Those new Intel CPUs use PCIe to connect to "southbridge". PCIe is designed to be explicitly backwards compatible across versions (yeah, there will be less bandwith to the "southbridge" available...irrelevant in nearly all scenarios).

How about adding more lanes than are in the original spec ?

Obviously the requirement doesn't exist if its something quite opposite is followed...the question is why Intel chooses so.

Because not doing so reduces costs ?

Based on their past actions, I have my doubts that what they they do is all around optimal.

What do you mean by "optimal" ? "Optimal" for whom ?

This is a good reason for suspecting "intentional obsolescence"...Intel has already done so quite a few times (no, don't limit yourself only to cpu sockets, if you really want to have vert clear examples...)

For example ?

And please, stop with portraying like it's a solid fact that there's no demand for greater (this all I'm talking about - greater, not absolute) upgradeability.

I'm not. I'm observing that it is a "solid fact" very few people upgrade systems at all, and even fewer are only interested in upgrading the CPU.

Even multiple components doesn't have to include so many major ones as you want to believe...

It's got nothing to do with what I believe, it's got to do with what I've been observing computer enthusiasts actually doing over the last 15 years. There is very little evidence to suggest a general desire across the PC market for greater upgradeability.

Look, seriously. The whole argument here is that there's a group of people in Intel who specifically set out with each new CPU design to make it incompatible with existing hardware, because by doing this they hope to squeeze more profits out of... the fraction of 1% of users who are interested in CPU upgrades. If that doesn't make you go "WTF ?" straight off the bat, then there's absolutely nothing I'm going to be able to say that convinces you otherwise.

I'll ignore the "everybody does equally bad things" nonsense for now, and address your rather odd take on monotheism.

First of all, you're saying that you know for a fact that the world works in such and such a way, and complain that a different belief system has got it all wrong. Isn't that a circular argument? And, isn't that the basis for all inter-theological fights? "No, no, you've got it all wrong. It's like this..."

And second, you're claim that "monotheism says there's only one way" is absolute nonsense. What way is that exactly? The way of a particular sect? The way of a particular time and place? There are as many "ways" as there are people. It's all about interpretation. Sometimes a particular interpretation gains enough followers that it takes on the force of the mob, but most people go about their business and deal with one another based on common sense.

Monotheism is about seeing the world as a single entity without the capricious nature of "godheads" or "mother earth". Every scrap of scientific knowledge we have points to a single monolithic universe (putting aside it's scale and theoretical "parallel-ness"). People simply recognized the power of such a concept before having even a notion of "proof" as we currently understand it. It gave people a way to simplify the world so they could get their increasingly sophisticated intellectual heads around it. Its a brilliant leap of understanding that has absolutely nothing to do with a given individual's claims about what that single entity wants exactly. Moses claimed God wanted "his people" set free. Jesus claimed God wanted everyone to go to heaven (among other things). Mohammad claimed God wanted people to submit to His will (the word Islam means roughly "submission"). Siddhartha (founder of Buddhism), claimed that there was no god, but that the universe was an indifferent but all-powerful singular thing. All of them (as well as many others) believed in a single power controlling everything everywhere, but what that single power actually "wants" various radically between them.

Monotheism is NOT a religion. It is a category of belief systems that includes our most modern understanding of the universe. We just don't call it god anymore. If you don't believe me, consider the remarkable similarity between the average creation story "god did XYZ and the world was born", to the creation story a physicist will tell you, "the singularity did XYZ and the universe was born". (There are many other 1=1 correlations if you bother to look).

I understand and share your feelings about institutionalized cults, but do not confuse the concept with it's application.

Random variation in solar activity, random outgasing of surfaces, and random light pressure effects on decaying surface patterns/paints should totally swamp any relativity effects.

There are also experimentally observed effects that have no current explanation. Perhaps they are just noise, perhaps not. The topics you need to search for are Flyby Anomaly and Pioneer Anomaly. That will give you enough background on the scale of unknown orbital forces to compare with the theoretical effects of relativity calculations.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flyby_anomaly

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pioneer_anomaly

especially considering the iPad isn't able to watch flash video except off of YouTube and a couple of other popular sites

That's not really true. I've run into quite a few sites that feed up raw video when browsed from the iPhone, and of course the same would remain true on the iPad.

And, there are already a number of common Flash players that are integrating code so that if Flash is not supported on a device, the player can fall back to HTML5 playback.

Remember that most of the video on the web today is ALREADY encoded in h.264, which the iPad/iPhone play just fine - it's only the flash playback container that gets in the way. It's really simple to just strip that container away for some browsers or devices.

You can't just go to a site and say it will not work on an iPad if you see a flash player, you have to actually try on the device and see how the site adjusts content for a flashless mobile device.