[DougMerritt]

ERNIE sounds kind of fascinating. And somewhat amusing.

Going off on a tangent: An oft-neglected issue is that, even when the random source (like avalanched diodes) is actually sufficiently random, any apparatus that captures that randomness for use inherently causes a bias in the observations.

Even if everything else is perfect (it usually isn't), in terms of signal processing, any observation window (e.g. a finite length of time of measurement) is an aperture which ends up getting convolved with the signal source being observed.

It sometimes helps to convert the skew into white noise with a "whitening" post-pass algorithm.

Using real life randomness is still a good thing to do, of course, it's just that are always real world issues with anything and everything.