I recently got a tiny point-and-shoot camera, a Canon ELPH 300 HS, and I've been participating in CHDK's effort to hack it. When we got RAW support working, I learned the camera's lens actually has severe barrel distortion that gets "corrected" in software before saving a JPEG.

Images are "shopped" before they even emerge from the camera these days.

To put that number in perspective, it would take a stack of 4GB hard drives extending past the orbit of Saturn...

I often get up early to jog or bike. At 6:00 AM, when I'm on a side street coming to an intersection with an arterial, and the light is red for me and green for the arterial, pressing the walk button will _immediately_ change the light for the arterial to yellow.

At 8:00 AM, however, with rush-hour traffic clogging up the arterial, the walk button appears to do nothing.

I could understand advertising $39.95/mo exclusive of taxes, but the phone companies themselves tack on a bunch of other surcharges that are _not_ taxes. They make them sound like taxes by calling them "regulatory recovery fees", but they're really unadvertised price hikes that they can spring on you at will, even when you have a contractual price.

Make phone companies advertise their ACTUAL rate first. Then go after these warnings...

(It's for this reason I use a prepaid Tracfone; no surprises.)

On a couple of flights, I've tried to catch a glimpse of the stars through the window--far above city lights, with less atmosphere to look through, I'd think it'd be a pretty good view. The placement of the window makes it very difficult to look "up", however--not to mention the blinking light on the wing and all the interior lights preventing any sort of dark adaptation.

A plane with a transparent fuselage should solve two of these problems by permitting a line of sight that doesn't require craning your neck and is angled away from the wingtip light. It'd still be tricky to block out other local lights, but maybe possible...

It's been quite a while since I was an admin in a Debian shop, but I'm pretty sure that's how it is in Debian. Which makes sense, since Ubuntu is based on Debian, right? I guess I'm sayin' it's not hard to say "the standard way" and mean "the way I'm used to doing things." I prefer Fedora since I use CentOS/RedHat on all my servers, but I don't know if their way is "the standard way" or if that's just how they do things.

I may be wrong, but I think the version they are playing in the video may be this version: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Super_Mario_Bros.:_The_Lost_Levels

When I was in high school, Zshell (an exploit that allowed running native Z80 assembly on a TI-85) was all the rage. The exploit and various apps (mostly games) spread virally throughout the school. I did some Z80 assembly programming myself, and it was a learning experience arguably more useful to my career than anything I learned in high school...

Years later at college, when my old 85 had been handed down to a younger sibling, I found I needed a graphing calculator for a physics class. I bought a TI-89 and was impressed to see TI allowed it to run native software, no hacks required. (There were still hacks, to get around a few limitations such as code size, but even these limitations were relaxed in later firmware versions.) I spent far more time programming the calculator than actually using it as a calculator.

Now they're back in their lock-it-down mode? Shame. It always disappoints me when manufacturers go out of their way to make their devices less useful--and in this case, a less capable learning tool, for budding programmers anyway.

It's not scheduled to fly again, but it'll be ready as a "launch-on-need" vehicle to rescue the Endeavour crew if that craft is unable to re-enter.

But why does it need to phone home?

How can an installation that was activated successfully suddenly become "non-genuine"?

I agreed with you, right up until that last comment.

Driving home tonight, I noticed dozens of buildings (mostly office buildings and hotels) that are uplit with thousands of watts of light. Car lots--even _empty_ car lots--are ridiculously bright, even after closing time. Billboards are nearly universally lit from below by lights that are pointed _straight up_, wasting the majority of the light they generate. My home city recently installed huge acorn-style streetlights every 30 feet along both sides of major thoroughfares. Why do governments focus on light bulbs and TV sets when our night skies are lit so brightly we can't even see stars anymore?

if you change the icon of your .exe file to be the word doc icon, then the .exe still shows up

That doesn't make sense. How is Windows supposed to tell that your binary's icon looks like Word's icon? I suppose Windows could cache icons from various versions of popular programs to compare against, but then malware writers would just make a change that would be visually undetectable, like modifying a single pixel.