XBMC runs very badly on Allwinner A10 and A13 CPUs found in the MK802, since the stock Android they come with don't support the regular hardware accelration in Android. (I imagine this has something to do with licensing and patents.)

There has been some work in making XBMC work better, but that requires flashing your own ROM file, and that can be a really big pain with the extremely cheap but really unsupported systems.. (See http://www.cnx-software.com/2012/11/12/xbmc-for-linux-on-allwinner-a10-devices-it-works-sort-of/ for an example of how to make it work.)

The devices usually come with a custom video player which works really well (the MALI GPU is quite powerfull), and I believe the youtube app has also been optimized. Hopefully the producers of the cheap Android sticks and tablets can work together with the XBMC team - the market must be enormous.

I'm sure lots of people here remembers the previous Microsoft produced phone, the Microsoft Kin series of phones. After all, they lasted all, oh, 4 weeks? 40 days? Something like that.

There is probably a lot of "slack" in the Windows 8 phone pricing as well - if the Windows RT "OEM license fee" is 80-95$, the Phone OS OEM price can't be far off. I'm sure Nokia, HTC and Samsung won't mind if they've got to add an extra 80$ in cost for each phone they produce which Microsoft doesn't have to worry about..

.. and the robots will be be located in Taiwan, at least for now: http://news.cnet.com/8301-17938_105-57318260-1/foxconn-to-build-taiwan-robot-kingdom/

Sure, it is possible that they will start building mainly robot based factories in mainland Chinal, but why bother? In its purest form a robot factory would just take raw materials and energy as input, with product as output. You want to place a factory like that in a location with a really stable energy supply, good infrastructure, and a stable political situation. Staff costs wouldn't be such a big issue, since you wouldn't have too many staff anyway. So, why choose China, where you would have to deal wiith rampant corruption, bad infrastructure and millions of starving former factory workers?

Personally I would put the factories in Japan, northern Europe and Canada, that way they would be closer to the consumers as well. It would certainly save a fortune in security!

MMC was one of the first distributions - I distinctly remember writing the floppies using DOS, it took something like 15 minutes per floppy, as they were written byte-by-byte, not fancy block-by-block as the young folks are using these days :P

After MMC I switched to SLS, then Slackware, RedHat (bought on those really cheap CDs you could order online), OpenSUSE, finaly Ubuntu.

The biggest change is probably that for the last couple of years all my networking equipment runs some version of Linux, my phone (Android), hell, even my DSLR runs Linux (http://www.sony.net/Products/Linux/DI/SLT-A55.html). This has not been a conscious choice by me btw, but it seems Linux really is everywhere these days.

Since it hasn't been mentioned: http://www.tomshardware.com/news/Windows-RT-OEM-ARM-85-Nvidia,15992.html

It is not too strange that you end up with an end-user price of 600$ - the 85$ should be added to the component cost, which is what, 150$ for a tablet of this class? Basically Microsoft adds at least 50% to the base cost of the device, all other costs comes on top of that.

Google gives away Android for free, so you end up with 49.99$ tablets on Alibaba. (I should get one of those in the mail this week - looking forward to taking it apart). Apple probably does something similar, but then they're not really aiming for the cost-conscious part of the market.

If you're self-employed, and plan to stay so, it is nearly impossible, as far as I know there are no "bring so-so-and so much money / create this many jobs" exemptions in any Scandinavian country.

What you can do is to get hired by a company, in which case it is just a couple of forms to fill out for the company in question [*], or get married.

*: This assumes that you've got some "valuable skills", and that you'll be able to make a livelihood here.

And, it used an Intel 386 cpu: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nokia_9000_Communicator. It was probably one of the most brick-like GSM phones ever.

Later Nokia switched to AMD for their 9100, then to ARM for the 9210 series. I bought a 9201i in 2002, I believe I paid t something like 1500usd..

There were also a few Japanese intel based phones, but those ran Windows XP.. Not really what I would call a smart phone. So, it might be correct to say that this is the "first Intel based smart-phone which might launch in the US".

Samsung has shown both pentile AMOLED and TFT displays at 10.1" / 2560x1600 resolution. The rumored "Samsung Galaxy Tab 11.6" is also supposed to have this resolution, hopefully as a non-pentile AMOLED display.

They've also shown flexible and transparent displays, so hopefully that 27" 8K display will come rolled up in a tube ready to hang on the wall.

Or, if you pay a bit of attention: The indefinite detention paragraphs are most likely illegal under the US constitution. By noting his reservations the comming court cases (appeals all the way up to the supreme court) will be quite a bit simpler. After all, it is the executive branch (where the president is), which has to prosecute in favour of the law, and the president stating reservations is a boon to any defense attorney. This is obvious, and has been covered in the news, but hey, most people complaning doesn't seem to know what the NDAA act really is.
The court cases, in case you don't know, will be judged by the judiciary part of the US system. Of course, if you and the republicans get their way the next president will be a republican, and the one or two new supreme court justices which will be appointed in the next presidential period will be really, really conservative. Then, the indefinite detention will most likely become law.
I'm not an American, but this should be obvious even with the most cursory glance.

That is unlikely, as the P2P technology that Skype is built on is licensed from Joltid (a company owned by the Skype founders - google Joltid and lawsuit).

The only thing that Microsoft is buying (as far as I can see) are a lot of users, a license for some P2P software, and some video chat software which pretty much duplicates what Microsoft already has.

It used to be that for someone else to get a log of where you've been in a given time period the police would have to ask the telecoms for their logs. (One can argue about how easy it is to get those logs, but the fact remains: It is not something everyone can get hold of.)

The iPhone log changes all of this. If you get your phone from your employer the employer has access to (and probably the right to) this information. It is not just access to your phone, but imagine you've synced your personal iPhone with a company computer at any time? Or what if it not your employer, but your (ex) husband's computer? Also, it is much easier for a lawyer in a civil case to request the information, as they don't have to involve the telecom as a part. Or what if you're a foreigner simply crossing the border to the USA? (Clearly, there are US government agencies who would love to get position tracking of every single iPhone owner who crosses the US border.)

It doesn't really matter how exact the information is, the point is that this is a change in how easily accessible the information is, and who can can access it.