When Xcar was made everyone lived in a forest. The Xcar need to have its own built in machete to get anywhere, plus a built in oil well and refinery to make fuel and 14 different types of wheels. Now we all live in high-rise apartments, so we put the widgets the boot (er, thats 'trunk' for americans) and cram the car with all its blades, drills and distillation towers into the lift (elevator) to get to the display.

Wayland car is roller-skates and a shoulder bag, just enough to skate down the hall to the lift.

The GNOME widgets now fit neatly into the shoulder bag. before you had to have a fake boot (xwayland) that strapped to your back.

Because making hardware has massive upfront costs. So either hardware manufacture is restricted to the existing players (and people who can get hold of millions dollar lones), or you use crowd funding.

and the GTA04 and the Neo900 :-)

Especially with the Neo900 project on the way http://neo900.org/

We are talking about RdRand, which claims to produce genuine non-deterministic random numbers.

So intel runs a scan to check that the random number generator gives the correct output?

well that settles it.

no there aren't. The digits of pi have no patten other than being the digits of pi, so they will pass a random number tests. A good pseudo random number generator will pass randomness tests, but can be easily reproduced if you know the starting seed. Also putting a simple sequence (1,2,3,4...) through an encryption algorithm will give you an output that passes randomness tests.

Was SMART showing anything before the failure?

its impossible to prove that a sequence is random. the digits of pi pass most randomness tests, but are easy to reproduce exactly. there are pseudo random number generators that pass random number tests. if you take a know sequence and pass it though an encryption algorithm you will get a sequence that passes random number tests.

So however remote the possibility is, RdRand may be outputting a sequence that can be reproduced on demand by the the designers.

The linux kernel acknowledges this and so mixes RdRand output with other sources. If RdRand is genuine and good, then the linux random numbers are much improved. If RdRand is bad, then no harm is done, (and you still get better protection against anyone who is not in on the secret).

There are a few opensource companies (collabora, fluendo, yorba) that offer things like consulting, or commissioned work. you might have to pay them to do an actual task though.

would a hardware or hosting donation work? could you buy a server and ship it to opensource project. could you set up a mirror server for one (or more) linux distros on you network.

corporate membership. this has been mentioned already by a few folk.

licensing. got any centos servers, you could swap them to RHEL. maybe put RHEL onto some of your workstations.

if you're doctor said he is 95% sure that you have cancer, i guess you wouldn't mind your insurance refusing to pay for any health care because there was not 100% certainty.

You get around the error in the estimate by looking at a large number of readings. There are plots showing that the style of usage has not changed with time, so I don't see how the downward drift could be caused by something like sampling when the battery is full or when its empty. I am also fairly sure that when you do a full cycle that lets the battery controller recalibrate. The 'study' may not be perfect, but I have never seen a better one (studies on discharging cells at constant currents and temperatures don't tell you all that much about laptops).

Yes temperature is an issue for batteries. But the temperature of a laptop battery is dominated by the design of the laptop, and how much current is being drawn (or charged) to it. Maybe the previous macbook pro was only used in a aircon'ed office and the macbook air is being used in a steel mill, but i think that would have been mentioned.

This study only covers 2 laptops (and only one in high detail), but its worth 10 times all the battery anecdotes that you hear around the web because it contains measurements. I hope some more people try his script, and post the results.

Another reference
http://www.wired.com/opinion/2013/06/why-i-have-nothing-to-hide-is-the-wrong-way-to-think-about-surveillance/

"For instance, did you know that it is a federal crime to be in possession of a lobster under a certain size? It doesn’t matter if you bought it at a grocery store, if someone else gave it to you, if it’s dead or alive, if you found it after it died of natural causes, or even if you killed it while acting in self defense. You can go to jail because of a lobster."

but they might 'interrogate' you until you give them a key that decrypts it.

safer to have something that will actually decrypt into something harmless. record a few hours of footage of a fish tank or something.

there was a question about open hardware http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/1j166z/hi_im_mark_shuttleworth_founder_of_ubuntu/ that gives you some of the answers

"This first version of the Edge is to prove the concept of crowdsourcing ideas for innovation, backed by crowdfunding. If it gets greenlighted, then I think we'll have an annual process by which the previous generation backers get to vote on the spec for the next generation of Edge.
So in this first generation Edge, no, we didn't look for open hardware specifically. We can choose silicon with more open drivers as we finalise the spec, but again I think the priority for the CPU / GPU will be performance to hit the goal of convergence.
In future generations, it would be great to see if we can do an all-open device, for example."
http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/1j166z/hi_im_mark_shuttleworth_founder_of_ubuntu/cba2wga