Also saw this one today, dual-core 1.2GHz Cortex-A9, 1G RAM, 4G flash, wifi for $20, crazy.

Don't understand this part - there should be no more effort involved to scale the size up really. The world has been moulded around the adult body, this robot would have the same amount of hassle in it as somebody suffering from dwarfism.

Look at this graph, move the time scale forward and change 'hole left by Christian dark ages' to 'hole left by fear of patent infringement'.

And I'm just out of mod points, damn. Anyway, thanks for the interesting post AC.

upgrade the motherboard.

I know Allwinner did a separate version of their A10 chip without HDMI (A13) to avoid heavy licensing costs, would the HDMI push the cost of the chip up much?

Didn't see any mention of hardware floating point unit(s). Is that just a given these days?

Cut the guy some slack, he's just been diagnosed with cancer, quite frankly he's going to be scared shitless and clutching at every straw he can get his hands on. I'm not condoning his approach but I can certainly understand it. Really though he needs to grit his teeth and just get on with the treatment ASAP, It's not the dark ages.

Funny because it's kind-of true. Brown noise is the most 'natural' of the noise types, it sounds like rain or wind.

Man breaks local law and gets punished for it, film at 11. Why is this an issue? In Thailand you get thrown in jail for simply disrespecting the king, in Singapore you'll get hung (or at least caned) for carrying the smallest amount of illegal drugs. the world is not completely homogenous (at least not yet).

end-user UNIX systems at least. TFA talks about Windows AD servers though, maybe they aren't doing the basic sanity checks on the upstream NTP data coming in?

At 20c per message (160 bytes), works out at $1310 of income per megabyte of traffic. for the telcos. Talk about a cash cow.

Nonsense. You can never have enough options.

"still years away from practical consumer applications"

I read this as "still years away from BS Rambus patents from the mid 90's to expire"

Yet another option is the Hackberry, which is a few dollars more but has wifi built in.