Given that FPGAs are big, slow, and hot compared to equivalent logic built as a fixed function chip(but with the obvious benefit of not being fixed function), Altera FPGAs manufactured on the fanciest processes available seem like a fairly obvious product of the acquisition.

Any bets on what other purposes they have in mind? FPGAs with one or more QPI links built in, for fast interconnect with Xeons? Xeons with FPGAs on die? Intel NICs with substantially greater packet-mangling capabilities, at full wire speed, thanks to reconfigurable logic?

Merely producing FPGAs on a nice process is logical; but could also be done just by selling them fab services. They presumably have a plan that goes beyond that.

Well, yes, most improvements in technologies draw inspiration from earlier technologies. The Tesla Roadster draws inspiration from the Model T. The Boeing Dreamliner draws inspiration from the P51 Mustang. Windows 10 draws inspiration from Microsoft Bob. The question isn't "was this inspired by something earlier" but "is this obvious in view of what came earlier?"

Also known as "published normally". Patent applications are typically published 18 months after their filing date. There's nothing "quiet" about it - it's included in the official gazette each Tuesday and Google Patents (among other services) take an image of it. But it's a nice attempt by Subby to imply that there's a dark conspiracy here.

This appears to be a reference to the 20-person pro bono committee at Wilson Sonsini. Most law firms have pro bono committees of partners in charge of selecting and approving pro bono work, which is then taken on by junior associates. The committee itself doesn't do the work, so no, they didn't have a "pro bono team of 20+". They probably had a supervising attorney, a patent agent, and a paralegal, donating probably around 50 hours total for the two applications.

They can also be filed before the public disclosure. They're inexpensive placeholders that you can file without paying fees for search and examination. If you don't file the nonprovisional application within one year, the provisional expires and disappears forever, so they're particularly a good thing for startups who don't have revenue yet.

That's the abstract of the patent. It has no legal weight and is only there to aid in searching through patents.

Well, given that adware 'offers' still get injected into installers, I'm going to use my incredible mental thinking skills to hypothesize "no, we aren't".

Aside from that, even if you don't get hit by the adware, having to defang an installer just to use a program leaves the indistinguishable taste of pure sleaze in your mouth for the rest of the process(looking at you, Oracle and the Ask.com toolbar...)

Sourceforge is dragging the GIMP project's name through the mud by bundling this shit, even if they don't hit anyone. That alone is more than enough to be displeased by.

Given that laptops(especially Apple's) are an increasingly heroic enterprise to open; 'internal jumper' probably isn't happening; but you might be able to get away with some other 'physical presence verification' mechanism that exploits buttons that the system already possesses(similar to the way that Chromebooks killed physical dev-mode switches, because OEMs didn't like the added cost, so now it's some multi-key combo during boot).

Not as good as a true hardware write protect(in theory, a suitably capable attack might be able to emulate USB HID or ACPI button events); but much more likely to actually happen than anything that requires cracking the case or increasing the BoM.

If I'm just harvesting nodes for my botnet, macs are pretty lousy targets, no more capable than PCs and substantially more obscure.

If I'm attacking systems for the data on them, or to MiTM/trojan/keylog the users of the systems; grab banking credentials and the like; mac users are a conveniently self-selected group of people atypically worth harvesting. Sure, there are a bunch of underemployed baristas with degrees in Individuality using the macbook pro that mommy and daddy bought them to watch movies in their dorm room; but as a whole, thanks to the higher prices, users of OSX devices skew upmarket pretty substantially(iOS devices have some of the same effect; but much less, since at least an iPhone 5c or the like is probably available as the 'free'-with-usurious-contract model on most telcos).

If you are attempting a corporate/institutional intrusion, macs vary in value: they are way, way, less common, frequently absent entirely; but where they are present, their minority status often means very limited integration into the enterprise's legion of 'security' products, IDSes, and everything else that the Windows users complain is causing logins to take 30 minutes. This makes them handy 'beachhead' systems, especially if they are loaded up with Office, Adobe Malware Runtime, and similar stuff that may well have cross-platform or partially shared libraries of vulnerabilities; but much reduced vigilance on OSX clients.

Less of an issue among people/organizations who exclusively buy new, from manufacturer or authorized retailer; but (at least on the PC side, I don't deal much with mac procurement), refurbished off-lease units are an enormous market. Very, very, popular with organizations that can't afford to ride the latest-and-greatest. It's not glamorous (something like the Optiplex 780 is nothing to write home about; but if you need a few computer labs or a cube farm on a tight budget, the fact that you can get units with an adequate 3rd party warranty, no DOA, 4GB of RAM, and an adequately punchy CPU for ~$150, sometimes a little less, each, is pretty compelling.

"Previous owner" isn't a scary vulnerability for exploits that live at the OS level; all the refurb stuff typically gets wiped once by the refurb house during their testing process, and re-imaged when it reaches the customer; but it is damn scary for firmware-level exploits. Especially motherboard firmware(HDD firmware exploits are scary; but taking out the HDD and shredding it, then replacing it with another low-capacity-everything-is-on-the-network-anyway boot disk is at least cheap); which compromises the system at a scary-deep level, and also compromises the component that makes up most of the value of the computer.

Without a good OS-level vector, preferably with a nice internet infection capability, it isn't a good candidate for a pandemic; but if this sort of firmware fuckery makes the used market about as reliable as buying street drugs, it will have a major impact.

So who is going to jail for violating it when it's off the books? The same guys that didn't go to jail when they were caught breaking the law by torturing people?

I thought it moved to distributed malware? Make someone else pay for the watts powering your attempt to come in late to a pyramid scheme.

Turns out the difference is some stuff some people use and are willing to pay more for but others don't need at all. See also the earlier Tesla cards.

That you claim to be an expert

You don't have to be the best in the world to point out a mistake made made by a complete outsider way out of their depth making weird suggestions. An undergraduate half way through first semester in any science subject, or a well read high school student is going to be enough on average for what is going on here.

Deceitful?
You are the one who put up the link about the criminal that changed fields to avoid detection, and suggested that was an example of how hard it was to detect such criminals. If it was as you suggest he wouldn't have had to change fields would he?

Exactly. The mantra of Blame Bush is so old and tired. Yeah, I blame Bush for what he did, and I blame Obama for making the crap Bush did the new normal, which is actually worse. GWB was seen as on the radical side of exercising presidential powers -- Obama's making that the new baseline makes reform much less likely and so Obama's presidency is ultimately even a worse disservice than GWB's was. Unless of course you want to live in a US where most all power, eventually all, lies in the Executive branch.

When it comes to 'software replacing teachers', we really haven't made many fundamental advances since Gutenberg(who at least substantially increased the percentage of the world's books that weren't produced by students taking lecture notes in class, which presumably meant that you at least had the option of reading the textbook and skipping the class). If you just need information, technology has done quite well, and continues to make improvements; but if you aren't ready to turn information into knowledge all by yourself, there isn't much on offer.

There is a certain amount of irony; but it's those years of expensive and supply-limiting training that are precisely what make such an attractive target.

It's not an easy target; the computer system that ends up replacing your radiologist or your lawyer or whatever will likely have cost far, far, more to develop than the human it replaced did to raise and train(even if you count the human's recreational spending); but the computer's ability to do work will just keep increasing if you buy more silicon, while the human doesn't scale. If you could hire a single radiologist and make him more productive just by buying additional office chairs, you probably wouldn't bother with the robot.