If your machinist is good enough you can probably fit a V12 in a wristwatch. It's just that all those cylinders will be very, very, tiny and the actual power generated will be rather unimpressive.

If you wanted the same effect in a laptop, you could probably add a GTX980 (250watt TDP) to this laptop as long as it was clocked at maybe 50MHz, rather than the usual 1100.

The trouble is that the entire i5-5200u, CPU and GPU, is also 15 watt part. Unless Dell is somehow just throwing away usable space inside that case, I suspect that fan noise, battery life, or both are going to hurt if you double the demands of the core silicon.

I don't know exactly how much you save if you wholly disable the GPU portion of the intel part, probably a little less than half, so even in that case you are talking about a pretty substantial bump in thermal load.

I don't deny that the integrated graphics are feeble, merely note that you are unlikely to get anything exciting into hardware that size. Even if we assume 100% efficient disabling of the integrated GPU, and savings of ~50%, a discrete GPU arrangement would involve a 50% TDP increase. If the integrated graphics can't be cleanly disabled, it might creep closer to doubling. I doubt that that would be a pleasant machine to work with.

Chicago, DC, LA ... that pretty much explains things right there. What do they all have in common? Liberal leadership

You can't buy away competition without big government collusion.

Here are a couple differences between drinking too much water and too big of government: 1) the number of affected people (one vs Millions), 2) You have to try to drink too much water vs natural progression of governance.

Slippery Slope is a logical fallacy not because it isn't true, it is a logical fallacy because it isn't always true; sometimes is not good enough in logic. The question is, have you seen government that has grown too big?

Here are a few acronyms that most citizens hate: IRS, NSA, CIA, DHS ....

Lastly, is there anyone that can seriously argue that government is not big enough?

Or, you can realize that Broadband is as simple as building out a new Fiber infrastructure, replacing Cable, using the model I've suggested.

Municipalities build out the infrastructure using one time Bond money, building a CO-LO facility and auction space to CONTENT and INTERNET providers. All last mile connections terminate in the CO-LO and a network technician processes connection requests from customers, "I want Time-Warner" or "I want Comcast", or "I want Google", who then patches customer to provider.

The cable is not owned by any single vendor, and there is competition for customers individually. No need for any regulation, and market forces will lower costs to the end user. AND things like the Comcast/Netflix argument simply disappears.

For long term maintenance of a low oxygen environment they are probably using a Nitrogen generator of some flavor. If you want the job done fast, the ready availability of liquid nitrogen is very handy: let one liter of that boil off and you get almost 700 of pure nitrogen. Just carry it down and dump it.

My cynical suspicion is that have a datacenter in an underground oxygen-purged bunker is something you cost-justify under 'disaster recovery' or similar; but actually do because of a vague, gnawing, ill-defined dissatisfaction with the fact that your life is basically as safe as it is tedious. The same sort of thing as why really boring federal agencies build huge SCIFs and random suburbanites lovingly shop for tacticool accessories to cram onto their AR-15.

That aside, I assume that they got it for peanuts compared to the original build cost, since abandoned bunkers aren't terribly high-value real estate(and potentially turn into blighted little holes if you don't keep them locked and have a cop watch the entrance moderately closely), and a cold war bunker is probably nice and sturdy, trivial to provide physical security for, and not too much more inconvenient than a situation where equipment has to be taken upstairs by cargo elevator. The oxygen purge seems harder to justify except for the cool factor, though.

Easy problem. They just hired some Perl divers to do admin. Those guys can hold their breath for an impressive amount of time and are comfortable with CLI use, natural fit.

I wonder what constraints were placed on the problem that made "displace the oxygen in this sealed bunker" a two-year problem? Maybe it's a quote taken out of context and refers to how long the entire environmental control setup took?

I suspect that in a computer of that size you wouldn't want anything other than integrated graphics. Sure, AMD or NVIDIA could provide a part low clocked enough, or cut down enough, to fit within the size and thermal constraints; but once they've done that they probably won't be much better than the already-integrated graphics.

Unless you have enough room for a proper GPU, low end discrete GPUs are increasingly somewhat pointless, since they always add complexity and cost; but don't necessarily outperform integrated ones by all that much.

You'd probably need to use a different formulation than for cotton or cellulose based bills; but I suspect so.

Based on a look at paints sold for use on plastics and vinyl(like this one), the strategy appears to be to use a suitably nasty solvent as a carrier for the pigment and have the solvent infiltrate the polymer's structure, carrying the pigment with it. In a case where you need not worry about damaging the polymer(unlike commercial plastic paints, where the solvent can't be so aggressive that it messes up the underlying material permanently), like tagging stolen bills, you could presumably be particularly aggressive in your formulation.

I don't know the chemistry of the polymer and the protective coatings in common use; but you can usually find a solvent that will do the trick, especially if you don't mind a bit of damage to the material being worked with.

I'm not saying that SNMP is the correct mechanism for IoT, just that the state of discovery and interaction between IoT 'things' is so dismal(except where specially handcrafted by the vendor) that SNMP's MIBs look positively advanced by comparison.

Crazy-cheap silicon makes connecting things to networks relatively simple; but it doesn't solve the much more difficult problem of making those things interact in a useful way without either intricate top-down command and control or a ghastly nightmare of emergent oddities and security problems. At present, there appears to be very, very, little headway in making the 'things' that are supposed to be internetworking aware of one another, much less usefully so, with people either rolling their own totally isolated little thing or attempting to be the gatekeeper for all device interaction. It does not inspire confidence.

The trick is that security measures have costs, in time, money, user convenience, etc. and it is considered 'crazy'(in the weak sense of 'not sensible', not the psych-ward sense) to voluntarily impose costs on yourself that are out of proportion to the costs of the expected threat.

There's always something you could be doing more securely; but only sometimes is it worth it.

Speaking of AM radios and software on the victim computer: this classic.

Unfortunately only works on CRTs; but it's a heartwarmingly neat trick.