I suspect that carriers have a somewhat mixed view of encouraging Microsoft to not fail.
In their competition with other wireless carriers, the carriers do want spiffy devices that will sell contracts and data plans. However, in the fight between telcos and tech companies over how the money gets divided, having strong handset and internet-based-services entities is Very Much Not what they want.
The AT&T/iPhone case is the most blatant: AT&T had an exclusive on what people wanted, and scored substantial sales despite constant whining about how their network sucked. However, Apple demanded a nontrivial slice, and their expansion into 'iMessage' and 'Facetime' and whatnot, never mind the annihilation of carrier download stores in favor of their own, shows a distinct disinterest in protecting the carrier's future gouging for SMS and other such services.
Given Microsoft's strong control of their platform and(while currently rather larval) strong potential for future integration with MS-controlled services to the exclusion of carrier ones, it isn't obvious that a carrier would want to encourage them.
Ah; but since the authorities made fairly significant fools of themselves in the prior guy-tooling-around-on-a-motor-scooter-and-shooting-people case, somebody has to go to jail for being a scary rag-head...
The one thing that was an issue, with XP's omission of DVD playback, was that so many of the 3rd party solutions shipped by OEMs were Absolutely. Fucking. Dire.
Dell, for one, had the unfortunate tendency to ship 'PowerDVD', which was abhorrently broken in virtually every way and(despite theoretically providing a supported DVD decoder for WMP) frequently managed to munge the system to the point where neither its own interface nor WMP's could handle DVD playback.
It would have been very polite of them to offer a separately licensed 'unobtrusive bundle of the directshow components you need to play DVDs', so that a little less shitware would have been shipped...
Do any of the officially-blessed-by-the-powers-that-be DVD player programs do input from ISOs? I know that every version of 'PowerDVD' that I've had the displeasure of working with doesn't, nor does WMP, even with a suitable directshow filter for DVD playback. It was my vague impression that the party line was that DVD images don't exist and certainly can't be played back like a good, honest, scratchable, optical-drive-requiring, terrible-access-speed DVD...
While Microsoft is certainly happy to nickle-and-dime for things over which they have control(Oh, you want us to flip the bit that allows you to bind to AD? $90 please.) DVD playback is arguably in a different category.
Thanks to the wonders of the DMCA, and possibly a raft of not-yet-expired MPEG-LA patents, it still costs money to legally ship a DVD decoder in the US, despite the fact that implementations of deCSS and MPEG2 are seriously old news.
Especially for the driveless consumer machines and the business masses, forking over a per-copy fee to the DVD cartel just doesn't make any sense for either MS or their customers...
I'm not saying that the Russian claims are actually plausible(especially given the somewhat...mixed...results that anti-missile systems seem to be capable of even under relatively sweetheart test conditions), just responding to the: "Neutralising Russia's offensive capability is a "threat" to Russia. Stopping them from harming other people is a "threat" now." statement by pointing out that the 'defense is a form of offense' logic is by no means novel or Russian; but a generic and decades-old feature of these nuclear deterrence games.
Given that ICBMs appear to be quite difficult to intercept(and only good sportsmanship even obliges you to be so overt, rather than just renting a U-Haul and driving the warhead downtown or any of a number of other sneaky potential strategies), it seems likely that most hand-wringing about missile defenses is premature posturing; but the logic under which it is conducted is quite old.
If you look at various SEC mandated, or voluntary, disclosures from publicly traded companies, you'll almost always see something like this example from Time Warner.
Legally, distinguishing between statements of fact and 'forward looking statements' makes a difference. It's like the securities equivalent of the “These statements have not been evaluated by the FDA. This product is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure or prevent any disease.” tag you always see on 'dietary supplements'.
So, if some optimist was given information that constituted a forward looking statement, with the usual boilerplate, about what Nokia hoped their strategy would do, they can go shove it. If Nokia outright claimed that this move would have a specific, definite effect, on their market position or stock price, Nokia may well have shoved their foot in their mouth, good and hard...
I suspect that you could dodge some of the liability issues in this case.
Yeah, if Joe American goes in to MGH for a CT, pays north of 5k(after insurance), and learns that some unfeeling robot, rather than a tired radiologist, misdiagnosed him, it'll be malpractice lawyer time.
However, in areas where the current standard of care often doesn't include pathologist inspection of cells; because there aren't any qualified pathologists, or they are too expensive for the majority of patients, I suspect you'll find a much greater willingness to embrace the idea that you can perform the diagnosis with a glorified webcam(wasn't there some story on slashdot a little while back about some research group hacking microscope optics onto cellphone cameras?) and a nickel worth of CPU time...
It sounds crass when you say it in so many words; but what you can get away with in medicine is very much a product of what the alternative would be. If the current standard is sufficiently dire, even mediocrity counts as lifesaving. If it just so happens that machines are actually really good at this classification problem, all the better.
In this particular case, we are putting the missile-defense systems there because that is the convenient place for them(if they could be sited elsewhere, that would actually be more sensible. Anti-missile installations aren't especially robust against anything but(possibly, if you believe the vendor) the task of shooting down ICBMs, so you really want them as far away from the ground and air forces of potentially hostile powers as you can get them.)
In the general case, um, probably inertia? And our airbase in Germany is pretty convenient for medvac stuff?
The other meanings of "MAD" are not lost on anybody; but it isn't really a new concept.
Theory goes that, in the presence of multiple nuclear powers with overwhelming destructive capability, only the ability to launch a second-strike of sufficient magnitude to dissuade anybody from launching a first-strike against you is a viable defense.
If one party obtains an actually functional anti-missile system, they neutralize everybody else's second-strike capacity, and thus enjoy the ability to launch first-strikes at their pleasure.
Unfortunately, most of this stuff was hammered out under the cold war logic of an environment with ~2 main actors, both presumed to be rationally self-interested, with easy attribution of nuclear strikes, and other favorable conditions. It doesn't work nearly as nicely if you go to N actors, introduce actors who are either irrational or interested in various apocalypses, or dream up delivery mechanisms that make attribution hard...
(The cynics might also argue that both the US and Russia aren't entirely uninterested in playing at cold war, since they both have decades of experience with it, a glut of high-level policy types who were trained under the assumption that that would be their job, and both have discovered that 'dialog with North Korea' and 'Fundamentalist Sandbox Meatgrinder' are lousy games. Plus, the cold war was probably the historical high water mark for buying awesome toys from defense contractors without actually having to learn their weaknesses the hard way all that often...)
It depends on the material, and the condition of the ball; but the added water can increase the mass of a soccer ball by a decent amount. A touch of dew on one of the fancy synthetics is likely almost irrelevant; but a somewhat worn leather specimen can get downright soggy.
Given the number of headers across the careers of serious soccer types, it probably isn't the biggest variable; but every little bit hurts...
It wouldn't necessarily be pretty; but I think that, with LVM, you could implement the ugly hack of carving all disks into partitions the same size as the smallest disk, and then creating your volumes on top of those, with redundancy between the chunks.
Having to do reliability calculations when physical disks take out a single logical chunk and others might take out 100 or more, though, would be pretty gross...
I was coming to say a similar thing: it seems like Bethesda is downright allergic to game balance.
In addition to the Morrowind case you mention, there was the issue in Oblivion where it was quite easy to 'level yourself out of' practically the entire world if you focused on the wrong skills, or didn't tune your skill increases correctly. In Skyrim, it's harder to totally nuke yourself; but varying techniques for potion and enchantment cycling are back with a vengeance.
They also have an aversion to games that aren't as buggy as they are massively ambitious. If you give them a while to settle down, and install some of the fan patches, they are usually worth the price that you'll pay by the time that they've settled down; but the mixture of bugs, glaringly superior and inferior gameplay strategies, and wildly overpowered skill exploits is the sort of thing that the griefers will eat for breakfast outside of single player...
As you say, the severity/frequency numbers for military brain trauma are different than those for athletes; but I mentioned it because the military has, of late, become interested in studying traumatic brain injuries, as well as developing instruments for measuring exactly what sorts of acceleration events are actually occurring in the field.
The DVBIC chaps have also been expanding their original focus, mostly on veterans with penetrating or massive-shock injury, to include cases of multiple modest blast exposure.
My understanding is that this is partially a matter of greater awareness of traumatic brain injury even at fairly low force levels, and partially a product of improved protective equipment and field medicine capabilities. A fair few more of the blast-trauma patients who would have just bled out in earlier wars are now living long enough to potentially experience chronic neurological problems.
Unless by 'helmet' one means 'comically large pillow enveloping the head and extending for several meters', there really isn't too much that can be done.
Helmets, if properly designed, can be very effective at preventing penetration(as with the ones designed to stop shrapnel or moderate-velocity bullets), as well as mitigating otherwise bloody scalp damage and downgrading what would be skull fractures into mere helmet fractures.
However, there just isn't enough room inside a helmet to achieve a safe deceleration rate. When a running player crashes into something, the brain has to go from X m/s to 0 m/s over a very short distance. Even assuming arbitrarily good material science, allowing you to space out that deceleration however you wish, you have a problem. Even if the player were encased in a perfectly rigid shell, that magically deadened all transmitted impact, you still have the inertia of the brain shoving it up against the interior of the skull.
Given that severe head trauma is even worse than mild to moderate head trauma, helmets aren't a bad idea; they can reduce damage; but if repeated minor damage is a serious problem, a sport that involves huge numbers of collisions is a problem...
Though, now that you mention it, there has been some concern about the effects(particularly when the soccer ball in question is wet) of the deliberate contact of ball and head in the strange and exotic custom of unamerican football...
Historically, the official line substantially underrepresented the risks of head trauma. As knowledge of the area has grown, an increasing number of players have been putting themselves on the list for inclusion in the brain bank at the BU Center for the Study of Traumatic Encephalopathy... The chap who deliberately shot himself in the chest, rather than the head, to preserve his neural tissue for research is a somewhat extreme example of the phenomenon...
Why we need doctors to tell us this? Isn't it pretty obvious that if you get hit in the head a lot, it will cause brain damage?
There are three things at play:
1. Our understanding of the (sometimes subtle) effects of relatively mild concussions and subconcussive trauma is actually a great deal better now than it was until fairly recently. Being able to view trauma-induced lesions(albeit by postmortem slice-n-stain) is fairly new. It has never been news that dramatic blows to the head will kill and/or disable you good and hard; but the epidemiology of correlating apparently minor ones with risks of a variety of psychological and degenerative conditions over time is tricker.
2. It takes time, if it happens at all, for those pointy-headed 'experts' with their 'evidence' to make it through the wall of popular opinion. Historically, the accepted treatment for most forms of sporting trauma was 'Man up and rub some dirt in it, pussy.' The idea that this might actually be a wildly stupid idea was not an immediate hit.
3. Frequent head trauma is commonly an occupational hazard. Football, boxing, hockey, military service, etc. Shockingly, most industries strongly resist the notion that their employees are being sickened or harmed by the conditions in their workplaces, because that might lead to increased liability, mitigation costs, or even having to shut down. It doesn't help that, in the case of football, much of the treatment of players was handled by team doctors, who have a certain incentive to keep the livestock in the game and producing, and among whom suggestions of serious harm were not a good way to make yourself popular...
Where did the FBI manage to dig up field agents who don't know that commercial facilities with high value equipment almost always have surveillance cameras? Christ, seedy dollar stores have surveillance cameras these days. Were they expecting nobody to notice when they just walked into a colo?
Something like that "Nest" thermostat(made by ex-Apple people, appropriately enough) seems like the sort of thing that Apple could handle quite effectively: the legacy thermostat interface is just a few reasonably standardized wires; but the frontends have historically been either elegant but spare(the classic bimetallic coil and mercury tilt switch dial units) or featureful but pretty dire(your basic $30 electronic unit that expects you to program a weekly schedule with the aid of about two teeny push buttons, a cryptic LCD, and a chinglish manual).
Cross-device integration, though, would be a much harder problem for them, unless the devices being integrated were pre-standardized or outgrowths of the iDevice/airplay-licensed/etc. ecosystem...
Ouch. I knew that the really high-end mobile stuff was damn pricey(and that seems to be the only stuff that is sold new without a computer wrapped around it, since people who buy bare CPUs generally want an upgrade); but I didn't know that the low end was so high as well.
I suspect that, if it came to it, Intel's superior fab capabilities would allow them to release a socket-compatible(or, if they are feeling really mean, slightly different socket that allows you to drop a 'real' i3/i5/i7 in; but doesn't allow you to drop a CPU released for the new socket into a normal i3/5/7 socket device...) 'i3 crippled edition' with various desirable features lasered off; but enough punch remaining to outfight the ARM team for substantially less than a normal i3.
They certainly Would Not Appreciate the margin cut, and would probably resort to all sorts of shenanigans, technical or contractual, to try to ensure that such a part didn't cannibalize sales of their nicer processors(in the same way that Atom parts were restricted exclusively to laptops with teeny screens and not much RAM, and were engineered to have lousy PCIe bandwidth to keep them from being paired with decent GPUs); but they could do it if they didn't have any other choice... They'd still have trouble touching the price of an ARM SoC with anything larger than one of their Atom parts; but the i3 and friends are genuinely much more powerful.
I assume that laser diodes are no more fundamentally resistant to degradation over time than ordinary LEDs are. Not a huge problem(LEDs are usually specced to be something like 80% of original output after 100,000 hours); but solid state devices only look immortal compared to their mechanical counterparts.
Solar cells can get excitingly upmarket as you start demanding bleeding-edge efficiency and minimal weight and bulk... For terrestrial installations, you can frequently get away with just buying more of the cheapies; but if you have limited wing to work with, and actually want to increase flight endurance, you can't really afford to just throw a load of extra mass and area at the problem. That means you'll be buying the good stuff.
NASA has done some work with solar-powered electronic aircraft.
They do work, and offer the attractive possibility of months-long loiter time and remote-control movability(in contrast to weather balloons that cost peanuts to send up; but go where the wind does until they pop or satellites that cost a moderately sized fortune to put into orbit); but these aren't exactly passenger aircraft: We are talking small-payload flying wing designs that are happiest above the cloud layer and are specially constructed of just enough fancy structural composites to connect the solar cells to the propellers. Project name is "Helios" if you want the nice pictures.
I suspect that(as with cars) the (really quite substantial) energy demands of a conventional aircraft would swamp the amount of power you could wring out of a solar array that could be managed within the area, weight, and cost constraints.
Slashdot Mirror
When you think that you deserve to have everything, you'll end up talking about whatever you don't have as though it has been stolen from you.
Unfortunately, the guillotine is out of fashion, so such conduct is allowed to occur unchecked.
I suspect that carriers have a somewhat mixed view of encouraging Microsoft to not fail.
In their competition with other wireless carriers, the carriers do want spiffy devices that will sell contracts and data plans. However, in the fight between telcos and tech companies over how the money gets divided, having strong handset and internet-based-services entities is Very Much Not what they want.
The AT&T/iPhone case is the most blatant: AT&T had an exclusive on what people wanted, and scored substantial sales despite constant whining about how their network sucked. However, Apple demanded a nontrivial slice, and their expansion into 'iMessage' and 'Facetime' and whatnot, never mind the annihilation of carrier download stores in favor of their own, shows a distinct disinterest in protecting the carrier's future gouging for SMS and other such services.
Given Microsoft's strong control of their platform and(while currently rather larval) strong potential for future integration with MS-controlled services to the exclusion of carrier ones, it isn't obvious that a carrier would want to encourage them.
Android, by contrast, is fairly closely controlled by Google if you want the full, blessed, all-google-goodness, flagship; but Google's very weak control over the periphery of the Android ecosystem means that it is trivial to get just about any company that makes cellphones to puke up an Android handset for you, complete with carrier branding and crapware, at cutthroat commodity prices. There is also some flexibility when it comes to hardware design. Consider something like the 'Motorola Admiral'(known to its somewhat reluctant users as the 'droidberry'). Not a wildly compelling phone; but the fact that you can get hardware that looks like that churned out probably helps the next time you and RIM go to the table about Blackberry service pricing...
Ah; but since the authorities made fairly significant fools of themselves in the prior guy-tooling-around-on-a-motor-scooter-and-shooting-people case, somebody has to go to jail for being a scary rag-head...
The one thing that was an issue, with XP's omission of DVD playback, was that so many of the 3rd party solutions shipped by OEMs were Absolutely. Fucking. Dire.
Dell, for one, had the unfortunate tendency to ship 'PowerDVD', which was abhorrently broken in virtually every way and(despite theoretically providing a supported DVD decoder for WMP) frequently managed to munge the system to the point where neither its own interface nor WMP's could handle DVD playback.
It would have been very polite of them to offer a separately licensed 'unobtrusive bundle of the directshow components you need to play DVDs', so that a little less shitware would have been shipped...
Do any of the officially-blessed-by-the-powers-that-be DVD player programs do input from ISOs? I know that every version of 'PowerDVD' that I've had the displeasure of working with doesn't, nor does WMP, even with a suitable directshow filter for DVD playback. It was my vague impression that the party line was that DVD images don't exist and certainly can't be played back like a good, honest, scratchable, optical-drive-requiring, terrible-access-speed DVD...
While Microsoft is certainly happy to nickle-and-dime for things over which they have control(Oh, you want us to flip the bit that allows you to bind to AD? $90 please.) DVD playback is arguably in a different category.
Thanks to the wonders of the DMCA, and possibly a raft of not-yet-expired MPEG-LA patents, it still costs money to legally ship a DVD decoder in the US, despite the fact that implementations of deCSS and MPEG2 are seriously old news.
Especially for the driveless consumer machines and the business masses, forking over a per-copy fee to the DVD cartel just doesn't make any sense for either MS or their customers...
I'm not saying that the Russian claims are actually plausible(especially given the somewhat...mixed...results that anti-missile systems seem to be capable of even under relatively sweetheart test conditions), just responding to the: "Neutralising Russia's offensive capability is a "threat" to Russia. Stopping them from harming other people is a "threat" now." statement by pointing out that the 'defense is a form of offense' logic is by no means novel or Russian; but a generic and decades-old feature of these nuclear deterrence games.
Given that ICBMs appear to be quite difficult to intercept(and only good sportsmanship even obliges you to be so overt, rather than just renting a U-Haul and driving the warhead downtown or any of a number of other sneaky potential strategies), it seems likely that most hand-wringing about missile defenses is premature posturing; but the logic under which it is conducted is quite old.
Eh, I wouldn't be so quick to dismiss it.
If you look at various SEC mandated, or voluntary, disclosures from publicly traded companies, you'll almost always see something like this example from Time Warner.
Legally, distinguishing between statements of fact and 'forward looking statements' makes a difference. It's like the securities equivalent of the “These statements have not been evaluated by the FDA. This product is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure or prevent any disease.” tag you always see on 'dietary supplements'.
So, if some optimist was given information that constituted a forward looking statement, with the usual boilerplate, about what Nokia hoped their strategy would do, they can go shove it. If Nokia outright claimed that this move would have a specific, definite effect, on their market position or stock price, Nokia may well have shoved their foot in their mouth, good and hard...
I suspect that you could dodge some of the liability issues in this case.
Yeah, if Joe American goes in to MGH for a CT, pays north of 5k(after insurance), and learns that some unfeeling robot, rather than a tired radiologist, misdiagnosed him, it'll be malpractice lawyer time.
However, in areas where the current standard of care often doesn't include pathologist inspection of cells; because there aren't any qualified pathologists, or they are too expensive for the majority of patients, I suspect you'll find a much greater willingness to embrace the idea that you can perform the diagnosis with a glorified webcam(wasn't there some story on slashdot a little while back about some research group hacking microscope optics onto cellphone cameras?) and a nickel worth of CPU time...
It sounds crass when you say it in so many words; but what you can get away with in medicine is very much a product of what the alternative would be. If the current standard is sufficiently dire, even mediocrity counts as lifesaving. If it just so happens that machines are actually really good at this classification problem, all the better.
In this particular case, we are putting the missile-defense systems there because that is the convenient place for them(if they could be sited elsewhere, that would actually be more sensible. Anti-missile installations aren't especially robust against anything but(possibly, if you believe the vendor) the task of shooting down ICBMs, so you really want them as far away from the ground and air forces of potentially hostile powers as you can get them.)
In the general case, um, probably inertia? And our airbase in Germany is pretty convenient for medvac stuff?
The other meanings of "MAD" are not lost on anybody; but it isn't really a new concept.
Theory goes that, in the presence of multiple nuclear powers with overwhelming destructive capability, only the ability to launch a second-strike of sufficient magnitude to dissuade anybody from launching a first-strike against you is a viable defense.
If one party obtains an actually functional anti-missile system, they neutralize everybody else's second-strike capacity, and thus enjoy the ability to launch first-strikes at their pleasure.
Unfortunately, most of this stuff was hammered out under the cold war logic of an environment with ~2 main actors, both presumed to be rationally self-interested, with easy attribution of nuclear strikes, and other favorable conditions. It doesn't work nearly as nicely if you go to N actors, introduce actors who are either irrational or interested in various apocalypses, or dream up delivery mechanisms that make attribution hard...
(The cynics might also argue that both the US and Russia aren't entirely uninterested in playing at cold war, since they both have decades of experience with it, a glut of high-level policy types who were trained under the assumption that that would be their job, and both have discovered that 'dialog with North Korea' and 'Fundamentalist Sandbox Meatgrinder' are lousy games. Plus, the cold war was probably the historical high water mark for buying awesome toys from defense contractors without actually having to learn their weaknesses the hard way all that often...)
It depends on the material, and the condition of the ball; but the added water can increase the mass of a soccer ball by a decent amount. A touch of dew on one of the fancy synthetics is likely almost irrelevant; but a somewhat worn leather specimen can get downright soggy.
Given the number of headers across the careers of serious soccer types, it probably isn't the biggest variable; but every little bit hurts...
It wouldn't necessarily be pretty; but I think that, with LVM, you could implement the ugly hack of carving all disks into partitions the same size as the smallest disk, and then creating your volumes on top of those, with redundancy between the chunks.
Having to do reliability calculations when physical disks take out a single logical chunk and others might take out 100 or more, though, would be pretty gross...
I was coming to say a similar thing: it seems like Bethesda is downright allergic to game balance.
In addition to the Morrowind case you mention, there was the issue in Oblivion where it was quite easy to 'level yourself out of' practically the entire world if you focused on the wrong skills, or didn't tune your skill increases correctly. In Skyrim, it's harder to totally nuke yourself; but varying techniques for potion and enchantment cycling are back with a vengeance.
They also have an aversion to games that aren't as buggy as they are massively ambitious. If you give them a while to settle down, and install some of the fan patches, they are usually worth the price that you'll pay by the time that they've settled down; but the mixture of bugs, glaringly superior and inferior gameplay strategies, and wildly overpowered skill exploits is the sort of thing that the griefers will eat for breakfast outside of single player...
As you say, the severity/frequency numbers for military brain trauma are different than those for athletes; but I mentioned it because the military has, of late, become interested in studying traumatic brain injuries, as well as developing instruments for measuring exactly what sorts of acceleration events are actually occurring in the field.
The DVBIC chaps have also been expanding their original focus, mostly on veterans with penetrating or massive-shock injury, to include cases of multiple modest blast exposure.
My understanding is that this is partially a matter of greater awareness of traumatic brain injury even at fairly low force levels, and partially a product of improved protective equipment and field medicine capabilities. A fair few more of the blast-trauma patients who would have just bled out in earlier wars are now living long enough to potentially experience chronic neurological problems.
Unless by 'helmet' one means 'comically large pillow enveloping the head and extending for several meters', there really isn't too much that can be done.
Helmets, if properly designed, can be very effective at preventing penetration(as with the ones designed to stop shrapnel or moderate-velocity bullets), as well as mitigating otherwise bloody scalp damage and downgrading what would be skull fractures into mere helmet fractures.
However, there just isn't enough room inside a helmet to achieve a safe deceleration rate. When a running player crashes into something, the brain has to go from X m/s to 0 m/s over a very short distance. Even assuming arbitrarily good material science, allowing you to space out that deceleration however you wish, you have a problem. Even if the player were encased in a perfectly rigid shell, that magically deadened all transmitted impact, you still have the inertia of the brain shoving it up against the interior of the skull.
Given that severe head trauma is even worse than mild to moderate head trauma, helmets aren't a bad idea; they can reduce damage; but if repeated minor damage is a serious problem, a sport that involves huge numbers of collisions is a problem...
Though, now that you mention it, there has been some concern about the effects(particularly when the soccer ball in question is wet) of the deliberate contact of ball and head in the strange and exotic custom of unamerican football...
Actually some donate more than others.
Historically, the official line substantially underrepresented the risks of head trauma. As knowledge of the area has grown, an increasing number of players have been putting themselves on the list for inclusion in the brain bank at the BU Center for the Study of Traumatic Encephalopathy... The chap who deliberately shot himself in the chest, rather than the head, to preserve his neural tissue for research is a somewhat extreme example of the phenomenon...
Why we need doctors to tell us this? Isn't it pretty obvious that if you get hit in the head a lot, it will cause brain damage?
There are three things at play:
1. Our understanding of the (sometimes subtle) effects of relatively mild concussions and subconcussive trauma is actually a great deal better now than it was until fairly recently. Being able to view trauma-induced lesions(albeit by postmortem slice-n-stain) is fairly new. It has never been news that dramatic blows to the head will kill and/or disable you good and hard; but the epidemiology of correlating apparently minor ones with risks of a variety of psychological and degenerative conditions over time is tricker.
2. It takes time, if it happens at all, for those pointy-headed 'experts' with their 'evidence' to make it through the wall of popular opinion. Historically, the accepted treatment for most forms of sporting trauma was 'Man up and rub some dirt in it, pussy.' The idea that this might actually be a wildly stupid idea was not an immediate hit.
3. Frequent head trauma is commonly an occupational hazard. Football, boxing, hockey, military service, etc. Shockingly, most industries strongly resist the notion that their employees are being sickened or harmed by the conditions in their workplaces, because that might lead to increased liability, mitigation costs, or even having to shut down. It doesn't help that, in the case of football, much of the treatment of players was handled by team doctors, who have a certain incentive to keep the livestock in the game and producing, and among whom suggestions of serious harm were not a good way to make yourself popular...
Where did the FBI manage to dig up field agents who don't know that commercial facilities with high value equipment almost always have surveillance cameras? Christ, seedy dollar stores have surveillance cameras these days. Were they expecting nobody to notice when they just walked into a colo?
Something like that "Nest" thermostat(made by ex-Apple people, appropriately enough) seems like the sort of thing that Apple could handle quite effectively: the legacy thermostat interface is just a few reasonably standardized wires; but the frontends have historically been either elegant but spare(the classic bimetallic coil and mercury tilt switch dial units) or featureful but pretty dire(your basic $30 electronic unit that expects you to program a weekly schedule with the aid of about two teeny push buttons, a cryptic LCD, and a chinglish manual).
Cross-device integration, though, would be a much harder problem for them, unless the devices being integrated were pre-standardized or outgrowths of the iDevice/airplay-licensed/etc. ecosystem...
Ouch. I knew that the really high-end mobile stuff was damn pricey(and that seems to be the only stuff that is sold new without a computer wrapped around it, since people who buy bare CPUs generally want an upgrade); but I didn't know that the low end was so high as well.
I suspect that, if it came to it, Intel's superior fab capabilities would allow them to release a socket-compatible(or, if they are feeling really mean, slightly different socket that allows you to drop a 'real' i3/i5/i7 in; but doesn't allow you to drop a CPU released for the new socket into a normal i3/5/7 socket device...) 'i3 crippled edition' with various desirable features lasered off; but enough punch remaining to outfight the ARM team for substantially less than a normal i3.
They certainly Would Not Appreciate the margin cut, and would probably resort to all sorts of shenanigans, technical or contractual, to try to ensure that such a part didn't cannibalize sales of their nicer processors(in the same way that Atom parts were restricted exclusively to laptops with teeny screens and not much RAM, and were engineered to have lousy PCIe bandwidth to keep them from being paired with decent GPUs); but they could do it if they didn't have any other choice... They'd still have trouble touching the price of an ARM SoC with anything larger than one of their Atom parts; but the i3 and friends are genuinely much more powerful.
I assume that laser diodes are no more fundamentally resistant to degradation over time than ordinary LEDs are. Not a huge problem(LEDs are usually specced to be something like 80% of original output after 100,000 hours); but solid state devices only look immortal compared to their mechanical counterparts.
Solar cells can get excitingly upmarket as you start demanding bleeding-edge efficiency and minimal weight and bulk... For terrestrial installations, you can frequently get away with just buying more of the cheapies; but if you have limited wing to work with, and actually want to increase flight endurance, you can't really afford to just throw a load of extra mass and area at the problem. That means you'll be buying the good stuff.
NASA has done some work with solar-powered electronic aircraft.
They do work, and offer the attractive possibility of months-long loiter time and remote-control movability(in contrast to weather balloons that cost peanuts to send up; but go where the wind does until they pop or satellites that cost a moderately sized fortune to put into orbit); but these aren't exactly passenger aircraft: We are talking small-payload flying wing designs that are happiest above the cloud layer and are specially constructed of just enough fancy structural composites to connect the solar cells to the propellers. Project name is "Helios" if you want the nice pictures.
I suspect that(as with cars) the (really quite substantial) energy demands of a conventional aircraft would swamp the amount of power you could wring out of a solar array that could be managed within the area, weight, and cost constraints.