How far a range do you get on them? What's the battery life like?

My cats have all been indoor cats, and only some of them have been willing to wear collars (the others find ways to ditch them and hide them under furniture), and most of the ones who hated collars were the ones least likely to be able to find their way back home if they got out. So changing batteries sounds like trouble.

(Disclaimer: I work for AT&T, but this is just my personal opinion, not an official corporate position.)

This announcement is about infrastructure for some of AT&T's cloud services; it's really separate from anything about laptop or consumer OS's. Basically everything in the world that used to run on servers seems to be migrating to cloud-type architectures, and I couldn't tell from the article which part of the business this was about (AT&T runs a wide range of cloud and hosting services for customers, some public, some custom, plus a lot of internal computing services for corporate functions, or it could be a corporate support deal of some kind as opposed to a specific set of systems.)

My work laptop, managed by the desktop support IT department, runs some professional-license version of Win7-64, and they manage what updates get shipped and when, so I don't get nagged about Win10. They also manage hosted virtual desktops, so people who want the Win7 environment for corporate apps and Outlook mail can have that running on top of whatever other OS (Mac, Linux, iPad, and older Windows hardware are all fairly popular for that.) (I also have VMware Player on the Windows machine, with a few different Linux guests on top when I need them.) My development machines mostly run Ubuntu, either on bare metal or with ESXi or OpenStack underneath; other popular environments I run into include CentOS and licensed RedHat.

Remember that this announcement is about Cloud Stuff - no matter what client operating systems you're using, the host environment is almost certainly either controlled by VMware or OpenStack or Amazon or Azure, and the servers are almost certainly Intel-ish CPUs running VMware ESXi or KVM (on some Linux platform) or maybe Windows Hyper-V. There are some exceptions (Docker's busy disrupting and overlapping with that space, and there's a bit of Xen left, and some switching/routing platforms like ODL or *NFV* things), and there are a lot of players trying to provide management and operations services, bare-metal-as-a-service provisioning where that makes sense, bare-metal-as-a-server-setup-method provisioning, etc.

A year or two ago, the field looked a bit simpler - either you ran VMware (with a high software price tag on every CPU or server, and services that worked, with mature support systems), or OpenStack (Free! With lots of services that didn't work yet, documentation you were free to write yourself and donate to the community, and an ecosystem of vendors whose products actually worked on VMware and were going to be working on OpenStack Real Soon Now. And Free!) It's a lot messier today, and lots more things actually work.

(Disclaimer: I work for AT&T, but this is purely my personal commentary on the industry, not company statements, and AT&T is such a big company that for any well-known technology we've probably got two or three different groups using it and a dozen more who've evaluated it and have much better informed opinions than I do.)

When The Bell System split up in the 1980s, AT&T got to keep Unix and most of the Labs, and the 7 Baby Bells owned most of the Bell telcos.
When AT&T split up into AT&T, Lucent, and NCR back in the 1990s, Lucent got most of Bell Labs, including ownership of Unix.

SBC (aka Southwestern Bell, the Texas Baby Bell branch) in the late 2000s and early 2010s bought Pacific Bell, Southern Bell, Ameritech, old-AT&T, and renamed itself AT&T because that had more brand value than SBC. The wireless businesses that were variously named Cingular and Cellular One and AT&T Wireless had their own complicated sets of ownership changes, but effectively SBC bought them. (Pacific Bell sometimes owned half of them, sometimes old-AT&T did, sometimes both, sometimes you really needed to know whether you had an "orange" or "blue" wireless service from the same company, etc.)

(Disclaimer: This is my own interpretation, not the official position of AT&T, many pieces of which I've worked for over the last few decades.)

The convenience of bitcoin vs. fiat currencies really was special, because it was a way to eliminate the risks of physically transferring money or transmitting it through heavily-tracked systems like banks and credit card companies. There's still some risk in shipment (much more for bulky smelly products than for small odorless ones), and of course it shifts much of the risk of defaulting on transactions to the buyer, but escrow services and markets like Silk Road reduced that risk to an acceptable level for many people.

Liquid detergent seemed like a really silly commodity to use for buying drugs, and I've always been skeptical about whether either the news articles about it were hoaxes or whether the reporters themselves got hoaxed. It's much harder to hide a transaction where you're handing somebody a case of detergent than one where you're shaking hands or giving somebody a cigarette and hiding some cash and dope in the process, and the transaction of trading the detergent for actual cash has got to be inconvenient, obvious, and hard to hide unless you've got an Amway distributorship or a friendly convenience store clerk who'll buy back the bottles to sell to the next customer. About the only advantage I can see to it is that cops really have no desire to rob dealers or customers by stealing detergent.

Bitcoin is useful for black markets because there's enough transaction volume to obscure the details of individual transactions, and buyers and sellers are willing to hold bitcoins long enough to aggregate or disaggregate them or at least hide them in the rest of the market, and there's enough volume that bitcoin buyers can get coins when they want them to buy commodities and commodity sellers can sell the coins they receive. If bitcoin's too chaotic to maintain a white/grey market, the black market can't piggyback on it.

If Bitcoin values change a few percent a day, that's ok for a recreational pharmaceutical market where the profit margin's high and the extra convenience drives more sales and the buyer and seller aren't nickel-and-diming tightly enough to have the bitcoin purchase followed by a bitcoin sale of the same amount a second later. If you're trying to use Bitcoin to replace Visa and Western Union by having lower transaction costs, that may not be good enough. If you're an online black-market merchant, you might want to aggregate bitcoins from a bunch of different transactions before selling them (or swapping them for different bitcoins.) If the market's not moving too fast, the financial risk of waiting is lower than the getting-caught risk of not waiting, and it reduces the visible patterns of always selling a bitcoin just after somebody bought one.

(Bitcoin, of course, is less anonymous than many people would like, and has other problems for a black market, because the coins are too big for many transactions; it's much more convenient to use integral-sized coins if you can, so wow, much dope, many Dogecoin!)

A year or two ago I was interested in finding out how these crypto-coin things worked, so I used one of my lab machines to mine Dogecoins. Mining real Bitcoins not only didn't make sense (ASICs had already taken over, and the machine I was using didn't have even a GPU that was good enough for mining), but also might have been considered to be a financial conflict of interest. Dogecoin didn't have that risk - I forget if I mined $.02 or $.20 worth in six months. It also meant that when I had to rebuild the machine and the Dogecoin wallet didn't restore successfully, I didn't feel too bad about losing all that money (though some Redditors didn't get tips in their tip jars after that.)

Bitcoins weren't designed to protect you from other people mishandling coins you've handed to them. They're a bearer instrument, not an ownership certificate, so if you're trusting somebody else to store more than transactional quantities of them for you, quasi-anonymously, well, good luck with that. The Federal Reserve and the banks that interact with it can decide to rip you off, but there's a lot of regulation designed to make that really hard (except at the public policy level, e.g. inflation ripping you off a bit, but that's different from your bank deciding to transfer all your money to themselves, or your gold/silver certificates suddenly becoming redeemable only for paper, or other things that lead to mass hysteria, dogs and cats living together, etc.)

Unregulated banks like Mt. Gox and its competition only had reputation to go on, so it was totally shocking to find that many of them got "robbed by hackers, oh, noes!" or otherwise absconded with the money. That's an ok risk to take if you're only trusting them with enough bitcoins to be the dollar-to-BTC changer or escrow on a small Silk-Road drug purchase; you were already taking a risk that your dope would never arrive anyway. But a transaction-handling business, if it's successful, is making enough money on fees that it's worth more to the proprietors to keep running it than to run away with the money; a money-storage business has a much higher potential for moral hazard.

Decentralization has always been a critical feature for Bitcoin, and it's really hard to do. The primary purpose for it is to create trust and eliminate control, though there's a secondary purpose which is that the math is designed in a way that if a cabal can control a large enough fraction of the mining capacity, they can rip off everybody else, which appears to have happened.

Class 1 also includes sending frozen people, etc., but the article doesn't put any more detail into it. It also doesn't include the fact that we don't have a clue how to build a long-term stable ecology that a generation ship or even a Mars colony would need.

He also doesn't include Class 4 - Robots/AIs instead of canned meat humans. That's the most likely option, and building a drive that will ever get to another star is still in the "sufficiently advanced technology" category, not actually conventional technology.

I worked on a bid for State Department embassy communication back in the 80s. State had a lot of "help" from the NSA*, because the real users of classified embassy email systems aren't the trade negotiators or agriculture department reps. The bid eventually collapsed after about three years, because of turf wars between State's IT department and the various other users who'd prefer to be running their own systems.

(*This was back in the X.25 days, and they wanted commercial off-the-shelf equipment using all kinds of options that nobody in the commercial world bothered supporting, and I was never sure how much of their help needed to be attributed to malice as opposed to bureaucratic incompetence.)

It's great that the State department is starting to publish some of the things it did in our name, but I've got more respect for Chelsea Manning publishing a lot more of them.

It's one thing for Hillary to be using her own mail server; Bush and Cheney made sure that their White House emails were destroyed so the public couldn't get access to them (so all of you Hillary-hating Republican partisans should shut up now, please! :-)

But why was anybody running a classified email server at State or Pentagon setting it up to send mail to an uncleared server like Hillary's?

This is the newer Raspberry Pi 2, not the original A/B/A+/B+ flavors of the Raspberry Pi or the new $5 Pi0, which use an earlier ARM version than the Pi2.

Your ISP isn't going to do anything about it. The sender's ISP might, if you bug them enough (try contacting their security people, because you're presumably not the only address that sender is port-scanning. Also, it's possible that the address is being spoofed by some third party to DDoS the "sender".) But if the packets are really coming from the sender, and you've contacted their Whois and abuse contacts without success, go for the "Contact Us" on their web page and contact everybody, CEO, sales, marketing, HR, webmaster, and any other @ you can find there. And if that doesn't work, start with phone calls. (I thought about suggesting that you send their IP people a copy of each scan packet, but you need to be really really really sure it's from them, because if they're being spoofed or otherwise attacked, you're helping do a serious DoS/DDoS on them.)

And sometimes it's not the apparent sender, and sometimes it's weirder than that. Many years ago, one of my lab machines was virused and sending a ping every second to a bot-controller address at MIT. MIT's web page didn't have useful help desk contacts that you could access if you weren't a student, but I knew the security director so I emailed him. Turns out the bot-controller was on a Sun machine in Japan, whose IP address was a byte-swapped version of an MIT address. (Yes, my machine was running Linux, one of the very early Red Hat versions, and it would get attacked every week or so. Nobody ever bothered the Win95 machine next to it, because what use would that have been to an attacker?)