They certainly tried, and I personally looked at the MSP430 launchpad as a fun distraction last spring ... and ended up ditching Arduino altogether, seeing as most of my projects didn't need the space. What TI was missing was Arduino's IDE, as hideous as it sounds, but they have it now--in the form of Energia (http://www.energia.nu). Still not as established as Arduino though.

Another big hit was the chips they released initially--the 1st gen "value line" chips were hideously underpowered, like 2KB flash/128 bytes of SRAM, more ATTiny-like in size. The current "v1.5" LaunchPad you buy comes with 3rd-gen value line parts, up to 16KB flash, still not quite arduino but doing a lot better (and with hardware UART).

I hope the Stellaris LaunchPad catches on quicker, it looks like OpenOCD is starting to work with it so I have high hopes a UNIX-based environment can be easily deployed for Stellaris development soon. What I am personally more impressed with is the LaunchPad's BoosterPack form factor ( http://processors.wiki.ti.com/index.php/BYOB )--they have thought of a simple and straightforward way to expand the capabilities, while retaining (in theory) some backwards compatibility with boosterpacks made for the MSP430 for example. Much nicer than Arduino's "shield" layout IMO.

As mentioned, yes, but additionally these things have "WebTop" which is some ARM-compiled distro of Ubuntu with firefox and maybe a few others running on that HDMI port. Looking at a ps listing on one of these you'll see "/usr/bin/Xorg" running.

Ask how Motorola did it, I own the Droid Bionic and its "WebTop" feature is a running Ubuntu on the phone that exports its display via HDMI. Not entirely sure how it works (I don't have the hdmi adapter to use it, either) but I know it runs Ubuntu.

Oops, looks like I am mistaken--I read a different (longer?) version of this same article. Odd that the copy posted was shorter.

Here's the version I read, with 9 pages: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/17/magazine/mag-17Sugar-t.html?_r=1&ref=magazine
And the reference to the term "cancer fertilizer" is gone, even odder... guess it's been edited since then.

Aluminum foil. That's what they use for the radiant barrier insulation.

If I'm not mistaken, everybody in this /. article's been arguing the merit of Sugar with its insulin-based evils as something that can be considered "toxic" but apparently haven't read to the end of the article.

The big point Gary makes towards the end is the association between sugar, insulin resistance and CANCER. "Cancer fertilizer" is the term he uses there. Makes sense to me, but I'm a layman and not a medical research scientist...

Plastic wouldn't have the infrared heat reflectivity / low emissivity of foil, that's why they use foil. Good question about grounding it though--none of the insulation products really have that in mind (that I know of anyhow), and I'd imagine connecting it in any way to the electrical system (even the ground) would have to be studied for implications for fire safety/etc.

Neither did I!