Well, the big disconnect also comes about because government leaders learned LONG ago that any time you offer to do something new, you start talking about tax increases to pay for it. People get to the point where they accept that's "just how it is", so the debate, each time, turns into one of asking if it's worth paying that much MORE out of your paychecks for whatever proposed improvement or benefit is on the table.

In *reality*, government sits on so many resources, we should probably be at the point where the right question to ask is one of redistribution of their existing budget.

As just one example, up here in the DC area right now, there's a big debate raging because the National Park Service wants to start charging a fee to use the C&O canal "towpath". Basically, this is a 70+ mile long stretch of land that runs along the side of the Potomac River that people use for biking, hiking, jogging, etc. Nobody's even really sure how the heck they'd enforce charging a fee to use it -- but the park services people are all gung-ho to do it anyway. The claim is that with Federal budget cuts, they just don't have the funds to maintain the towpath without enacting fees.

But woah! Wait a minute here! If you look over at the Bureau of Land Management, those folks own a HUGE chunk of the entire West Coast of the U.S. right now, claiming it's land they need to care for and manage. How much of a budget do THEY have?! How about letting a little more of THAT land go back to nature, un-managed, and give that money saved to the National Park Service? That's a much more logical move, IMO, than expecting people to pay to bicycle or hike along a dirt path.

Well, I'd say that fossil fuels, which are mostly composed of dinosaurs who were unable to adapt(along with plants who were unable to adapt, and various other organisms who were unable to adapt) revolutionized the hell out of our entire civilization...

Maybe if IBM were buried and subjected to a few million years of heat and pressure they too would become a highly coveted resource?

I'd be inclined to say 'amazing' for the price. I understand the use case for rPi, beaglebone black, cubieboard, etc. when you need video and actually good GPIO(even more so if you need proper PWM, i2c/SPI, etc. BBblack, especially, has some pretty powerful specialty I/O options); but routers are so aggressively priced that they are often a pretty good deal for adding network capabilities to assorted projects on the fast and cheap.

I'm always up for other suggestions, of course; but I'm currently a big fan of the little 'travel/portable' routers that the RT5350 seems to have spawned a bunch of. Ethernet, USB, 802.11B/G/N, typically a serial port(I got lucky with the ones I purchased, the pads were even labelled and everything), and a few GPIOs, all for $15 or less. Kind of weak (usually 32MB RAM and ~400MHz MIPS core); but feel the price.

A mixture of both. The AMT system includes a dedicated ARC cpu, which runs its own OS and functions independently of the host to a large degree; but also can see into, and sometimes make use of, some of the hardware visible to the host system(details depend on version). For communication, for instance, the AMT system has access to the wired NIC below the OS's view(wireless NICs are more complex, I think AMT can do a direct connection to a trusted AP if configured to do so; but can't do VPN without piggybacking on the host OS), and it also has enough hooks into the various peripherals that it can do remote KVM in hardware, by emulating HID devices and snooping the framebuffer, mount an .iso as though it were a connected SATA device, and access some storage and memory locations that are also accessible to the host OS or programs, in order to gather data on system health, software versions, etc.

I'm not exactly sure how the BIOS/UEFI flash and the flash that stores the AMT firmware are related to one another. On computers with AMT, a 'bios update' will often flash both; but I don't know if that's because they are just different areas of the same SPI flash chip, or whether it's just a convenience bundling of two nearly unrelated updaters.

They all tend to be fairly miserable(though thermal issues are often more a product of the desire to have more space for ugly branding and fewer vents, which can be fixed with a bit of applied violence); but I do have to give the hardware credit for often being rather amazing for the price. The firmware is shit more or less across the board; but it is astounding how much actual computer they can cram into a $20 router.

Any remote management tool would be a 'backdoor', except that it is put in place by the owner for their convenience and with their consent.

AMT is a particularly powerful, and somewhat opaque, management tool. Anyone who suspects the possibility that(deliberately, or by mistake) those very, very, useful capabilities might be available to others under some circumstances would naturally be suspicious of it.

And, for the FSF and those who share their concerns, the fact that it is a wholly proprietary(and tricky to remove or replace) blob embedded in the brainstem of their computer is not something that would make them happy.

That may differ between laptops and desktops, or between AMT versions. On the desktops I've seen the AMT stuff is active if the PC is plugged in, regardless of its power state. Some of the capabilities of the AMT system cannot be used if the host PC is off; but the system itself runs on a separate processor and only turns off if the PSU is unpowered. Laptops may need to be more conservative, for the sake of retaining battery life while inactive.

Speaking of Dell, failure, and lawyers, back during the 'capacitor plague' era the law firm that Dell retained to fight capacitor-plague related lawsuits was itself stuck with capacitor-plagued Dells. I can only imagine that their IT people saw the humor in the situation. True story.

If your machinist is good enough you can probably fit a V12 in a wristwatch. It's just that all those cylinders will be very, very, tiny and the actual power generated will be rather unimpressive.

If you wanted the same effect in a laptop, you could probably add a GTX980 (250watt TDP) to this laptop as long as it was clocked at maybe 50MHz, rather than the usual 1100.

The trouble is that the entire i5-5200u, CPU and GPU, is also 15 watt part. Unless Dell is somehow just throwing away usable space inside that case, I suspect that fan noise, battery life, or both are going to hurt if you double the demands of the core silicon.

I don't know exactly how much you save if you wholly disable the GPU portion of the intel part, probably a little less than half, so even in that case you are talking about a pretty substantial bump in thermal load.

I don't deny that the integrated graphics are feeble, merely note that you are unlikely to get anything exciting into hardware that size. Even if we assume 100% efficient disabling of the integrated GPU, and savings of ~50%, a discrete GPU arrangement would involve a 50% TDP increase. If the integrated graphics can't be cleanly disabled, it might creep closer to doubling. I doubt that that would be a pleasant machine to work with.

The problem is that if the airframe is moving directly at the White House from, say, New York Ave, it could do so at ten feet above the ground. Would still clear the fence, but anybody on the roof of the White House opening up with any sort of AA or even conventional small arms fire would be, essentially, shooting right at hundreds of people, cars, trucks, and office buildings. NOT an easy problem to solve.

Yes. And drones don't kill people, people kill people. It's actually kinda funny to watch a lot of normally "progressive" types who've always reflexively ridiculed the sport shooting types for their defensive postures regarding irrational gun laws ... suddenly find themselves in exactly the same predicament. "But I just want to do some fine art landscape photography from 50' feet up!" Uh huh, and I just want to break some clay pigeons. But we're BOTH evil now! How's it feel buddy!

Scenario: pop away some sort of cover on a flatbed truck a couple of blocks from the White House. Fire up a very un-sexy, easy to build hexa than can easy lift a few pounds. It could quickly self-navigate straight up to a couple hundred or more feet (these things can climb like rockets), above any local building tops, and then move horizontally towards the White House at the better part of 50mph. Who CARES if it can be detected? If there are people on the White House lawn doing some sort of camera op or press conference, that bird would be right over them in the blink of an eye, and could drop something nasty with shocking accuracy, within a meter of a typical presser podium. It would happen so fast that being detected or not doesn't really matter.

I love these machines. They're great for all sorts of fun and creative uses. But a smart, determined bad guy really could put them to some very evil, if innovative, use. And that's the point. New government limits on their use make the bad guys just laugh!

I have a pimped out Phantom. The extra payload it carries:

1) GCU
2) Gimbal
3) GoPro with Battery
4) Video Downlink TX with cloverleaf antenna
5) iOSD
6) Various related cables, mounting hardware

Which all adds up to almost 340g - and it still maneuvers like crazy, and stays up for an easy 15 minutes.

No, it's not a lot. But it's lot more than low-double-digits. My bigger rig can easily carry 8 or 9 pounds while climbing to hundreds of feet faster than you'd believe. And it can go horizontally at a pretty frightening speed.

There is a radio controlled flight club for the DC area, which operates out of Gaithersburg (really not that far a drive from DC proper).

http://www.dc-rc.org/