By the way: Charter Oak's mandatory "cornerstone" class was a wonderful experience, and just what I needed. Think of it as a boot camp on how to research and write academic papers (and read them). VERY enabling.

I wish I'd had the equivalent when starting at my first University back in 1975.

I'm using Charter Oak State College. This is because they are an accredited and respected school, specializing in in distance learning, which accepts a high enough score on a recent Computer Science GRE exam for credit-by-exam on many of the course requirements, and (if certain requirements are met, such as being active in an industry using them) accepts older credits (i.e. math, distribution requirements) that many other institutions would consider "stale" and timed-out. They do not currently offer a BSCS, however, so I'm going for a BSGS with a CS concentration. I've taken three classes from them so far, and am currently taking a math class (needed but not offered there) from the University of North Dakota for transfer credit. Several of my few remaining requirements I expect to complete by exam (and a couple - public speaking, English - by waiver due to documented work experience).

Another excellent school (with a more technical orientation) that also specializes in distance learning is Thomas Edison. They do offer a BSCS, but stopped accepting the CS subject GRE for credit (because too few students used it for them to continue the effort of keeping it qualified against their own requirements). In my case this made a big difference in how much work would be required to reach the diploma. For some others, especially those who need many of the classes (or test-out equivalents), are tech focused, and would find the more directly applicable degree a benefit, Thomas Edison would be a good choice.

These schools are oriented toward people who wish to complete their degrees but are employed or located where going to a classic college is impractical. Examples: Deployed military personnel, low-level medical employees seeking higher certifications for career advancement, workers located far from a good subject-appropriate school or working schedules that interfere with school scheduling.

Two credit-by-examination programs are also related to this. DANTES is one - driven by the military's need to provide education for their soldiers without interfering with their duties (but open to all). Another is CLEP (College Level Examination Program), a product of the College Board which provides 33 subject tests which are accepted as proof of accomplishment by most universities. Each program lets you receive college credits without actually taking a class, by testing whether you've successfully taught yourself the subject.

PC manufacturers like HP used to void warranties when clients installed GNU/LInux, not anymore.

Just a year or so ago I bought my wife an HP laptop specifically for a sysadmin class where she'd be installing Linux on it. Got it home, had a question for HP about it, and discovered in the process (from the phone support) that installing Linux would void their warranty. Checked the paperwork: Yep! So we returned it to Staples for a full refund and went with something else.

When did HP change this policy?

I am in much the same boat. My branch of the industry went from garage shops to IPOs to conglomerates. The hiring process went from people-in-the-know to armies-of-PHBs-working by the book. The number of potential employers went from hundreds to a handful. The workforce went from top-notch locals to armies of adequate, semi-adequate, or inadequate H1Bs.

I had been a pioneer and well recognized by other actual techies - even those that had gone on into management or entrepreneurship. But after catching a layoff when the conglomerate deemphasized its new acquisition's function, I went from highly-paid pan-expert to 17 months unemployed due to the same HR-is-a-brick-wall for non-commodity heads effect.

I finally ended up contracting at a long-running garage shop in a niche market, a position found through a contact who had just watched them have a project almost fail for lack of a person with my particular skill set.

Meanwhile I'm finishing the degree via "distance learning" through an accredited institution. By the time the contract runs out I hope to have that checkbox checked. (College is a LOT easier when you don't have the draft board trying to send you to Vietnam and you can do the classes online when you're free and alert, rather than at 8 AM when you're a night person.)

Strictly speaking "transistors" are any circuit element that involves a "transfer resistance", i.e. a parameter that is resistance-like and dynamically controlled by another parameter.

Junction transistors do this one way. Field effect transistors do it a completely different way (or perhaps more than one different ways). Both of those happen to be implemented with semiconductors.

This voltage-variable tunneling along gold decorations on a non-conducting nanotube is a transfer resistance and the mechanism of transfer is very akin to a field effect transistor: The tunneling path is modulated by a control signal.

(Or at least it should be. In the example given in TFA, the control signal is actually the end-to-end voltage, so we really don't have a transistor yet. More like an avalanche/tunnel diode built without semiconductors. But it seems virtually certain that a control electrode throwing an E-field into the tunneling path will modulate the amount of tunneling, so an actual transistor should fall out very shortly.)

But what if you have a mile long pole and correlate it's movements into a form of communication. As soon as you move the pole on one end it would instantaneously move on the other for instantaneous communication.

Nope. The motion propagates to the far end at the speed of sound in the pole - much faster than sound in air, but glacial compared to light in vacuum.

Don't bother looking for an unobtanium with near-infinite stiffness and an internal speed of sound faster than light-in-vacuum. The motion at one end encodes information about what is happening at that end and that information is propagated down the pole by interactions between the pole's component particles, interactions that all are no faster than the speed of light.

This new technology will ensure the hyperpower status of the USA for the 21st century; given plentyful resources located in the north americas politician deposits.

Nah. The U.S. has no monopoly on government bombast.

... this seems like a glorified turboprop engine.

Which it is.

But without the fancy gearbox of a turboprop or the transmission of an engine-driven rotor. It should be WAY simpler mechanically, much lighter, and need far fewer moving parts. Eliminating the gearbox losses should gain them far more efficiency than plumbing the fast, hot, gas around costs.

The fluid coupling between the compressor and the rotor can't be efficient.

SURE it can.

What makes you think it can't? It's just a rotating joint with a seal on a hollow shaft. Nothing new here, move along.

In fact there is nothing new here anyhow, unless there's some aspect of it they're not telling us. "Water sprinkler rotor"-style helicopters have been played with for half a century or so.

Let's get them to volunteer to be the first to go: "Republicans on Mars!"

The fewer of the miscreants on this planet, the better.

How is that a failure?

Under that legal regime, if you don't lose a dollar, you can't charge your customers $1.06 to cover it with a little profit.

If Bell Labs spends (for example) a hundred million and makes nothing, AT&T would have charged the ratepayers a hundred six million and made six million dollars. But when Bell Labs spent (again for example) a hundred million and made a hundred and one million licensing their inventions, AT&T doesn't get to charge its customers an extra hundred six million and only makes one million dollars, not six million.

And they get to cry all the way to the bank.

Of course it soon made enough that they were farther ahead of the amount Bell would have made by soaking the customers. But the original plan was a "failure".

I wish I could "fail" that way, even on a somewhat smaller scale. B-)

However, many aircraft are still "then". Switching them to unleaded will destroy their engines after a while - requiring, at least, head and valve replacement. And if you can't get a replacement head with hardened valve seats and slides for the vintage engine, you're S.O.L.

I don't need to read feeds from multiple devices. That means I don't need to synchronize. And, that mean I don't need Google Reader, or Feedly, or the hassle of Tiny Tiny RSS, or whatever.

What I need is a local RSS reader, a client. I already have that, and I had it before Google invented Reader.

We could probably survive without #3 though.

#3 was not just about letting the cops use your house for staking out your neighbors or the army using your home for a free bed-and-breakfast.

It was to keep them from planting a spy in your house, to report on all your activities.

IMHO it is even more apropos now than back when the "quartered troops" were redcoats. Now they're spyware or hardware keyloggers planted in your computer, or racks of tapping equipment in server rooms, as with "Study Group 3" or "Prisim".

We just need a supreme court decision that these automated agents, located on people's or companies' premises, consuming their space and resources, and spying on their activities, are "quartered troops" within the meaning of the Third Amendment for it to become as important in the electronic legal landscape as the First, Fourth, and Fifth are in meatspace.

According to Lapsley's account Draper just tagged along with the real hackers.

I knew him in those days. He really was quite innovative.

But also quite talkative. I have amazed others who knew him when I describe the time he was staying at my place I actually got him to shut up for over a minute in the middle of a technical discussion.

Of course I did it by showing him something with a phone that he didn't think was possible. (He then shut up while he worked out some of the ramifications.)