A lot of folks at work are switching to these and they seem happy.

I'm going for a stand-up desk first. I'll look into the 4k monitor early next year and see how things are then.

People wonder how we'll ever convince Americans to give up ownership and switch to rented, self-driving cars...

We'll do it by:
a) Jacking up insurance rates on people who still want to drive
b) Jacking up the price of vehicles by mandating expensive equipment

In 30 years, you won't be able to afford a car, much less afford to drive it. I'm not making a moral judgement here, I just think it's bound to happen.

I don't have a dog in this race, but I've got to point out that California is actually in a relatively wet period and if it returns to it's formerly dry state then California will be fine. The people, maybe not so much, but California has been much drier in the past.

Yep... and my work machine as well. It all depends on the apps you use. If you are like most people nowadays and only need a web browser then Linux is probably sufficient as a desktop OS.

I should admit that my work desktop does host a windows 7 VM, but that's only because my company chose an IE-only solution for our timetracking tool.

I had a feeling someone would say something like this...

According to TFS, the program is for open source code. You know, the code that is already open and scannable by a web crawler. If the NSA wanted to do this for nefarious purposes(and I'm sure they do), they would have(and probably have) started their own program years ago. They don't need you to upload your open source project for them.

I'm willing to bet the NSA has all the closed-source software source they want as well. I doubt my company's shitty security, for example, is any hindrance to them.

Actually, my first thought is why isn't the NSA doing this?

Securing our nation's information infrastructure is one of their core missions(along with spying on OTHER nations, which I also think they should be doing, instead of spying on US). They have the talent to be able to do it effectively.

So the poor general can't participate in the usual dance of former Washington insiders who use cronyism and connections to enrich themselves after 'serving' in government?

There should be a name for that... like 401(c)... where c stands for crony capitalism.

I've got over a decade of working on networked, embedded devices. With the exception of content security, I have never in my recollection been on a project where a significant effort was devoted to the security of the system.

I've worked for a company who made devices which process electronic payments. I asked them about security and whether they ever did an audit. The SW veep's response was "We use SSL."

No one wants to think about it. Security is a hard problem and it blows budgets. Forgetting about security during development rarely(never, really) costs anyone a job.

Marketing and management need to require it before the money generates the will to fix it.

Not always... We need the horsepower for some jobs we're doing, and we have a GUI. Not all 'servers' are locked in racks and hidden away from the world

Working on a product based around these now...

As far as I can tell, the Nuvoton WPCM450 is what contains the Matrox G200ew clone for graphics output. Thanks to XAA being discontinued in X.org, the MGA driver is practically unusable for X at this point(even with an ancient, 2d window manager).

Yet another reason to avoid this hardware.

If you think you can't train a computer vision system to do it... Sure, maybe it's 20 years before it's cost effective(although for underwater welding...), but it's coming.

If you can boil it down to an algorithm, however complicated, you can get a computer to do it.

Eventually the computer does it better, because it has more sensors than you, thinks faster, has finer muscle movements, and can execute more complex algorithms than you can.

We're about to see this with driving.

Nah, you recycle the waste. It wastes energy, because you're casting more metal than you need only to spend the energy tearing it apart and recycling it, but the metal, minus some oxidation, should recycle fairly easily.

Cool, sounds like a job for sensors and algorithms.

"Anything you can do I can do better..." sung the old computer...

Why is it that the holes can move but the electrons can't? I thought holes were just places where electrons could be but aren't, so moving holes implies movement of electrons.

Anyone familiar with the physics of electrets? I was thinking a while back that you could freeze a charge in cooling PLA or other plastic being used for printing. I looked around and some guys talked about it briefly a few years ago but never really explored it.

It seems like it might come in handy to bake electrets into your design. If nothing else, you could make half of a position sensor without having to glue on a magnet or something. I seem to remember hearing that the electret effect is influenced by mechanical strain, but it might make the charge bleed off and ruin the electret.

I doubt you could put enough charge in to allow you to make a motor or speaker, but who knows....