Would this work on the Raspberry Pi? Or some other cheap computer that an amateur could use as the starting point for his or her home robotics project?

Fluid ounces? British fail. About as many people in the UK use fluid ounces as use hogsheads and firkins. Older people sometimes use ounces for weights in cooking, but all fluids are measured in milliliters now (with the exception of blood, beer, and milk which for the time being still come in pints - although the latter is in the processes of transition)

Its a question of degree. Certainly ARM is a good company that can easily been seen to produce valuable IP.

However, if they somehow went bankrupt, a patent troll could buy up their IP and set up a very profitable and entirely non-productive NPE who would only subtract from human technological capability.

Unlikely he would be able to enter the country, based on what happened to the other guy: http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2009/may/06/michael-savage-sue-jacqui-smith

By the way, this is an extreme decision. Don't take it as a normal occurrence. I've said some pretty off-colour things on twitter and I'm fine.

Fucking hell that is a massive strawman.

My point was not that ARM is bad for producing IP, merely that it is a symptom of how the UK economy works that they shy away from manufacture.

In the world economy, the UK is like the guy in a team who says he is the 'ideas guy' they lounges around the office doing very little but taking credit for everything. We have to remember what it is like to get our hands dirty.

This disconnect from the physical economy makes us unresponsive to changes in it (when oil prices rocketed last time, in 2008, it wasn't British people who went hungry...) - and that is dangerous.

My personal political beliefs, as far as economics go, is that we need an economic system that is rooted in physical processes - but still allows room for innovation. Both Green and Pirate political economy figure influence me in this. I see them as inherently compatible.

Yep

They draw up a definition of property that is enitirely contrary to common sense, and use it as a pretext to brutalise people in the name of sticking up for their 'rights'

Green and Pirate issues do have some overlap. Currently pure rent-seeking counts as economic activity, and so long as someone in your country is getting revenue from somewhere else, can perversely appear as growth. This is not a trivial problem; the UK has been a heavily IP-based economy for a long time (look at ARM: a UK company making one of the most ubiquitous architectures in the world that doesn't itself ever make a single chip. Pharmaceuticals are another good example.)

This can mask underlying problems in the physical economy - which should be of concern to Greens. Anything that allows you to maintain business-as-usual whilst oil prices rocket and we head towards a permanent energy crisis is obviously dangerous.

...and all those orders were scuppered by various countries who basically didn't like the fact we had something they didn't. Grumbling from a few members of the public was just a pretext. The corralling of Concorde into transatlantic trips was a purely political decision from all parties, to stick it to France and the UK.

It wasn't that it only "made sense" to to flights to JFK - it is that the US attempt at a supersonic passenger jet was an utter failure, and when UK/France got theirs built first you guys basically through a hissy fit, banned some of the most profitable routes (across the US and back in 1 working day) on the shallow pretext of sonic booms

(hint: The US isn't exactly densely populated. The problem was manageable even over land)

At sub-supersonic speeds, a Busemann Biplane doesn't produce sufficient lift under acceleration, undergoing considerable drag.

Well, that is all well and good - but what happens at super-subsupersonic speeds?

I am not a teacher. However, I trained as one for a short while (I wasn't cut out for it, as it happens.) - and both my mother and wife are teachers.

I have direct experience of UK classroom teaching, as the vocational part of the teacher training I did. I have gone into my wife's school to run a special lesson on stars when the class started asking questions about astrophysics she couldn't answer (we had lots of fun explaining hydrodynamic equilibrium with groups of kids pushing against each other!)

Despite having more direct contact with education that most of the posters here, I feel far less inclined to offer up a solution. Its called the Dunning-Kruger effect, people.

And this is the problem with this X-prize nonsense. The notion is that teachers are somehow morons, and if only some flashy entrepreneur could jump in with a magic idea, everything would be golden. The contempt for the teaching profession is inherent in the concept (and in the comments here, judging by the number of people who think that teaching unions are the source of all education problems.)

My personal suggest is to first of all, stop using teachers as punchbags and listen to them. Unless, of course, you would improve healthcare by demonizing doctors? In fact, that is the analogy - people who think they can improve education by second guessing teachers are equivalent to those who think they can improve healthcare by second guessing doctors i.e. homeopaths.

Anyone offering a magic bullet here is an educational homeopath.

Its almost pitiful watching the west (both US and EU) cheerfully gallop towards oblivion as political, economic, and technological powers.

The private sector will colonise Mars? With what money, I ask. Who is going to pay the hundreds of billions needed for this complex operation?

Our leaders have just given up. They haven't a clue what is wrong (or are in complete denial about it, e.g. peak oil) and think that if they just pray to the invisible hand everything will magically turn out OK. They are like Mayan priests desperately ramping up the human sacrifices as the crops fail around them. Clinging to their faith even tighter the more it conspicuously fails to deliver tangible results.

Let me offer a simple prediction. SpaceX will end up being slip into a profitable, but unremarkable, satellite launch business, and a separate manned spaceflight business. Having a monopoly on US human spaceflight, the latter will cheerfully gouge NASA for every penny they can, as part of their fiduciary duty.

US human spaceflight will stagnate even further. ESA will remain a non-presence in human spaceflight. The last of Russia's Soviet-era technology will be retired and they won't be able to replace it with anything decent. China and India will take the solar system. The End.

Not that unreasonable a prediction. Iran has really stepped on the gas with regards to science+technology (their current president - yes the 'crazy' one - is himself an engineer I believe.) They have done a couple of orbital launches - confirmed by other nations, not lied about them like DPRK did - and have stated they wish to put men into orbit.

One sunny prospect worth considering though; the Islamic world has an unfortunate habit of producing, in a very small minority of its population, suicide bombers. Imagine what damage could be done by such a person in control of a spacecraft moving at ~10km/s...

One day we will truly master the art of connecting human nervous systems to computers. And on the following day, some asshole will create the first neurological malware.

The future is a tech-illiterate grandma driven insane by trojans, trying to claws her own eyes out just to try and make the continuous loop penis enlargement ads stop.

The buzz is because of the very low price, and its educational design objective. This is aimed, in part, at children who want to learn computers (properly I mean, not the crap they teach you about spreadsheets in school.)

As you point out, this is mobile-phone-like hardware; but that potentially means that an inventive teenager could use it as the basis of a homemade mobile-phone-like device.