Probably still better than Intel's Galileo board, which doesn't even have proper native GPIOs (they all go through a slow I2C I/O expander), is more expensive, and has worse power usage.

Did you actually bother to click on the second link, written yesterday, which is all about how the problem is still there even after the supposed fixes? Be sure to read the second page too.

Tesla advertised their car to owners as actually having the much lower levels of power usage it would have if the standby functionality was working corrrectly. They completely neglected to mention that it wasn't functioning and that the car used far more power when not in use than they were claiming. It's no different from advertising a TV as having ultra-low standby power usage when in fact the manufacturer knew it would draw far more power.

It almost certainly just acts as a transparent proxy that intercepts connections and DNS requests and sends them through Tor - there's already support in the Tor client for doing this.

Of course, your example shows one reason why any statement about the Model S's safety from Elon Musk should be taken with a pinch of salt - it's just too new! Capacitors with that issue generally took well over a year to go pop (that's partly why the capacitor manufacturers didn't cotton onto the problem), so if the Model S had exactly the same fire issue you were complaining about Elon Musk could still portray it as less likely to have a fire because it hasn't existed long enough for that kind of problem to show up.

To be fair, if that had happened to Model S's then Elon Musk and his supporters would be spinning it as a good thing and the media coverage as some kind of anti-electric-car crusade just as he is with the Model S fires - after all, not only did no-one get hurt by the fires, there was essentially no chance of anyone getting hurt because no-one was in the cars at the time, and it only happened as a result of them being underwater.

You're also teaching them not to recognize when calculations make no sense. How can you subtract 5 pennies from a cup of 6 units of coffee? You can't, and that kind of check will be important in a few years once they move onto using that maths for real-world calculations where dimensional consistency is important.

If you read the sentence before that: As single bits in memory control each task, corruption due to HW or SW faults will suspend needed tasks or start unwanted ones. It only took a single bit in non-error-detecting RAM getting flipped to cause that particular fault, something that could easily happen due to cosmic rays or minor radioactive contamination in the ECU packaging - and that's before you even take into account all the other potentially memory-trashing code. It's more like a manufacturer deciding not to ground the case at all and just hoping nothing will come loose and short to it.

They found, amongst other things, that single-bit flips in non-error-detecting RAM could cause unintended acceleration. Those aren't exactly uncommon and can be made even more common by things they didn't investigate like the materials used to encapsulate the chips.

Some of the chip vendors' USB implementations have license restrictions that make them unsuitable for open hardware projects. There are generally decent open-source replacements but it's not clear they can sublicense VIDs even if they can afford one.

This should be insightful, not funny. Back when I was buying a webcam there were some supposedly USB-compliant UVC webcams from reputable companies that just plain didn't work on Linux because they malfunctioned if you send requests in anything other than the exact way Windows happened to, and I'm pretty sure this was just the tip of the iceberg.

Which is in turn a direct result of USB VID/PID pairs being expensive and a pain to obtain.

Oh, this is definitely setting a dangerous precedent alright. Remember that Samsung and the other companies have FRAND patents because they helped develop fundamental technologies that made mobile phones possible, like the radio interfaces that allow them to talk to base stations, whereas Apple don't because didn't. By declaring that Apple's refusal to license those patents shouldn't result in an import ban because they're FRAND, Obama's basically telling companies that they shouldn't waste money developing that stuff.

He's sending a clear message that the companies should instead invest their resources on building a thicket of patents on stuff like UI, wait for someone else to do the unsexy fundamental technology work, then use their work for free whilst using your UI patents to ban those that did the boring but necessary R&D work from selling anything. If this isn't your business model from now on, you're the sucker that's going to be taken for a free R&D ride by the companies that did work that way.

Where I live there's at least one market stall that does that kind of repair locally, complete with a hot air reflow station.

You're right that the older 30-pin cables had no method of checking for authenticity, but starting with the iPhone and newer iPod Apple began to require authentication chips in certain kinds of 30-pin cables. For example, they blocked video out and in some cases even audio out on all cables and docks without an authentication chip, including older Apple-made cables that predated the chip.