I'm a power user and while I use google products, I certainly don't trust them. That said, I understand planned obsolescence, but I really just want to see some ARM systems put out that are comparable to modern x86 machines in terms of specs.

If anything this should have an HD display, 4-8 core processor, and 8GB ram for me to even care about it.

Likewise, on the non-mobile front, I wish Cubie and these other manufacturers would produce something that'd fit in a standard case, accept standard RAM modules up to 32 or 64gb, not have limitations on the gigabit ethernet controller, and have more than one SATA port. I want a real computer, only with the ARM architecture and power savings.

I nag the manufacturers and they just brush it off.

Does the Gizmo support using both SATA drives on a port multiplier? I'd like to setup a RAID-1.

This + hardware RAID.

Got a link?

If I wanted a freaking atom board, I'd buy one for $100 and load it up with another $100 worth of RAM.

I'm going to keep complaining about the fact that there's not a low power, low cost ARM platform out there ($200 or less) with hardware SATA RAID support. While the cubieboard is the best ATM and supports port multipliers, it's really too bad that the thing can't use both devices attached to the multiplier at the same time. All I want is a hybrid NAS and home server that has 2-4 cores and 2-4gb RAM. Size isn't really a factor but power usage is...

Anyone know of a platform I've not looked at?

Whatever improvements they make will hopefully be sent as patches and pull requests to the open source projects they're likley building upon...I don't want to run a commercially run distro, or at least one that's more restrictive like Ubuntu, etc....

I run Arch for a reason.

Such as the ones used in the wifi SDCards by Transcend and PQI SD cards.

Imagine a bunch of tiny cheap linux boxes to act as meshes, dead drops, micro servers, etc...and imagine how long they'd run on a battery, or even a battery with solar!

https://forum.openwrt.org/viewtopic.php?id=45820
http://www.keyasic.com/keyasic_sub.php?type=information&inid=24
http://hackaday.com/2013/09/19/advanced-transcend-wifi-sd-hacking-custom-kernels-x-and-firefox/

If he thought things through and legitimately cared about his own well being and freedom, he would have scrubbed them himself as Snowden has.

The journalists and wikileaks do not have the responsibility in respect to Manning's freedom, though. Seeing as he was personally invested in this effort to blow a whistle, even though it could potentially jail him for life, he should have gone through and cleaned the documents as best he could in an attempt to keep himself from being blamed for ...well, the things he is now going to jail for. I feel he's imprisoned more because he was sloppy, and because of the repercussions of his actions, and less because of "treason" as he wasn't attempting to aid enemies.

The US entered the Vietnam war under false pretenses - the bombing at the Gulf of Tonkin of the USS Maddox was likely not all it appeared to be, if it happened at all. Just like Afghanistan and Egypt in the past and now, the US had no real business being in there - we only went to war in Vietnam to make Lyndon Johnson look tough and get him reelected.

Regarding the sentencing - the judge decides when to release that, being a fed, he likely has been colluded with to shape the news landscape.

I'm not insulting - I'm a twentysomething hacker type myself. I didn't say all of us were that way, but MANY of us are, and those are the ones who will blindly follow Assange or Anonymous all the way over the cliff.

Don't be thick, and "war crimes" are defined quite differently from what he did here. Being in a permanent war with a nonexistent entity doesn't really count as a true war - "war on drugs," "war on terror," Vietnam - all farces or based on farces.

I'm saying they released the sentencing information and the news about the NSA on the same day in an effort to obscure what the NSA is up to, as they know most of the techie/twenty something/hacker types will quickly drop everything to do some sort of "Free Manning" chant and forget the other news.

All that said, I personally believe the difference between Manning as a pawn of Wikileaks, and Snowden being a true whistleblower isn't intent, because they both had good intent. The difference lies in that Manning was not only working as a naive pawn for Julian Assange, who the US government hates, but in his effort to quickly become what he thought was a hero, he neglected to scrub the names of innocents from the cables and files he released, potentially threatening people in the US and abroad.

Aside from that, he has sociopathic tendencies and I hope he can get the help he needs, as well as parole - it's always sad to see a young man lose a large portion of his life for something that amounts to a crime on paper - that's not to discount the potential consequences of what he released.