What were they trying to bomb at the time?

MicroUSB is tiny, so you can build tiny devices. What is wrong with a microUSB to USB cable?

Mice don't have USB ports either, because they have an integral cable. MicroUSB is the best way to put a non-fixed USB interface on a small device.

If it is because you hope to use lack of an ABI to force drivers to be open what do you say to the fact that the most stable graphics driver in Linux is Nvidia, who is closed?

Having used it and also used the open Radeon driver, the answer is that it simply isn't. It may be the best-performing Linux graphics driver, but it is far from the most stable.

There needs to be *at a minimum* public education on this issue, and if nobody is willing to do that, then handheld lasers need to be outright banned for unlicensed individuals.

Or you could have what the UK has: laser devices regulated according to laser class. Anybody can have one of those less-than-5mW red pointers that people use for presentations, while potentially blinding brighter green lasers are theoretically harder to obtain.

It's a good system, since you can't actually harm someone with a normal laser pointer, since you blink before any damage is done, like unexpectedly seeing the sun. However, in practise it is too easy to mail-order a green laser from Hong Kong.

To be fair to the shitstorm, there are historical reasons to be a bit worried when Exelon describe something as a planned release of steam with minimal release of radioactive material. Lets hold out for the NRC report.

And use a reverse VNC connection (where the viewer listens on a port for the "server" to open a connection). That way, you only need to worry about your own NAT router. There are some VNC servers that allow you to create a nice package that when run automatically opens a reverse connection, which, combined with a dynamic DNS service for your own network, could give an idiot-proof way to get things started.

Also, not everything nuclear invoves decay and radioactivity. This is why NMR had to be rebranded as MRI.

OpenGL never caught on? That must be why iOS and Android gaming is dead and most new mobile games are written in XNA and released only for Windows Phone 7 these days.

Price-fixing IP cartels?

Move more than about 5 cm away from the card and it won't read.

... if for some reason you are a fraudster with some sort of objection to violating specs and potentially created temporary interference. Otherwise, crank up the power!

Being the richest guy in the world makes you a target, whether you deserve it or not (see sept 11).

Are people still seriously saying that 911 happened because "they hate our standard of living"?

I am in no way saying it was deserved, but it also wasn't motivated by the US's wealth. Its policies in the middle east, especially the unquestioning support for Israel, are much more relevant.

For those who don't want to go through the comments themselves: DCTech started posting two days ago and has criticised Firefox, Chrome and Apple. No criticism of Microsoft; in fact IE saved the web and "IE9 is a completely good browser" today (CSS is overrated).

He also persistantly uses what looks like Reddit speak. We "mod posts up", not "up-mod posts".

Supposed the website you were trying to access was hacked?

The choice of microUSB rather than USB-B or something is probably because there is a spec for high power over microUSB. It's used in the new standard mobile phone chargers. IIRC, a dumb charger can short the D+ and D- pins; indicating that it is too stupid to operate a real bus or do enumeration, but a device is welcome to draw as much current as it wants (with voltage possibly dropping if it draws to much; like a battery).

Perhaps somebody more knowledgable could correct some details or link us to the spec.

Teaching ARM is the equivalent to teaching Visual Basic Programming, common but very closed architecture.

Uh, what?

No; teaching people to program C on an ARM Linux machine is the equivalent of teaching people to program C on an x86 Linux machine: the CPU is proprietary, but who cares?

The cross-compiling thing is a red-herring too; you'd just run GCC on the RaspberryPi and for educational purposes it would be plenty fast enough.