The SL series are not true ThinkPads. Lenovo continues to sully the name.

My kitties already have an RFID-based cat door, the PetPorte from the UK. http://www.petporte.com/

They needed it to keep a raccoon out of the house. I admit the twittering is cool though!

Tamron already produces a much-admired 18-250mm walkabout lens for the same cameras. Sure there are limitations with such a technology, but they have received praise for making the right sacrifices, and less total sacrifices that expected.

http://www.amazon.com/Tamron-18-250mm-3-5-6-3-Aspherical-Digital/dp/B000IBLMHQ/ref=pd_bbs_sr_2?ie=UTF8&s=electronics&qid=1217614148&sr=8-2

It gets nearly as good a review as Nikon's famous 18-200, which also has some noticeable limitations and costs twice as much money. Even a pro shooter just wants to take some holiday snaps at times, and doesn't want to carry the bag along. Not mention hikers or travelers who care about good photography but for whom it is not the purpose of their trip. These are awesome lenses for a lot of people.

@Bartender

Okay, well *I* have invented an unpowered prosthetic device. It converts energy from the athlete's torso and upper legs into forward moment, just like running does. It uses two wheels and a simple gear to accomplish this. Can I qualify for the Olympics?

There's nothing new in this paper... the entire propagation model rests on logging into the admin interface of each router, which they assume can easily be done 36% of the time using simple dictionary attacks. They propose no other method for 'hacking' the routers.

Connection encryption is not even the mechanism that is intended to stop this - the password is what is supposed to stop it.

In nearly all situations other than warfare, pre-exchanged one-time-pads are a perfectly workable option for secure communications. It's more complicated than now, but very doable. It can be automated reasonably well, and is provably unbreakable (misusable, yes. bypassable, yes. breakable, no).

There are also new types of public-key encryption out there than haven't made the mainstream yet because we don't need them.

Symmetric key encryption is not subject to the same level of degradation at the hands of quantum computing as asymmetric key encryption. I believe the most a quantum computer can do is reduce the crack time linearly rather than exponentially. Double your key size and you've accounted for the gain that quantum computing brings.

I may be incorrect here or there, but the summary is that quantum computing isn't going to break tomorrow's encryption, only yesterday's and some of today's.

Hmm, he looks familiar...

http://media.movieweb.com/galleries/821/1900/lo/p6.jpg

Simple fact people: you can't legislate quality of life if you share anything like a free-trade economy with parts of the world that lie outside your sphere of legislative influence.

One of the reasons that employees are so expensive in the US is that companies are required to give them all kinds of benefits. People thought they were helping workers by passing such laws. Instead they were just destroying jobs. You cannot create wealth by fiat. We've made it illegal for cheap labor to exist in this country, but we haven't destroyed the demand for it and we can't control supply from other countries. So now instead of being home to the cheap labor, someone else will. Instead of those cheap laborers spending their money in our country, on products made by others like them in our country, they'll be spending it in another country. The world economy is only leaving us behind because we want no part of it.

As the world gets smaller, international trade of all kinds increases. This includes the trading of labor for wages. It is oceans and transportation costs that created divisions of wealth along national boundaries, not manifest destiny. In fact, one of the very things that *did* help to create great wealth in America was the preservation of relatively free trade. What we see now is only the same act on a larger stage. Levels of wealth around the planet will converge. It is bad for us, but very good for a lot of other people. Save a good portion of your wages, plan for the future, and consider that your wealth is in your loved ones, your health, your security and your freedom. Because it will not forever be in your international buying power. There are not, really, any mysteries in this process, nor are there any ways out of it.

It's apparently already fixed.

http://blogs.zdnet.com/Google/?p=434