As someone who lives in Mountain View, I'd like to second this post. Google WiFi has never worked well. In my experience it hardly ever worked at all. I'd be happy to be rid of it.

You might be confusing Syria with Jordan, because Syria was most definitely not our friend at any point. They have been a client state of the Soviet Union / Russia for many years, their Alawite (a form of Shia) minority runs the military dictatorship that is sponsored by Iran, and it props up Hizbollah in Lebanon. The US has had an arms and technology embargo on Syria since at least the 70's, there are no direct flights between the two countries, and there are no banking ties between them.

CNN's comments are equally terrible. It's hard to believe a reputable news organization allows them on its website.

Cost is not a big issue. The big issue is power.

A laser of this type is almost always a chemical laser because that is one of the best ways to portably produce that much energy in a hurry. The drawbacks of this are
1) the laser reactant supply needs to be reloaded after every shot or few shots. This is time consuming.
2) toxic chemical byproducts of the power-generating reaction. If you're defending a base in the middle of the desert, this may not be an issue. If you're defending land that you care about, like your home town, it is a big problem.

If the laser is battery-powered instead then prepare to wait a long time between firings for it to charge. Even a nuclear reactor on an aircraft carrier doesn't deliver the kind of wattage this needs in a burst, there will need to be a charge-discharge system.

Until the power problems are solved, don't expect to be seeing too many lasers shooting down missiles.

Someone mod this guy up. A7 is a single issue, in-order core with basically no frills. An A9 like in the Tegra 3 is a triple issue out of order processor with a much faster FPU. It blows an A7 away in performance by a wide margin, although it is a much larger and more expensive chip.

These are cheap for a reason, and they're unpopular in the rest of the world for a reason.

The Allwinner chips used in these tablets are all ARM Cortex-A8 based. A Cortex-A8 is basically unfit for a tablet. The lowest end tablets sold by Apple, Samsung, Motorola, Sony, Acer, and Asus 4 years ago didn't have a CPU this slow. Just because they can get away with selling these in China doesn't mean that they are worth anything.

"Don't be evil" is the greatest marketing line in the history of technology because so many doe-eyed nerds wholeheartedly believed an advertising company has their best interests in mind.

It's actually a massive liability. I can boot an ARM Cortex-A9 in 1000 lines of assembly. An Atom requires a multi-megabyte binary blog delivered by Intel (source unavailable) to simple turn on an Atom. And yes, it does start out in 16-bit real mode as if anyone wants that. Can you guess which one of these is more debuggable?

Today Intel sells three versions of the same desktop chip; a high end one with all of the features enabled, a midrange one with some features disabled, and a low end one with most features disabled. Device makes know that once Intel is in a position of strength, they will do to mobile chips exactly what they are doing to desktop chips today. Let's look at one feature: SHA hashing engine. Intel Core i7 devices have this built in. Core i3 also has this but disables it. What if you want a low end SoC with a SHA engine? Any ARM vendor will sell you one, SHA engines are cheap and easy and everyone has one. Intel makes you pay for the high end part just to get a minor feature. Multiply this by all of the other SoC components and you'll see why nobody wants Intel to be in the lead. With ARM, chip vendors are competing on features, performance, and price. Nobody is picking ARM the company, they are picking the ARM ecosystem of chip designers and chip fabricators where everyone competes.

Why would you need that? The platform-specific part of the kernel is a fairly minor part of the overall code. There's a lot more code investment in the VM, the FS, the network stack, and other major kernel subsystems, which are all generic code and distributed to the public, than the specific implementations of low level locks, interrupts, and page table map managers. The fact that we can't build and run XNU on ARM doesn't mean that we can't share code with it.

iOS is doing even better.

There seem to be some uninformed posters here, so here is the OS X relationship to BSD:
The OS X/iOS kernel is based on Mach, which is a microkernel mashed together with a BSD kernel. It has a lot of BSD code in it and continues to share code with the other BSDs. It has features borrowed from BSD such as DTrace, PF firewall, file system support (including ZFS before it was removed), the networking subsystem, kqueue, jails, and others. While Mach is fundamentally different in some ways, to a POSIX binary it looks and feels just like any other BSD system.

The OS X userland is also based on BSD and was originally derived from FreeBSD. It uses the BSD libc and many of the command line tools are from the BSD world (from grep to ssh). It also includes some GNU tools, such as bash. Apple is actively working on replacing many of these, and they recently dropped GCC and GDB and replaced them with Clang and LLDB.

Oh god. Imagine if developer unions do happen and then I'd have to choose between working at a unionized company full of idiots or working at a non-union company that is staffed with Libertarians. I'd probably quit programming forever.

It does sound like fun and I would enjoy it given the right working conditions, though I imagine these are highly unlikely to be found in a military operation.

However, no lawyer can get you the guarantee you're looking for. If you are a male and a United States citizen, you'll remember having registered for Selective Service ("The Draft") before your 18th birthday. Under the right conditions any registered person can be called up for service, all it takes is an act of Congress.

Where can I find this LLVM back end? It does not appear to be on llvm.org.

Can you name the three vendors? Qualcomm for sure. Marvell seems likely. Nvidia says they will have a chip out, but I have serious doubts about their ability to deliver.