Actually, the guy DIDN'T go to the police on his own. The police came to his house and started asking him questions, then they brought him to the station.

The differences between what happened and "an arrest" are that he was not mirandized and (presumably) was not handcuffed. It's still possible that the officers led him to believe he didn't have much choice in the matter.

Actually, I think it is YOU who are missing the point. Because if an Arduino will satisfy your needs, then by god, use the Arduino! If your project's small enough that a $30 Arduino UNO will be ample for what you want it to do, you'd be downright silly to build your project around one of these, instead.

But you're falling into the same trap that a lot of other people are -- thinking that all embedded systems have the same needs. Not all embedded systems need to be low-power, battery operated, or have no need for a display or a disk controller. Some robots need a lot more processing power than you can cram in an 8-bit micro, especially if you're dabbling in machine vision and autonomous systems. A document scanner (not to be confused with a document camera), laser printer, blu-ray player, and an XBOX 360 are all examples of "embedded systems", too.

The above list showcases another misconception about embedded systems: Not all embedded systems can stand alone. Sure, you could probably build a scanner around an Arduino -- I've certainly had scanners in the last 30 years that were built around much less capable microcontrollers -- but you'd need an external computer to drive the thing and to stitch the images coming off the sensor together into one single page and save that as whatever document format you want. If you just want to connect it to your desktop computer or you've already got a spare PC that you want to dedicate to controlling your project, that's fine. But you can save a lot of space and power if everything were able to be integrated into a single system.

I'm not trying to say that you should go out and buy a stack of these and use 'em everywhere you'd use an Arduino. That wouldn't make any sense. It's entirely possible that you, personally, are never going to contemplate a project that would ever need more than an Arduino UNO, or maybe you'll eventually upgrade to a DUE. And that's okay. Really, it is. But just because YOU don't have a need for something like this, doesn't change the fact that some of the rest of us might.

The $110 UDOO Dual core is most comparable to : RPi x 2 + Arduino DUE = $130 (using your numbers)

The $130 UDOO Quad core is most comparable to : RPi x 4 + Arduino DUE = $210

So yes, if you're just going to compare one embedded board to another, without taking into account their relative capabilities, the UDOO is more expensive. If instead, you compared the boards based on BOTH cost AND capabilities, things look very different.

Sure, for some things an Arduino mini is going to be plenty. But some projects make more sense with a multicore system processor and an I/O subprocessor.

Actually, the RPi is single-core, and thus you would have to bolt FOUR of them (at $35/ea) together with an Arduino DUE (at $50) to have something comparable to the $130 UDOO Quad, (board-only -- the board packaged with power supply, 2 preloaded SDCards, and HDMI cable is $160) and that mess wouldn't get you the SATA port that's on the UDOO Quad. -- The dual-core UDOO doesn't have SATA.

Except that when you're trying to emulate processors and hardware, trying to spread that across multiple threads makes trying to get clock-cycle-perfect synchronization between the different parts of the emulated hardware gets really freaking hard. And since MAME is all about emulating the hardware as perfectly as possible, that's not gonna happen.It's been discussed at length in the various MAME mailing lists and FAQs.

MAME does use multithreading for graphics rendering, but all of the hardware emulation is single-threaded.

Now, if you were to build an arcade cabinet around this thing, connect the arcade controls to the board's Arduino, and load a sketch that emulates either a keyboard or multiple gamepads.

Oh, and the pcDuino is "close to" this in so far as a board with only a single-core ARM Cortex-A8 can be considered "close to" a board with a dual (or quad) ARM Cortex-A9 *AND* the same Cortex-M3 that's on the Arduino DUE.

Which is to say, not very.

It won't be.... "a work-a-like", that is. The UDOO board is, quite literally, what you get if you take an Arduino DUE and bolt it onto the same PCB as a quad-core ARM system with a SATA port(*), instead of using a USB cable to connect the two. The Arduino code runs directly on the ATSAM3U, just as it would on a "real" Arduino DUE.

(*) The dual-core board will *NOT* have a SATA port.

Netflix wants to switch not because they're looking for DRM. They want to switch because they're looking for a better platform that also supports adequate DRM. Sure, no matter what they come up with, somebody's going to find a way to circumvent it. But the majority of people aren't going to put that amount of effort into it.

Besides, from all signs, not even Microsoft takes Silverlight seriously anymore. ( http://www.infoworld.com/t/microsoft-windows/microsoft-shuns-its-own-silverlight-while-embracing-flash-214335 )

Switching to HTML5 will allow them to build a user interface that will work on any system that'll run a modern web browser and stream video content as long as a supported DRM module is available.THAT is the reason that, as of now, the only way to stream content from Netflix on linux involves using WINE. They climbed into bed with Microsoft and moved their platform to be 100% Silverlight, and Microsoft absolutely refuses to allow their DRM interface to be ported to Mono, which means that any system that isn't Windows or MacOS is SOL.

DRM support in HTML5 allows Netflix to be in control of which platforms are going to be able to play their content.

It's not all sadism, although a little of that certainly helps.

As is pointed out in some books, part of the "Hacker Mindset" involves identifying and questioning assumptions. ( eg: http://my.safaribooksonline.com/book/networking/security/9781593273422 )

Screwing around with the UI and diving the code to figure out where the assumptions are, whether or not they're valid, how the assumptions can be invalidated, and what unexpected things happen when the unexpected occurs -- For some people, that's the very definition of "a good time."

Paste buffer fail.
THIS is the link I thought I was posting -- https://play.google.com/store/search?q=repligo+reader&c=apps

Sorry, all.

I see that several people have suggested the iPad, but I'm astonished that I'm the first to suggest RepliGo Reader. It's pretty damn awesome.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=guF533z4bdM

I highly recommend watching the demo video