"The Supreme Court doesn't accept my legal genius, therefore the Supreme Court is wrong, and I remain the greatest constitutional expert EVERRR!!!!"

$250 has been the standard price for a full version of Windows Pro OS for quite some time now (like XP era), so cry insane all you want, the price has been the price for as long as you've (not) been paying it.

Internet trolls and other hyperbolic posters have been around as long as the Internet was around. I remember when I first started posting one Usenet in the very early 1990s (1990-91 or so), that there were many flamewars that ended with everything from legal threats to, at least in one case, a poster threatening to show up at another poster's house and beat him senseless, and in those days many of us actually had our home addresses in our bloody sigs! I don't think anyone ever really took it seriously, even when the poster making the threats was a net kook (and ye olden days there were some legendary kooks, particularly in places like talk.origins). People, particularly when shrouded in anonymity, behave in ways that they would never dream of behaving in person, which to my mind is a key to the notion that most of even the vilest trolls are really just assholes letting off steam in public forums.

I'm not saying that all conduct on the Internet should be protected, but I think we have to accept that anonymity and instant communications from any corner of the globe creates a somewhat different situation. I've personally been threatened with bodily harm a couple of times in the over a quarter of a century I've been on the Internet, and while I can't say it didn't effect me, I suppressed any desire to panic and realized that the assholes in question were, well, just assholes, and the odds were pretty damned low that I was ever in danger.

You might not have noticed before when I stated a wrongful accusation.

Lenovo was far from being 100% innocent in their actions, as you state.

Someone who is truly wrongfully accused will spend years and tens of thousands of dollars or more repairing their reputation, which most individuals can't even afford to defend the accusation, much less the clean-up efforts.

I'm curious, what say you when you are the one spending thousands to try and wipe out Google's search history after you're wrongly accused of said hacking crime and you successfully defend yourself and your reputation in court, but it still lingers for all future employers to search and find, all because you "bloody well expect" such a "criminal" to be branded immediately.

Seems few people really think of the consequences of shit like this, especially if framing professionals for cybercrimes may turn out to be just as popular as committing the crime itself.

There's some overlap. Altera FPGAs have lots of fixed-function blocks on them, ranging from simple block RAMs to fast floating point units. There's a good chance that Intel could reuse some of their existing designs (which, after all, are already optimised for their manufacturing process) from things like AVX units and caches on x86 chips. A lot of the FPGAs also include things like PCIe, USB, Ethernet and so on controllers. Again, Intel makes these in their chipset division and, again, they're optimised for Intel's process so being able to stick them on FPGAs instead of the Altera ones would make sense.

The main reason that you're probably right is that Intel is generally pretty bad at getting their own internal divisions to play nicely together, let alone ones that are used to being in a completely separate company.

You might want to look at the papers from MS Research on their use of FPGAs in their data centres.

My guess would be coarse-grained reconfigurable architectures. Altera FPGAs aren't just FPGAs, they also have a load of fixed-function blocks. The kinds of signal processing that the other poster talks about work because there are various floating point blocks on the FPGA and so you're using the programmable part to connect a sequence of these operations together without any instruction fetch/decode or register renaming overhead (you'd be surprised how much of the die area of a modern CPU is register renaming and how little is ALUs).

FPGAs are great for prototyping (we've built an experimental CPU as a softcore that runs on an Altera FPGA at 100MHz), but there are a lot of applications that could be made faster by being able to wire a set of SSE / AVX execution units together into a fixed chain and just fire data at them.

That minimum wage guy is one of the major costs for a taxi company. The IRS rates miles driven in a car at a little under 60/mile, which should cover maintenance, depreciation, insurance and fuel. A taxi that only had these costs could be quite profitable at 70/mile. In New York, taxis cost $2/mile, which isn't that far off other places in the USA. The minimum wage guy needs to be paid even when the taxi is waiting for the next fare. With an automated car, you'd just leave them scattered around the city powered down and turn on the closest one when you got a new job.

So, all of your money is stored outside for the winter?

Wow, that's gotta suck. The rest of us are inside snuggled up next to the common sense ATM location...

What you call "routine" the rest of the world pretty much calls "obscure".

In 25+ years of banking, I've never loaned out my PIN or ATM card. Not even to a family member (they have their own card anyway). If someone needs a loan, they get cash or a check. You know, kind of like how everyone else loans money.

Uh, how often are you lending your debit card and PIN to any friend, or even family member? I mean seriously, can't think of a single time I've done this. Someone needs to run an errand, they get cash, or they have their own ATM card.

Ah, yes, the infamous PIN...why didn't they think of that infallible impossible-to-break bulletproof security model..

$250 is absurd? Since when?

I can still find Windows 7 Pro selling for that much. Seems to be the usual price for a full version, and their "free" offerings are about as zero-cost as others turn out to be.

Oddly enough, while I do agree with you, I find myself very frustrated that we seem to have a lone voice on Capital Hill when it comes to opposing that regime.

Why is it seemingly only Rand Paul's job to stand against laws that are blatantly unconstitutional? (Yes, I'm speaking to you, every other lawmaker representing the People).

I find myself laughing that lawmakers are still made to take an oath to support and defend the Constitution...makes you wonder what the hell for.

Well, at least now you have an idea of just how bad IoT deployment is going to get.