http://maps.google.com/?ie=UTF8&ll=27.605462,-97.306359&spn=0.013139,0.021544&t=h&z=16 Suck in ocean water from one area, blow it out in another. This plant sucks water from the Laguna Madre (the body of water between the Texas coast and Padre Island) then spills the water into the Oso Bay, which is in turn connected to the Corpus Christi bay. This plant is a natural-gas fired plant, but evidently had coal in mind with the docks...cooling water and fuel via the same route.

http://maps.google.com/?ie=UTF8&ll=28.768261,-96.047201&spn=0.103977,0.172348&t=h&z=13 I noticed this a few weeks ago while flying over the area. Yes, this is nuke site.

Copyright does not give the property holder the right to tell users what color/brand glasses they are allowed to wear when reading a particular title and this is really no different. Amazon/Kindle should stick to their guns and let the end user decide to turn on the TTS engine or not. Besides, most people can read a lot faster than even the fastest discernible speech.

Not when the yellow period is shortened to increase the ticket yields, which I've not yet seen myself in my location, but have heard about. I'm not one to advocate running red lights, but if going up against intentionally shortened yellow lights, I say countermeasures are appropriate and justified. If a locale wants to play dirt, this'll shield their dirt.

Here's a neat idea. I really want to do the same with my license plate for the stupid redlight cameras in my city, but was thinking a few strong camera strobes with an IR filter set up as a slave flash would work better.

http://www.hacknmod.com/hack/blind-cameras-with-an-infrared-led-hat/

This IR hat hack is cool, but needs to be modified to regulate the current through the LEDs or they'll burn out quickly.

I wonder how long a GW satellite would have to operate to capture the amount of energy required to build the PV arrays and the rest of the sattelite, the rectenna, and match the energy consumed in producing and operating the spacecraft used to put it into orbit. Its my understanding that the amount of energy used to create PV arrays is pretty substantial alone...years worth of operation on earth. I hope this is a lot better both in efficiencies creating the modern PV panels, and in capture efficiencies.

Why the hell are we still paying for text messages? Yeah, I know this is offtopic, but it's just freaking sick that the rest of the civilized world is much more forward thinking than here in the US in terms of data services. Why do we tolerate being the cell oligopoly's little bitches? This is f***ing madness.

...possession is 9/10th of the law.

Seriously, I'd just overwrite the device with a utility such as dban then keep my mouth shut, forever. This is the advice I'd offer anyone in this sort of situation. I actually take it a step further in that I dban _every_ used storage device I get without first looking to see what is on it, so I have no clue if I ever received something via a second-hand device that I should not have.

I know how to make beer, so will bring the beer to the BBQ. I hear slow roasted long pig goes well with a good cold brew.

talk about prior art...if this survives the challenge I'm leaving.

value of the recording vs penalty...

The value of the suspected recorded content may give the owner of that content far more political leverage than some stupid law gives his oppressor. This, of course, only applies if there exists some sort of [even potential] automated dissemination of the aforementioned data. If the oppressor knows the user has the only copy of potentially incriminating evidence, it would be a very different and dangerous circumstance for the user.

It could be quite useful if there could be a known delay before the gigantic and awesome fireball mode activates. I'd also suspect there'd probably be some sort warranty exception for the use of that mode.

This is the perfect opportunity to use some sort of crypo that encrypts the data stored (video, whatever) in a block by block fashion as it is recorded, but encrypts with traditional PKI so that there is no open session to attack. Also, the secret key shouldn't be stored on the device but instead reside with the news agency, trusted friend in another country, etc. In a nutshell, devices from video cameras to general-purpose gps-enabled geek toys shouldn't be made into easy tools for a repressive government to compile evidence against the user of the tool. I also realize though that these repressive regimes could just outlaw the crypto and make that penalty very harsh/cruel/insane, but then there's also the whole field of stenography, and this cat and mouse game can still continue ad nauseum. I really would love to build something like this out of a DV camera and some sort of small embeddible computer that could handle the I/O and crypto at DV rates.