I did not know that the state could choose to drop charges. How convenient for them.

I mean, doesn't the person whose rights were infringed on have to make that call? And since that person is apparently now dead, how can they just somehow arbitrarily decide that charges should be dropped?

I would imagine that the reason price hasn't been announced yet is because they don't know just how much they will ultimately be able to make them for themselves, and the giveaway they are doing is to gauge demand so they can figure out how much they have to charge.

If that's the case, the more ideas that got submitted to them, the better it will be.

Of course, it also might mean that giving them a preview into what kind of demand to expect, they might know for sure just how much they will able to fleece future customers. So hey... what do I know?

Iirc, MIPS32 ISA is wholly compatible with MIPS64 ISA, the latter being a proper superset of the former.

I agree with your first sentence entirely, but to answer your question, standardization makes it a lot simpler, and often less expensive, to find technical information or support for whatever it is you are using.

The story was just here on slashdot two days ago

I have to admit to some excitement about the recently mentioned MIPS32 board as well, but to be fair, I don't think anybody is actually sure how much of a rival the MIPS32 microcontroller board is liable to be, since its price point has not been announced. If it costs 50 times as much, for instance, then it's not really in going to rival the Pi because it's targeting a different market entirely.

Just why do you think the government would care about that? Or were you not paying attention to what was actually being talked about?

If that's all it could offer, then what would be the point?

True... but they have to demonstrate that they are safer by a margin that is large enough to be statistically significant, which is why how much safer they would be actually matters.

So you won't, in other words.

I mean sure... they'll eventually get to that point, but the number of years of statistics they are going to have to collect on millions of driverless cars driving, collectively travelling billions or even trillions of miles to determine exactly how much safer they are than cars that utilize human drivers is going to be enough that most people alive today probably won't see it happen.

Consider that without a price, a person doesn't even have the OPTION of buying one...

And of course, price *IS* important in the real world... most people don't pay more money for something if they do not genuinely believe that it carries a value that is worth the amount of time and energy that it took to earn that amount of money. That's all very well and good if you have infinite amounts of cash, but most of us do not, and have to do menial things like budget. That involves knowing what your expenses are likely to be, and what kind of time frame it would take to pay for things that you do get.

I would suggest that the much bigger problem with a lack of price means that it's currently impossible to get one at all, since the giveaway period has also expired.

There's no price yet because they're giving away the first production run to people who are going to do interesting things with them...

If that were actually the real reason that they don't have a price on it, then that would also imply that they do not want anyone to have one who doesn't already know what they want to do with it, and has an idea that *THEY* approve of.

[nt]