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But the whole front half of the airplane on most airlines (LCCs excepted) has power outlets. That includes premium economy and a bunch of regular economy.

You don't need brand new gear though: A used Nikon D2x or D300 on a good lens will produce results as good as most pros would get with film back in the day. Those bodies even drive all the old (cheap) Nikkor AF lenses. Total cost for a body and a couple of high quality AF zooms will run you less than $500 on eBay.

If you want to get really cheap, pick up a D1 for $35, a refurbished 55-200 VR for $100, and maybe a 2x teleconverter for $20.

Tractors are allowed. The magic phrase you need to type into google to get the relevant results is "farm implement."

There's a lot more to a micro controller than the CPU. Intel's Micro controller offerings have traditionally had weak timer and ADC peripherals.

Edit: Just glanced through the user guide [0]. The timers are pretty basic.

The general purpose one timers only count down, and don't have capture/compare logic (lame!). It does not appear that the timer end state (all 0's) can do anything other than interrupt the CPU (like triggering the ADC, toggling the state of an IO, or capturing the state of a comparator or IO).

The watchdog only seems to have a single clock source (CPU clock), with no backup like in the MSP430 series. So you can probably get stuck in a low power mode, and there's no protection if the clock source rolls over and dies. There's an interrupt-then-reset mode, which is nice, I guess.

The real-time clock is nothing that can't be implemented in lightweight software using a general purpose counter on, e.g., MSP430.

The ADC is a bright spot. The channel sequence table appears to allow channels to be sampled in arbitrary order, and a multiply-adder can apply calibration constants to the raw conversion before the data leaves the peripheral.

[0] http://www.intel.com/content/dam/www/public/us/en/documents/...

What good are bombs and cannons if you don't have fuel for the bombers or shells for the cannons?

Just pay for precheck.

It's $85 for 5 years, and realistically, yes, most of that money just goes to line the pockets of the politically connected. On the other hand, you can pretty consistently go from curb to club in 5 minutes, and you bypass the nude-o-scope.

I'm all for standing up for principle, but this one is already lost. TSA doesn't care if 10 ppm of the traveling population opt out. Google "managed inclusion" if you want to understand why organizing an opt-out protest on Thanksgiving (or generally encourage people to opt out) won't change anything.

> There's a significant background check involved which, I suspect, does more to enhance security than some millimeter wave scanner in the security line.

No, there isn't.

I walked into the interview booth on a whim one day, when my flight arrived early. They were booked solid, but someone had missed their time, so they slotted me in. My "extensive" background check was completed and KTN issued in less than 24 hours. They may run some sort of cursory criminal records check, but any such check is automated and too fast to be called "extensive."

Edit: I should add that I do not have (and have never had) any sort of security clearance, but people who do tell me that the process for the lowest level of "real" security clearance takes many months and costs many thousands of dollars.

That or you can just listen for tire noise. Even electic cars are quite loud above 25 mph, or so, so it only really becomes a problem at stop lights. Even then, the distinctive power supply whine will let youn that a hybrid or electric is behind you.

If anything, you'd expect lower fuel consumption for a given amount of power due to the reduced pumping losses.

On #1, it actually is a problem. Look at the range of the fuel cell cars that have been released or announced. None of them have even as much range as a Tesla Model S (and they cost more...).

It also presents a problem for refueling. There is no reason to expect a hydrogen car to refill any faster than a natural gas car (and plenty of reasons to think it will take longer to get the same amount of range). If you aren't familiar with natural gas cars, take a look at the Edmonds's long term review of the Honda Civic NX.

Frankly, I don't see how hydrogen cars are going to compete with electrics in terms of range, performance or refuuling time. Who is going to buy them? And we are subsidizing the hydrogen infrastructure, why exactly?

HP was known for building generally good test equipment, including arbitrary waveform generators. Op is humorously referring to the fact that the test and measurement division was spun off first as Agilent, then Keysight (seriously?), and probably something else by tomorrow (marketing is furiously brainstorming new meaningless names. They only need to merge with Danaheer and rename themselves Flukeronix for the circle of life to be complete.

What exactly do you consider odd? As others have replied, hydrazine has a long history for RCS systems in spacecraft, and kerosene + oxidizer mixtures have long been used for propulsion engines. The only technology here that isn't entirely orthodox is the lithium battery, but that's just an evolutionary upgrade from NiCads. Apparently the range safety guys finally decided that it was ok for an unmanned craft to fly with lithium.

Which is too bad because it is the connector used on almost all sport GPSs, many bicycle head and tail lights, as well as many generations of Canon still cameras, not to mention most non-Apple MP3 players. For better or worse, mini B plugs are in practice the most common connector on things which are not cell phones.

That might be the reason that service dogs are typically of breeds that are least likely to cause allergic reactions.

Is there any place I can find more detailed requirements for earthquake seismology stations? I feel like modern off-the-shelf parts could be used to build the signal conditioning and digitization stages for well under $20/channel, and cheap wifi-capable ARM dev board have become available in the past few years. 10 millisecond time stamps are possible with NTP and easy with a GPS or WWVB receiver. How hard are the power limits? Do you actually need 20 bits of resolution over the full scale, or is that just a proxy for getting enough small-signal sensitivity?

Except for the "reasonable rate" bit, which (IMHO) also includes "reasonable latency." Real UARTs can be used for, e.g., pulse-per-second inputs from GPS or atomic clocks to discipline an NTP server. That doesn't work for a USB->serial thingy (because the latency is literally three orders of magnitude worse).

Yea, and the previous treatment (which only managed the disease, not cured it) was around $300k per person over their expected lifetime.

It's a valid question, not sure why you're being down voted. It nicely fills the use case of "I could totally run this project from an 80 cent microcontroller, except that it needs network connectivity, and the only practical way to do that in my environment is with 802.11 or 802.3."

The Raspberry Pi designers made a bunch of, IMHO, totally bone-headed design decisions early on (e.g., RTC "costs too much", but let's throw on a bunch of expensive ZIF connectors for overpriced peripherals that nobody will use) and the B+ is a move in the right direction to fix that.

My use case is "wifi terminal server." Which is to say that I built a battery-powered RPi system to connect Sky Safari on my iPad to a go-to telescope. The official Sky Safari wifi peripheral is $180 and can't even act as an access point! With the RPi, I have a better uart bridge (in that it runs hostapd) for one third the cost of the official solution. Plus, there is the possibility of adding auto-guiding using the gpio pins and some hacking.

It's definitely in the USB 1.1 spec, (with some verbiage that excessive current draw on one port is not allowed to affect other ports) though they may have relaxed it later. I have several old Belkin hubs that will terminate (with prejudice) power to any port that draws over 550 mA, until you physically power-cycle the hub. This is annoying for obvious reasons, especially on 7-port hubs with beefy power supplies, so most hub manufacturers don't do that anymore.

> How would the autonomous delivery trucks you are talking about actually deliver the packages?

For the first iteration, I'd have a human take the boxes from the truck to the door. The truck would have one of those laser designators like Kiva uses for amazon warehouses to help the human pick the box. The difference is that the human is a minimum wage drone instead of a unionized teamster, so the savings could be quite substantial.

Plus, since the truck is automated, it doesn't have to be static while the picker is out running with the package.

Research is typically a profit center for the university. The standard cut (known as "overhead" in the biz) is 30% of research grants. Capital equipment (typically defined as stuff costing more than X dollars) is taxed at a lower rate (usually 10%). Research assistantships are also charged 30%. Also, any modification to lab facilities (electrical or carpentry for example) is usually required to be performed by university staff at a cost (to the grant) of around 2 to 3 times union rates.