For example Honeywell may have filed new patents that failed to cite their own existing technology/patents.

I think when all is said and done, it's plainly not fair to describe Honeywell as a patent troll...there are a bit of a dinosaur, but they are the incumbent in this space and they did develop a lot of the basic thermostat technology...there time may well have come to become extinct...but they aren't parasite lawyers (though you can be sure BOTH sides pay them....)

Graphite heat straps are already common practice in Space and Aerospace roles. You think your overclocked gaming machine/room heater has problems? Try dissipating heat in a vacuum when there's nothing to convect.
http://www.techapps.com/thermal-straps.html

I can attest to this drugs potency, I've used it on two instances, and on one I suffered mightily the day and night after I took my weekly dose. Another of my friends was hospitalized after a psychotic episode on this drug. A girl I used to date used this drug for 2+ years during a posting to Sierra Leone in the military, apparently without any long term effect...but well beyond any duration it had been certified and tested for...however the flip side is that the initial brigade that was sent to Sierra Leone in a hurry were not on an anti-malarial and a large number came down with serious Malaria. Luckily there are much better alternatives in 2012, and I think it's somewhat weak to see this in the press...if it's being doled out to troops in this environment still then that is wrong and someone should get on it now, but this tabloid journalism and new culture of Mil/Gov leaks to the worthless press is ridiculous. Solve the friggin' problem, don't play some political game of buck passing in the headlines

In recent history small scale hydro schemes have actually been seen to be more environmentally damaging than traditional large ones, largely because the can escape some of the environmental oversights in various jurestrictions. British Columbia is one of the worst offenders, where 49MW is a key project power output threshold below which it;s much easier to build a scheme. A very informative little film by my friend Bryan, now a Nat Geo camera man: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WPtddgUqr4o

Here's another great link to an NPS site dedicated to the ground breaking remval of 2 obsolete dams on the Elwha River in WA.
http://www.nps.gov/olym/naturescience/elwha-ecosystem-restoration.htm

Hydro has it's place, but its not panacea.

$13.75/mo is chump change...let me tell you how much 250 engineers sat in down town Palo Alto costs per month...SGP is many things, but a fool is not one of them. ~$100M in and a $1.2B paper valuation means your lawyers spend a lot of time thinking thinks out before you act.

There have been FPGA's big enough to implement OpenRisc on now for at least 13-14 years. I designed an OpenRISC based system that included additional logic many times the size of the OpenRISC on an FPGA in 2002 and designed and manufactured an ASIC with most of the same logic in 2003. These repeated "Someone just built the first opensource chip/system/board/hardware etc" threads on Slashdot make me laugh. Does anyone do any research anymore?

OK, Kurtis beat me to it, but I'm glad he got the chance personally to acknowledge how much of what this project is based on is due to the efforts of Dave and Harvind, but also the vision of Matt Ettus who's built a company on the much more obscure proposition of open source hardware and enabled countless cool projects like and including this one.

Its a quite accurate statement to say Apple is a founder. ARM originally stood for "Acorn RISC machine" and was developed internally at Acorn. When ARM was incorporated as an independent entity it was done so with Acorn and Apple as 40% owners and VLSI technology (at that time the sole manufacturer) as a 20% owner. At that time the name was changes to "Advanced RISC Machines". Apple had more than Newton in the big picture at that time including laser printers. The ARM610 was indeed developed specifically for the Newton, with a special MMU by ARM as one of its earliest projects. ARM cpu's (in many case multiple ones) are in every cellular handset I'm aware of in the last decade not just smartphones. ARM cpu's are being used by most of the next wave of startup companies in low power server design..look at Smoothstone for an example. And of course they are making serious inroads in Netbook design, both NVIDIA's Tegra and Qualcomm's Snapdragon are giving Intel plenty sleepless nights right now. The last ARM design I did put an ARM7n in every electricity meter...in other words our entire tech world is already built around this architecture.

The royalties on the older designs are tiny and not going to be affected by an acquisition, don't expect any significant cost changes to be noticeable at retail even if it were possible to renegotiate the royalty schedules. After some stagnation in the last decade where ARM struggled to break out of the the low cost embedded space the company is suddenly looking strong again and it could be quite possible that Apple wants to go this way as an insurance policy, because they fear other big stalkers might acquire a company they are increasingly strategically reliant on.