These are pretty serious allegations, but if it's true it wouldn't be the first time this has happend.

Hmmm... I wonder who would have the most to gain by undermining Apple. Could it possibly be a major corporation with an infamous track record of attacking its competition by proxy?

Showing one image a day for 25 days is a great way to generate repeat traffic for your blog and increase page views, especially if your blog is picked up by Slashdot!

Or you could skip the middle man and go directly to the source and get as many beautiful HST images as you want... right now.

Most modern phones are probably much too power hungry to be get enough energy from audio vibrations, even you manage to ramp up the efficiency close to 100%, which is unlikely to ever be practical.

Where this could be useful is in specialized low-power devices that get bundled into emergency survival
kits.

OTOH, future cellular devices might incorporate enough improvements into power efficiency (e.g., e-ink displays), such that you could significantly extend battery life and perhaps even power a very basic subset of the phone when the battery runs out.

Also, harnessing vibrations efficiently might be very useful in surgically implanted medical devices where replacing the battery can be rather inconvenient.

Putting aside the question of whether filtering is desirable in the first place ("think of the children!"), or issues regarding the potential for future abuse (e.g., censorship of unpopular speech, and who determines what needs to be filtered in the first place) at the technical level any halfway-reliable filtering technology that peeks into the transport layer is going to add a huge amount of overhead that will increase costs and degrade performance. Good for the equipment companies, but bad for everyone who would prefer their Internet connection as dumb and fast as possible.

OTOH, OpenDNS provides a free, opt-in filtering service available to anyone who wants it. It's very easy to deploy, why not just use that?

I know a little bit about this because I am one of the developers for TurnKey Linux, a new opensource project which builds small installable live CDs (we're up to 9) optimized for various mostly server-related tasks. I've been investigating supporting live USB mode.

Your generic run-of-the-mill USB drive has about fourth-half the read/write performance of your hard drive nowadays (10-15MB/s). Since there are no moving parts (spinning platters), usually the seek times are very good.

There are several things you can do to optimize the performance of an operating system running live from a USB drive:

1) buy a faster USB drive: a good USB drive (e.g., Lexar JumpDrive) can have 2-3 times the performance of a generic.

2) Use a Linux distribution with a smaller footprint such as DSL (50MB) or Puppy Linux (standard edition is 68MB): the smaller the footprint, the less your drive has to read, the faster your system will load.

3) Try loading the operating system system into a ramdisk: many live USB distributions have the ability to load themselves into RAM. With some you have to add a cheatcode in the bootloader. Others do it by default if there is enough memory (usually not a problem with small distributions and modern computers).

4) Try turning on readahead: many distributions which are designed to run from a live CD or live USB have a feature that reads ahead various files important to the boot sequence sequentially. Whether or not this helps depends on the characteristics of the storage medium you are using, but you should investigate it.

There is a ton of supporting evidence that talking on your mobile while driving is dangerous. The legal situation has more to do with convention and historical artifacts than anything of substance.

In fact, not only is talking on your mobile more dangerous than talking to passengers, but talking on your mobile while driving can be as dangerous as driving intoxicated, at least according Mythbusters which did a cellphone vs drunk driving experiment on season 3 ("Killer Brace Position")

The two hosts arranged an obstacle course into four parts: accelerating to 30mph and then stopping at a stop sign, parallel parking, seeing how long it would take to do 15mph through the whole course, and while going 30mph, being told to switch left, right or center lane. Each part was graded by an instructor.

During a sober run of the course, both test drivers passed. However, during the cell phone run, Hyneman asked the drivers three questions in which they had to either think about the answer, repeat a sentence, figure out a verbal puzzle and list five things. Both drivers failed the obstacle course.

Is anyone else here tired of knee-jerk partisanship framing discussion in terms of false dichotomies? Government involvement can do a whole lot of good or a whole lot of bad. The devil is always in the details.

Good: regulate to prevent monopolization of last-mile utilities and reduce barriers to competition.

Bad: let lobbyists who supported your campaign write bills that hand out huge billion dollar tax breaks to carriers to build out the next generation "information superhighway" and sit idle while all of that money goes straight into the pockets of shareholders instead while countries like South Korea and Japani take the lead in broadband while America slowly turns into a broadband backwater.

Hopefully things will work out a little differently in the new administration.

Thanks, thats good advice. We do put a fair deal of effort into spreading the word so this is something we've given some thought to.

I'm aware of two significant appliance related communities - VMWare's virtual appliance marketplace and rPath's rbuilder community. We'll be promoting TurnKey appliances on the VMware marketplace as soon as we directly target VMware. Right now to minimize overhead while maximizing our coverage we only target Live CDs which can be installed into multiple VM types. Supporting any specific VM format is not very difficult technically but it adds some overhead so thats something we'll be getting to a bit later.

Also, it seems the concept of a Live CD is something users are more familiar with than the concept of a software appliance.

I don't think we can promote via rPath's community because that requires you to use rBuilder to assemble appliances and that will probably never happen.

Are you aware of any other communities we should try and target?