The Adafruit IOIO gives you a bunch of analog and digital IO's, runs on
a battery, talks via Bluetooth, and comes with an Android dev kit
so you don't have to figure out the bit-banging interface.

The only downside is that it is limited to Bluetooth's bandwidth
and latency, which may or may not be compatible with your
other project requirements.

You won't know until you test. So I did. Here's my results:

With the aid of my girlfriend, I tested myself to see just what I could tell apart. The test music was "Veteran of the Psychic Wars", by
Blue Oyster Cult, listening through some very high end Audio-Technica headphones I picked up in Akihabara earlier that year.
I tested:

16bit WAV (GRIPped right from the CD, 1440 Kbit equivalent)
320Kbit LAME ABR MP3
256Kbit LAME ABR MP3
192Kbit LAME ABR MP3
128Kbit LAME ABR MP3

I found that the WAV and the 320Kbit LAME were "different", but I couldn't tell which was better. So, dead heat. I could tell that the
256Kbit LAME encoding was pretty damn close, but not quite as clean (the snare drums were the giveaway). Anything less was
clearly not as good. 128Kbit was practically unlistenable when I A/Bed it against the WAV or 320Kbit, it was that bad.

So there; now when I rip my CDs I keep the .WAV and encode
at 320Kbit ABR

The PROP-M carrier vehicle made it down- but failed after 20
seconds. If the rover even deployed, we never knew it, and
we definitely never actually got data back.

Grammar is just an aid to clarity- when the two conflict, geek rule is that clarity trumps grammar.

For example, consider the old format:

    Helen asked "How do you plan to do that"?

versus the newer:

    Helen asked "How do you plan to do that?".

The first form, although "grammatically correct" according to S&W, is ambiguous - did the speaker state that Helen asked a question, or ask if Helen did so? The second form is unabiguous; the speaker states that Helen asked a question.

I was entering the MBTA T station at Porter square about two weeks ago, and was accosted by a Massachusetts State Policeman.  He politely told me that I was "selected" for a search.

me: "And what does this search entail?"
him: "We swab the outside of your bag and look for explosive residues".
me: "And if I decline?"
him: "You'll have to leave the station."
me: [looking up thru the skylights at the nice day outside]
me: "It's a beautiful day.  Thank you officer, I think I'll walk."
him: "Have a nice day."
me: "You too."
..... and I turned, went up the escalators, and out of the station.

No problems, nobody followed me, shouted to me, nothing.
And no Gitmo team either.

I'd say, by demonstration and experiment, you can just decline
and walk out without any repercussions besides having to walk
to the next T station, which is usually about a 15 minute
walk away (worst case: catch a cab).

At least the supreme court has held that declining a search on
public property is not cause for arrest nor for a search.

The folks at Mitsubishi Research actually came up with glasses that work like the ones in "They Live"... without the special glasses, you see one image, with the special glasses, you see another (secret) image.

Their paper is at
http://www.merl.com/publications/TR2002-011/

and the video is pretty darn amazing.

My bedroom alarm clock has broken set-the-time switches.

So I had to wait up till (new) midnight, and plug it in right then
so that it would be on time.

So, I set an alarm for myself to wake me up in time...

Assuming the information on the hard drives is just PII, but not
covered by HIPAA or some other government regulation, there are
three quick and easy ways to destroy them that I've used. All three
work at the "I have $10,000 to spend to recover the data" level of
disk recovery (i.e. the NSA probably could pull some data and
so could the FSB or Mossad, but not your local script kiddie).

1) Gun. Take 'em to the firing range and "pop a cap in 'em".
Preferably several rounds each. The idea is to bend the
platters enough that they can't be easily read. Note that this
is step 1 in "military decommissioning". It is also a lot
of fun.

2) Bandsaw. Cut the disks in half. This is much less fun
than it seems; you will spend more time than you expect
doing this. Wear eye and ear protection. Your local high
school or tech/voc probably has a bandsaw you can use.
Don't cut right through the hub, as the hardened steel ball
bearings will really mess up the blade. Cut to the side of
the hub only. DAMHIK.

3) Hydraulic press. This is what we currently use at work.
Just push a 4 cm. steel bar endwise through the middle of
the disk drive till it comes out the other end. We use a
20-ton press (from Harbor Freight - it's cheap enough
that we don't care), with both hand and pneumatic pumps, and
we can decommission a disk in about thirty seconds,
without even having to remove it from the server cage
sheet metal. Most machine shops as well as the
tech-voc highschool will have a hydraulic press in this
scale.

Major bugs in the assumptions of this paper: they assume the
average commuter can do 14 MPH on an unassisted bicycle,
that personal time is valueless, and that bicycles are as safe
as cars.

I ride in Cambridge near MIT, and when I was in *decent*
shape (i.e. doing half-century rides back-to-back) I was lucky to
peak at 17 MPH and maintain an average of 10 MPH during traffic.
I'm sure a Tour-de-France competitor could maintain 14 MPH in
traffic, but I don't think an average Cambridgeite could come close.

They further assume that the person's time is valueless, so walking
at 3.5 MPH and bicycling at 14 MPH have no impact on the overall
quality of life. Similarly the time you "recover" (reading on the bus
or subway, listening to the radio in the car) is zero-value as well.

Nor do they factor in the (significant in Cambridge) medical
costs due to the high rate of bicycle-to-car and bicycle-to-pedestrian
accidents. Since a single accident with an associated E.R. visit
would cost ~$1000, that would completely invert the ranking
and make the bicycle the most expensive transportation
available.

The Economist published a study on exactly this about ten years ago. They took the full NHTSA collision database of all fatalities in multivehicle accidents, and looked for "significant effects".

There was only ONE indicator that rose to statistical significance- weight of the vehicle. More precisely, the probability of a person dying in a two-vehicle collision is proportional to the inverse square of the masses of the vehicles; heavier vehicle wins, and it wins by the _square_ of the ratio of the masses. Half the mass == FOUR TIMES LIKELIER TO DIE. A third the mass == NINE TIMES LIKELIER TO DIE.

The worse part: NOTHING ELSE MATTERED. Super-safe "brands" like Volvo and Mercedes did no better on a weight-by-weight basis than Subaru or Ford; the highly touted "design for safety" did absolutely _nothing_ (in a statistical sense) to help passengers survive.

In short- saving fuel may be good for politics, global warming, etc. Therefore it's a good idea to get everyone _else_ into small light cars, but it's an even better idea to keep yourself and those you hold dear into the heaviest vehicle you can afford to buy and operate.

I've played extensively with a Nook Color.... and dispite a luscious color screen, it's none too speedy even doing what it's supposed to be doing, being a bookreader. Pages stutter as they cross the page; the update rate is not only well below 10 Hz but it's also irregular.

I can only fear what it might be like running something "that should have more CPU available".

That said, for $250, who cares? :)

First the Big Custom Computer market (STRETCH, EDVAC, etc) was destroyed by the mass-market mainframe makers (IBM, CDC, Univac...)

Then the mainframe market (IBM, Honeywell, Univac... does Univac still exist any more?) was cannibalized by the minicomputer makers, like DEC, Silicon Graphics, and Data General.

Then the minicomputer market (DEC, SGI, DG, et al) were literally eaten alive by the PC makers (Microsoft in conjunction with Compaq, Dell, and a new piece of IBM)

Now it's the turn of the PC makers to be rendered irrelevant by the "little teensy computers" that masquerade as smart cellphones, book readers, or "mobile internet devices", whatever _those_ are.

It may well be a race to the bottom, but as long as Moore's Law and it's corrolaries hold up, it's gonna be fun.

Edsac was not the first stored program digital computer.

Konrad Zuse's Z3 was running in 1941... turing complete, vacuum tubes, and all.

They're lying to you. Update your resume. That company is in a death spiral and you're better off getting out as soon as possible.

I've been there. Same situation- work till you drop for a promise (not in writing, of course) of some trinket-level reward - in this case, a $5000 bonus for working six months of 16 to 18-hour days (call it two full quarters of extra effort, 1000 hours. So it was $5 an hour actual pay rate, but that's not important).

We delivered. Management said "We never thought you'd do it, so we didn't budget for it and Marketing isn't ready to release it so no bonus."

So no bonus.

We should have expected better, since this was the same management that did an _inverse_ stock split, but only for employee-owned shares, except for the four employees who were founders, those guys shares didn't inverse-split. After it all shook out, my $40,000 worth of "signing bonus options" turned out to be worth $427. Funny how vulture capitalists only issue non-diluting shares when you are acting in a position of power.

Expect NOTHING in return from your bosses when you deliver, except possibly layoffs since you are no longer necessary, and will probably have major health problems so your medical bills will be costing them money on the group insurance policy.

I would say tell your employees exactly what was told here, and hope they have the sense to say FSCK YOU to your boss. "You want that? We want twenty percent of the company, NON DILUTING SHARES (i.e. if the company issues additional shares, even billions of shares, you still own 20% of the company. Shares that aren't non-diluting are worthless, see above note on turning $40,000 into $427.)."

In fact, don't even talk to anyone else. Just update your resume, circulate it, interview, do a professional job of task handoff, documentation, etc. and leave with a polite, professional note of two weeks notice.

What I don't understand is why he's so easy on 'em. He's giving the cheaters a four-hour slap on the wrist and no permanent record.

What I would have done (and did; I taught college level computer engineering) is that cheating, if caught, is an automatic zero credit on whatever you cheated on.)

My conclusion is that their forensics is full of holes and they have absolutely no clue who cheated and who didn't; there's no other reason to offer such a tremendously good amnesty deal.