I don't see this as a problem at all. This is the type of thing that screams for a dedicated processor, not a GP chip, and it's typical to see a 99% reduction in power consumption when you go this route.

If you are going to cut cost, Bluetooth isn't a terrible place to start. Especially if you have 1 or 2 USB ports. (I didn't see that in the article)

GPS is also not so meaningful in a tablet; in a car you'll more likely use your phone.

I remember well when Honda was the butt of similar jokes in the Late 70's and/or early 80s. Nobody makes these jokes anymore.

Most times, market disruptions occur when previously expensive or inaccessible technology is provided at low cost. Sometimes, this happens when a high-end provider streamlines their processes and deliver their wares at new, lower cost. Far more often, however, it happens when a profitable, low-end provider moves upscale and discovers that they can deliver higher end wares at lower cost.

There are significant odds that your kids will drive Tata cars and love 'em, if they are, in fact, still driving them.

Stale thread is stale. But I bought a bluetooth keyboard for my phone and love it!

If I want to type srs bsns then I unfold the keyboard, which casually fits in my shirt pocket. Unfortunately, this model of keyboard is no longer manufactured and the price appears to have ballooned as a result. (When I bought mine a year or two ago, it was $40)

Even if they could review the source, there's no assurance that the binaries provided actually come from said sources. Further, there's no assurance that the "NSA bullshit" is in any way obvious. It could be as simple as an exploitable memory leak which can be tripped in certain, very rare conditions that would have no indication at all of being exploitable or "NSA bullshit".

My guess is that China wants to start pushing their "Red Flag Linux so that they can at least have a chance at knowing when their security is compromised.

I'm sitting in front of my $2500 laptop while a $50 TV stick smoothly plays Netflix on my bedroom TV. This "TV stick" is a fully functioning Android computer with all that implies. This is the "desktop equivalent" to the laptop, which in this case is a mobile phone device.

My point is that what "is a computer" is so cheap that the market is about to be tripped, completely. My phone now represents the majority of my interaction with the Internet in a personal context, and I do Internet development professionally.

So you don't think Forest Service land management (or the lack thereof) has anything to do with it? Because the timeframe for increasingly bad fires matches up really nicely with changes in approach to doing so...

Riiiight. So this has absolutely nothing at all to do with progressively worse nonmanagement of national forests over the past 30 years, opting instead to wait for a really big fire to clear burn areas?

Nice dogmatic and unfounded supposition, warmers.

That there are as many active mobile devices as there are people doesn't mean that everybody has a mobile device. And the reality is that mobile devices actually are ubiquitous, and the 7.1 billion number understates their ubiquity, since many devices are wifi only.

I type this on my Linux laptop that I use for work, but outside of some gaming, mobile devices have taken the crown for personal use. Mostly, I browse on my smart phone. I schedule on my smart phone. I email on my smart phone. My "TV" is actually a Google TV Stick running android. I frequently take a tablet with me when I travel, just so I can plug the hotel room HDMI into it and watch what I want, rather than "what's on".

Mobile devices are everywhere, and still growing fast, and have completely up-ended the computer marketplace. This trend will continue and even if you knock the number in half, it still stomps the every loving *!@#$* out of the classical desktop "computer".

Which is pretty much bollocks. Debt is one of the most powerful economic tools ever invented, rivaling money itself. Like any tool, it can be used well, or poorly. It's basically never a zero sum game.

Sorta, but not really. Debt is a type of mutual bet made by the investor/banker and the beneficiary that the value of the assets purchased by the debt will exceed the value of the money the debt reflects. And most of the time, it works out, and everybody wins!

Let's say I need $100,000 to buy new injection molds for my business in order to build a product. Without the $100k loan, the injection molds never get built, and at the end of a year, you have $100k in cash still sitting in the investor's hand.

But if the injection molds get built, and the product sells, you have:

A) The investor no longer has $100k in his/her hand, but they have the debt, now somewhat greater than $100k. (interest)

B) The borrower has $100k in debt, offset by the value of the new injection molds, AND the profits made from the product created with the injection molds.

This scenario is a positive sum game. Personal debt is an entirely different matter.

Like before, you are making a bet with an investor, and it does sometimes work out for the positive, but consumer debts are typically used for things to consume. If you spend it on a house, a house can be built that wouldn't exist otherwise, so it's probably a good deal. If you spend the money on hookers and blow, you truly consume the money and have no assets to "win" on. Now you have interest due on the money, which is economic activity that won't happen. Money spent on interest is then NOT spent on "real" goods, and everybody loses. Even the lender loses some, as the overall economy is damaged, even if this loss much less than they gain in personal interest money.

The absurdity of the premise behind "a gun that can't get turned on its owner" is almost beyond the pale.

Why?

Because guns don't generally get turned on their owners. It isn't a common occurrence, not here in the US, or anywhere else. If it was, we'd see a lot more "man shot in home by intruder with own gun" than we do.

It's an urban legend, up there with other silliness told by high schoolers to get their dates to snuggle close.

There is one and only one pragmatic use for limiting who can use a firearm: restriction of effective force into the hands of the "right people". The right people will always be those who have power, and want to keep you from it. Consider that for a moment before embracing so-called 'smart guns': the people pushing these want to restrict firearms to only the military and police.

That's worked out so well for people throughout history already, hasn't it?

What continues to blow my mind is, despite the breaches of civil liberties and outright offenses Obama and his administration have perpetrated against American citizens - and then lied about - we still have people who voted him defending him and saying he's doing a good job.

From a liberal point of view, Obama has been a worse President than Bush, by a long shot: if you look at "what has he accomplished", "what has he lied about" and so on.

And this doesn't even get into the NSA spying and things like that, which he's obviously quite fond of.

Unless, of course, we're trying to imitate a truly socialist state, like Soviet Russia. Then he's been excellent.

Neither.

The "nothing compares to the bandwidth of a minivan full of tapes" maxim applies here. Specifically, it applies to the length of time it takes for a cargo ship to transgress the Pacific.

Rail can move a large number of people faster than a plane can.
Rail can also move a relatively small volume of cargo faster than ships can.

They want to be able to get R&D and "latest greatest" products and similar over here ASAP so that they don't lose out to fledgeling US industry which is popping up to deal with the length of time it takes to get foreign made products.

They may also want to have a more direct venue to get large numbers of Chinese people here to "colonize". They do own a large percentage of the US, at this point.

China's economic model can probably be called summarized as calling them pragmatic opportunists (lack of foresight for their empty cities and ecological destruction aside). They leverage the benefits of other peoples' shortsightedness (such as with the exchange rate, and consumerism) to benefit domestically.

However, locally sourced labor and goods most certainly can compete with shipping by sea.

That's exactly what's happening: a lot of goods are being returned to US manufacture right now. Companies are starting with their emerging products and building the R&D and facilities to do it here, instead of offshoring the 'expensive' production part to China. For instance, go and try to find a new household appliance - you'll be hard pressed to find a GE or Whirlpool appliance which isn't "Made in the USA" now. We're seeing this happen with small bin electronics and inexpensive tools, too. Why?

Competition. They've been able to slash their product costs markedly by doing so. We're not talking just the cost of shipping, we're also talking about product defects and overall quality, turnaround on even minor R&D revisions, and so on.

If China can turn the current "time to market" of a product revision from about 2-3 months (after all is said and done) down to a month to a month and a half (at least for select customers and/or producers), the cost of rail over sea shipping would be marginal to the big picture of retaining American income.