A15 is much more power efficient than A8 (and A9, which was the one being actually compared). It uses more power, but it provides higher performance per watt.

Comparing two CPUs and saying that one is more power efficient than the other because it uses less power is meaningless, otherwise the old 8086 kicks the new Atom's ass in "power efficiency".

What an obnoxious comment. You'd think that at least here on Slashdot people would be intelligent enough to understand that when somebody asks for an advice on an activity, it doesn't mean that that's the only thing they will do for the rest of their lives.

That just measures relative weight. It compares the forces of gravity acting on two objects, and slides if one is being pulled harder than the other.

I decided to learn human biochemistry directly

Any good learning material that you can point us to?

Here's a hint. That 5 gal bucket of hypochlorate intended to kill the algae in your swimming pool can make a bomb big enough to blow a house into splinters. It is frequently used as an oxidizer in rocket fuel. Guess what, unless you go on a binge on buying the stuff, the checkout lady won't even look twice about you buying it! Make it into a bomb? Crush the shit up, blender it with some deisel fuel, and pour it into a sturdy container. Use a model rocket engine as the ignition source. One improvised explosive device, all ready to go.

Or, if you want a dangerous high explosive, you can go the more complicated route of putting ammonium nitrate into a bunch of 1 gal glass cider jugs, attaching some labgrade tubing to a glass shunt inserted into a stopcock, and putting aquarium bubbler stones on the other side, dropping some copper items into the cider jugs, corking them off, and using the resulting nitrogen oxide gasses to produce clean nitric acid with some distilled water. After that, you simply titrate out a nice supply of ETN explosive using the big bottle of truvia brand sweetener as the erythritol source. A 16oz bottle of truvia sweetener will get you one hell of a bomb.

For the above mentioned poison, you hermitically burn the bloodmeal without an oxygen source, and bubble the gas through a tall cylender of water. (Such as in a high temperature glass crucible). After that, the method of delivery is a subject best left for the madman; one I felt would be particularly nasty would be to add the hydrocyanic acid to some freshly milled mazipan, then chocolate coat it and hand it out. Marzipan already contains very small quantities of hydrocyanate from the bitter almonds used for flavoring, so it would be completely undetectable by the victim.

Are you seriously saying that those are equally hard to kill 30 people in a school as walking in with guns and shooting? You are going to hand out poisonous Marzipan bars in kindergarten to 30 kids that will eat it without anybody stopping you? Do you really think that building a chemistry set at home and learning to titrate is as easy as picking up a gun? And, how are you going to get into the school, blow up the front door, and then get kids to nicely wait in the classroom while you get in and set up another round?

There's a reason why almost all mass killings here are with guns -- they are by far the easiest way to kill a whole bunch of people. The fact that it's possible to do it another way doesn't make it nearly as easy.

"woah... well' we're in Canada now. Health care isn't that expensive here -- even for foreigners."

No? Last time I had a foreign visitor go visit the emergency room, we got hit up by a $450 bill for having a blood test done. After sitting there for 8 hours.

I've seen the health care in both places, and my experience is that it costs the same, you just don't get to see the bills in Canada unless you bring a foreigner to the doctor.

I enjoyed not having to pay in Canada, but I enjoy not having to wait in US.

The weapon itself is interchangeable - although it was a gun this time, it just as easily could have been a bomb, poison gas, or a well-aimed car. Our choice as a society is whether we want to enumerate and ban all the things people can use as weapons, or if we'd rather figure out why people want to use weapons in the first place.

I don't agree. It most definitely is not easy to replace the gun with poison gas or a bomb -- neither can be purchased legally and are much harder for the average person to get to. A well-aimed car could never take out a classroom full of kids and a number of adults. There is absolutely nothing that is as easily available and can cause similar damage as a firearm.

That's not to say that we shouldn't work on the problem of getting people to stop wanting to hurt random people in malls and schools. While we do that, it would make sense to also make it harder for those that want to do it, though.

"MAD" was exactly what the prevention was about. If you have a system that's going to kill the opponent even after he kills you, then they will likely not try to kill you in the first place.

If Russians felt, at any time, that a quick strike would take the US revenge capability, they'd be a lot more likely to strike than if they knew that moon nukes would be coming afterwards.

Doing this would be a bad idea. BT MAC can be spoofed so pranksters could make trouble. Speeders could turn off BT in their cars.

However, I do think it is very technically feasible to do it.

Wait, so you're saying the system is easily corruptible and bypassable, but it still makes it feasible? To use the common phrase around here, I don't think that word means what you think it means.

"The application grid is a paradigm that was introduced five years ago, and we have completely changed that", he says, as he opens up the application grid.

Then he proceeds to show us the revolutionary multi-tasking interface, which is in a 2x2 grid.

I hope they plan to have some better demos soon.

You are comparing completely two different setups that are measuring the power usage of different things, running very different loads. One is a heavy GPU benchmark measuring the cpu/gpu power usage, the other is total system power of a lightly loaded unit, dominated by memory and wireless chip power.

Even if they were running the same thing, the comparison would still make no sense without looking at actual performance numbers. I could run a CPU benchmark on Cortex A-8 for a total TDP of under 2W -- would that mean that that's the best chip of them all?

I haven't found a VW or Audi dealer who won't place a factory order with fewer options than anything on their lot

I've had a completely different experience with VW. The dealer said that he could order the car with options I wanted, but would not consider anything less than MSRP. That's for a car that they were selling for anywhere between $3000 and $4000 off of MSRP for the ones on the lot.

In practice, it was equal to a refusal to order it. I ended up getting a Nissan...

Sure, so why don't you start off by telling us why an Exynos Cortex A-15 chip running a web benchmark is using about 8 watts of power, with the display turned off so only SoC power is being measured, while Intel has already demoed a full-blown Haswell running Unigine Heaven at... 8 watts

Wait, wait... are you trying to say that in a notebook system doing wireless web surfing, the only sources of power are the CPU and the display?

If so, you are way off.

but by building a plane that's years ahead of what Airbus can produce, they're increasing the value of their brand.

Yes, all of two years. Of course, A350 could run late, but that's the current plan -- late 2014.

I say maybe A15, because from Anandtech's latest review here, Samsung's Exynos 5250 using A15 cores does not have a prayer of getting into smartphones using 5W at load. Your smartphone will be dead in an hour of web browsing with that kind of power draw.

The maximum load is just that, something that the CPU can output when maximum processing is needed, which certainly isn't web browsing. These CPUs scale down both the voltage and frequency when "simple" tasks are needed of them. On top of that, you're going to see a lot of this configuration in phones, too.