That reminds me of something interesting I noticed - in "western" countries the emoticons are focussed on the mouth, :) :( :p etc
But in Japan, they are mainly about the eyes, like ^_^ (others mangled by slashdot)

What a ridiculously disproportionate penalty, I thought only the US was that screwed up.
I blame Sony.

I'm living in Japan, so lately I have been renting a "seedbox" in the Netherlands for $15/month.
I can download whatever I want to through the web interface, then copy it via sftp.
I'm sure solutions like this will start becoming a lot more common soon.

This guy reacted 300ms later than the others and he blames it on the speed of sound?
300ms at 340m/s is 102m, there's no way he was that far away from the other athletes.

Yeah, I bet countries like china would never even CONSIDER dosing kids from birth to get an advantage...

Try looking at http://www.4dsystems.com.au/

They sell touchscreens around that size with a controller that you can either program using a C-like language, or send commands to from an AVR etc.

I don't know why this is being hyped so much... from my brief look it seems pretty dodgy.
I'm not an expert in data transmission, but I have reviewed quite a few papers.

Two main points stand out:

1. They have two lasers of different wavelengths just so they can use the phrase "wavelength division multiplexing", but the lasers point at separate photodiodes! The lasers could be the same wavelength and it would make no difference.
Doing this adds nothing to their paper and lowers my impression of the research quality.

2. Their adaptive filter seems to require that the receivers already know the correct data in order to measure the amplitude/phase error and adapt.
Why would you need to transmit the data if it is already known at the receiver???

I would reject this paper.

Roy and HG's coverage is the only one worth watching these days.

What collision avoidance?
They are all externally controlled, and the controller knows their position to within a few mm due to the very expensive vicon system they are using.
All they are doing is moving along preplanned and precalculated trajectories.

As a robotics researcher I'm not really impressed.
External control and localisation removes 99% of of the difficulty of the problem.
It also makes this research useless for any actual real-world function, it's only good for fancy demos in their specially prepared room.
If they did that with only onboard sensors and control, THEN I would be impressed.

I wouldn't call this laser "the same manner as visible-light lasers" really, it lacks one of the fundamental features of a normal laser - self amplification via feedback from mirrors.
It sounds like this could be the _basis_ for a laser, as a pump source causes superluminescence, but without feedback it won't be particularly directional.
Perhaps if it can be triggered to start the avalanche at one end a directional burst could be achieved though, kind of like a nitrogen laser.

I work in Japan (Tokyo) as an engineer in a small company. I was worried about extreme hours and no holidays when I started, but it is actually OK.
Official hours are 9-6, and people actually start to leave around 6:30. The boss is indeed a 50 year old man, but he leaves around 7 (maybe cause he's not married).
People sit/sleep at their desks during the hour off for lunch, but nobody does any work unless something is really urgent.
I usually leave about 7-7:30, but I leave at 6 sometimes and it's fine.

Over the new year holidays most people took about a week off, but that's about it for the year besides public holidays. There is "golden week" too though, where there is a small gap between a bunch of public holidays, and most people take those off.

It may be different in large rigidly controlled companies though.

100Mb/s dowload, no cap
100Mb/s upload, 30GB/day (yes day) cap
Cost is about US$50/month, for only a bit more 1Gbps is available but I thougt that was slightly excessive.
It's good to live in a civilised country!

Actually this is a perfectly normal problem where the results you get out of a computer will depend a lot on how well you define the problem. If you define the shape of the lawn, the size of the cutter, and the turning characteristics of the mower accurately, I have little doubt that a computer can come up with a more optimal solution than a human (even if only by a small amount). A human with a stopwatch is unlikely to try more than about 15 different routes while a computer in simulation can try millions of routes in a short time.

The question is really "is it worth it". A human can easily come up with a decent route just by looking at the lawn, so it is probably not worth the time of making a simulation and running an optimisation to save 5% of the time unless you are a professional golf course mower.

Well 6,600 pounds is 2,994 kg, so I suspect that the actual value is 3,000 kg and it has been converted to pounds for for certain poor backwards readers.