Because the /system partition is read-only. Removing the apps will screw up OTAs and/or make them MUCH more complicated and difficult to test.

Once disabled, removing them has zero benefit. Free space in /system gains a user nothing whatsoever since, as stated before - it's read-only.

Much of why CM and other AOSP-derivative projects are popular is to get rid of carrier and OEM bloatware. Very few people don't install gapps, and while some of the gapps packagers (such as PA) now offer "micro" gapps packages with most of the unnecessary Google apps installed, the package recommended by CM (as in, linked from their wiki) is a complete one.

This is effectively Google's response to OEMs (especially Samsung) putting on atrocious crapware that was ruining the Android experience for many users. e.g. "this is why OEMs can't have nice things".

One of the biggest issues is that sometimes the OEM crapware would constantly hound you to create an account with the OEMs own ecosystem. Google's stuff, at least, usually doesn't hound you if you click "no" during the initial Google account setup. Samsung, on the other hand, would constantly spam me with persistent notifications until I rooted and removed their crap. Also, OEM/carrier crapware was far more likely to do funky stuff in the background without the user's knowledge/approval than GMS.

Yeah. Windows, as far as I can tell, shows iowait CPU as normal CPU usage.

Linux, at least, shows iowait usage in a separate bin, letting you know when you're I/O bound.

Nearly every time I've found my system unresponsive/slow, I've noticed my CPU utilization bar on my system monitor widget is almost entirely green. Green = iowait.

In a number of cases, the iowait was high because my system was swap thrashing. If your system bogs down under heavy multitasking, it's much more likely you need more RAM and not more CPU.

Yup. In many cases, the newer SoCs in phones have improved performance-per-watt.

Not always though... If you want amazing performance-per-watt, you don't want a flagship SoC, you want a midrange one. The quad Cortex-A7 Snapdragon 400 blows away any member of the 600 or 800 family in terms of battery performance. This is, among other reasons, why most of the Android Wear OEMs have chosen Snapdragon 400 units and disabled the unnedded cores. (Motorola was the only exception, and their usage of an OMAP3 has led to major criticisms of battery life since it's made on an ancient manufacturing process and the Cortex-A8 is significantly less power-efficient than the A7 even on the same manufacturing process.)

I have a device with a 2.5 GHz Snapdragon 801. Most of the time I've capped the CPU frequency at 1.5-1.7 GHz and don't notice a difference.

A Russian Internet disconnection would seriously alter the power balance/politics in EVE Online too...

The whole "partial discharges are bad" thing dates way back to the old days of timer-based NiCd chargers. Back then, chargers were dumb - they terminated the charge cycle based solely on a timer, and not based on detecting a full charge. The infamous "memory effect" wasn't actually the thing at play in most cases there - it's actually extremely difficult to reproduce outside of a lab. The problem was simple overcharging due to dumb timed chargers. As far as users were concerned, the symptoms were the same as "memory effect" so the myth stuck.

In general, partial discharges/recharges of a lithium-ion are far less stressful to it than a full discharge/recharge. However - li-ion/li-po batteries tend to lose capacity more rapidly if they are routinely kept at a high state of charge. Lithium batteries are "happiest" when they hover around 50% state of charge. (This is one of the reasons Teslas default to only charging up to around 80% unless you specifically "top it off")

Lead-acids like most non-EV car batteries are quite different beasts - they are happiest when fully charged, and will lose capacity RAPIDLY to sulfation if let to sit when partially discharged.

I've had issues with Gigabyte products in the past - but never with ASRock or Asus. I have no idea why people are saying ASRock/Asus are out. I have a relatively new Sandy Bridge system with UEFI and no issues, and also have a headless Haswell system with UEFI and both are rock solid. Neither system has had a working Windows partition in a year or two (well, in the case of the Haswell, it has NEVER seen Windows.)

It's a good question. I can see why PSN was originally targeted - some of Sony's behavior around then was atrocious.

But these guys are targeting everyone.

Many of the delays in fusion research can be attributed directly to inconsistent funding.

If you keep on yanking money and then giving it back again, you're going to get FAR less productivity during the funded periods than if there were continuous funding.

The NSA has two directives that often conflict with each other:
1) Protect communications that are critical to our nation's security. This is mostly military/government comms, but they have a role in securing banking and other civilian networks. An example of what comes from this side of the NSA is SELinux - which is now heavily used by Android to provide additional security against malware.
2) Compromise and monitor the communications of our enemies. These guys overstepping their bounds are what has been routinely making the news lately.

While I can't see an obvious reason for the guys in category 1 to want to strengthen Tor, it's possible. (Potentially on behalf of another agency... Think in terms of Tor's use by Chinese dissidents.)

I'm fairly certain the people in categories 1 and 2 don't get along with each other. While in theory their goals should not conflict (one focuses on our enemies, one focuses on strengthening friendlies), the truth is that it's hard for the guys in category 1 to strengthen friends without also making those tools available to our enemies - and the guys in category 2 are routinely overstepping their bounds and attacking friendlies.

Success in a test tube and/or monkeys doesn't mean much as far as hope for a drug viable for humans. After all, the trials for Tekmira's drug are on hold by the FDA due to safety concerns ( http://www.cbsnews.com/news/ho... ).

Also, Tekmira is NOT the company that manufactured the drug used to treat Dr. Brantly and his coworker - that was Mapp Pharmaceutical's ZMapp

Huh? Nobody else seems to want it? Then why are Linux-based laptops (ChromeOS is Linux) frequently in the top 10 best selling laptops on Amazon?

(Usually there are 2-3 Chromebooks up there, but right now there's only one. I'm not sure how often they recalculate the rankings.)

"Closing the older nuclear plants is not an option for many EU countries, which are facing an energy capacity crunch as other types of plant are being closed or mothballed because they can't cover their operating costs, or to meet stricter environmental regulation."

In short: While nuclear isn't perfect, it currently sucks less than any other alternative available.

(Renewables just aren't scalable enough yet.)

That's pretty much how government contracts work.

It fails because:
1) The customer will change their requirements mid-stream, screwing everything up
2) Even if they don't, in some cases it's discovered once everything is complete that the system which meets all of the customer's requirements is utterly fucking useless in the real world. I believe this was a major role in healthcare.gov's failures - many of its issues were discovered post-launch

"It is highly recommended to use a router configuration we're not going to document or even provide you a link to".

The document implies that at least one modification is a flash and RAM upgrade - but they don't even provide links to details of this modification and/or whether any other techniques are needed (how do you populate the bootloader in the new flash? Or does the SoC itself have a built-in recovery mode?)