The model B has a lot more thought into the board layout. Having the power, and HDMI all on the same side of the board and the optional I/O also all on one other side, makes so much more sense and will allow much cleaner looking enclosures. Although.. I still wish they had done even MORE thought and out the I/O on the OPPOSITE side of the board where they have all the GPIO pins.

When Arthur came up here (Atlantic Canada), it took out the power for a few days.. heck some were without power for a week. While without power, all the big box stores were closed. However, small mom & pop shops stayed open, using a hand ledger and accepting cash. I was actually in one store buying supplies that was operating by candlelight.

I am pretty sure that in Canada > 75% of transactions are made with plastic, easily. It may be more in the 85% range.

Pretty sure (and the laws of physics would agree with me) that induction cooking methods will heat your pot far faster and more efficiently than gas, no matter what clever designs are achieved.

- It sits high on a wall in some common area, far from the cubicle of anyone who would want to use the thing for actual testing

- Many of devices are mounted so high you wouldn't even see them without a stepstool let alone be able to interact with them (see hilarious video http://tv.slashdot.org/video/?...)

- Almost all the devices are Google Play edition devices or Nexus devices and they're all using Chrome for testing, none using stock Browser or Firefox or Dolphin or any other browser. Hardly a good cross-section of devices or browsers for compatibility testing! It seems more like a PR stunt to increase Google device visibility. In fact they even say this outright! "We picked our devices mostly from Google Play Edition devices, and picked a few other fun and shiney net devices that would look cool on the wall"

I am sorry, I am not going to bother engaging in this line of discourse anymore. If you think any of this stuff is anything other than trivial, you have obviously been brainwashed by the security theatre proponents.

Relevant. Must-read short story if you haven't.

http://marshallbrain.com/manna...

"Now, a successful terrorist must spend an extra $100 on parts and 100 hours on hardware modifications, while still spending the time and money to jump through every other hurdle in the way."

"... the point is to raise the difficulty high enough that the attack isn't worth the hassle."

If you stop and think about these statements you will see how stupid they are. Such statements make sense when the motive is financial and the prospect of fines or incarceration is a deterrent. Or when such people are not extremely well financed. None of these things apply here. If you are an extremest who plans to kill yourself while blowing up an airplane, there is no point at which you stop and say "awww screw this, it's not worth the hassle". And most of these guys are backed by people will millions in the bank.

Just because you can power a device up does not mean it has not been modified.

Anyone with even moderate skills could EASILY take an off the shelf business class laptop, remove 3/4 of the guts of it, replace it with a tiny SOC, fill the case with explosive, and the laptop would boot and display and work just fine. The only way to know it was modified would be to look in detail* at the system specs and compare to an online DB - do you honestly think that TSA is going to do this? Replace all of above with phone / tablet, it is the same story.

* Oh, other than XRay the damn thing, which is what the TSA does anyway do they not? I honestly do not get what this "powering on of electronics" is supposed to achieve. Only the most idiotic of plots would be foiled by this.

At first I assumed that the people were stuck n a room for hours upon hours with nothing to do. Then I read...

"The period of time that Wilson and his colleagues asked participants to be alone with their thoughts ranged from six to 15 minutes. Many of the first studies involved college student participants, most of whom reported that this "thinking period" wasn't very enjoyable and that it was hard to concentrate. So Wilson conducted another study with participants from a broad selection of backgrounds, ranging in age from 18 to 77, and found essentially the same results.

Is it just me or is it a very poor reflection on today's society if people can not just sit and think for 15 minutes?

For the record I would have ZERO problem doing this at all... in fact I could think for hours... although having a pencil and paper to keep track of ideas and plans would be helpful.

Or you, you know, saw the film Enemy of the State 16 years ago and knew even then it wasn't far off the mark.

Yes it did you just weren't paying attention.

No matter what issue you want progress on, you can't advance that issue if there is a superPAC fighting you. Thus, all issues come secondary to the issue of eliminating the superPAC.

And if they surveyed people on how much TV advertising affected their buying decisions I wonder what the result would be? Above or below 30 percent? And what multiple of social media ad spend is spent on TV advertising again? 10x, 100x? By thatmettroic everyone in America better say they are not only affected by TV ads, but they cause them to buy two of everything.

I disagree that it is a component that is needed in computer science. I mean.. one should UNDERSTAND basic statistics just to operate in modern life, but this has nothing to do with CS at all. One should understand what a sample is, what standard deviation is, what mean vs median is, what the normal curve looks like, etc.. everyone should know this graduating from high school nowadays. If they don't then the school system is failing. None of this has anything to do with computer science though unless you are writing a program for or using statistical analysis. Like I said before, I have been working in the industry for over 10 years now doing very complex stuff and I have never used statistics to do it. I don't understand at all what this article is talking about, it seems to confuse the idea that statistical analysis of large data sets is the only thing computer science is about.

A comment like this shows a fundamental misunderstanding of algorithmic theory. You don't have to determine if an algorithm is performing more or less efficient through sampling or statistics, you can PROVE it using math.