If you can't quite make the leap to the Nest, and what you really want is the ability to run the thermostat from your smartphone, 3M makes a nice WiFi Thermostat that you can pickup at Home Depot for under $100. I was motivated by laziness to switch out my old programmable thermostat for the 3M one a few months back. Yes, it's not as cool as the Next, but you can switch it into away mode from anywhere you can get online if you forget when you go on vacation. The 3M thermostat uses Radio Thermostat Company of America's WiFi module and software interface. I haven't read into it much, but it appears that the API is open so you can in theory write your own software to control the thermostat in the event of the company going under and their web services disappearing.

If you get a SMS message in Russian...

Wait until the middle of the night to access the laptop as the theif will be able to see you moving the mouse around via LogMeIn. Go to town adding security software and such to track down your laptop, or just get annoying and do all you can to brick it. Set a password, require password to disable screen saver, require password on wake, turn on FileVault, etc.

If you get your laptop back or replace it, set a password on the laptop, make sure the laptop asks for the password on wake and for disabling the screen saver, and turn on FileVault to encrypt your home directory, and use CrashPlan or your cloud backup service of choice to backup your data. At least then if your laptop grows legs you're data won't be lost as well, and the theif can't access your files.

Netflix and iTunes have some of the season 41 episodes, as well as no shortage of previous seasons. You can also grab the Sesame Street Podcast for numbers and letters.

Microsoft Support for Windows XP Professional SP3 ends in 1033 days. My thanks to Apple for giving users another reason to upgrade their Operating System or replace that old PC.

My understanding is the customers impacted by the Amazon outage weren't paying the higher price to have their data spread across multiple data centers. It was a decision made by Amazon's customers, and they chose to take the risk and go with the lower priced service, or their customers didn't understand the risk they were taking.

As Microsoft Security Essentials is offered for free for personal and small business (up to 10-PCs) use, the only reason I can think of to pirate AV software is because you're also pirating Windows and can't pass the WGA validation test. Even then why bother...just use the free version of Avast that doesn't care about WGA validation.

Many Bothans died to bring us this information.

Doesn't matter if they are lagomorphs or rodents. They are still cuddly and delicious.

Pretty sure it was possible for the Play Station 3 and PC versions of Unreal Tournament 3 to compete, and the PS3 supported keyboard and mouse controls. From what I've heard the downfall was the only way to path a Play Station 3 game is for Sony to approve them and push them out via PlayStation Network. Sony ultimately didn't do this fast enough so UT3 for PlayStation became incompatible with UT3 for PC.

If I'm recalling this correctly, in this instance it's manufactures desire to control their platform that was the problem, not the difference in capabilities of the hardware. The PS3 hardware seems like it should be on par with a PC.

With gaming consoles geared to pushing 1080p graphics and PC monitor manufactures not pushing resolutions higher than 1080p into the mainstream it seems like the hardware environment for games that allow cross-platform multi-player couldn't be better. Just need to get the console manufactures to get out of the way...

I'm over thinking it. Here's a R/C plane going from VTOL to normal flight and back to VTOL.

http://www.technovelgy.com/ct/Science-Fiction-News.asp?NewsNum=1322

Shouldn't be a problem to take off from the power line. The electric motors used in R/C airplanes can generate enough thrust to hover a plane and all it's gear. Build the drone with two electric motors and counter rotating props and you could take off vertically (as well as hover) at full thrust (if that). Go up 50 feet, then turn off one of the motors to spin into nose dive position and kick the elevator to full climb to get back to horizontal flight. The great thing about R/C plans (and drones) is you can do crazy stunts that would make a human pilot motion sick, black out, or outright kill them.

Even if you secure the WiFi access point the information Google is interested in is still available. They are looking for the MAC address of the WiFi base station and the signal strength, then correlating that data with GPS data. The data they are interested in is not private data.

Oil spill cleanup technology hasn't advanced much. The equipment in use today is pretty much the same as in 1989. The advance in technology has occurred in preventing the oil spills in the first place. Impossible to determine how many spills have been prevented by improving systems over the past 20 years, the feats of engineering involved here will never get any credit. The failures that result in disaster on the other hand will be what we remember. That's the way the world works.

Everyone who knows how to deal with an oil well at this depth works for the oil companies. Other oil companies are assisting.