RMS, is that you? The world is never going to be your communist open source utopia where closed source and profiting off of software is illegal. People don't need the netlist for every IC they use. This board is more closed than most, but it's a compromise I'm willing to make as the price per performance is better by a mile than anything out there.

Putting it in a safe wont stop a determined criminal. Just like the common Slashdot aphorism that the most powerful encryption can often be defeated by a $5 wrench in a back alley.

There are already several places selling "fake" Arduinos. They are actually identical to the real ones, because the design to arduino is completely open source, and the official one has a rather high margin, so there's space for chinese manufacturers to come in and produce clones for cheaper.

So you're saying hacking child porn sites is like sleeping in tents outside banks?

Basically they do this because they want to be able to update the browser silently. The update process for firefox involves dialogs popping up, you have to OK them, then next time firefox restarts you have to approve a UAC prompt (on windows at least, I assume some kind of sudo popup on linux/mac). Chrome updates silently in the background, next time you open it you have the new version, but you don't get all sorts of popups and new tabs spamming you about it like with firefox. Also updating chrome doesn't disable half your extensions which is nice.

That cable is totally non standard, for crazy devices that output analog over their HDMI port. Most do not. HDMI is digital, VGA is analog, you can't convert from one to the other with a simple cable. It would not work for the raspberry pi (notice how the page says NOT FROM COMPUTER OR LAPTOP on it)

Hmm, you've got a good point. We should definitely discourage any sort of technical advances, since those advances might be used for DRM!

From what I read the theoretical max is 512MB, but it depends on a 512MB chip in the specific format being available (it's a special package, it mounts directly on top of the processor), which at this point either doesn't exist, or is hard to get.

For about $10 you can add on wifi and bluetooth ($2 for a USB BT adaptor, $8 for a USB wifi adaptor). Sure they may not be the fastest, but for something like this low powered ARM chip, you're not going to be pushing hundreds of megabytes per second anyway, so it's not an issue.

Due to issues of scale, I bet it would cost them much more than $10 to add wifi & bt onto the board itself.

They are using a Broadcom processor, which is proprietary and not available to the general public. Coincidentally, the leader of Rasberry Pi also works for Broadcom. They are known for being pretty unfriendly to open source in general, so most likely that has rubbed off on him? My thoughts are that they are trading away openness in order to get the price down ($25 is an amazing pricepoint for an ARM board at this caliber)

The chipset powering it is a proprietary broadcom System-on-a-Chip. The reason they are able to use it, is because the leader of the rasberry pi project works for broadcom. You can't even get a datasheet for the processor. Also it's BGA, something you can't normally solder together in your home without fancy equipment.

Well, your printer does embed invisible tracking codes into the printed page which links it back to you...

http://w2.eff.org/Privacy/printers/docucolor/

Cool, sounds like they're trying to do exactly what I want, will help a lot with the mods. Can't wait for them to finish. (Current versions of spout seem to just add a few minor features, they don't have any of that advanced stuff yet).

Can I plug it into bukkit yet? Can other players log onto my server without having to go through the hassle of loading up forum pages, opening up minecraft.jar, replacing class files, etc?

That's the main problem with all the minecraft mods (besides bukkit ones), they're a hassle to install, and don't work on multiplayer (and the ones that do, require every single player to muck about with their client).

Probably the built in NPCs wont be as good as millenaire, but at least I'll be able to easily use them