture; all it takes is a bit of software. How long until someone here whips up an improved Android camera app?

I'm probably under-informed, but I haven't heard of any cameras with full-blown movement sensor, although I know some of them can work out portrait vs landscape by now. Sounds like camera manufacturers have some catching up to do in the hardware department.

Please hit them with a clue-bat at info@schoolmaster.nl. This page on their website requires silverlight as well: http://www.schoolmaster.nl/Foldermateriaal/Magisterboek/tabid/615/language/nl-NL/Default.aspx If you try installing the plug ins, you'll be redirected to the moonlight plugin. Which won't install because it is "not compatible with firefox 6". So in other words, it won't work on Linux. I wonder why am I not in the least bit surprised?

Just because you made it yourself doesn't mean it's worse than the proprietary alternative. I'm using the Volti volume control applet in my task bar. Yes, I contributed to it. I'm using it not because of the pride of having contributed to it, but because now that it's patched, it does what I need it to. I've also written HD24tools, of which I *am* proud. That has little to do with me having written it, and more with what I've actually accomplished by doing so: I've got about 3500 users in 70 countries, running a mix of Windows/Mac/Linux, and the owners of the proprietary solution recommend my software over their own. I'd hardly call that being resisted by the market. It just so happens that my software solves a few problems that the proprietary software does not.