As long as so many companies, towns and states earn so much money digging dirty polluting black rocks out of the ground and burning them to generate electricity, there is no chance that that the USA can move to a cleaner greener future.

There is some evidence out there to suggest the practice of shielding really little kids (babies on up) from these allergens (which is something more parents are doing because of concerns about the risk) is actually increasing the chance that they will become allergic as they get older and that introducing kids to all these foods very early will lower the risk.

Do cows fed on the diet they evolved over 1000s of years to eat, namely grasses and similar plant species, produce as much methane as cows fed on GMO cereal grains and such do?

Oh wait, if you fed cows what evolution designed them to eat, you couldn't sell $1 hamburgers at the golden arches...

The in-development Neo900 smartphone, whilst it doesn't have the latest and greatest hardware specs, is specifically being built to make it harder to do this crap. Option of going 100% FOSS on the main ARM processor with the exception of some userspace blobs for the PowerVR GPU (at least that is the intention) plus a hardware architecture that prevents the closed parts of the system (WiFi, cellular radio etc) from having access to the other hardware (there is no way to for the cellular module to have any access to the microphone, speakers or the memory or flash/filesystem of the main processor at all)
No walled garden (since its 100% FOSS there is no control by anyone other than the user), not trying to sell you apps (no app store means no apps to sell) and no spying or tracking (unless you happen to install something that does spying or tracking)

Is the Neo900 for everyone? No. But if you want a phone that genuinely gives YOU the user the control, the Neo900 is the only device out there that can really do it... (and although not everyone likes binary blobs, the nature of the Neo900 means that if someone does produce a FOSS driver for the PowerVR stuff, it can be use on the Neo900 no problems)

Even if you do go for an electronic lock, there is no reason why it has to have a full OS (much less something written by Microsoft) underlying it. You could probably implement the logic for a safe on a simple microcontroller. Even if you need things like auditing (e.g. to record who opened the safe and when) all you need is a bit more memory (to store the list of valid codes and when those codes can be used plus the log of which codes are used and when) and a simple real-time-clock chip to keep track of the current date/time.

Also, there is no reason to leave any wires or ports or access points exposed to the outside world except for the battery compartment (if the safe has an external battery compartment to allow for battery replacement if the battery is drained) or the external power source/backup battery connector (if the safe has an internal battery box to allow for providing power if the batteries inside the safe are dead)

If I had some stuff I wanted to keep secure, I would buy a safe with a dial combination lock, not an electronic safe (and certainly not one with software sophisticated enough that it needs an actual OS underneath it)

What is to stop Lattice from simply shutting down this project for an open FPGA toolchain for their FPGAs?

Or does Lattice not care about this particular project for some reason?

I refused to comment on YouTube because of the whole G+ thing, now I can go back to commenting on the many interesting YouTube videos I see :)

If you are writing software that takes in a password and you are hashing the password to compare it to a stored hash, there is no reason at all to restrict the maximum length of a password or prohibit certain characters from being used in it.

If you are writing software that takes in a password and you are NOT hashing the password (but instead storing it in the clear or otherwise doing something with it), you shouldn't be writing software involving passwords in the first place (I can't think of a single valid reason to do anything other than store a password hash. Even "lost password" features can easily be done via temporary passwords or email-me-a-password-reset-link features)

I would love to hear from the people behind software and web pages that limit the length of passwords or restrict what characters you can have in it why they do such a stupid thing.

Doesn't H.264 (aka MPEG4) which has much wider client support (browsers, hardware decoding, mobile etc) do a good enough job?

Whats left unsaid is how many ISPs (including those that dont yet exist except on paper or in someones head) would LIKE to offer super fast broadband but are unable to because local or state authorities have been convinced by dinosaur companies like Comcast and Time Warner to block alternative ISPs comming into the area and providing good access.

If governments at all levels stopped listening to the dinosaur ISPs and their friends in Hollywood and started listening to the people who elected them, the number of people able to get gigabit service (or even just super fast service) might start to be a meaningful percentage of the total population.

If you dont provide remote access to the car systems, how will systems like OnStar be able to start the car remotely (ala Die Hard 4.0)?

I have watched enough Top Gear to know that there are plenty of fancy cars (sports cars etc) out there where you use the infotainment system (or at least the screen for the infotainment system) to configure all the various settings for how the car will perform. So on those cars at least, there must be a 2-way link between the infotainment system and the car control systems.

Not sure whats more impressive, the fact that a 19 year old is able to get DARPA funding or the fact that a 19 year old (and his team presumably) is about to go into mass production with a fairly fancy looking custom microprocessor on a 28nm fab process.

It may well be possible to rig the spinning cage full of balls. But I bet its a LOT harder to do (and a LOT riskier in terms of getting caught or getting it wrong and not getting the numbers you thought you were going to get).