I agree, but that doesn't change the fact that there is an awful lot of NIMBY going on. We could've and should've been building new reactors since the 70's, but instead the reactors that are online are mostly still the original first generation designs from the late 50's and early 60's. The same whack job environmentalists who should be all for this, are also typically the most adament against it. Yet watch them and their energy use isn't substantially different then any other American....

I suspect by the time we figure out that we can't put up with this NIMBY crap we will be OUT of oil OR have completely screwed up the environment once and for all...

I mean really this was the first new nuke plant licensed in 30 years:
http://money.cnn.com/2012/02/09/news/economy/nuclear_reactors/index.htm

And it's the AP1000. Still a Water based design and Generation 3.. Though from the look of it a lot safer than most of the reactors (Gen 2) in operation

Why?
NIMBY

4Layer? It was probably 2. But a worse case scenario would've been to make it more. Remember we're talking today.. Today an 8-layer board is nearly as cheap as a 2-layer board and if it meant having a legal product it would've been done.

"It’s not just a failure; it’s an abject one" Really? Now I admit the situation could be a ALOT worse with the accessories and cables, and until you've ran the test you don't know. But it's only about 6dB above the line, I've seen a lot worse problems [try 20dB!]. There is a good chance this would be a relatively easy fix when you start looking at the problem.

A ferrite bead on the power supply cable would probably fix the "bad power" supply if indeed that's what it is. And some judicious copper taping would likely fix the other problems. Worse case you do a board spin and add ferrite beads to the I/O and possibly move suspect traces into internal layers. Worse WORSE case you change the clocking to use spread spectrum which would likely not require any changes except in the clocking circuits. None of those would prevent a "modern" version of the product from going to market.. And a good engineer could probably implement them in less than 6 weeks in a production environment...

Plus it doesn't even manner, if you were going to bring a sinclair back to market it would draw about 20mA, run on USB power and be completely implemented on a single chip.... Because it has roughly the same processing power as a PIC uC.

Practically? This clearly demonstrates that it pays for the windows license and is also a revenue stream. Either that or Dell is sticking it to linux users just to get a few more bucks... Probably a windows machine that they just pay some high school student to install linux onto....

Who wants to take a bet there is a windows 7 key on the bottom of the laptop?

Apparently, pushing refresh and then posting a reply comment is not sufficient. The backend for Slashdot must not be fully synchronous. We must have posted at the same time and non had made the comments page yet, even though they were working their way through the database.

If you don't need the money, enjoy your summer! Spend time doing hobbies, volunteer opportunities, working on open source projects [programming]. Worry about education and internships when you get to college.

It'll be A LOT easier to get employed after your sophomore year. You should try after Freshmen year, but no guarantee it'll happen.

Maybe take a general ed class that will transfer at your local community college if you must do "something productive"

Woot!. First post!

Come on there must be better way... Perhaps by having a raid array of the appropriate infrastructure?

Not necessarily. IF you get into MIT and your parents aren't super rich [of course if they are super rich you probably don't have to worry about debt either because you've got $$$ from mom and dad], they will may make the financial offer competitive or even better than State school. MIT is need blind (on admission) and academic blind on financial aid. and they have a very big endowment / devoted alumni. They are committed to making MIT affordable to everyone.

Take my example:
HS Class of 1998 (yeah I'm getting old....)
California Resident.
Son of Vietnam Vet (at the time This meant FREE tuition at California State Schools.)
Parents made ~$60,000 /year with 2 kids in college and 1 still living at home. [Solidly middle class, but not even approaching rich back then]
NO college savings [Damn parents...]

Cost of attendance (approximate numbers, after free money given by universities):

UC Berkeley: $16,000 /year [NO Free money, some subsidized federal loans, some UNsubsidized federal loans]
MIT: $15,250 /year [>$20,000 free money [MIT alumni scholarship] + Federal Subsidized loans

Loans and Summer Internships covered that with no problem.

Graduated FROM MIT with about $10,000 /debt. Not too bad. If I hadn't flown home to california 3+ times a year probably could have pushed that to under $5000, or not bought those two laptops at ~$2000 each....

It's called coherent integration gain. It's done entirely digitally in a modern radar such as this and can in theory allow you to detect pretty much any signal no matter how weak [there are practical limits of course...] The whole radar they've described probably has a BOM cost of less than $200,000. The real gotcha is labor to make it work, not the material cost. That'll cost millions [probably >$10Million, you could find out if you want to dig through some defense contracts and find the value of this one...] but so did your new iPhone 4S. The difference is that your iPhone 4S is going to have millions made this not so much. If the government wanted to build 100,000 of these, the cost would probably drop to around $50,000....

Here's the idea:
1) You transmit N identical pulses of radar waveform (probably an LFM or NLFM waveform for this application)
2) They bounce off the target and return to the radar
3) You receive them. They are WAY below the noise figure (say 50db). No amount of normal filtering will get them back. You have to analyze the noise for something that isn't "noise" like....
4) You use a matched filter that has a maximum output when the input signal is exactly the LFM you originally sampled to "pulse" compress the signal
5) If you're lucky the matched filter output has gotten you 20-30 db of gain because it's looking on a single pulse basis for the exact signal of interest. That 20-30db gain DOESN'T apply to the noise, because the noise won't match the matched filter [random vs determinisitic], therefore you've gained 20-30db of SNR.
6) Now remember you transmitted N pulses. Why not look for a signal across all of those? That's the next step. For this application they'd probably use Doppler processing. Turns out that if you do this properly you get gain on the desired signal equal to the number of pulses, so if you transmit thousands you can get that remaining 20-30db needed to make the signal >15db SNR which is the usual minimum for reliable detection in thermal noise.

It's really straight forward. The challenges here are not in that part of the design. That part is easy..

The challenges are:
1) Making it realtime (Coherent processing doesn't work when targets lose coherency that happens when they move "too quickly"). This limits the number of pulses you can use to make useable system
2) Dealing with the Dynamic range between the (very) STRONG wall return and the very weak internal targets. [Very expensive ADCs and RF amplifiers can help, they've also apparently added a doppler filtering step in analog which is interesting.... But fundamentally it's a pain]
3) Target classification. The military could care less how many TV and appliances you have. Unfortunately those will show up as targets behind the wall too...
4) Making it small enough and draw a reasonable enough amount of power to be vehicle mounted
===> If you fix #1 with more output power or a larger antenna you run into this problem.....
4) Having enough resolution to actually differentiate 2 separate targets. Without going into the details this becomes problematic for short range radars like this....because you want to see things that are on order 1ft x 1ft.. Radar is much better at seeing Planes and Tanks...

Actually this may not be a vulnerability in units without a removeable battery. When a Lithium Ion [or polymer] battery is removable manufactures install microcontrollers with firmware to orchestrate the safety system and do battery life management. This firmware is often provided by the pack subcontractor rather then written by the larger system manufacturer...

The pack has firmware for two reasons:

1) There is a variety of failure mechanisms that can cause fire and explosion with Lithium Ion batteries. When the uC detects one of these is occurring the battery is either temporarily or permanently placed in "Safe" mode. This disconnects the battery from it's terminals. Since on units with removable batteries these conditions can occur outside of the unit, these important safety functions must be built into the battery. Your typical Cell phone battery has three or more terminals for these functions [even though only 2 terminals is needed to charge/discharge the battery]
===> Another safety concern is "fake" batteries which often don't have these safety features, so often the uC authenticates itself to the Laptop before it can be used. This protects from counterfeits and also makes the laptop manufacturer money on replacement batteries.....

2) Charge Cycles and battery capacity information is also stored and calculated. This information is provided to the higher level system, when the battery is inserted. This is important so your Laptop can guess (relatively accurately) how much time is left even after you change the battery to a possibly degraded or partially charged spare. [Current monitors detect how much power goes into the battery and how much is removed. Based on historical information from previous charge/discharge cycles a good guess on the remaining capacity can be made]

Things are different however in units with a non-user serviceable battery. A lot of the safety concerns can be explained away and not protected against, since the battery is in a more protected position (this all comes down to lawsuits, if you can say the user tampered with the unit and prove it then the company is off the hook...). So often they will have a "dumb" charger connected to the battery with most of the safety functions removed. A special purpose capacity monitor chip (without firmware) can be used for the power monitoring feature. Thus in a lot of systems you don't need the uC (and thus the firmware) at all, if you assume the battery can't be tampered with...