If you need IO breakout get a $49 Cubieboard, http://cubieboard.org/

Same ARM Cortex CPU/RAM/flash/HDMI as the Android sticks plus a 96 pin header including I2C, SPI, SATA, RGB/LVDS, CSI/TS, FM-IN, ADC, CVBS, VGA, SPDIF-OUT, R-TP..

I agree, these taxes aren't really lost. They are instead paid by the shareholders via capital gains and dividend taxes. If you force the corporations to pay it you'll just see an offsetting decline in personal taxes collected. There's no magic here that will create billions in new tax revenue, best you can do is shift around where it is being paid.

Corporations and not living entities, they are just some paperwork that organizes a group of shareholders to work together. But most people don't understand this and want to tax the corporations. It would be much simpler to eliminate the corporate income tax and pick up the same tax revenue by taxing the individual shareholders. Nobody is eliminating any taxation in this model, it is simply a change in the point where the tax is collected.

And i should not use copy paste with a spelling error in it.

Let me repeat that, plan you lighting before you start. Again - plan you lighting before you start. If your electrician wings it and makes mistakes it is almost impossible to fix.

For example high end lighting in a dining room might have:
1) chandelier
2) halogen cans over table
3) halogen cans around sides of room
4) art light aimable cans
5) cans over buffet furniture.
6) tray lighting in the ceiling

Do you really want six dimmers in the wall of the dining room? No. What you want to do is remote all of those dimmers and have a single keypad at each opening into the room. Remoting a dimmer means putting it down by the electrical panel or in an attic. The home automation feature of the keypads then controls the remote dimmers. Doing this at wiring install time is almost free.

Repeat this in each room of the house. Think about art lights, fireplace sconces, in-cabinet lights, switched outlets, in-floor outlets in the center of rooms. Plan all of this before you let your electrician start. If you plan all of this correctly you'll never end up with 8-gang rows of dimmers. Well designed lighting is an easy way to make a major improvement to the feel of the house.

Hide the thermostats in closets and use in-wall remote temperature sensors. Disable the temp sensor inside of the hidden thermostat.

Someone please send DMCA takedown notices to all sites currently covering the US presidential election. That might get the problem fixed.

Ian Douglas' Star Carrier series does a reasonable treatment of this. All of his battle scenes involve dealing with speed of light restrictions. The characters have FTL drive but it is only useful for travel between stars. Three book series is a good read.

The way to combat this is for every website that detects the DNT header to simply respond with a page saying how to turn it off or download a different browser. How quickly we all forget what it was like to be constantly bombarded with ads for products you cannnot use or cannot be purchased in your locale.

Not a VPN, but what about a IPv6 tunnel to Hurricane Electric? Much of what you are interested in is IPv6 accessible. And the HE tunnel is free.

Might check and see where the IPv6 anycast address routes to from your location. Might be in a different country.

Your optical cable can do two channels of uncompressed or 5.1 of highly compressed - usually AAC or MP3.

I agree that Dolby was a real benefit back in the stereo days. But the need for Dolby processing disappeared with HDTV and Blueray. Dolby doesn't want to give up the $100M/yr in licensing fees so they 'invented' pointless things to mess with HD audio. They are taking advantage of the brand awareness built back when Dolby was a valuable feature. Every device you get with a Dolby label carries $2-3 in licensing fees. Keep Dolby for stereo processing, but get rid of it on HD audio.

The purpose of these Dolby "enhancements" is to ensure that every receiver and TV manufactured has to pay Dolby a big license fee so that they can recover the source material that has been Dolby encoded. I wish they'd just leave HDMI level audio in uncompressed PCM. But then we wouldn't need to license these Dolby decoders.

An alternative approach is to limit the number of patents that the PTO can grant to something like 500 per month. Right now they are granting around 100,000 per month. Do we really have 100,000 new concepts a month worthy of patent protection? I sure don't think so. But those 100K patents a month generate huge income streams for the legal profession.

Limiting the number of patents granted makes them much more valuable and enforceable. They will also be of much high quality since they will be forced to find their way to the top of the application pile. If someone invents wormholes it will obviously receive a patent and gain full protection. For less novel ideas all of those patent lawyers can surround the PTO and fight to be one of the 500.

Now a company can choose. Submit a patent and join the giant fight to get it issued. Or ignore the whole mess and just respect the much smaller pool of patents being issued. Maybe ten of those 500 patents will be software patents. That is a manageable number of patents to read and respect. Sure the giant companies are going to end up with all of these patents. Fine, let them. They would get these patents in the current system too. It is a small price to pay for getting rid of 10M junk patents and the trolls associated with them.

They're at about 120 years under current law and Congress has shown no restraint in extending them further. Right now a work from 1923 will come out of copyright in 2019. Other circumstances can trigger longer periods.

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

You have to wonder if Oracle really thought about the impacts of trying to copyright APIs. Their entire business is built on APIs designed by other companies. Hmmm -- kind of sounds like Google and Java. Winning on Java will have repercussions on Oracle far in excess of what they will win.

Why do you assume SQL isn't copyrighted? Our fine copyright law makes everything copyrighted unless you specifically release it. If this decision says APIs are copyrightable IBM will automatically have that copyright since they created SQL. The court will simply be acknowledging that IBM has always had a copyright on SQL even if IBM didn't know they had it. And thanks to the Mickey Mouse in Perpetuity Act (Bono Act) IBM will probably have that copyright for several hundred years. Just because they haven't been asking for licenses and fees doesn't mean they can't start with Oracle at the front of the line.

Allowing APIs to be copyright will destroy the computing industry in the US. Can you imagine the damage of AT&T going after the C run-time library?

Yes, we should punish Citibank severely for not specifying which rounding method it was going to use in those hundred pages or so of legal fine print I got with my mortgage. Certainly this justifies harsh prison sentences for the CEO and board of directors. I bet they wished they'd added yet another page to that hundred page document - then they would have been safe from this idiotic lawsuit.

It says my mortgage payment are due by the close of business. But it doesn't seem to specify a time zone. Could be grounds for another class action!