I find it pretty easy to remember - I go to Google today.

The UI was what made me switch both to Google originally and from it some years later. When I started using Google - and when Google started gaining significant market share - most users were on 56Kb/s or slower modem connections. AltaVista was the market leader and they'd put so much crap in their front page that it took 30 seconds to load (and then another 20 or so to show the results). Google loaded in 2-3 seconds. The AltaVista search results had to be a lot better to be faster. I switched away when they made the up and down arrow keys in their search box behave differently to every other text field in the system.

My 'precious electronic toys' use about a tenth of the power that the ones I was using a decade ago for the same purpose did. Even lighting power consumption has dropped. My fridge, freezer and washing machine are the big electricity consumers in my home - efficiency has improved there, but nowhere near as fast as for gadgets.

There's a lot more to government than military intelligence gathering and law enforcement (although it would be a good idea for someone to remind most current governments that those are two things, not one). And most government projects end up spending insane budgets. This isn't limited to the US. It amazes me how often government projects to build databases to store a few million records with a few tens to thousands of queries per second (i.e. the kind of workload that you could run with off-the-shelf software on a relatively low-spec server) end up costing millions. Even with someone designing a pretty web-based GUI, people paid to manually enter all of the data from existing paper records, and 10 years of off-site redundancy, I often can't see where the money could have gone. Large companies often manage to do the same sort of thing.

The one thing that the US does well in terms of tech spending is mandate that the big company that wins the project should subcontract a certain percentage to small businesses. A lot of tech startups have got their big breaks from this rule.

Maybe most Americans aren't qualified and are just a little too stupid to work in their facilities?

How's that for PR?

That's why you run the OS (like linux) on the Atom CPU and do your real time interfacing on the Quark CPU that's designed to run an RTOS.

Just like how the BeagleBone Black has an ARM CPU and a little PRU

by the way, if you need to do precise timing, you should probably be using a hardware timer. That way you can sleep the device or change the clock to save power instead of burning up power at full speed in a NOP.

It's not a 32-bit processor, it's 64-bit.

Well.. technically there is a 32-bit processor, but that's in addition to the dual core 64-bit processor.

Probably because it's a 500MHz, dual core 64bit CPU with another 100MHz 32bit CPU along side it with 1GB of RAM, not an 8bit MCU?

I'm not your research assistant. Google it yourself.

All those bells and whistles come at a cost. The Edison draws about 10x as much power as an Arduino. Much more capable to be sure, but at a cost.

I doubt it has any safety features at all.

The Linux drivers require a version of Libtiff from 1993, and have never been updated - ever.

Please, when can we have a hack that makes these printers print in Linux?

Or *BSD support?

Or Android support?

A "Carrington-level" event nowadays would most likely be much less disruptive, as back then all the early radio and spark gap stuff was well under 50 MHz, which is where almost all of the natural noise winds up in the spectrum. Ever notice, for example you can hear your shaver motor on an AM radio but not an FM one. This is not due to AM vs. FM, (well, it is a little) but mostly due to the fact that AM is about 1 MHz and FM is about 100 MHz, well above the "static line" around 50 MHz.

It would take a much stronger signal than back then to cause the same level of disruption. Not saying that can't happen, but modern radio communications are quite a bit more robust than they were back over 100 years ago.

Of course its rejected. Bacon is the only way! (Sausage is for Emacs users).

Sorry, I meant that the spending capability is there if the financial case justifies it.

And no, there aren't massive swathes of potential avenues of attack. There are only the pathways that bacteria don't share with humans where the drug has no other toxic effect. There will be new antibiotics - no question - but its questionable whether there will ever be another sulphonamide or penicillin.

We did have a little thing called "smoking" which was quite popular in the 20th century. A second order effect was something called "industrialisation". Another second order effect was the fact you became ten times less likely to die of accident or disease. Yeah, certain cancers in certain cases are driven by environmental exposures, and other cancers have trends we don't have explanations for. From there to "it's getting worse" is an unsupportable leap.