There's no such thing as a "basic microcontroler".

BASIC Stamp Microcontroller Module

(Yes, I know that's not what you meant.)

I'm not the GP. I assure you from experience that big, expensive, proprietary in-house solutions are far better than the big, proprietary, pseudo-COTS that the government gets tricked into. Here's how it goes:

1. Put an RFI out to COTS vendors.
2. Find out that none of their products meet even 50% of your requirements.
3. Ignore the previous fact. You'll be off to your next gov't. project, looking like a hero, before the shit hits the fan.
4. Push for your favorite COTS vendor, possibly the one for whom you used to work. (Hmm...) Fudge all the numbers to make it look good. No one ever got promoted by telling the boss that what he wants to do will be a long and expensive process no matter what.
5. Gov't pays COTS vendor to modify the product to the point where it is only usable for the government. Congratulations, you've defeated the purpose of COTS and will now shoulder 100% of the cost for any maintenance or new features.
6. End up with what amounts to a big, expensive in-house solution, only gov't doesn't own the source code, has to pay licensing fees every year, all changes have to go through the "COTS" vendor, and they've got a fat contract for life.
7. It's cool, like I said, by the time everyone figures this out you, Mr. Bigshot PM, are not even directing that project anymore. You, being the genius who replaced big, expensive in-house stuff with fancy new COTS product, got promoted and moved to the next big thing as soon as everyone signed on the dotted line.

COTS is great in theory, but it's usually a total lie.

PHP really is not that bad. Years ago it had a really horrible default configuration. But PHP, in my opinion, is viewed as worse at security than other scripting languages because it is more frequently used by people who have no business writing server-side code.

I use an IBM Model M keyboard from the early 90s. A better typing experience does not exist.

Why don't we just wait for the space robots to find us?

Should be titled:

Most File Sharers Hypothetically Say They Would Pay For Legal Downloads

What people say in surveys and what they do when there is actual money in play are two different things. What is "cheap"? And what pay service could possibly be as convenient as BitTorrent? If you have to log in and provide payment information, it's already not as convenient.

Anyway, I wouldn't extrapolate too much from that survey.

Do you trust anyone to release HTML5 support for your 2-year-old mobile phone? Do you trust your mobile OS provider to pay licensing fees to MPEG-LA for your 2-year-old mobile phone?

All signs point to h.264 as the HTML5 video codec of choice. There's nothing non-proprietary about it. It just so happens that Apple is part-owner.

I hate Flash as much as the next coder, but at least it's widely used already, proven to do particular things very well, not caught in the middle of an uncertain future (h.264 vs. Theora vs. VP8), and not currently threatening a patent war, the consequences of which are not yet known but will likely create their own bag of hurt for both developers and consumers.

HTML5 will only be good if it's final implementation is good. The idea behind it is nice, but right now it has a lot of corporate fingers in it, playing for their own interests over yours. It will be a miracle if we can all come out of this without practically renting the web from MPEG-LA.

I would take attendance, but attendance would not be required or have any effect on the student's grade.

Students who don't attend class fall in one of these categories:

1. Independent, studies on his/her own, doesn't need the lecture to succeed
2. Irresponsible, not taking college seriously, will fail the class and that will be the end of it.
3. Irresponsible and entitled, seldom showing up to class. When they do, they waste everyone else's time by asking the professor questions that they would know the answers to if they'd been coming to class regularly. Then they take up the prof's office hours. Then, if the prof refuses to help them, they go whine to their parents, who in turn call a Dean and make a stink.

So if I were a prof, I'd take attendance just for a paper trail. Then I'd set some rules like "If your attendance is below X%, then my office hours are not for you; they are for responsible students who made an effort already. If your attendance is below X%, I will likely not call on you during class because it is likely that everyone else in the room already knows the answer to your question."

That way the people who can learn and pass on their own can still do it that way, but the entitled students who think the professor and everyone else in class should work on their schedule get shut out.

Wake me up when this NVIDIA's proposed solution doesn't double my electrical bill and set my computer on fire.

You might be able to make the civil disobedience argument if he had, say, broken into the email account, downloaded everything, and sent it to a site like Wikileaks. Instead, he put the password on 4chan, and in the process he didn't really expose anything and delegitimized anything that might have been found.

Painting this kid as some sort of noble hacker/whistleblower is pure fantasy.

(At the same time, I do feel empathy for him, as we all know what law enforcement would do if someone broke into one of our personal webmail accounts: Absolutely nothing.)

12.04 Purple Peopleater?

It's more like:

"I'm linksys! I'm linksys!"
"No, I'm linksys!"
"I'm linksys!"
"I'm linksys!"

...etc., etc.

Okay, I sort of opened myself up on that one. However, I would argue that underpricing in order to destroy competitors is only a short-term scheme; the long-term goal is to raise prices once those competitors have been eliminated.

Name me one company who has used a monopoly to lower their prices.

This rhetoric is really kicking it up a notch. We're getting into really cynical propaganda territory here.