Sure, like most consumers know what an "Operating System" is...

earth:/$ chroot /media/venus

There is a HUGE difference between blinking one LED, and running a light show with 1000's of LED's over a wireless link., or any link for that matter. I could do it with an Arduino, or a PIC, or a Raspberry, a Beowulf Cluster or anything else. And build the banks of addressable power relays, work out the wireless protocols, the addressing discovery system, macro language for syncing it with music, and ... whatever. A lot of work. Not even in the same time zone as flashing an LED using Arduino GPIO. Trivial as that is, or as capable as Arduino is, its hardly the 'off-the-shelf' answer TFA was clearly looking for. There may be an Arduino-based answer, but neither the GP or the blinker tutorial was it. The GP's -1 off-topic was clearly deserved.

I think it sounds like a good idea, and I'd be your first customer. Then again, I thought Aereo was a good idea too, and on solid legal ground as well. I'm dumbfounded the courts shut them down, but given that they did it seems pretty clear they will shut down whatever derivative or similar business model you come up with, on whatever technicality they can get to stick. It would seem that legality or common sense or "public benefit" doesnt play as much as a role as we would like to imagine.

This is obviously some use of the term "off-the-shelf" that I wasnt previously aware of...

Thats true! Santa only exists if you dont look. If you do look, he wont be there, and somewhere a cat in a box dies.

He started Slashdot. He wrote:

I dont like Beta cant you tell?
The clowns at Dice can go to Hell!

I do not like it in a post
I will not read it from your host
I do not read it from the tubes
No one likes it! ('cept the n00bs)

When MyCleanPc's over done
It leaves more room for Haselton
Dont talk of Hitler, please just stop it
As Godwin said "Hey! Step 4 - Profit!"

I do not care for Beowulf, see?
In Soviet Russia they cluster ME!
Reading TFA's unthinkable
And karma whores post things unlinkable

Until you mod me +5 Troll
This 'global warming' wont get old
Lets talk of Darwin and of God
(If you're game, you insensitive clod)

So mode them down, it makes them stronger
The flames will only get much longer
I wont reply and I wont bore you
But if I do say FTFY

- D. Seuss, (Nuked from orbit 'just to be sure' - 1998)

Must you make this partisan? Comcast bought *everybody* off. http://www.nationalreview.com/...

Power management. Ever tried to make a decent transceiver that runs for 3-5 years on a 2016 coin cell? Burst transmitters are easy enough, but receivers eat power. And everything else you assume is pretty much wrong too. Its not a static password, and its not possible to clone a key based on the signal it gives off. Now, you can do a man-in-the-middle replay attack with a jammer, maybe, and if you have the master key you can clone a key from two sequential transmissions, but thats different. And its been suggested that you can recover the master key from a side channel attack, but I havent heard that its been practically demonstrated outside the lab (yes Ive seen the papers but havent seen any evidence that master keys are in the wild at this time (someone correct me if Im wrong)). The biggest security 'flaw' seems to be the case where drivers press the remote 'lock' button 3 or 4 times because they like the sound of the horn.

"Incompetent" and "crappy" are pretty strong statements for something you know so little about. There is always room for improvements in a technology, but key fobs need to cost pennies to make, occupy a few square centimeters of PCB space, work reliably with cheap circuit components and few PCB design restrictions, transmit long ranges with truly awful power budgets, use an open standard (not dependent on obfuscation), and it does need a back door for a corrupt and idiot-based dealer network to override when people lose their keys. If you can come up with something better (and by that I mean actually design AND build something that can be mass produced) you will be fabulously wealthy. So get to work, read the KEELOQ spec, and profit.

Best job I ever had.

Mr. Assange, what you've just written is one of the most insanely idiotic things I have ever heard. At no point in your rambling, incoherent response were you even close to anything that could be considered a rational thought. Everyone in this room is now dumber for having read it. I award you no points, and may God have mercy on your soul.

I typically partition the drive into two logical drives. The inner partitions with awful performance are where my media goes (movies, music, photos). The performance falloff is non-linear. Also, performance degradation over time is worse for the inner tracks, so inner tracks are where you put data that is more or less static, or at least written sequentially.

Yeah, right, its the victims fault.

Ive been designing in FTDI devices for years. They work first try, they're cheap, the drivers are excellent, support is good. If I need a USB interface device, I only buy FTDI-based adapters because, well, all the same reasons. Plus they're faster than anything else Ive tested (a serial port at 1mbps can be iffy - only a few do it reliably and they all have FTDI bridges).

Given all that, why should FTDI support knock-off crap? I dont want the crap on my systems, in my board designs, and the faster I know about it the better. Hell yeah, brick it baby, and let the retailer sort out the counterfeiting mess in their supply chain.

And while we're at it, same for SD Cards. "If they work I dont care", seriously? Another place where counterfeiting is rampant, the knock-offs cant hit speed and reliability targets, if they work at all. Last bulk buy I made at Staples was 70% counterfeit and wasnt close to hitting published specs. And sure the store manager took them back, but Staples Corporate couldnt care less that their supply chain was contaminated. SanDisk and FTDI are *NOT* the scumbags here, its the consumers that dont give a rats ass as long as they save 3 cents, the retailers that make 3 cents extra, and the wholesalers that make 2 cents extra. You, sir, are the scumbag thats the problem.

Which is just economics, easily solved. Just use a massive wind and solar farm, paid for with government subsidies, to run initiation and containment. Take your 30% energy yield, sell it on the spot market as "green energy" at an inflated price (with more subsidies). Use the paper losses to eliminate taxes on your oil refinery. What am I missing? Oh yeah; 'Step 4 - Profit?'

That remains to be seen, actually...