Any display big enough for development will draw more power than the CPU. (Although I suppose you could kludge some non-backlit e-reader into being a dev system.)

The other problem is that all this development seems like an insane urban-planning clusterf*ck... the rulers who are bankrolling it all want a glitzy showpiece to puff up their egos, and basically spend their lives traveling between high-end luxury malls, 60th floor corporate boardrooms, and enormous homes, in fleets of air-conditioned Mercedes SUVs. So they're designing a city optimized for those things. The result seems to be someplace that looks impressive in very long shots of the night-time skyline featured in inflight magazines, but which doesn't really work very well as an actual city (with, you know, people, not all of whom are necessarily ultra-wealthy)...

One decade maybe. But the primary development environment for kernel and driver work today still looks very different than in 1980.

I said vim, not vi. I'm well aware that vi goes back further, but nobody in their right mind would consider using the original vi as their primary development tool these days. And Emacs goes back to 1985, not 1972. Sure, it can trace its roots back to ed, from 1972, but it is even less like ed than vim is like vi.

In 1980, Xenix did not exist yet.

Well that's the problem with your whole premise.
You do development before you build the plane.

The F-35 has turned into a white elephant specifically because of its backwards R&D/procurement process.

The F-35 is a compromise design.
Mostly it compromises its ability to loiter on the target, carry large amounts of munitions, and dogfight.
So as long as you don't want to do any of those things, the F-35 is better than older weapons.

Ha! The F-35's issues are not "teething problems," they are R&D problems.
The F-35 is a procurement disaster of such epic proportions that tomes will be written to warn future generations on what not to do.

Just to stay on topic, one of those tomes will talk about engine problems and why the military should source 2 different engine designs.
It will also mention that, because of the F-35's unprecedented budget overruns, the second design was canceled.

Obligatory "me too", via Saunalahti/Elisa @ .fi for a couple of years now.

This problem should solve itself as downloading and cloud-based games take over and game stores disappear. GameStop is closing 120 more locations. Game retailers are going the way of record stores and video rental outlets.

So now threatening to deface a police website is a matter of national security. Got it.

Naw, he's still an a-rab, and terreristy trumps republican.

This is, however, part of what I've been waiting for for a year. I've always wanted Snowden through Greenwald to name names. They say they pick up everything but it's only the targets who get their emails read and their phone calls listened to. Okay, who are the targets? Names.

So first they told us it wasn't Americans, it was only foreign terrorists. Now we find out they were targeting Americans. Now the Fox News crowd is going to say "yeah but it was just scary mooslems!" and the NSA will lie and say that this was the extent of their targeting operations.

The next article, then, I expect to show that no, they were also targeting Americans completely unrelated to Islam, like Occupy organizers or Tea Partiers. Or even political candidates. That is when the shit will really hit the fan.

Love how you just can take a single message, completely out of context, quote a bunch of text which is perfectly true, and claim it says anything about your use case.

It was a release announcement, it wasn't out of context, and it was entirely relevant.

Your bullshit is old, has been debunked multiple times over

How could you debunk the point I'm making when all I have to do is link to their own release announcement and point out what it says directly disagrees with you?

nothing but hot air from the camp of the other, abandoned desktop

Nope, I was using KDE from the 1.0 betas all the way to the 4.0 betas. I only switched to GNOME after the KDE 4 debacle, and I found that even worse and ended up moving off Linux altogether.

If you want local solar to play any part in this future, it might help to restructure the power grid (at least in the USA).

The way things are currently setup, residential solar can only get pushed around the local grid.
This can be changed, but it's expensive. So obviously it's not popular.

There's nothing mysterious about this. The problem is that if someone gets control of circuit breakers for large rotating equipment, they may be able to disconnect it, let it get out of sync, and reconnect it. This causes huge stresses on motor and generator windings and may damage larger equipment. This is a classic problem in AC electrical systems. A more technical analysis of the Aurora vulnerability is here.

The attack involves taking over control of a power breaker in the transmission system, one that isn't protected by a device that checks for an in-phase condition. Breakers that are intended to be used during synchronization (such as the ones nearest generators) have such protections, but not all breakers do.

Protective relaying in power systems is complicated, because big transient events occur now and then. A lightning strike is a normal event in transmission systems. The system can tolerate many disruptive events, and you don't want to shut everything down and go to full blackout because the fault detection is overly sensitive. A big inductive load joining the grid looks much like an Aurora attack for the first few cycle or two.

There's a problem with someone reprogramming the setpoints on protective relays. This is the classic "let's make it remotely updatable" problem. It's so much easier today to make things remotely updatable than to send someone to adjust a setting. The Aurora attack requires some of this. There's a lot to be said for hard-wired limits that can't be updated remotely, such as "reclosing beyond 20 degrees of phase error is not allowed, no matter what parameters are downloaded."