Yeah, sorry. I misread the letter. It says I must send it back if I decide not to continue participating in this program.

Agreed. I'm participating in this and I've had my router since around November.
Also they're not "giving them away" per se. The routers have custom firmware on them and they come with a letter saying when we're done we want the routers back otherwise we're sending you a bill (as agreed on when you signed up for the program).

As a CMU student who heard from a professor who shall remain unnamed, the future of computing doesn't lie in "parallelization across a single resource," but massively parallelizable computing, or distributed-resource computing. OO languages are not great at that as message-passing has massive overhead when serializing and deserializing. Thus, in the interest of the "future" they're moving away from OO as a freshman course, and instead leave it for the more specific courses. (15-211, etc).

That could be all speculation by the professor who shall remain unnamed but it also could be that the silly drama students have to take a programming course and they have no use for OO so they're dumbing it down so that not all the drama students fail. I suspect the latter.

If you RTFM you'll know that the summary is misleading. A quote from TFA best explains the claims:
"The patents Kodak holds are incredibly broad, effectively covering images that are stored centrally and can be ordered online,"

I agree. The alternatives there provide sync across computers but only for the same browser. I use both Chrome and Firefox extensively and I will greatly miss the ability for (fo)Xmarks to sync my bookmarks, passwords and tabs across all my browsers, regardless of whether its Chrome/Firefox.

For now, I'm using Firefox sync as my primary syncing mechanism and importing into Chrome whenever I update something in Firefox. Its somewhat annoying, but I guess I'll deal. Maybe I'll switch back to using primarily Firefox.

I go to CMU and I did my capstone in Embedded Devices last year. One of the other groups was doing something that was almost exactly what the OP asked for. The project was called Jeules and you can probably still contact the team members to get some more information about it.
Their wiki unfortunately is locked down now, but it used to have the exact parts list and some of the circuit diagrams to build the system.
http://jeules.org/

The answer was posted yesterday at 2pm Eastern in the comments:
http://uscybercom-watch.blogspot.com/2010/06/uscybercom-logo.html

I agree completely, as evidenced in my first risk point, but anecdotal data does not speak for everyone. People will associate this problem with the PS3, not Sony. Why do you think they even removed "Sony" from almost all of the PS3? You see "Sony" in the "Sony Computer Entertainment of America" but thats about it. You see SCEA and PS3 and "Playstation" everywhere, but its not commonly called the "Sony Playstation 3", just "Playstation 3".

Finally, the very vocal community of Linux geeks are a VERY minor part of the PS3 community, and even smaller part of the gaming community as a whole. The PS3 is first and foremost a gaming machine. If you ask anyone on the street what a PS3 does, the first answer is always play games. Thus, I really believe that this issue will be practically negligible in the PS3's street cred. In fact, you can't even buy new PS3s that can install Linux anymore.

I understand that they are in fact removing functionality - but you bought a gaming machine that happens to be able to use Linux, not a Linux machine that happens to be able to game. People (in general) understand that, and I don't think that if they (the general public) are looking to buy a gaming system, the loss of the ability to install Linux on machines you can't even buy anymore will change their opinion in the least.

Sorry, I meant to say "lost" since these only apply to fat PS3s and they've stopped making them. Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PlayStation_3#Model_comparison

I beg to differ on their losing profits, this is a purely profitable change for Sony:
Sony loses money on every PS3, and gains money back from licensing games, and their own game sales. They also gain money from PSN. What are you removing from the PS3s? The ability to install another OS. Does that contribute to profits at all? No. In fact, it caters to PS3 supercomputing, which involves buying a sizable number of PS3s (a net loss for Sony) and not buying any games (no profits here), and not even connecting it to the PSN due to bandwidth overhead and since it'll be running a separate OS anyways.

Lets see about risks:

1. Unhappy geeks who are running Linux. These people, btw, probably don't buy as many games since they're not running the PS3 to game all the time. Small loss, but who's going to stop buying games for their ($400+ at the time) fat PS3? Sure they might sell the PS3, but the next person who buys it will definitely buy games for it since no more Linux on it.
2. People who buy PS3s simply to run them as supercomputers. Shedding these people is pure profit.
3. Some hackers now providing firmware cracks. Sony doesn't care - if you brick your PS3 its now no longer under warranty because you've voided it. No risk here.

Basically, no surprise here.

This may have been true 20, even 10 years ago, but its 2010 now. Even though the government still suffers from corruption (what government doesn't to some extent, to be honest), believe it or not, the actual economic drivers in the industry are quite safely and well seated in China's global agenda.

Plus Xi'an subsidized 1/4 of the research lab, that means 3/4 of the cost was out of Applied Materials' pockets, which is still a sizable investment by any means. Unless there is some corruption or loss that costs more than that investment, there is no reason for them to pull out of there any time soon. And a 75-year land lease to add on to that? Sounds long-term to me.

I agree. When I first read the title, "Serious" jumped out at me (possibly with the assistance of being the first word), and luckily for me I actually RTFA'd. Speaking for myself and more than likely any one who's done any web programming, a minor mistake of data passing being in the incorrect format for the Google APIs to digest is much much less than a "serious" design failure. In fact, its not a design failure at all. Its a code error, and luckily (or possibly unluckily) for the guys at USAspending.gov, Google's APIs don't just segfault out and crash the page, instead they try to parse it in a "is this what you wanted?" sort of way.

TL:DR - its not serious, its not a design failure, its a coding bug, and as TFA says its a 2-3 line fix. Not newsworthy if you ask me.