As long as you get final say over who approves the software, then UEFI secure boot is great.

The issue is that Microsoft will be in control of what software is approved.

For now all x86 hardware still has the ability for you to disable secure boot and to load your own keys. What's changing is that this will be optional. Once that ability is removed, then that hardware will only boot software signed by Microsoft.

The issue is that as of Windows 10 certified hardware that ability will be *optional*. (And the concern is that Microsoft may offer some incentives for hardware vendors to remove the ability.)

This is less a flaw in UEFI, and more a flaw in the process for updating the graphics drivers.

The expectation is that they will offer some incentives to hardware manufacturers to get them to remove the off switch.

Redhat Enterprise Linux 7 and reasonably recent versions of SUSE have cryptographically signed kernel and drivers that work similarly to Windows.

The network is not necessarily involved. The example given of a self-driving car talks about the amount of time taken to distinguish between a plastic bag blowing in the wind and a child running in front of the car. This is not "network" timekeeping, just regular real-time processing.

Dell U2412M, U2413, U2415 are all 24" monitors with 1920x1200 screens.

Or you can jump up to 27" 2560x1440, 30" 2560x1600 or even 34" 3440x1440
Or you can go to a 4K screen or even a 5K one.

I note that the Porsche 918 uses two electric motors, one for each axle.

Putting an electric motor at each wheel would eliminate the transmission, allow the use of smaller motors, and allow for active torque control at all four wheels (instead of just being able to break you could accelerate each wheel too).

I suspect that to minimize unsprung weight you'd want to have a small driveshaft at each wheel.

If you're dead set on putting it in the crawlspace, then either:

1) Go cheap enough that it's essentially disposable and you can replace it when it dies.
or
2) Go expensive with SSD storage and passive cooling in a totally sealed case. (To minimize environmental issues.)

I bought a Truly Ergonomic. For "normal" typing it's fine, but for coding it moved too many of the keys around (square brackets, backslash, tilde, etc.) and I found it really hard to get used to.

I work with OpenStack, and regularly want to simulate 3+ VMs on my laptop. I've got 16GB of RAM, and could use twice that, but almost no laptops support 4 DIMM slots. (You pretty much have to get the mobile workstation ones, and they cost a lot.)

Even integrated video can handle Sketchup reasonably well, which is about as much CAD work as the average person will ever do.

As for video encoding, most people are fine with letting it run overnight so the speed delta doesn't matter.

I dislike Harper as much as most of us, but to be fair it has always been the case that charitable organizations were not supposed to engage in significant amounts of political activities.

Yes, many of them (of all political stripes) have been doing just that for quite a while, but the law has been on the books for a long time (just not enforced very strictly).

It seems to me that the only real bit of inventiveness is to have a way for the phone to automatically detect that it has been inserted into the holder (and presumably switch to a different operating mode).

I don't think Google Cardboard does this, but it's an obvious incremental step.

Native apps all the way, since I don't actually have a dataplan enabled on my smartphone.