My first computer was an Apple ][+ clone. I bought the bare circuit board (the only documentation was silkscreened onto the board), took my overtime in parts from the electronics firm I worked for (one of the engineers supplied EPROMS :-) and populated the thing. 48k memory, woohoo! Built a decoder for the surplus keyboard I had, built a power supply, wired the video output into the contrast control (I think) of my parents' colour TV, it worked perfectly. Then my parents came home from Florida early, "Um, son, what have you done to the television?".

I went on to build a 16k memory expansion ("Why do you want all that memory?" I got asked), a disk controller (had a pair of 8" floppies for a while), all kinds of stuff.

The point of winning awards, at least from (I think) Rob Sawyer's view in an interview/article some while back, is that the author makes more money because the work will stay in print longer.

And I believe that it was in Playgrounds of the Mind that Larry Niven who argued that SF wasn't a ghetto; it cost the people in it a substantial amount of money to belong (reduced sales), it's tough to get into (have to know your science), and some other stuff. Therefore it was a high-end country club...

We have a LJ4V bought to do tabloid-sized stuff. The only problem with it is that there are no toner cartridges any more. HP quit making them, and the new-old-stock ones all have internal parts that have lost their plasticizers and cause everything to print grey. Sad...

So, what would be the optimal gravity for sweet-potato fries?

Only the residue left? So you could add it to water and turn it into wine?

He got attention for similar stuff in 2002 http://it.slashdot.org/story/02/03/14/2051228/airport-security-vs-cyborg-steve-mann Indications are that he uses this stuff for augmentation of reality, not for regular day-to-day life.

I occasionally do sound reinforcement for a non-profit arts-promoting organization. I used to play music before events, just to fill the dead air. Gave me an excuse to buy interesting CDs to play that fit with the events. After an event a while back, the organization got a nastygram from Re:Sound, telling them that per Tarriff 5 they must pay a *percentage of the gate* for events where recorded sound was used.

The result? No music is being played before events. No CDs being bought. No musicians being hired to play pre-show tunes. Lose all around.