If you read "The Madness of Crowds", Tulip mania is even closer to cyrptocurrencies. At the height of the Tulip bubble, people were trading pieces of paper that "promised future delivery of a Tulip". The good tulips themselves were time consuming items to cultivate, so "exchanges" were set up at street corners to trade the paper promising future tulips. No-one verified that any particular piece of paper was tied to a real tulip, so the last person holding it eventually found it worthless. Everyone agreed that having pretty colored tulips in your home would be nice (i.e. ICO promises), but in the meantime just trading the paper gave you a profit. The actual value of the tulips was small.

Processor clock speed doesn't equal sustained MFLOPage. As soon as the program counter jumps somewhere outside the instruction cache, you get hit with an eternity (in processor terms) delay waiting for the cache to get filled again by some algorithm that tries to predict where the Program execution will go next. Modern CPUs, both x86 and ARM types, rely on cache size to a huge degree. At the end of the day, the bigger cache size wins for real life problems, and that's a crucial spec that's hard to find for these vendor specific devices.

This problem is already solved. http://www.thinkgeek.com/product/8928/

This always nags me. Did you actually sell your stock and realize that gain, or is it still on paper? If you did sell your stock, then you'd have none for when the stock goes up to another insane level? Did you have the foresight to buy many dozens of shares originally so you can sell them off one at a time so you still have some left? Apple stock is a one-way elevator, except when it stops and you fall off. You have to get off at some point to get your money out. If you sold them all, you've got nothing left in this game.

On launch day I managed to get my email address entered in the RS website a few hours after the official start, didn't think I was anywhere near the front of the queue. Last week I got an email with the order token, and now I have it! (California) Ordered a laser cut clear case off ebay.uk, that came quickly too. Looking forward to bringing it up with my 8 yr and 6yr old sons this weekend.

This deserves an answer. Consider the cost of compliance - making sure that FTP stays up and doesn't bit-rot the files, keeping account of the version of busybox used in each released product and its various versions (hardware revisions and software). Making sure that customer support world-wide knows how to answer questions related to GPL and point them to the FTP area. Busybox compliance checking always starts with a simple email to your customer support, and if your out-sourced customer support gets the answer wrong, the next step is a laywer-written letter to corporate HQ, then people inside the company start clucking like a chicken about how much this GPL stuff is costing them in discussion meetings and memos about how to remedy the compliance problem. Repeat that a few times and its obvious the solution is to prefer non-GPL libraries.

Absolutely correct. There will also be users who start down the path of loading modified software into the product they bought, screw it up and then complain loudly to the manufacturer that it's broken. Unlike the "I hit it with a hammer" case, its never going to be obvious that the user is the one who willfully bricked the device, so the manufacturer is going to end up replacing it every time. This is a huge drain on profits, so Sony is making the business decision to prevent this happening. Sound decision, I'd do the same.

The tools you used to compile the binary don't have to be free (libre or beer). For GPLv2, it is a courtesy to include instructions on how to compile, which would include saying "you need to purchase xyz compiler, version abc". For GPLv3, this was made specific, you have to include the project files (e.g. makefile or proprietary format) that a user can use to recreate the binary if they owned the same tools. It works for you as well, you don't have to include instructions on how to use your source with any other compiler, just because the requester says "all I've got is gcc".

Not 100% correct. iTunes (US) is DRM free. Other country''s iTunes (e.g. JP) still have plenty if not all DRM'ed AAC files.

Search youtube, there are several vids of people who let loose a rm -rf / to see the death throes of a linux eating itself.