Also a reasonably handy way(not necessarily optimal; but good enough to get the job done) to organize the equivalent of a group buy. Unless you really love screwing around with toner transfer and ferric chloride, PCBs get markedly cheaper when you go from 1 unit to a few hundred or few thousand units, as do pretty much all the components you'd stuff the PCBs with. DIY isn't impossible or anything; but it'll be a good bit cheaper per unit if the quantity is higher.

What I find a bit surprising about this story is not that it turned out to be a kickstarter disappointment(big surprise there...); but that they managed to survive a legal challenge(expensive, unpredictable, bolt-from-the-blue), and software development going to hell(common enough that you can safely assume it'll probably happen; but still a potentially crippling blow to timelines and budgets); but then got blown to hell by the BoM somehow going from 'sell for $99' to 'can't sell for less than $350'.

Apparently naively, I would have expected BoM to be markedly more predictable, and controllable, than either legal or software costs.

That is one thing that it absolutely is NOT. It's a donation platform, and some people asking for donations offer some incentives in exchange for your generosity. That's it. There is no investment. People who've given money are not vested in any way, except perhaps emotionally.

There's also the problem that, given the fairly tight power constraints and often mediocre storage in phones, even fully fixed software is going to be somewhat mediocre if the hardware producers aren't shoved to support the feature.

On the PC side, it doesn't matter as much, it's downright tricky to buy a slow CPU and only modestly costly to get a really fast SSD, so doing FDE fully in software is relatively painless(though you can also get hardware support, of TCG Opal is your thing). Phones, not so much. Especially in the cheaper seats there are often some fairly terrible storage performance at the best of times, and while modern CPUs are fast when asked to be, you'll pay in battery life for every second they spend not sleeping.

More than a quarter of British Muslims recently polled said they support militant Islamists who attack westerners they consider out of line with jihaddi sensibilities. That's 27% who applaud the slaughter of magazine publishers by ISIS-associated Muslim fanboys/girls. Those people think that ISIS is very Muslim, and is in fact a better example of practicing Islam than the more "moderate" groups who don't practice or support such violence. What is it, exactly, that you think Obama is demonstrating to those millions of people who simply laugh at his assessment of the Muslim-ness of one group or the next?

With whom are you having that debate? Bombs aren't supposed to make distinctions between innocent people and medieval-minded wackadoos following the Koran's guidance and lopping heads off of the local insufficiently-Islmaic villagers. It's human intel, targeting, and decisions that make that distinction.

No, you're just annoyed that someone actually paid attention to the words someone said.

I think this is a great strategy, but how would Epic Games know what a developer's gross income was, year after year, on a particular game title?
Is this a matter of Epic trusting them to report it honestly, or is it part of contractual terms where you're required to supply them with your tax records each year, or what?

And "everyone else" is going to look to Obama as the arbiter of what is, and is not, proper interpretation of the Koran? Really?

So, here you are, twisting and turning, trying to avoid the actual commented-on issue, which asserts that Obama has the power to "take away" Islamist street cred, or bestow it. Limit your comments to whether that's actually true, or not. Which Muslim, in which country, is going to be thinking one moment that ISIS adherents are strictly faithful Muslims fighting the good fight against evil things like women who want to read and write, and then based on something Obama says, change their mind and decide that position (and thus ISIS) is no longer actually Islamic? What kind of person do you think holds ISIS as being defender of the faith but who also holds Obama as someone they should listen to as an authority on what is, or is not, authentically Muslim? Can you point to a single person, anywhere, who holds both positions?

Oh, certainly. My point is not that they are harmless, or that their aims are noble(they aren't, and if they could they'd continue expanding until they ran out of room and/or infidels); but that this ideological commitment to territorial expansion also has downsides for them.

Since their desire is to expand(and their continued legitimacy as a 'caliphate' depends on it), they can expect basically all their neighbors to be frosty at best. The ones that aren't Real True Muslims can expect to have their heads sawed off and used to make snuff films, so they aren't going to be too happy, and will have a strong incentive to fight like their lives depend on it, because they do, and even the Real True Muslims can, at best, land an Emirate or similar subservient status. If the alternative is losing power entirely, they'll probably go for it; but they certainly won't like the idea. Aside from ensuring that local politics remain ugly, the enthusiasm for territory also requires a comparatively large amount of manpower dedicated to fighting relatively conventional battles for borders as well as doing boring but necessary administration and governance stuff. And, in addition to there being nothing quite like really, really, boring bureaucratic work to cool some hormonal, maladjusted 18-20something's zeal for Jihad, people fighting comparatively conventionally to take or hold territory are the type of army that we have the best shot at picking off from the air. They probably won't oblige us by behaving exactly like 1970s commies, only lower budget; but they aren't going to take and hold a contiguous nation-state without at least periods of relatively conventional warfare, of the kind the air force just smiles really wide when it looks down upon.

They can still be nasty fuckers, and they are; but their ability to focus on the 'far enemy' (ie. us) is pretty small compared to their ability to focus on the 'near enemy'(every last person who ended up on the wrong side of a nasty little tribal feud in the middle east). Not necessarily zero; but very low per unit manpower and resources.

Contrast to classic Al Qaeda, or the assorted islamist militants that Pakistan's ISI cultivates for use as proxies against India: such groups have no particular territorial ambitions, they just need some basic office and living space, they are generally at least somewhat willing to be 'ecumenical' about various internecine disputes as long as there are Americans and Jews and so on to attend to. Much less dramatic, in terms of capturing locations with actual place names and generally acting like a state; but much more flexible in their ability, and willingness, to deploy resources against soft targets wherever the opportunity arises, and much trickier to root out, since they both look much more like civilians and have a much better chance of having good relationships with at least one host country.

I would definitely agree that IS showing signs of actually expanding out of their little shithole would be Bad; but unless they can do that, their expansionist desires actually make them somewhat less risky to our interests because they'll be focused on slugging it out with their neighbors, rather than blowing up targets of opportunity worldwide. (Very, very, cynically, an IS that fails to expand might even have some benefits: if you want to remain even a nominally liberal democracy, you can't really do anything about religious wackjobs who hate you and your civilization; but live there anyway for some reason, until they actually do something criminal. If, suddenly, their most-likely-to-be-violent and/or most zealous people voluntarily start emigrating to some hellhole to get themselves killed, well, sucks for the neighbors; but some of your problems are now solving themselves.)

They are 'surveillance' cameras. Sometimes, surveillance is, indeed, an ingredient in the production of 'security'. Other times, not so much. In either case though, the camera only ever handles the surveillance, possibly with some other component producing security from it.

Well, if you live in San Francisco you may well have been forced out of your home by V.C. activity; but that's a slightly different operation...

That isn't entirely false, in that they'd be more than happy continue their merry little campaign unto victory or death; but it's a fairly shoddy version of true.

ISIS are a bunch of sociopathically bad neighbors; but their ambition to 'caliphate'(which implies and requires acquisition and effective control and administration of territory) makes them rather more locally focused than an outfit like Al Quaeda. As does their (admittedly gruesome) enthusiasm for settling local grudge matches with Shia and various other groups they deem heterodox. It doesn't make them nice; but it does make them more likely to spend their time on local bloodletting rather than international plotting, and it makes them so uncompromising that they aren't particularly good allies, even of the most cynical convenience, for anyone. They've made it fairly clear that anyone who isn't the correct flavor of muslim is definitely off the table, and they don't call their little strip of sand "The Islamic State" as a gesture of cooperation with other nominally-islamic states in the region, who are unlikely to take being called illegitimate very well.

Should I take it as an unflattering reflection of the true strength of The Caliphate(tm) that it is being actively butthurt about having its twitter privileges revoked? That's the sort of thing that is pretty pathetic among individuals, much less would-be nation states allegedly arranged allong deity-ordained lines.

You've just made them even happier with their choices. You fundamentally misunderstand what makes them tick. They want you to hate them. They're banking on it. They need you to hate them, and they're willing to do things like roast people alive in order to make you hate them even more.

Do you really think that an organization of many thousands of people which slaughters other Muslims for being insufficiently Muslim will give a rat's ass whether or not a politician in the US considers them to be sufficiently Muslim? Obama can no more "take away" their embrace of fundamental Islam than he can turned to by millions of other Muslims as an authority on whether they are legitimately following the Koran. What nonsense, to even suggest such a thing.

People like the Jordanians will demonstrate their "legitimacy" through their own actions, not through having the president of the United States proclaiming their particular adherence to their own cherry-picked passages in the Koran as being the "right" one. Would you consider Obama to be also a strategic genius for weighing in on which groups in Israel or Brooklyn or Poland are legitimately Jewish? Please.