What is and isn't fair game on the wireless spectrum? I would have naively assumed that it was always fair game to demodulate and record a wireless signal, but not to break the encryption if it existed, but this article suggests that isn't the case. Presumably listening in on a conversation on the ham radio bands isn't wiretapping (although perhaps rude, I don't know the conventions). Clearly anything where you're breaking encryption is a no-no. But there's plenty of ground in between where it's not immediately obvious what is and isn't allowed. Does it just depend on whether there is an expectation of privacy? Are rules different for different frequency bands? Are the rules different for listening vs recording?

Does the new law that caps charges to retailers for debit card use apply to credit unions as well? I'm considering switching to a credit union, but don't want to do it if they're charging retailers a lot more than the big banks do. Does anyone know of any banks or credit unions than charge retailers sane fees for transactions?

SEDS (seds.org) is a national student group in the USA and stands for Students for the Exploration and Development of Space. There are local chapters at a lot of universities so they'd be great place to make contact with people who are wanting to get into the same industry as you. They would also probably be good people to contact to get advice on choosing a university for your undergraduate studies. I attended one meeting of a chapter at the University of Arizona and they were doing some seriously cool stuff. A few of them had put together a microgravity experiment to study liquid lenses and got a grant to go up in a zero-g plane to test it out. They're currently starting a project to build a micro-satellite and arrange for it's launch. That this is being down by an undergraduate club on their own initiative is pretty impressive.

I have a subscription to New Scientist and think of it as the scientists equivalent of a celebrity gossip magazine. You definitely don't ever believe the title on the cover is a fair summary of the actual research it's talking about. Nevertheless it is a good way to keep up with fields in different areas than one's own and it is a very easy read. Also it is that it's insanely cheap. An annual subscription can usually be had for about US$1.50 an issue. The result of this is that the science journalists don't have a whole lot of time to spend really understanding the research behind the articles they are writing. I think they do a pretty good job considering they have maybe two weeks to write an article about something that would really take years to get a proper grip on.

In the universe's defense, that limit does not apply to reversible computing. As long as your logic gates aren't destroying any information then there is in principle no minimum energy requirement.

That 7% statistic appears to be taken from dividing the number of subscriptions by the population. In fact it should be divided by the number of households. The real number is likely higher.

I don't think any phone company in the U,S, comes close to the despair-inducing level of German T-mobile. They would make my top five things I like least about Germany. The U.S. T-mobile has an entirely different culture, and although not perfect is a vast improvement.

T-mobile prepaid isn't bad. You pay 10c a minute for phone calls and $1.50 per day for data. If you only need to use data every few days then it works out quite a bit cheaper.

Didn't find any relevant pics but if anyone's interested the research group's webpage is http://www.helmholtz-berlin.de/forschung/grossgeraete/mikroskopie/index_en.html.

I can believe that a phone could be more distracting than a crying toddler. Unfortunately they mostly scream rather than cry which is considerably more distracting. Also, phones don't throw things at you.

And no books either. Unless you get 3D glasses for your babies and buy those special 3D baby-books.

My understanding was, that it's not so much that tv is bad for children's development, but that it's not good, so that if they spend 2 hours a day watching tv, that's two hours that aren't spent playing, talking or doing something beneficial. An 18 month old banging on a computer keyboard is practicing physical skills just as if they were playing with blocks.

I don't think it's worth setting up something elaborate for an 18 month old, all they really need is something that looks like a computer so they can feel that they're doing the same thing as mummy and daddy do. An old laptop works well, or one of the cheap toy computers. My son is three at the moment and sufficiently self-controlled to be allowed to play with my laptop. I set him up with a text editor and let him "type".