That seems to have been a problem only with Windows XP. I didn't have it with Windows NT 3.1, NT 4, Windows 2000, or Windows 7. (I skipped XP).

Ubuntu Linux seems to have an incredible number of background processes that aren't really necessary.

Right. It's ordinary industrial automation. It's also strange that Intel would have CPU testers that weren't networked and reporting to some machine aggregating statistics and looking for process variance. It's pretty much routine in factories today to network the machines. That's been going on since the 1980s.

The Mitsubishi C Controller mentioned is just a CPU board packaged as a Mitsubishi Electric industrial automation module for convenient mounting in industrial automation cabinets. "It includes two Ethernet ports, an RS232 port, a USB port, a CompactFlash card slot and a 7-segment display for debugging and diagnostics. The (Intel Atom) CPU comes with the Wind River VXWorks real time operating system pre-installed." It's programmed in C.

"Only about 100 missing-child reports each year fit the profile of a stereotypical abduction by a stranger or vague acquaintance." Those are the real kidnapping cases, and there's usually no identified suspect whose phone law enforcement could dump.

Rank of this problem in things we need to worry about: 4,534,211.

Low-cost terahertz radar imaging is going to be very useful in handheld devices. You really can see a short distance into many materials. Great for seeing pipes and electrical wiring in walls. The day will come when that's a standard tool one buys at Home Depot.

Until that's working, a cooled IR imager would be useful. Those are great for finding heat leaks in houses, but currently cost too much.

Then eBay can become a bank. In exchange for more regulation, they get to do lending and can borrow from the Fed.

Why not? There have been $30 Android tablets available in Shentzen for a year or two.

OK, so now you're encrypted from user to Cloudflare, in plaintext within Clouflare, and possibly in plaintext from Cloudflare to the destination site. That's more an illusion of security than real security. Even worse, if they have an SSL cert for your domain, they can impersonate you. Worst case, they have some cheezy cert with a huge number of unrelated domains, all of which can now impersonate each other.

LAX just runs people through huge powered revolving doors to enforce one-way traffic. They used to have a sign that said "Once you have passed this point you cannot return".

We get a warped view here in Silicon Valley. Lots of Teslas. No Supercharger stations, though. There are a fair number of electric car outlets around, of too many varieties.

This is no big surprise. All the mammals have surprisingly similar DNA.

True. My Android phone has no Google account, so I disabled Google Account Manager, Google Bookmarks Sync, Google Contact Sync, Google One Time Init, Google Play Magazines, Google Play Movies and TV, Google Play Music, Google Play Store, Google+, Market Feedback Agent, and Picasa Uploader. No major problems.

That's quite correct, and not an exaggeration. The "City of London" (now a tiny part of London) has a governmental structure left over from the Middle Ages. (It was codified in 1189AD, but is older than that.) It's one of the few holdovers from the feudal era that hasn't been modernized. The City of London Police should have been absorbed into the Metropolitan Police decades ago, but haven't been.

That's a beautiful little project.

We've gone from "So clear you can hear a pin drop" to "Can you hear me now?!?"

Right. Cellular telephony just barely works now. There's lag as long as a second, even when the call supposedly isn't going over VoIP. (Sprint seems to have that problem.) There's occasional echo when the lag exceeds what the echo suppressors can handle. Background noise kills the cellular compression algorithm.

Why don't we have CD-quality audio on phones?