Move more than about 5 cm away from the card and it won't read.

... if for some reason you are a fraudster with some sort of objection to violating specs and potentially created temporary interference. Otherwise, crank up the power!

Being the richest guy in the world makes you a target, whether you deserve it or not (see sept 11).

Are people still seriously saying that 911 happened because "they hate our standard of living"?

I am in no way saying it was deserved, but it also wasn't motivated by the US's wealth. Its policies in the middle east, especially the unquestioning support for Israel, are much more relevant.

For those who don't want to go through the comments themselves: DCTech started posting two days ago and has criticised Firefox, Chrome and Apple. No criticism of Microsoft; in fact IE saved the web and "IE9 is a completely good browser" today (CSS is overrated).

He also persistantly uses what looks like Reddit speak. We "mod posts up", not "up-mod posts".

Supposed the website you were trying to access was hacked?

The choice of microUSB rather than USB-B or something is probably because there is a spec for high power over microUSB. It's used in the new standard mobile phone chargers. IIRC, a dumb charger can short the D+ and D- pins; indicating that it is too stupid to operate a real bus or do enumeration, but a device is welcome to draw as much current as it wants (with voltage possibly dropping if it draws to much; like a battery).

Perhaps somebody more knowledgable could correct some details or link us to the spec.

Teaching ARM is the equivalent to teaching Visual Basic Programming, common but very closed architecture.

Uh, what?

No; teaching people to program C on an ARM Linux machine is the equivalent of teaching people to program C on an x86 Linux machine: the CPU is proprietary, but who cares?

The cross-compiling thing is a red-herring too; you'd just run GCC on the RaspberryPi and for educational purposes it would be plenty fast enough.

Are you by any chance an N900 owner?

But why is it front page news every time these guys pass gas?

Mostly because they're being very open about the development process on their blog, meaning you see stories about stages which wouldn't be announced publicly in comparable projects.

It has onboard storage via the SD card slot; and USB for external storage (the only external storage anybody really uses now anyway). You just need a mouse, a keyboard, and a monitor, which plenty of PCs don't come with.

The Arduino is an advanced microcontroller. The RaspberryPi is a minimilist Linux computer. Not an embedded thingy like iPodLinux either; it's capable of running a real, conventional distro with glibc, Xorg, etc.