Yes, warrentless wiretapping is a problem. (I'll not talk about Britain here)

But spot the difference between allowing police to track specific phones for investigations and the NSA recording all communications for everyone, forever.

The police can be held accountable. There is a paper trail of who accessed what and how often. These stats are made available. That's the difference.

Yes, the Data Retention Directive is problematic, and we should push to limit the storage time limit to 2 weeks. The fight against this directive is still ongoing, as it is costly and unnecessarily invasive to privacy.

yup. that's about the long and short of it. although it's at first consideration a complete pain for system designers on both sides of the interface - a nuisance for CPU Card designers because they have to substitute extra ICs such as USB-to-SATA in cases where they pick a SoC that doesn't have SATA - and bewilderment for I/O Board designers because why would they use a CPU Card in e.g. a tablet that has features they don't need such as Ethernet?? - the alternatives are absolute chaos.

the advantage: you can tell the average end-user "just buy one of these, it will work".

the alternative: think about this scenario as it is in many other standards such as Q-Seven , where you allow ethernet to be "optional" and you allow the I/O boards to "recreate" ethernet say using USB-to-Ethernet. how do you route that? well, if you think about it what you have to do is actually put down an Ethernet Hub IC on *every single I/O board*, and some sort of crazed switching, as well as put down a USB-to-Ethernet converter IC and probably a USB Hub IC as well... because the designers of the I/O board will never know if an end-user is going to plug in a CPU Card that has native Ethernet or is expecting it to be left up to the I/O Board using USB.

now expand that chaos out to SATA as well, as well as any other interfaces, and you can see immediately that a non-optional standard results in instant chaos. it's fine for Q-Seven (well... it's not. not really) where the expectation is that the Q-Seven Cards will never be removed from their carrier boards, but then why build a standard where the end-user is never expected to upgrade their system without needing a specialist degree in engineering in order to assess if the upgrade will even work?

the guiding principles behind the EOMA standards are: it must be SIMPLE, it must be OPEN, and it must work in HUGE volume.

the A10 is out-of-date so we're using the pin-compatible A20 instead. dual core ARM Cortex A7.

I think every country that has a roman-based judicature and uses funky words like judicature qualifies as a descendent.

Here's a foreign word missing in this discussion: De-escalation.

Because that's not a product they sell? Go to a car navigation company (TomTom, Garvin, Navit come to mind) and give them money, they do what you want. Why you expect more than something basic from a free service is beyond me.

Still, I think in this century materials and systems will be developed which can detect neutrinos 1000 times better than today. That opens up new possibilities in astronomy (solar neutrinos, AGN, looking past the CMB just to name a few).

Yes, neutrinos start the SN explosion according to current models. However, the timing results for SN 1987a were actually inconclusive, as observatories were not connected to calibrated precision timing systems.

why didn't they post stories on slashdot?? then they would have got some attention. in fact... hang on: why have i *never* seen an article on h-online cross-referenced anywhere, and why have i *never* seen them in a google search??

Amazon Cloud Service Hit By Car Crash

One of Amazon’s EC2 cloud computing data centres was knocked offline after it failed to cope with a power outage caused by a car crash

KB2775511 has substantially reduced the CPU load and improved file-sharing performance on one of our heavily-used Windows 2008 R2 file servers.

Microsoft recommends that it be applied to both servers and workstations.

http://blogs.technet.com/b/askpfeplat/archive/2013/03/12/slow-boot-slow-login-sbsl-hotfix-rollup-for-windows-7-and-server-2008-r2-available-today.aspx

But there may be problems with it under some circumstances:

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/winsdk/archive/2013/05/13/roll-up-update-kb-2775511-reports-with-smb-2-0-data-truncation.aspx