Sure, Plug in the bulb, connect through adhoc network with the bulb, enter SSID and WPA key.

Who says the switch on the wall has to control power to the bulb? Seems kind of silly to be routing power through all the walls anyways.

It seems you've already found similar technology useful! You find that 5 minutes is a good amount of time after you've parked your car to have lights - now how about expanding that thinking. Maybe the bedroom light could turn on at night after you shut off the TV in the living room.

The advantage to these are they use already common and existing technology. Most places already have a wifi network setup - no need to set up a redundant one for the lighting. WiFi is an established standard with plenty of devices.

No one's suggesting the only way to turn on the lights should be to use the smart phone - it's just one option that can be made available. You can bump the switch with your elbow when your arms are full OR you can have the lights turn on when your phone is in range after you come home OR automatically turn on when your garage opens and it's dark at the end of the day OR you can turn them on from a button in your car OR wire them up to a motion sensor somewhere completely different.

There are endless possibilities once you have the technology in place, but you're limited to very few options if you're required to flip a switch on a wall to control your lights. But I get it - smart phones are complicated and those damn kids use them too much already so no one should have more technology - especially not nerds on a tech news site.

The main difference is the LIFX ones are direct wifi whereas others on the market typically require a base station of some sort that controls the bulbs and acts as a bridge.

LED bulbs (even with extra electronics) are already much more power efficient than other bulbs. They also have some definite advantages such as changing colors and lifespan. Controlling the lighting can do a lot to improve the atmosphere of a space. It's easy to change intensity and color of LEDs, so pretty much anything is possible. You can have a rave in your apartment or a flickering fire in your den or just a low blue nightlight in your hallway.

Honestly I'm amazed at the resentment of so many /. users to being able to control their environments electronically. Nerds are the ones that embrace technology and push the cool ways to automate simple tasks like switching light switches BEFORE it gets to the mainstream. Guess people are getting old and starting to fear change and these new fangled smart phone connected devices.

The LIFX ones haven't been available that long (except for the kickstarters). It's a more complete solution than others that have been available.

Why bother to have switches at all when you can have lights controlled by your smart phone? Could even do some cool hacks so the lights come on automatically when your phone is in range and it's during hours that would be dark.

One would hope that he had compressed it before encrypting it. It does seem fairly high though. He could store 42,500 copies of your small sized website and that's assuming he didn't compress it.

But there are plenty of jobs after a 20 minute drive south to Massachusetts

I had to go the same way - especially with NCIS LA where 50% of the time, the suspect would be killed by the team or interrogated in a secret...boathouse with no lawyer. Not to mention the "hacking". My girlfriend got mad at me for making comments so I'm not allowed in the room anymore while it's on.

A few days of a supermajority which he used to pass health care. Congress isn't fast enough to do everything in that short of a time and Republicans filibustered the rest of the time.

There really aren't two sides - it's like comparing evolution with ID - the experts are overwhelmingly on one "side".

Saying "well he's going to pollute so I might as well too" is a horrible philosophy. We can do our part to move to better energy sources, and pressure China to follow, but China is not even going to consider it if the US is using the very same fuel.

There's no protesting or even as much outrage as there should be because it's not a very interesting leak. There's not even a group being victimized (like hispanics or conservative 501c4s), it's something that affects everyone equally.

It's not like people are being inconvenienced like by the TSA, basically it's an out-of-sight, out-of-mind situation. Furthermore, most people probably expect the government has been doing this all along. If you watch CSI/NCIS they use information like this all the time without warrants so people believe that as much as they believe the government can scan photos and match/identify faces.

We're not going to see any change in congress - back in the Bush administration when the secret NSA rooms were discovered in telecom buildings, the same issue came up and latest went away. Due to our poor election laws, the only alternative to a centrist Democrat like Obama is a right-wing nut job who would take the same actions (probably go further).

The goal is to put a solar canopy over them to help power the station. Probably once the onsite batteries are charged, they'd even be able to make money on some of the lesser used routes. It's not so bad when you're wasting solar panel since it's going to waste anyways.

Battery swapping may seem like a common sense idea, but the technology in batteries isn't there that we can have a small enough batter package that can be robust enough to be swapped.

Windows has symbolic links these days (older versions had "junctions" which are similar but not quite the same).

I was looking for a new distro to upgrade an old netbook and installed the RC this weekend (with MATE desktop). It started out a little shakey as the keyboard didn't work, and the mouse wouldn't click (due to a hardware issue and trackpad clicks not enabled), but after a restart and some mouse settings, it's nice and snappy.

Previously had Ubuntu netbook remix and tried Ubuntu with Unity, but that was just so awkward to use with a tiny screen and trackpad, and somewhat sluggish when web browsing.

I'd never tried Linux Mint or MATE in the past, but it seems to be a good combination for a low power computer.