Not if you liquid cool the video card too.

Yes, make his wife wear headphones around the house whenever the PC is running. Brilliant idea.

Just do your gaming in the spare room. Put a small quiet/silent PC in the living room for media centre stuff if you cannot live without a living room PC.

Also, I'd have to advise against replacing the TV with a projector. They're hellishly expensive if you get one with decent resolution, require a pitch black room to look any good, effectively prevent rearranging the living room, etc.

I would think that the cybernetic bits should be treated no differently than any other physical evidence on or in a person's body. If, for example, paint stains on a suspect's shoes prove that (s)he was at a certain location at a certain time, that's effectively the same thing as an implanted chip that proves the same thing.

Because it's a cheap computer that they can own themselves and be free to experiment with, rather than the expensive family PC that their parents will stop them from doing anything adventurous with. That the hardware itself offers nothing special is irrelevant. That it's a "shitty platform" is irrelevant. You don't need blazing fast network throughput, massive storage or heaps of CPU power for learning basic programming. You just need a functional system with the necessary basic tools for programming, and this provides it for very little cost.

It really depends what the particular aim of the education is. If it's teaching hardware design to university students, sure, you've got a point. But it's not. The educational aims of the RaspPi Foundation are teaching primary school kids how to code and do simple stuff with a GPIO port. You don't need an entirely open platform to do that.

I'm in favour of things being completely open as much as the next man, but the reality is that there are instances where it's not the greatest concern. It doesn't matter to the ten-year-old writing Hello World in Python that the graphics driver is a binary blob or that the full specs of the SoC are not public. When he's got the knowledge and understanding to be able to delve into things like that (likely some years later), there's nothing stopping him from moving on to platforms that are completely open.

Interesting idea, and it is in general terms good that different options are appearing on the market. With that said, I see no compelling differences between this and the Raspberry Pi for my uses. Replaceable CPU/memory? Meh, $35-odd to entirely replace the whole computer is below my give-a-damn threshold. More CPU grunt is kind of nice, but to begin with anything I'm doing with something in this class of computer is not something that needs a great deal of that. More RAM? More or less the same thing as with CPU grunt. I've still got the earlier model of RasPi with only 256MB in active service as my ssh/torrent/whatever box, and it works just fine with such little memory.

Plus, the Raspberry Pi is a popular platform with its particular hardware features well supported by a variety of software. I imagine this thing's SoC has a different hardware mpeg4 decoder than the RasPi (if it even has one), for example, meaning you couldn't just take a RasPi build of XBMC and use it with this.

Still, if you do need something that's the size and approximate cost of a Raspberry Pi but with a little more power, or the same size and a bit more costly with a bit more power and more RAM, good for you, you now have another option.

There is nothing that would motivate me to get a smartwatch. Everything they can possibly do is done better by a smartphone, with the sole exception of the convenience of being able to tell the time with a glance at your wrist, and that is offset by the inconvenience of having an uncomfortable chunk of metal strapped to your wrist. One might possibly be able to make a case for Google Glass or something like it, but not a smartwatch.

Which is all well and good... except for the facts that A) the NSA doesn't seem to be constrained by what is legal or not, and B) whistleblower protections aren't doing people who blow the whistle on this sort of level a whole lot of good.

I'm glad there are people who understand this; that one's career or profession is not the only knowledge and worth they have. I, for example, work retail in a not especially post apocalyptically useful field, and IT. Selling stuff is arguably going to be useful post-apocalypse, but I am also capable of building things.

But was it necessarily a bad decision? From the simplistic view of living vs not living, maybe so. But maybe not... not everyone believes that "continue living at all costs" is good. I'm not super familiar with cancer treatments, but what I do know is that they're often supremely unpleasant to endure, often have a rather unpleasant aftermath, and aren't actually guaranteed to keep you alive. I can certainly understand people deciding "no, I'll just let the cancer run its course." I imagine that Steve Jobs, looking back on his life and accomplishments, might well have thought "maybe that's enough that I need not cling desperately to life as long as possible."

Of course, I never really followed the details of his cancer and death, so that is basically pure speculation. But the point is that "I don't want this treatment for myself" is perfectly fine. "No-one should have this treatment because it betrays illness culture" is not.

That doesn't seem bizarre at all to me, it just seems like human nature. "I get by quite fine without being able to hear. In fact, I'm better off not being able to hear!" Substitute the ability to hear with basically anything else that some people have and others don't, you get the same sort of thing. Bald people who tell you that it's a sign they've got more testosterone and are therefore better in bed, for example. "I'm better than people with a full head of hair." It's natural to (want to) see what makes you different from everyone else as something that makes you better than everyone else.

Personally, I try to avoid doing shit like that. There are certain conditions* I have which are a disadvantage to me, that some people say means I have advantages in other ways. If an actual cure were developed for them, I'd be celebrating. And beating the shit out of anyone who tried to prevent others from taking it because "it's killing [condition] culture!" A culture born of a reduced quality of life is a culture we can stand to lose.

*I don't like advertising the specifics, and they're not really relevant.

Meh, I've spent more on things that are less real and ultimately less useful. At the bottom line, this is a service they are providing. Not all services - very few if any, in fact - result in your gaining a physical object.

I'm also sad to see it go pay only, and have been using it for quite some years. But I figure... well, considering how much I spend on everything else technology and internet, $25 a year isn't going to kill me.

Merely fighting against America does not necessarily make them bad guys, in a reasonably objective sense. If you are American, then anyone fighting against you would seem to be bad guys from your point of view, but from an outsider's point of view, it's just "these guys" and "these other guys".

Some might argue that them hacking makes them bad guys by some measure, but the US has been doing the same thing, so I'd consider that inconclusive at best and hypocrisy at worst. Others might argue that the stuff done to Americans during the Vietnam War makes them bad guys, but given everything done by the Americans during the Vietnam War... well, same conclusion.

With that said of course, the Chinese government has had a history of doing some very shitty things to a lot of people. On the other hand, so has the US government...