What punishment can we impose if they don't live up to that demand?

(Hint: nothing.)

I'm an expert observer of my own environment, and have noticed that now that they're built into every phone OS it's been a decade since I was more than a few steps from the nearest calculator.

What value does being able to rattle off the old times table have when you're sitting in front of a computer (with a calculator app), with a smartphone in your pocket (ditto), and probably a desk calculator with some vendor's logo on it (since they're about $0.99 in bulk)?

Oh for fuck's sake. Yes. Memorizing tables is not math, it's an exceptionally boring party trick.

Right, but all the sound reveals is whether the CPU is busy or idle (or more likely, how much current it's drawing). Adding random-length pauses exactly at the steps where knowing whether the CPU goes idle leaks part of the key would break this sort of listening attack.

With multi-core processors it might even be possible to mask the sound by starting up another thread to do useless work that sounds like encryption but isn't...

That's dinosaur thinking, though. If they were streaming, they could sell every viewer in every "slot" to the optimum advertiser.

+5, Funny

Because eventually they will. But when they do, they'll be a monopoly that's in the business of selling gigabit+ symmetric connections at a price mere private individuals can afford.

"Home" service from the current monopolies top out around 100 Mbits down and 10 up, and they show no sign of wanting to push those top speeds up, probably out of fear of cannibalizing the huge margins on their $250+/month "business" lines.

...because it had been developed on Macs. Halo was mostly finished when MS borged Bungie.

You missed the major one:

- 0 Counter negative points raised in "The Everything Store" and recent news stories about poor working conditions in Amazon warehouses. Steer the narrative about Amazon toward how they're building the shiny future instead of how they're out-Walmarting Walmart.

Not well, from what I can see. It requires buying/building hardware, and you have to remember to take the device if you want to access a stored password away from home. KeePass + Dropbox goes everywhere my phone does.

It gets you an energy charge of $43/month. After the base fees, distribution fees, and because-we-said-so-now-pay-up fees it's more like $70 total...

It's something else altogether, originally it was a project to put a multitasking kernel, TCP/IP stack, GUI, and web browser on a Commodore 64, and has since gone in a mesh networking internet-of-things sort of direction.
There was a Slashdot article on the original desktop-oriented release, but the links are all dead.

The worst of both worlds! In 5 years, instead of a car that's hard to sell because potential buyers don't know the condition of the battery, you'll have a car that's impossible to drive or sell because the battery was returned to Renault after the lease ended.

Anyone else reading that as "US Has Radically Advanced Facial Recognition Software, Wants To Phase In Use In Unclassified Programs In 2014-2018"?

Or has my Snowden Cynicism gone too far?