Europe and other government purchases are not driving Cisco and other equipment advances in speed. That's mostly capital investment. Euro governments (and US munincipalities) are leveraging this by way of uaving taxes to pay for it.
A
  few years down the road, it won't see so fast when quad streams, each of 4k video, to every house are the desire.

Then there's turnaround latency, need to have twitch games 3d generated at the server in a reasonably tiny time frame.

No, these city services, akin to water and sewer and electricity, will be reliable, but no longer on a timely upgrade path.

I hear a presidential limo made from a Chevy Bolt, with an electric engine and no armor, is much more fuel efficient, too.

I wondered that, too.

In any case, Boeing saw no business case for larger planes, while tons of room for smaller, direct jets. More to more airports with less hub crap.

The Airbus decision flabbergasted them. Officially, anyway. Cynics realized it was some European Union pride/multistate boondoggle as pieces were mandated to be made in most countries. Business case is irrelevant to politicians in such a situation. See also perennial money-loser SST.

The problem is that if the airframe is moving directly at the White House from, say, New York Ave, it could do so at ten feet above the ground. Would still clear the fence, but anybody on the roof of the White House opening up with any sort of AA or even conventional small arms fire would be, essentially, shooting right at hundreds of people, cars, trucks, and office buildings. NOT an easy problem to solve.

Yes. And drones don't kill people, people kill people. It's actually kinda funny to watch a lot of normally "progressive" types who've always reflexively ridiculed the sport shooting types for their defensive postures regarding irrational gun laws ... suddenly find themselves in exactly the same predicament. "But I just want to do some fine art landscape photography from 50' feet up!" Uh huh, and I just want to break some clay pigeons. But we're BOTH evil now! How's it feel buddy!

Scenario: pop away some sort of cover on a flatbed truck a couple of blocks from the White House. Fire up a very un-sexy, easy to build hexa than can easy lift a few pounds. It could quickly self-navigate straight up to a couple hundred or more feet (these things can climb like rockets), above any local building tops, and then move horizontally towards the White House at the better part of 50mph. Who CARES if it can be detected? If there are people on the White House lawn doing some sort of camera op or press conference, that bird would be right over them in the blink of an eye, and could drop something nasty with shocking accuracy, within a meter of a typical presser podium. It would happen so fast that being detected or not doesn't really matter.

I love these machines. They're great for all sorts of fun and creative uses. But a smart, determined bad guy really could put them to some very evil, if innovative, use. And that's the point. New government limits on their use make the bad guys just laugh!

I have a pimped out Phantom. The extra payload it carries:

1) GCU
2) Gimbal
3) GoPro with Battery
4) Video Downlink TX with cloverleaf antenna
5) iOSD
6) Various related cables, mounting hardware

Which all adds up to almost 340g - and it still maneuvers like crazy, and stays up for an easy 15 minutes.

No, it's not a lot. But it's lot more than low-double-digits. My bigger rig can easily carry 8 or 9 pounds while climbing to hundreds of feet faster than you'd believe. And it can go horizontally at a pretty frightening speed.

Because a drone can autonomously delivery a brick of C4 to within a meter of where you want it to go on your first try. And you can be miles away while it does that. "Miles away" is also handy if you're using it to deliver an aerosoled nerve agent or some bio-nasty substance over, say, a presidential press conference in the Rose Garden, or a speech on the steps of the Capital.

No, this is them annoying some of their customers (people who want to fly illegally in the DC no-fly zone) in an attempt to preempt knee-jerk over compensating by federal authorities. The feds would rather just ban the devices entirely, period.

In the Washington DC area, flights of any kind are and have been for many years very severely controlled. The DC Flight Restriction Zone (the "DC FRZ") is a 30-mile-wide circle in side of which it is illegal to fly any sort of remote control device of any kind at any altitude. So, yes, it sucks to be in the suburbs, seemingly a long way away from the sensitive downtown areas that include the White House, the Capital, Reagan Airport, the CIA campus, and all of those other high-profile places and people ... but, too bad! Federal offense with stiff fines and possible jail time if you're caught. That includes kids with $20 bought-it-at-the-mall 6" pink plastic helicopters playing around in their back yard. Yes, it's ridiculous. On the other hand, it's a rare week when a trio of big helicopters doing runs like the one between the White House and Camp David don't go thundering over the tree tops of suburban Maryland. You can hear them coming quite a ways out, and if you were prepared, you could easily have a modest quadcopter or more substantial hexa up to over 1000' feet and be at the same altitiude as (or above) Marine One by the time it and its decoy siblings flew directly over your house on the way to a routine presidential golf outing. That's the sort of thing that has had the DoD, Secret Service, HSA, and FAA all uptight. Mind you, a person flying a more or less radar-invisible foam and plastic RC plane could have done that many years ago, too.

And so we have a 700 square mile area where flying a 3-pound DJI quadcopter is very, very illegal, and has been for years. That DJI is updating their GPS-aware flight control firmware to make it impossible to fly their devices in that area is a sign that they don't want their products to be simply banned outright. We are not at the sweet spot of rational rules and implementation on this one, not even close. And of course someone with true mal intent isn't going to be bothered by the rules or the firmware limitations anyway.

You want scary? The same can be applied to general text on the Internet, tying posters on different sotes together, including anonymous (not your real name avatar) to a site with your real name.

Which the NSA probably has churning away on its databases. Which probably does little more than add confirmation of said links from watching and recording all traffic to any and all of a billion IP addresses.

And I, for one, welcome our new panopticon overlords who won't abuse it, not one of their thousand agents, because they're supposed to check a got-a-warrant box on a piece of paper before choosing to abuse it.

That is 24%. That means your device could be 20% cheaper and they would STILL make more money then anybody else in percentage per product in the electronics world.

It's the bottom end that's the problem with this, not the top end. The bottom, not-Apple, not-iPhone product end, where a guy with some money is sitting there and wondering if he should invest.

Lessee. Taxes on corporate profits look like they're going up. I see a marginal chance at success at best. Screweth it!

A few percent of investment scared off the bottom, and there's your decade of stagnation.

If ping crashes, or even executes arbitrary commands because of a specially crafted command-line, it's not a security vulnerability.

That's a pretty sweeping statement to make. Most interesting security vulnerabilities (IMO) are the results of multiple smaller issues and/or design decisions that can be chained together.

For example, a lot (most?) of the Linux distributions I see have ping's SUID bit set, and it is owned by root. So, yes, ping executing arbitrary commands absolutely *can* be a security vulnerability, because I can potentially use it for local privilege escalation from non-privileged user to root.

"Eventually the CD might not be supported,"

welcome to the 21st century where music is listened to on phones. devices that are obsolete in 2 years but can store all your music on a tiny bitty chip unless you've been torrenting the best music of the past 100,000 years.

as to 'not supported' there are chinese firms still selling 8 track tape playing devices, despite the fact that all of the remaining tapes should have deteriorated now. they also sell vhs decks which the local wal-mart actually has a model on the shelf. blu-ray playback is not going away anytime soon. i have 2 bluray writers, one for the desktop and one usb powered one for the laptop(s). reel to reel tape decks may now be considered obsolete but there are people who still use them in the industry.

there will be pushes to make new fancier stuff, yes. it is called marketing. the vast majority of my cd-rs are still readable and only some of them have bitrot. but i wasn't organized with my cd-rs so i have a considerable number of discs i don't really know if i still have the data or not. most of the data isn't really mission critical and despite losing my music collection about 4 times now (from windows formatted hard drives) the back ups cd-rs and dvds and now 1 bluray, i have only lost 1 song to bitrot 1 song and it was all because i had backups that survived longer than hard drives.

i recommend HDDs and BD-R discs for backup. BD-R while subject to bitrot are still the lowest energy overhead per GB in the consumer space. HDDs are the cheapest per GB but if left running so as to automate backups draws more power and powering off a HDD in the consumer space means you have to be there to power it on for archival use. though there will at some point be a 'smartphone' app to remotely put them to standby via software. this can already be done with a NAS and Wake-on-LAN and a little scripting. but then the energy requirements are significantly higher on a NAS than on a usb hdd. anyways using both media HDD and Blu-ray offers a better chance of not losing everything. flash memory is nice but i wouldn't expect it to last forever, my compact flash devices suffered from an issue where the memory would take more and more power from devices until the cameras running them couldn't power them from fresh batteries, could have been the camera but it is hard to say but i wouldn't consider any flash memory as reliable when compared to hdds and bluray devices.

my second computer was an 80286. it had 1MB of ram, and we had i believe EGA graphics and a serial mouse for gaming and word perfect. for dos word perfect 5.22, think vi and emacs having a child it is what wordperfect for dos behaved like. it had an extensive array of command line abilities (my teacher had a rolodex with all the commands she used) and yes she needed a rolodex to sort the functionality. but it supported a mouse too and had menus, often triggered by the function keys and/or the mouse. but yes even dos apps had mouse support. and the sad thing is, while *bsd supports mouses and multiple mice automatically (or did lat i used it) linux doesn't do this without modifying configuration files, people like in ubuntu don't worry about the tty's anymore but i loved using copy/paste and scroll lock in FreeBSD when i used it... cause i always did all my root work in the ttys instead of x windows. well once i learned that running x as root is bad... somewhere i learned about su, but i know whenever i was setting up freebsd it was from the ttys most of the time...