Subtle? They'd rather their kids (and everyone else, if they convince enough people) get all sorts of nasty and possibly deadly diseases rather than be (gasp!) autistic. As someone with multiple autistic people in his family, I say fuck 'em with a rusty spike.

Why do you spend that much money on switches?

Sure. But you don't own other houses made by the same blueprints, or which look similar. Even if you buy the blueprints themselves.

OK, not a bad idea. Couple problems, but it could work.

And here is where it falls apart. People will start ignoring the signal again as soon as those who don't need to use it start to use it anyway.

God I hate business-speak. "Work together to better monetize your inventory"? Three words' meaning over the span of seven Dilbertian words...

I don't see how Richard Dawkins is an "inflammatory jerk-off". Hitchens you could definitely make a strong case for, but Dawkins? Certainly he's very vocal about his opinions, but there's nothing wrong with that. He seems to me to be a very kind person. Christopher Hitchens was the one who'd miss no chance to tell you you're a fucking retard.

So, in your opinion, is there no intersection between "hackers" and "computer programmers"? Because I'm pretty sure there is one, and it's quite large.

Actually, no. That's the first time I've seen a nice DIP ARM chip, and I'll have to look into it. Thank you! But I'm still not going to do that immediately, since I still have a bunch of AVRs sitting around, and quite a bit of time invested in learning the ins and outs of programming them. I also suspect that chip is a good bit more expensive than a simple ATmega, though I haven't actually looked, so I could be dead wrong.

No proper benchmarking, but in my experience it is much slower. I did read the source code. It compiles to a rather complex C++ function involving multiple table lookups and branches - repeated for every single digitalWrite(). Not nice at all for bit-banging protocols and such. When you call digitalWrite(12, 1);, it actually has to look up which register "pin 12" is in, and which bit that is. Then it checks to verify that you actually called pinMode(12, OUTPUT) - every damn time. And it does this with function calls, not just OR-ing the PORTB/C/D register with the right bit.

Everyone is just bitching about how much better their favorite chip is than AVR. This isn't even an article about that. Save it for an article about different microcontrollers.

As for the "WTF would I do with a 'wearable platform'" questions - what happened to all the hackers on Slashdot? You know, the people who were actually interesting? Jesus, I don't know what you'd do with it. I don't know what I would do with it, to be honest, but whatever happened to that inventive spirit? Just because you can't think of anything doesn't mean it's useless.

Now allow me a minute of hypocrisy to discuss why I like AVR. When I want to prototype a microcontroller-based device, I don't need some $55 "Maple" device, or even an Arduino. I bought a tube of five ATmega328s from eBay for $7. I toss one on a breadboard with a 16 MHz crystal, a couple of capacitors and a pullup resistor for the reset pin and wire it up to a 5V power supply. When I make the final circuit, I throw a DIP socket on the board, and into that socket goes the programmed chip. Again, with just a crystal, two capacitors and a resistor (maybe with a decoupling cap, depending on the rest of the circuit). Total cost? Maybe $5.

No need to even use the Arduino "IDE" or anything else, if you don't want to. And why would you? It's crap, anyway. I edit the file in vim, and generally stay away from their slow helper functions like digitalWrite() in favor of direct register access. But sometimes, it's nice to throw an Arduino library in the project. They might not be fast, but hey, you're using a 16 MHz microcontroller! It's really easy to just #include and be ready to use an LCD.

Good point about autism, and that hits home for me because I have a large number of autistic family members. Of course, "slow" is still a valid description, if a bit politically incorrect, while "just didn't want to pay attention" intentionally blames the individual.

The difference that I see is that autism and ADHD can be studied properly, we know a good bit about their causes (if not enough, it's still a start) and can medicate (whether that is desirable is a different story, but it does show that there are actual, medical causes behind them). However, I have yet to see a difference between a personality disorder and a shitty personality. They seem to be just labels for a common personality we find unpleasant.