Currently, the RAM is actually on top of the CPU/GPU in a Package-on-package arrangement. It's the way that the SoC is designed and provided by Broadcom. The only way to provide 1GB of RAM seems to be to redesign the whole board and separate the RAM from the CPU (trading off speed for capacity).

The Slashdot editors are likely to assume that everyone on Slashdot knows a handful of companies/products that have been talked about a lot lately (like Bitcoin, Airbnb, Uber, RaspberryPi, Tesla, and a few others). It's usually not true that everyone knows what all of them are, but complaining is only sporadically effective.

Tourists bring money from other economies into circulation in the local economy. Hotels are more expensive than residences, tourists are essentially forced into paying for restaurant food, and they pay at most attractions to see the sights. Property taxes are paid by the hotel that the tourists stay at. Presumably, the residents of the city also visit other places, where they don't pay income tax (being tourists, themselves). Things ought to balance out, in general.

Thanks for the clarification. Some of the wording was vague and made it sound like the program was provided through a school, rather than being available to an individual student. The student sign up site seems to require a school e-mail address, a verification code from the school or a Microsoft representative, or with an ISIC (which I'd never heard of before, at least not specifically by that name). 2 of those 3 point to the school being involved, and getting an ISIC looks to be something the student would have to do on their own, in at least some cases.

If you're going to hook up your expensive device that's running what's essentially an embedded copy of XP to the Internet, then it's not Microsoft that made the mistake. AECL actually made numerous engineering mistakes in their product. An analogous situation to the Therac-25 problems would be if the medical device/robot/SCADA company wrote bad control software/drivers for their devices. Going the other direction, if the Therac-25's software had been perfect, but the PDP-11 caught a virus when someone connected it to a network, would that be AECL's fault? The fault of the company that wrote the PDP-11's OS?

Apples and oranges. A safety defect in a car can mean death and injury. A security issue in an old OS can mean data theft or other shenanigans, but not generally something fatal. From a more cynical perspective, settling a single wrongful death suit may cost more than doing a best-effort recall of the remaining '96 Tauruses on the road. Microsoft would be able to state that it had fulfilled its Windows XP support contracts and provided an upgrade path to still-supported products. Anyhow, Sasser never killed anyone.

That works out well for the subset of schools that MS has partnerships with, and it apparently starts at the secondary education level. I was interested in programming in primary school, but had no guidance or resources at that time. IMO, if they're providing tools starting in high school, that's a little late (and that assumes that my child will be going to a school in the DreamSpark program).

Huh, I've never seen that before (that large of a Wal-Mart, I mean, not the overzealous proselytizers). In my eyes, they did more to hurt their cause than to help it. It should've ended when you said "No thanks."

Thank you for providing citations. I'm sure that those pages are where I originally got my information.

Wait, there are elevators in Wal Mart?

An actor named Robert Newton, from Dorset, played both Long John SIlver and Edward Teach (both from Bristol) in Disney movies in the 1950s. He used a West Country accent to be appropriate for the characters. Apparently, it stuck when other actors were designing their own performances.

Or do both. Short number code, some diagnostic data on the screen, and a QR code linking to more info. The QR doesn't have to be much more than a couple square cm in a corner of the screen.

It is, but peer-to-peer doesn't mean "magic". Lots of older games are designed so that you can just plug in someone's IP to connect to their server. For the game to get a server list though, there has to be somewhere that hosts the list and will respond to clients requesting a copy of it. Basically, even for a P2P connection, you need some form of broker that points you over to where the "swarm" is.

Hamachi is a zero-configuration VPN system that used to be free, but now needs a subscription to unlock some of its features. It's been years since I've used it personally, so I don't know exactly which features are available to free users and which are limited to subscription-paying users.

Custom-manufacturing a board isn't cheap, especially in small production runs. A high volume of sales would mean larger production runs, which would lead to lower prices.