Local friends got me playing WC3 DotA, and I moved over to Dota 2 when Valve got the native Linux client working reliably. I also keep Civ 4: BTS around when I really have to be unproductive but can't sign up for an hour-long game.

Pretty obvious typo for "can now be".

Depends on which level you label the "code". The way the PAL worked was that the firing parameters were stored encrypted, and the code entered was used as a decryption key. Bad code, random firing sequence (and a fizzle).

What the system does with the key labeled "Caps Lock" is controlled by the OS, just like all the other keys. Remapping Caps Lock is usually quite easy in any modern system; KDE's Keyboard settings page has options to make it an extra Control or more exotic things like Hyper or Super, and on Windows you can use RemapKey or AutoHotkey.

the site is remarkably content-free. In particular, is this just a nice implementation of SAP/RTP, and if not, why? Even AirPlay is just RTP with an obnoxious (and broken) encryption on the payload.

I'll pile on the Arduino bandwagon here. For somebody who knows software (specifically, C with a bit of kinda-C++ for libraries), it's quite simple to get started, literally just requiring plugging in the USB cable and clicking the "upload" button to send a program to the board. You can get "shields" (stackable expansion boards) like the already-recommended Motor Shield to handle high-power or specialized connections, and you get a USB serial port to talk to the Arduino board from a computer (necessary if your "simple" soccer robot needs vision processing). It's great as either a simple standalone controller or a scriptable I/O breakout board.

Our group was focused on muon tracking, and I never got into any detail on the calorimetry. Which detectors did you work on?

The most sensitive device I've used was responsible for tracking individual muons/taus, so the options seems kinda ham-fisted.

Oh, I'm completely with you: Developers should run QA, but there will always be bugs that slip through. I was responding to the AP's insinuation that Google should be catching all their security problems in internal QA but that Microsoft should get a pass for some reason.

Why single out Google? Shouldn't traditional software vendors have also run programs through QA?

Yes, there actually is a difference. In the United States, the consensus of the Supreme Court appears to be that there's a distinction between producing a physical object in one's possession (such as a key) and divulging information in one's memory. Among other things, giving up an encryption key or a combination to a safe is an admission that you did in fact have access to the contents, whereas a key might have been planted in your office.

I'd suggest taking a look at Eucalyptus, an open-source cloud management system that's compatible with the Amazon EC2 APIs and thus pretty easy to script and automate for production resources and any of the students who want to play with features like on-demand load balancing.

While there are a number of good tools out there for working with scalability, more important than any particular tool is building your application in such a manner that it's easily parallelizable. In a Web app, a core principle to keep in mind is that the more stateful the application server-side, the more difficult it is to scale, and so designing your application tiers in such a way as to decouple requests is key. Limit the amount of session state the server has to keep track of, and you'll be able to load-balance request handling smoothly.

To be fair, the blame regarding OTG lies mostly with Intel, which explicitly designed USB to be a master-slave protocol (requiring a host PC) to compete with FireWire, which is peer-to-peer and has a layer 2 that looks more like Ethernet. OTG actually does put the phone into host mode, but there's negotiation required so that the phone knows which state it's supposed to be in and two OTG-capable gadgets can still operate correctly with OTG-oblivious hosts.