Any HVAC system installed or revamped in the past 15 years is likely to have a programmable thermostat. Whether people are using these _correctly_ or not (which as others have touched on here is not necessarily super intuitive, part of the problem Nest is meant to solve), I think attempts of some sort at saving energy with these is pretty common.

isn't the same auto-correct system in TextEdit.app available by default in any cocoa text-fied on OS X? And if you think that system 'mostly sucks', perhaps it is because you are vastly underestimating what a difficult feature it is to implement?

I didn't say it was easy and I'm not underestimating anything, that doesn't change the fact that autocorrect on Mac sucks.

I don't get what the 'insert line divider' is meant to be. It seems to just insert a large, fixed amount of whitespace characters?

Try it out! It's a hyphen-based separator I found myself using to divide chunks of text. For now it almost functions as "sub-notes" feature.

The keyboard shortcut is Cmd/Ctrl + /

Yes, I did try it out-- for me at least, on FF/Win7, it just inserts about 20 whitespace characters.

looks like its basically just the reference implementation of the MGC3130 chip, with an arduino library for i2c communication.

Anyone from the project here care to elaborate on the niceties of this dedicated chip? I'm currently putting finishing touches on a project with a swipe-based (touch, not hover) interface built around the (surely rough-and-dirty, but surprisingly capable) CapacitiveSensor Arduino library.

I'm sure the timing issues one sidesteps by using a dedicated controller ic are critical for projects more complicated than mine, but I'm curious if you know more about the limitations of trying to implement something similar onboard with the AVR. Is there something fundamentally different in the sensing method here compared to low-threshold capacitive sensing?

One of the project owners here. I've used the capsense arduino library a long time ago and it's decent when you don't need the accuracy. I found that the sensor values were affected by the environment quite a bit e.x. I'd have to recalibrate everything if the project was being used in a room with a carpet which affected the body charge. Maybe you found a way around it?

Re: the sensing method, they're similar in the sense that both the avr and mgc3130 detects a change in capacitance to figure out the position. But the mgc3130 controller can detect capacitance changes in the femtofarad range.

There's nothing new in Autodesk buying up everything they can get their hands on in the parametric modelling space, but I was surprised to see recently that they have made a rash of acquisitions and new product developments targeting the hobbyist/hacker community under their '123D' banner.

They're also very unfocused. They bought circuits.io , but doesn't seem to have given it the required treatment for it to grow to be a common tool.

Target has their own line of credit and debit cards which they push aggressively in-store, I assume these plans pertain to those.

Correct, it's written in the quoted passage

"all of its store-branded cards would be reissued as MasterCard chip-and-pin cards"

The difference is that harboring conflicting and controversial viewpoints is part and parcel of the mission of a University.

I can see this being big with the media-art crowd for installations if it has any sort of real graphics oomph. From what I've heard the pi is just barely capable of hd video, anyone able to divine these tech specs into a comparison with the pi's graphics capability?

The public school you attend is not generally viewed as a free market decision as only certain members of society have the economic freedom to 'select' a different one, and public schools have legal obligations to protect the privacy of their students.

I imagine most people here are not working in K-12 education and so are not familiar with these issues, but it should be understood that many public school districts are making use of Google Apps for education in a capacity which is either explicitly or implicitly compulsory for students, including creation of private accounts on minor students' behalf.

If Google is not being entirely forthcoming on precisely what personally-identifiable information they are retaining about minor students they are potentially in a great legal mess here.

The public school your children attend is very much a decision as people commonly choose the location they live based on that. As evidence of this perceived quality of school district can be a major factor in property values.

As a minor many of your choices are of course left to your guardians, if as a minor you have a problem with their decision making then that's really an entirely different manner.

You are compromising saying 'its not worth finding a new place to live, possibly a new job, to avoid having my children use google' That is very much an analysis on your part.