It's kind of a nuisance that the biggest fans of the 'white race' tend to be walking arguments against it. Why don't they try the "Ha! I'll show the mud races what's what by being a successful human being!" a bit more often?

These two things are not mutually exclusive. In this case, I'd assume that he is accused of attempting to build a weapon; but that the 'weapon' he was trying to build (by virtue of having no ballistic, explosive, or even particularly sharp, components) probably doesn't fall under any of the stock weapons possession charges, so the feds, in lieu of maybe getting some hilariously tiny occupational health and safety violation fine assessed, are going after him on the 'conspiracy to commit murder' angle, which is actually a crime for which nontrivial penalties exist.

They don't tend to be called 'terrorists'(because, by virtue of being moderate, they use violence to achieve ends that good, upstanding, people agree with); but nothing about being a terrorist actually requires any particular flavor of agenda, just the presence of somebody opposed to whatever your agenda is, and the willingness and capability to employ coercive violence and fear.

Somebody like Sir Arthur Harris would arguably qualify. He was an ideologically unexceptional commander of British air forces during WWII, and implemented the British 'saturation bombing' efforts against civilian targets and infrastructure. As he candidly described it:
 
"the destruction of houses, public utilities, transport and lives, the creation of a refugee problem on an unprecedented scale, and the breakdown of morale both at home and at the battle fronts by fear of extended and intensified bombing, are accepted and intended aims of our bombing policy. They are not by-products of attempts to hit factories."

If that doesn't qualify as 'terrorism', I'm not certain what would; but he's a deeply un-radical figure, pretty much heading to the office every day to implement the (widely prevailing) logic of "Total War" in the service of his government, a not-exactly-radical line of business.

(I don't particularly mean to pick on the British, relatively staid people who execute what are unambiguously terror tactics aren't especially uncommon, or confined to any particular nation, he just happened to be a good example that I hit on quickly.)

It's possible (read, likely) that this guy was not exactly a mental giant. That said, there is an interesting subcultural twist in certain subsections of American conservatism: they don't necessarily like judaism; but their particular flavor of Christian millennialism requires Jews in order to fulfill assorted 'prophesy' related events shortly before the end times.

You wish: The computer systems security expertise that goes into enforcing XBL DRM is far more sophisticated than that that goes into securing our voting systems.

"Hey guys! I used to be for DRM; but when I saw that it would ruin my launch, I became totally against it! Don't worry, though, just because it would be trivial to alter the deal at any future time, either over the internet or through exciting and mandatory system updates baked into new disk releases, you can still trust me!"

...this is it. We've got drones on Mars already. They just don't fly yet.

Presumably because it's a markedly cheaper, easier, and quieter method of doing the same thing: Given the.. er... 'robust' state of law enforcement oversight, your major protection from any given investigative method is that it's a pain in the ass and/or expensive, and you aren't worth the effort. Reduce the effort, and you increase the number of people who are worth the effort.

That's ridiculous reasonig. It presumes people can't adapt their knowledge to new applications. I have no trouble with that.

And Cisco people come more expensively than Cisco gear. Seems to me it would be cheaper to go with something "not cisco." This is why I said "maybe worse" [than Microsoft] because they REALLY leverage their critical mass hard and they do so by creating this army of Cisco loyalists because they all have the IT industry fooled into thinking they are worth more.

None of what has been presented actually says Cisco is "superior." It all says Cisco is conveniently entrenched.

What amazes me is the current level of brand name dominance in technology. (I know, I'm repeating myself so I'll abbreviate) It's all so consumerist. We don't care what it actually does or doesn't do... or even how well it does it. We just care about the brand name.

"Do you know about networking?" "I'm Cisco Certified!!" "That wasn't the question..."

How many Cisco certified people do you know that don't know anything about networking?? I know a lot. It's the brand name that makes them important and the brand name that makes these devices valuable.

It tickles me to hear people say "Linux" and "toy" in the same sentence knowing that Cisco uses Linux in almost everything these days. That's like saying "I own a Lexus, you wouldn't catch me dead in a Toyota... those cars are crap!!" Sorry, but... you know?

And to me the real killer is that networking is 99.999% about being protocol implementation faithful so ALL devices of all brands should do the same damned things. (Yes, I know there are Cisco specific protocols and people should avoid them to avoid vendor lock-in.) Cisco isn't quite as bad as Microsoft, but in some ways, they're worse.

I think you don't quite get it. It's not "countries" that hold economic sway. It's a rather small collection of bankers. Countries don't control their own money any more. Pretty much every nation "outsourced" their monetary policy to "the cloud."

Now, the US Dollar is pretty much the world's exchange currency, but BRIC is set to replace the dollar.

I'm not saying things will be better once the US collapses. But it will give the US a chance to reboot and become something better (but might become worse). The people in charge are NOT going to give up short term benefits in favor of a better long-term future.

Economic power used to have something to do with production and crap like that. Now it's all about who is in control of the money. Problem is, those in control of money are not particularly responsible or interested in the welfare of the world.

One of two bad things will happen:

1. The US's influence over the world will implode
2. The US's influence over the world will be "something something something 'DarkSide' something something something 'Complete!'"

What happens next should be obvious. Personally, I hope US influence implodes -- we need freedom and democracy again.

I'd imagine that it depends on how heavily current GPU/CPU compute systems lean on the 'CPU' side of the arrangement:

If the CPU actually keeps reasonably busy(either with aspects of the problem that aren't amenable to GPU work, or with assorted housekeeping tasks required to keep the GPUs fed and coordinated across the cluster), Intel or AMD offer pretty good prices for chips that provide a lot of PCIe lanes, support tons of RAM, and are supported by most of the world's horrid legacy software. Plus, motherboards and other supporting gear are brutally commodified, which is always nice.

If the CPU is mostly idle, and mostly gets included because it's the cheapest way to get a bunch of PCIe lanes and boot an OS that can run CUDA drivers and a NIC, then a Tesla-like card that includes a weedy little ARM core and can run on a simple backplane, without any PC server components, would seem like a logical thing to produce.

I suspect that they also don't have too much of a choice: the cost and energy savings of die-level integration with the CPU are difficult to ignore(and, even if they were less impressive, AMD and Intel both have pet GPUs that they integrate into most of their cores, and can freeze out anything more tightly integrated than a PCIe device at their whim, as Intel indeed did when they changed Northbridge interfaces). Either Nvidia commits to building SoCs that are all things to all people(a rather tall order), or they allow existing SoC-spinners to choose a GPU architecture with rather punchier PC roots than some of the traditional low-power/embedded guys.

Nvidia has been fabless since the beginning, the only difference with this announcement is that they'll sell you the ability to put their GPU on your die, rather than exclusively buying and reselling TSMC-fabbed GPUs of their design...