As somebody who is looking for a more powerful prototyping platform on the cheap I look forward to this. But I would not use it for a majority of my hobby projects, which do not need a lot of this power.

Most arduino projects only use a few I/O pins and very little processing power. Many hobby projects could be made with a much weaker pic processor, and many could get by on the basic 8 pin pics. Many people don't know that the simpler solutions exist, because they only see arduino stuff all over the web. The full development board is way overkill.

Additionally, with current arduino setups, it is fairly simple to make a clone around an ATmega chip. All parts are soldered easily through hole, and the schematic is easy. With a 32 bit surface mount chip, the schematic gets complex enough that most hobbyists are now scared off by the hard soldering and the crazy layouts. The open source, easy to clone nature of Arduino that made it what it is today is incompatible with the new high-end boards, and people will have to pay more for the official dev boards, or something else professionally fabbed.

Oh No! I won't be able to get horribly fragile laptops with absolute crap for support anymore. I have an HP laptop that I bought just over two years ago. It has been mailed back to them for service five times before the warranty expired. Three of those times, they entirely failed to fix the problem, cracked the screen, or didn't return the battery. Every time I have to call them up it is a painful experience talking to India. Contrast with my experience with apple: when I had a bad power supply on a two year old laptop, the guy at the apple store got a new one from a wrapped box and swapped it over the counter with absolutely no questions asked. There's a reason apple is running HP out of the harware market. They make better hardware, and they are actually pleasant to deal with when something does go wrong.

Exactly. I can concede that yes, they do run some cool analytics that help them predict things and do their jobs. Does the giant screen help analyze data? No. Visualization is a result of data analysis, not a tool for it. Whats the story here?

Its most likely their initials, and the last 4 of their SSN. I've worked in offices where that is the default password they set up for you, and 90% of people never changed it.

I'm pretty sure gmail accounts are unique regardless of periods. You can use no periods, or periods between every letter in my gmail address, and it will still get to me.

Exactly. If I see my neighbor has open Wifi there are two possibilities:
1. They don't know how to secure their router, and their network is dangerous.
2. They do know how to secure their router, and they have it set up in order to steal personal info from neighbors.
Either way, I'll only use it in an absolute pinch, and never for anything sensitive.

It would make sense that you would need to be actively working on marketing a patent in order to enforce it. If the purpose of patents is to allow the inventor to be profitable from an invention before it is released to the public domain, it makes no sense to allow killing an idea by patenting it in order to suppress it.

They couldn't make the claims page part of the main verizon website? The css and layout are so different, I was asking myself "Is this a scam?" Even the url is dubious. It appears genuine, but if people were smart (which they aren't) they would be careful about where they type in their personal information. Seems like a pretty nice scam to me: Set up registration form somewhere on the web. Submit inflammatory articles to slashdot linking to said form. Steal all the email accounts you want.

From TFA: "Mr O'Connor said people carrying drugs inside their bodies could die if bags split or leak, so it was important to check as soon as possible." So my rights are being violated because some felon might kill themselves with their stupidity? Makes sense. I'll bend over now.

But they can't walk away from a counter-suit.

Sound logic, but the person who gets caught should not have to pay for their inability to adequately enforce the law. The fine should be proportionate to the crime, not proportionate to the number of people they can catch.

I would love a cloud photo sharing service that is easy to use for family photos. Something like facebook photos but not in facebook. Something that allows albums, tagging, comments,access control, etc.. Any suggestions?

I think I remember a system that relied on distributed hash tables to accomplish pretty mush the same thing. That will at least remove the central trusted authority problem, but opens itself to a whole other class of attacks as well.

Cue the plugin which takes a screen capture of the decrypted image and re posts it in its original form. If you can read it you can copy it forever.

There has been little official word on any api yet, except they want to make one. It is not included in the current beta release. The state of modding is currently decompiling the obfuscated java, making some changes, and recompiling it. kinda a hacky way to make changes.