The article does mention that a 91Wh alternative battery is available when you configure the device, which presumably makes battery life (somewhat) more competitive.

I remember doing optical experiments with calibrated light sources from 1950...They still live in 1960x

Well, they ain't russian to get anything new.

I like "Crashberry"

How do you get references from dead martyrs?

Actually, the fine print would probably resemble: "You will receive stated number of virgins in the afterlife, but Al-Qaeda and its affiliates cannot guarantee the quality, skill, sexual preference, or the species of the virgins. Nor do we offer substitutions."

I think the challenge with the current system and shared Euro currency isn't that a nation loses control of its own policies on things like taxation and trade, its that whether those policies actually work is significantly influenced by the equivalent policies set by other nations that share the currency. As we've seen in recent years, if some nations screw up their own economies due to poor management, corruption, or for any other reason, it does have a serious knock-on effect across the whole currency group.

So, although a shared currency doesn't in itself imply shared tax and spending policies, I suspect that more centralised government (and therefore necessarily less autonomy and sovereignty for each member state) will follow in practice. To a degree, it already has, with the nations that struggled worst after the crash effectively being forced into unpopular austerity policies by foreign influences in return for bail-out money or even having their entire governments replaced by technocrats for a while.

The mostly-unspoken underlying question here is whether the people of Europe actually want to bound together in that way. Some people do see a United States of Europe in the future. Generally speaking, the people of the UK don't, or at least don't want to give up our own national identity to become part of such an umbrella organisation, any more than Canada wants to be the 51st state just because some Canadians speak the same language as most people in the US and they share a border and some broadly similar political views.

In principle, I agree with you.

However, "working it out" when you're starting with the level of disparity between countries like the UK and Germany on the one hand and the "new Europe" nations on the other is a generational problem that will take many years to solve. It's not something that can be finished in a matter of months with a quick treaty or two.

In the meantime, if you immediately establish tight integration as something like joining the EU does, you have artificially increased the pressure on both the weaker and the stronger nations. Consider that Greece -- which was already an EU member and part of the Eurozone -- is still in serious economic trouble today, coming up to seven years after the big crash. There are still serious political frictions there over dealings with Europe, and there are still serious political frictions in nations like Germany, where they have been picking up the tab for all that time.

One possible alternative is to provide humanitarian and economic aid to less fortunate nations without such close formal ties. For example, the UK has a government department responsible for international development. It has thousands of staff, and now sends over £10B per year in aid funding, mostly to nations across Africa, Asia and the Middle East. This makes the UK the #2 provider of official development aid (after the US) in absolute terms, and the #5 provider (after Norway, Sweden, Luxembourg, and Denmark) relative to gross national income.

So again, if the UK were no longer part of the EU, this doesn't necessarily mean the UK would no longer support the economic development of the "new Europe" states. A cynic might also point out that unlike the EU, there are also actual accounts showing where the money for UK overseas aid is really going and robust mechanisms for reporting and shutting down fraudulent claimants.

For the near future, this kind of arrangement might be more beneficial to the nations receiving the aid and impose a lower risk on the nations giving it, without the mechanics of shared currencies and the like clouding the issue. So again, looking at the big picture, I don't see much of an argument for the UK becoming more tightly integrated with the EU and in particular joining the Eurozone given the current economic disparity among member states.

iot != cloud

No. "IoT" most definately == cloud. Everything that actually respects your privacy came out before "IoT" was a thing.

"IoT" is a euphemism for "home automation, except trojaned so we can steal your data."

The trouble is that just about every fucking "IoT" device is designed to communicate over the Internet to the manufacturer's servers, even when it would make more sense for it to just communicate with a base station/server over the LAN and have the data never leave your house. Allegedly it's for ease of use, but that's bullshit -- it's for data-mining.

Could you test this by blowing my organ?

True nerds would find a way to get Emacs to do it.....I bet RMS put the code in already even.

thats four times LiteOS! Get some Huawei developers work on this, and they'll reduce this patch to 64 bytes.

"64 bytes oughtta be enough for any Martian."
    - Marvin Gates

Amen! Science is a difficult profession with a long and winding road until you get a stable career, and no guarantees even after boatloads of education. You often have to be willing to sacrifice a family and personal life early on to make coin in the profession.

Women tend to value family life and family issues more than men. I won't put a value judgement on that preference here, but the practical side is that science is NOT a family-oriented line of work.

Precisely. And since, in terms of economic strength, everybody in the expanded EU most certainly isn't equal (please note that this is not intended as any sort of insult, merely a statement of fact) the free movement principle does not work well.

In particular, what has really happened in certain cases, for example with Poland and England, is that most of the movement has been one way. This puts strain on English services, but it's important to recognise that it also means many of the people who would be best placed to help Poland develop its own economy are among the most likely to find working in richer European countries more attractive and/or lucrative, creating a "brain drain" effect back home. In the long term, both nations could end up worse off because of the imbalance.

In principle, freedom of movement is a good idea, for both business and pleasure purposes. But on the business side, it does require reasonably balanced parties so the traffic at least roughly cancels out. This was the case in the early days when there were far fewer nations in the shared European machine, but with the expansion to nearly 30 actual or aspiring member states with much more diverse economic conditions, the same logic no longer holds.

Those boards don't work on water, unless you got POWAH!