Wow, I can't wait until the Congressional hearings on the "hook up classes" held by the first school district that tries this. Teaching "children" about healthy sexual attitudes is a major taboo in the US. It undermines the message they were getting from their church and parents about sex being evil and dirty.

The Kickstarter has a handheld version with a battery, screen, and keyboard. You can install Wolfram Alpha on it as well (it comes by default with Rasbian now). It has better everything than a TI graphing calculator and costs $49.

Even cheap flat panel TVs usually have a lonely Composite jack somewhere on the back, just in case someone's grandfather wants to plug in the VCR. Of course this means you'll be limited to NTSC resolution and probably a fuzzy picture, but it's $9 and has built-in Wifi and Bluetooth so you don't need to hang a wired keyboard off of it like you do with the Pi. I'm not sure what I'd do with this, but that's true of all of these cheap little SBCs, and I usually find something worth doing.

The handheld version with the GPIO pins sticking out seems pretty cool. I'd really like to feel that keyboard before committing to it though.

The way I see it, MIcrosoft wasn't making that much money from consumers on version updates. Almost nobody buys a box copy of Windows to do the upgrade. They just upgrade when they buy a new computer. It's always been rather expensive and the past few versions of Windows have had additional barriers to entry (annoying changes to the UI for instance) to further discourage people from updating. With this system your new "made entirely of ribbons" OS interface is just a Windows Update away.

Several years ago I was really concerned about the 2038 rollover because so many protocols have hard baked 32 bit timestamp fields in them. Even if systems were updated the protocols might not be. But I've come to realize that once the systems are updated, the protocol tend to follow suit in the next revision, and in the next 23 years pretty much every protocol is going to go through at least one revision. There are still going to be a few holdouts that have trouble in 2038, but I'm expecting it to be as much of an event as the year 2000. A few fringe things act weird or even stop working, but pretty much everything important is OK.

If you let a bunch of loons run it's pretty easy to look good by comparison. Look at Mitt Romney. A terrible candidate by most measures, but still better than all of the frothing at the mouth crazies he was running against. This is especially important if you don't have a good centrist candidate and you need to make him look centrist by comparison.

Actually firing people is unpopular, even when you are "lowering the size of government". It means taking services away from people and reducing government oversight. It's better to just spend recklessly and then force the next president into financial crisis after financial crisis so they are forced to make the cuts instead.

That's why "debt doesn't matter" when the Republicans are in charge.

I thought he was implying that the current Republican slate was full of crazy old white men. For all of her numerous faults, Carly at least has one thing to differentiate herself from the pack. Two if you count the whole "drove a Fortune 500 company into the ground" thing.

Certainly you have heard of a place called Bengahzi? The Republican attack machine already considers it the worst attack on America since the War of Independence and according to them she personally orchestrated the attacks with help from Khaleid Sheik Mohammad and George Soros. They'll eventually get that report out of Congress saying exactly this if they try enough times.

There's no way the computer is going to win at Strip Poker.

Is that what those "5 years of experience in every technology ever invented, must be willing to relocate, starting salary $30k no benefits" jobs that litter job listing sites are?

Were you willing to guarantee your projects were defect free? The FAA is an excessively risk adverse organization. In some ways this is good, it's safer to fly from LA to London than it is to drive 10 miles from your house to the airport, even though you're in a metal tube traveling at nearly the speed of sound (so fast that human reaction times are effectively a moot point, once you see an obstacle in your way you are already dead) through all sorts of crazy weather and other challenges. The downside of this is that it is almost impossible to get them to replace a working system, even if the replacement is objectively better than the old one. One problem the FAA runs into on a regular basis is that tertiary technologies (like their network and comms systems) are constantly going obsolete and most of the vendors disappear and the only ones that remain jack their prices up into the stratosphere because they know they have a captive market.

There is objectively less innovation, literature, and even art from the Islamic world in the current day. You can measure scholarship per capita and it is not even close. They are squandering their human capitol on petty bickering and tribalism.

I just bought the USB-Serial adapter. Native serial ports on laptops are gone and they're not coming back. I know most of those adapters are total crap (so many fail when transferring block data at even just 57600), but chipset manufacturers don't even include serial port lines on the southbridge anymore.

3 ports means I can plug in a Keyboard, Mouse, and have one port for a USB Thumb Drive, Serial Adapter, Ethernet Adapter, DRM Dongle for whatever I'm actually doing with the laptop. If USB keyboards reliably came with USB hubs built in I could reduce that count, but you can never be sure what the site will have when you get there. Most USB keyboards aren't well equipped. In a pinch you can obviously use the keyboard on the laptop itself, but it's not as comfortable and most places have random USB keyboards sitting around.