While the general concepts of those tools are free and open, there are patents on specific implementations of all of them. People are always inventing better wrenches. If you made a copy of Craftman's new wrench of the week and started selling them, I'm sure you'd be hearing from their lawyers.

We live in a world, wrong or right, were people innovate for profit, not the betterment of society. I don't see why people feel computing devices should be any different.

If you don't require a high resolution you can use the SPI pins on the Pi's GPIO headers to directly interface with a TFT panel.

He means without having to have a reaction mass the size of a star ...

I would still pick C, and use it to write a higher level language compiler / interpreter.

This is also in TFA:

My guess is the FBI is covering up that they somehow got VPN access into the Silk Road's internal server network. The same VPN access Ulbricht used to administer the servers from his local coffee shop.

They had already been tipped off about Ulbricht when he tried to order fake IDs from Canada. Then they figured out he was spending a good amount of time using the local coffee shop's wifi. They then sniffed his wifi traffic directly or just ordered the coffee shop / ISP to allow them to do the same. They couldn't decrypt his VPN session but they could see the destination IP which either lead to his server host provider or a 3rd party VPN service. Either way they just pressured the company that runs the service to give them the keys. Now that they have access to the server network they could collect what ever information they needed to build a case.

The key to my theory is the PDF of the PHPMyAdmin access. Notice it's an internal IP address. No way they were accessing that from anywhere but the server network.

Plain text is great when you're just transferring text. The problem is HTTP has been used for transferring a lot more then just text for a long time. Images, file downloads, video, etc. With HTTP/1.1 browsers have different parsing code paths depending on if it's a binary file or plaintext html. There are also special cases for handling white space and stuff like that. It makes developing and testing a browser more complex then is should be.

This won't effect AJAX. HTTP is abstracted away from the javascript engine by the browser. I imagine there might be some additional HTTP header parameters to play with while making AJAX calls, but that's about it. All the benefits from HTTP/2 will happen behind scene as far as AJAX is concerned.

The Stream laptops won't have a touchscreen by default, not the tablets.

Anyone who thinks we surpassed TOS flip communicators didn't really pay attention. Those things had a range past orbit without the use of a cell phone tower or any other kind of relay infrastructure. The TNG communicators, on top of that, were hands free speakerphones with perfect audio quality and small enough to pin on your jacket.

I also never noticed them needing a charge.

With Asimov stories, start by assuming there was a fundamental shift in computing. The positronic brain is an artificial version of our brains, not a Turning machine. Even if you could manually rewire every neuron and synapses in a human brain you could not program a person in the traditional sense. Everything is based on fuzzy logic. Our brains don't work in absolutes and pure logic like a traditional computer.

The robots in Asimov books are like a brainwashed slave race. If you are brainwashing your human level intelligent slave race, The Three Laws is a good starting place.

Unlike the robots in this experiment, most Asimov robots are not programmed in the traditional sense. Their positronic brains are advanced pattern recognition and difference engines much like our own brains. The Three Laws are encoded at a deep level, almost like an instinct.

In the story Runaround, Speedy is much like a deer in headlights, stuck between the instinct to run away and remain concealed. Doing neither very well. The design mistake was putting more emphasis on the third law versus the second. The PHBs knew better though and felt the robot was too expensive to leave to the command whims of the human mining workers.

I like that story because it illustrates what happens when managers make engineering decisions. ;-)

I think you're on to something. You don't need to blow the tank up to make it inoperable though. A command that simply instructs the engine and/or transmission to enter a mechanically unsound state and cause a major failure would work well enough.

Well let's ignore the fact that Mongolia, Russia, and Ethiopia are places, not races. The underlying issue is:

Race is a social term used to generalize the ancestry of a person. It's to vague to make a prediction about the genes, and their expression, in a particular person.

There is a lot of genetic diversity even in, what can be considered, a genetically homogeneous population. Genes that have been unexpressed for generations can suddenly appear again if the right couple have offspring. Even the genetic expression within offspring from a single couple can vary wildly. I think most of know cases similar to the family with 3 brown hair and eyed kids, and 1 with blonde hair and blue eyes.

You throw genetic diversification increases from a few 100 years of globalization into the mix and the whole notion of scientifically defining a race, let alone predicting actual gene expressions in a individual, becomes ridiculous.

Predictions of gene expression can only be done on a case by case basis within a specific heredity context. This is the reason the doctor's form asks for your parent's, grandparent's, and siblings medical history, not what race you are.

While note a "real" power connector, you can power the Rpi through the GPIO header. Works nicely.