If by 'valid fear' you mean 'prejudice-inspired paranoia', then your statement may be true.

Turning off WiFi when you're out of range of a base station is easy. Turning it back on when you come back in range is hard...

I'd rather have a Thunderbolt port on the phone and put everything else (external GPU, SATA controller, GigE controller, and so on) in a PCIe dock.

Comparing mA is stupid without also comparing voltage. The USB can provide 500mA at 5V, which is 2.5W. There are also modes for higher power, but they require negotiation. The Qi charging spec allows delivering up to 5W to low-power devices, 120W to high-power ones.

They're different numbers. Wolphram Alpha says 44oz of Pepsi is 503 Cal, which is 25% RDA. It also says it's 46% of the RDA for carbohydrates. RDA for sugar is 90g for women, 120g for men, and it contains 139g of sugar, so that's 115%-154%, depending on your gender. Putting that number on the cup ('this contains 150% of your recommended daily amount of sugar') would be even better.

Racing is a bit different from riding. Racing any vehicle (or even running) has a fairly good chance of causing injury, because it's forcing you to quickly decide between a speed advantage and safety. One serious injury per 25 hours covers quite a lot of races, but seems very dependent on the kind of racing. Near my father, there's a 24 hour mountain bike race, which people do individually or in small teams (up to 4). With that statistic, I'd expect almost every team to suffer some form of injury during the race. Unless 'getting a bit muddy' counts as a serious injury, that isn't the case. Even the crazy people who do it on a unicycle mostly manage to avoid injury.

A better approach than a ban would be to require the cups for sugary beverages over a certain capacity to prominently display a calorie count. And none of the 'per serving' bullshit that has become increasingly common, with some small print hidden somewhere saying '* Contains 15 servings'.

Wolphram Alpha tells me that a 44oz container of lemonade contains 312 calories (16% RDA). I suspect that if you printed that information, large enough to read, on the cup then a lot fewer people would order them.

I don't think they could fit within their power budget with an off-the-shelf BTLE SoC. They may find a DSP that can do some processing on the incoming signals to determine whether it's worth powering the BTLE part within the power budget, but it's unlikely - they'd want something very specialised. ASICs of the complexity that they need can be quite cheap, but you'd still be pushing it to get it done in $500K. You could probably build a working prototype for that, but getting it into production would need a bit more.

The difference is that the LCD needs to be on all of the time. The Pebble does a little trick where it uses the accelerometer to detect when you've just turned the watch face up and turns the screen on then.

Even once a second may be more than you need. If the aim is to have something that communicates with a much more powerful device, then I'd imagine that every 10 seconds you'd turn on the passive receiver and do a tiny bit of signal processing to detect if you have anything that might be a bluetooth signal (the receiver is always online because it's part of your energy harvesting, but the DSP isn't). If you do, then you bring the transmitter up and send a ping. You're only using the 10mW of Bluetooth LE for a tiny period, once every 10s, if you've already detected that there's a high probability that someone is trying to talk to you.

Even then, the power requirements are not obviously below what you can get from energy harvesting. You need to have a timing source that lets you detect when the 10s quiet window ends, and the more accurate you make that the higher its power requirements are. I'd say it was probably possible, but definitely not easy...

Here in Cambridge, computer science has a worse gender balance than mathematics, which is worse than the national average. I think the only department with a worse gender balance than us is the veterinary school (which is something like 90% female - apparently it's easier to find women who want to to take a degree that involves a lot of time with your hand up a cow than to work with computers).

I find it hard to credit logic that says women have more of a natural aptitude for mathematics than for computer science, but something is putting them off applying. I've just become responsible for admissions at an all-women college, which currently has two students in computer science in total for the three-year undergraduate course (both just about to enter the second year, no new admissions entering the first, no second years moving to the third). The college wants to increase its intake in STEM fields, but it can't do much without more applicants - it's not going to do it by letting in women who aren't qualified, because that's self-defeating in the long run (and in the short term affects the college's ranking within the university, which affects applications, and so on).

And, honestly, given some of the male students we've had getting 2.iis, I find it hard to believe that there weren't potential applicants of both genders who would have made better use of a Cambridge education.

The way the joke is phrased is different. Each person in the bar might have been confident in their ability, given the right framework, to write the required code. But writing safety critical code requires different engineering practices to a lot of other software. If you're writing aeronautical code, then you typically have a small required feature set, and a huge budget for QA relative to the development budget. A company that's set up to release early, release often, and do testing by deploying to a subset of users would not be able to easily adapt, even if their programmers were of the same caliber as those writing the aeronautical code.

The same holds for the associated mechanical tasks. The skill of the welder is important, but it's not enough without also having people responsible for modelling the stresses that the weld will be subjected to, people determining the required quality and people inspecting the result. It doesn't matter if you hire the best welders in the business whose welds pass inspection 99% of the time, if you're not paying the inspectors to catch the 1%.

Same. For some reason, my hair always triggers the security scanners so I always get someone checking I don't have a concealed... something... in my hair. The biggest irritation flying to the USA is not the TSA, it's immigration. Most airports put on a fraction of the immigration officials that they need and so the queues are huge and move slowly. My most recent trip was a pleasant surprise, as people who have entered on an ESTA before were put in the residents line at Chicago O'Hare, where it's mostly automated and so got in with lots of time to spare to catch my connection. If I'd been in the main line, I'd have just passed immigration (but not customs) when my connecting flight started boarding in another terminal.

If you've been flying enough (25K miles in a year), United gives free upgrades to economy plus, which has a bit more leg room. Not much, but for me it's the difference between almost enough and enough...

It's not a clear-cut distinction. Bill Gates didn't inherit most of his wealth, but he did inherit enough to have the seed capital to be able to set up his own company and the contacts via his parents to get meetings with people at IBM and other potential big customers who normally wouldn't have talked to anyone at a small startup as a potential supplier.

Add to that, it's also possible to consult during your PhD. A PhD student in the UK gets a stipend of £12K. That's non-taxable, which means that any other income that you make during your PhD starts at the bottom. The tax-free allowance is £10K, so the first £10K you earn consulting is also tax free. If you're working in a commercially interesting area, then you can take home £22K/year tax free during your PhD, which is equivalent to a taxable salary of £28K ($47.7K). You're still eligible for student discounts on a lot of things, so your cost of living is a bit lower too and you may be eligible for (university subsidised) student accommodation. And, of course, you don't need to stop consulting when you use up the tax-free allowance, but it's a fairly good benchmark of where you should stop if you want to have enough time to finish the PhD in a reasonable timeframe.