It's worse than that, honestly. If he were just a chest-thumping internet blowhard, that would just put him among the untold millions of gratingly defective personalities infesting the internet. No big deal.
However, for all his pleasant protests to the contrary "Oh, look at me, I'm against Wal-mart and the Iraq war!", he is basically the smiley face standing in front of a bunch of unsavory characters(HB Gary's work on rootkits, for instance, was not exactly "defensive" in nature...)
Choice little bits like "Good threat intelligence requires comprehensive real-time collection and analysis on all threats, and in a constantly connected, social media-dominated world, this appears to some as an encroachment by governments or companies on privacy in the name of security. In my opinion, well-intentioned efforts run afoul of some civil libertarians and privacy advocates because of the perception of encroachment. But with mediums like social networking Web sites, which enable easy manipulation of identity, it is getting difficult to separate the actual threats from the bystanders." certainly do sound all nice and 'nuanced'; but are basically a polite re-statement of the justification for the too-creepy-even-for-congress Total Information Awareness stuff.
In a slightly different vein, his "The need for anonymity for in the latter case is critical to protect whistleblowers or dissidents. In the case of the former - online protests - I believe anonymity and the lack of personal accountability is absolutely corrupting what I think are some of the key tenets of lawful protest. These include personal sacrifice and a willingness for individuals to stand up and be associated with a cause or idea with boots on the ground, as it were." sure does sound nice, except for its implied premise that there are "whistleblowers or dissidents", the good guys, who can be clearly separated from mere "protesters" who had better be ready to wear nametags and stand neatly in the free speech zone. Fantastic... Earth to Aaron Barr... Entities being attacked always classify their attackers, whatever their means, as the most dangerous/evil category available. Nobody says "Well, gosh, I guess that the guy who just leaked our secret plans is just a good, honest, whistleblower. Good on him!".
For all his 'shades of grey' droning, assertions of 'liberalism', and whatnot, this guy is a dirty little cog doing his bit for surveillance society(but not to fear, he says he is a "white hat"). At best, he maintains the oh-so-not-at-all-daring position that other people's dissidents are good guys who are worthy of protection; but the(apparently not "dissident") actions of 'attacking' "Law Enforcement" and "Sony" are just evil criminal stuff. Apparently they are in the way of "Western Information Dominance"...
Is he implying, by the notion of "more constructive" that crushing him and shedding some light on his creepy private-sector-spook buddies was not, in fact, a valuable use of time?
If it were possible to do so more widely and efficiently that would certainly be "more constructive"; but I'm suspecting that he has something else entirely in mind...
I'm told that there is an eldrich evil beyond mortal understanding entombed under Nintendo's headquarters. If they don't release a '3-D' gimmick that sucks and craters every so often, it will be unleashed upon the world...
Somewhere between 2025 and 2026, it is expected that cracks in the earth will again start devouring interns and releasing mephitic vapors in the lower levels of their HQ, and they'll start development of the next one.
In between these so-called 'darkest blasphemy appeasement' periods, Nintendo will follow a sensible strategy of releasing fairly well designed and popular games on inexpensive hardware, in their selfless quest to remain solvent and stockpile enough cash to be able to survive their next round of saving humanity...
In that case, TFA is even more of a non-story. 130W has been the informal-maximum-retail-TDP for parts from both Intel and AMD for ages now, without any notable cooling issues. Even multisocket 1Us can do that, at the price of being obnoxiously noisy.
What I find logically incomprehensible(though cynicism fills in nicely) is how an officer's conduct in an excessive force incident can be bad enough to deserve firing but some how not also be bad enough to automatically be turned into a criminal case.
Cops typically have comparatively broad latitude to apply violence during arrests, and internal review/oversight mechanisms are notoriously weak. If even internal affairs thinks the guy is worth firing, how can their not be substantial evidence that his actions amounted to a crime?
I'm pretty sure that smashing a guy's face in with a flashlight wouldn't be legal if I were to try it... (Ideally, of course, cops would be held to a higher standard, in recognition of the powers with which they are entrusted, and scum like this would just have 'Dirty Cop' tattooed across their faces before being left for the prison population to dispose of; but holding them to the same standards as everyone else under the law would be a nice start.)
An injunction against Samsung's inferior copy was issued, protecting our sacred exclusive right to produce rectangular objects with touchscreens. Any evidence that contributed to this correct outcome was itself necessarily correct.
I don't know what the phone market looks like(a variety of pacific-rim mysteryphones are starting to ship with Android, probably not blessed by Google, rather than WinMo, probably not licenced from Microsoft; but I'm not sure of the provenance of the Android on carrier-blessed handsets...); but there are a number of devices in reasonably wide circulation running more or less completely non-Googled Android setups:
All the B&N Nook devices(dual-screen, color, and touch) are Android-based, albeit running a custom B&N application for more or less their entire interface. With a touch of poking, they are pretty much straight 2.2 underneath.
I'm assuming that most of their STB sales are bulk contract deals with cable companies, who would not take kindly to being yanked around just so that Google can spite Microsoft. Those sales will presumably continue for as long as the contracts run, quite possibly longer, if the profit is there.
However, the "Future developments we actually care about" team is probably downloading the Android SDK and getting ready for some Google TV action as we speak...
It's(with the exception of Google's own userspace applications) 'Open' as in 'released under an open license'; but it is pretty much straight 'cathedral' when it comes to development. Google has never even pretended that it is some sort of 'community-developed' thing; but, honeycomb aside, it was open after release to third parties. I'm just curious to see if that will remain...
The top-of-range extreme gear, as you say, is just enthusiast candy of minimal relevance to the rest of the market.
With one exception: This particular "Extreme" part, with its comparatively huge cache and ample supply of PCIe lanes, certainly sounds like it could be a viable close relative of a fairly mean 1-2 socket Xeon(it wouldn't be unprecedented, a number of "Extreme" enthusiast Intels have been Xeons without dual-socket capability, and some single-socket Xeons have been, basically, high end desktop parts with "Xeon" stamped on them so that they were acceptable to the low end workstation market). And that is a market where people do shell out for expensive processors, and one where AMD(with their comparatively cheap CPUs that have lots of cores and can handle plenty of RAM, great VM boxes...) has been holding out.
The "Extreme" SKUs are strictly for slightly nutty enthusiasts; but they often resemble pretty strongly what Intel has, or soon will have, in the low-socket-count Xeon market...
180watts is totally doable on air. You'll either need a fairly large heatpipes-n'-copper arrangement with a 120mm or two blowing over it, or something annoyingly noisy; but you'd only need water on that if you were pushing the clocks further and needed to keep temperatures down to keep it running stable or not-throttling.
Given that Intel chips have had thermal throttling protections since the P4(the effect makes for a cool demo: spin up something CPU intensive, pop the cooler off, and watch the slideshow start, pop the cooler back on, watch the FPS shoot back up...) chip death from pure overheating should be pretty rare(OEMs selling expensive chips with coolers that never actually allow them to run at full speed, on the other hand...)
The best way to cook a chip is found when you start fucking around with the supply voltage in order to get higher stable clock speeds. That can kill your CPU good and hard if done in excess, and in a way that not even a liquid-nitrogen immersion cooler can prevent.
Unless intel wants to incorporate some sort of voltage watchdog(either some tiny voltmeter, or a bunch of carefully calibrated fused/resistive elements that are tuned to blow at specific voltage steps to show the max voltage to which the chip was subjected over its operating life, or something of that nature), they probably won't be able to detect most of the real customer-error kills, and won't face too many purely thermal replacements.
Particularly for high end or "extreme" CPUs, homebuilders virtually never stick with the stock cooler anyway. If they buy the retail box at all, rather than the OEM one, the cooler just goes in the trash/on ebay/cooling something else. Big OEM builders, on the other hand, frequently want a custom cooler that integrates with their toolless or minimal-tool easy maintenance cases, to cut repair costs. For everybody else, Intel is still offering a badged "official" cooler.
This really just seems like a sensible recognition that there really isn't much point investing in chasing the high-end cooler market(which isn't an enormous R&D burden or anything; by Intel standards; but churns pretty fast and is at least partially driven by aesthetics, which aren't Intel's strong suit.) and there also isn't much point in shoving a chunk of finned aluminum in every box if it is just going to get tossed out(also, with the increasingly large number of enthusiast CPUs that are probably being purchased online, or from locked cases at retail, making the packaging a lot smaller will make everybody happier. CPUs are tiny, CPU+Cooler+retaining plastic tray is a decent size box.
The only place where the Intel stock cooler ever made much sense was for lower-end homebuilders or OEMs too cheap to do their own case designs. Those segments can still buy the Intel-blessed coolers if they want, and everybody else can go with what they were already using anyway.
I'm sure that, by some strange logic, having another entrant into the wireless market would raise grave antitrust concerns, bring down the terrifying Exaflood apocalypse, and probably destroy access for poor and rural Americans(have I covered all the FCC/FTC pleading points?) in a way that, say, letting AT&T acquire T-Mobile would not...
I've never been quite sure if Verizon's cruft actually manages to make them enough money to make up for the universal loathing of it, or whether there is a deeply-frustrated 3rd-rate graphic designer embedded somewhere high in their structure who takes out his rage at his own failings by forcing them on the world...
They've got pretty much the best US cell network, which gives them a strong position to sell voice and data contracts at aggressive prices, why do they have to puke all over the devices that connect to it?
That, actually, could be one complication of this acquisition: Android has, historically, been largely open(with the caveats that the bestest-flagship-development-buddy of the moment often had pre-release access, and some of the new stuff *cough*Honeycomb*cough* takes its sweet time to be released); but that was at least in part because they had no pet OEM, and were willing to loss-leader the OS and some applications in order to get devices built and released.
Now that they do have a pet OEM, will Motorola simply be the permanent bestest-ever-flagship-development-buddy, or will Google take the gamble of alienating 3rd party OEMs and increasingly close/lengthy delay everything that isn't GPL2/Linux kernel, to improve their Android devices relative to 3rd party ones?
They don't have much of a choice about the Linux-derived stuff(unless they feel like migrating to an entirely different kernel, which wouldn't make much sense) or busybox, or about previously released Apache-license Android-specific components; but nothing obliges them to refrain from letting free releases of most of the Android userspace and libraries(ie. the stuff that actually makes Android useful as such, rather than as a slightly weird embedded linux variant) rot...(consider the OSX analogy: the Darwin kernel stuff and many of the underlying unixy bits are freely available as BSD or GPL; but everything that makes OSX OSX, rather than just a weirdo BSD fork, is closed up tight. Architecturally, nothing stops Google from doing the same with Android, if it suits them.)
I'm hoping that Motorola is going to be used as a 'model design'/flagship house, along with a source of defensive patents; with 3rd party OEMs and merry ROM-cookers getting more or less complete access; but that isn't a given.
I for one think that Google should stick to search engines.
It wouldn't too much surprise me if Google would actually prefer a world where they could do that. It's something that they are already good at, where getting patent-trolled seems to be less of a risk, and where their customer goodwill is probably at its highest.
Strategically, though, that tactic Has Problems in the medium to long term. If, increasingly "search" means something integrated into the shell of your lockdown iAppliance, or Microsoft OmniSuite 2012, Google becomes dependent on the goodwill of intermediaries, who have plenty of 'not as good; but they would tongue-wash our Ferrari for a chance to be our search provider' options to choose from.
Their various extensions into other markets, while probably driven partially by restless capital, also tend to be into areas that are calculated to enhance customer's abilities to continue to access core Google properties without involving intermediaries who have much to gain by either forcing Google out or forcing Google to pay for the privilege of remaining in.
The question is, if it's going to be Google owned, will this mean Motorola devices will be opened up as up until now they seemed to be the most locked down Android devices. Judging by the openness of the Nexus One etc. I'd imagine and hope this will be the case!
That will be interesting: I suspect that it will tell us whether the locked bootloader nonsense is actually a carrier demand(and, if so, a carrier demand that they want to stick to, or one that they'll bend on with a touch of pressure) or whether it was a 'hardware companies would prefer that software upgrades be accomplished by hardware replacement' problem...
Obviously Google doesn't want to lose money on their new hardware division; but it seems pretty unlike them(and poor strategy in the face of Apple's relentless hardware/software integration) to play nickel-and-dime software lock upgrade drive games to eke out a few extra handset sales at the expense of customer satisfaction and overall success of Android and the various web services that Google actually makes their money on.
On the other hand, if handset locking is some sort of carrier fetish(that they are only willing to make limited exceptions to, for the occasional flagship device), we might not see much change. Google's attempts to crack the carriers through direct sales have been underwhelming in their success so far, and Apple's sales number suggest that Joe Public isn't clamoring for an unlocked bootloader... At least Google is unlikely to cruft up stock Android too heavily.
Returning no light is a tall order: If you are an efficient absorber of light, you'll heat up, and emit black-body radiation.(Assuming you don't just happen to occlude your star from the perspective of an earth observer during part of your orbit and get picked up that way, where being darker actually makes detection easier...)
There are probably some chunks of fairly dark and very cold material floating virtually undetectable in the void, but if you've got a nearby star irradiating you, it's just a matter of a trade-off between reflecting light and emitting it...
It could just be a quirky, excessively tightly specified, phrasing during the 'dumb it down for the journalists' phase; but their might actually be a more astronomy-related reason:
If Kipping has had to get his hands dirty with any of the apparatus-side aspects of doing very precise optical telescope work, he may well have encountered substantially blacker-than-ordinary surface coatings being used to scrub unwanted light-scatter in sensitive optical gear. In the spirit of accuracy, he might have been emphasizing that your garden-variety "black paint" doesn't compare; but didn't want to just say "paint" because there are some very specialized black surface finishes that are less reflective still.(I think that the record is presently held by some curious carbon-nanotube arrangement that only reflects 0.045% of what falls on it.)
On the other hand, largely because of the efforts of team MPAA, even the vaguest hints of something resembling copyright infringement are your authorization to more or less auto-DMCA the target whenever they poke their heads up in parts of the internet under US jurisdiction...
It usually suggests that competitive pressures on the seller, at least in that segment, are sufficiently low that they derive greater benefit from improved price discrimination than they do harm from making their prices less competitive. Given their fab prowess vs. AMD, it isn't totally surprising that Intel sees themselves doing better by voluntarily cutting the value of low end parts, rather than letting higher-end buyers get away with paying less.
(Secondarily, and specific to this particular instance, it probably doesn't hurt that consumer PCs frequently get crufted up and 'slow' over their lifetime and Joe User has no idea why. It's rarely the processor's fault, so what Intel is selling won't help them; but "make your computer faster!" is a well established product line, and Intel's offering won't technically be a lie...)
Slashdot Mirror
It's worse than that, honestly. If he were just a chest-thumping internet blowhard, that would just put him among the untold millions of gratingly defective personalities infesting the internet. No big deal.
However, for all his pleasant protests to the contrary "Oh, look at me, I'm against Wal-mart and the Iraq war!", he is basically the smiley face standing in front of a bunch of unsavory characters(HB Gary's work on rootkits, for instance, was not exactly "defensive" in nature...)
Choice little bits like "Good threat intelligence requires comprehensive real-time collection and analysis on all threats, and in a constantly connected, social media-dominated world, this appears to some as an encroachment by governments or companies on privacy in the name of security. In my opinion, well-intentioned efforts run afoul of some civil libertarians and privacy advocates because of the perception of encroachment. But with mediums like social networking Web sites, which enable easy manipulation of identity, it is getting difficult to separate the actual threats from the bystanders." certainly do sound all nice and 'nuanced'; but are basically a polite re-statement of the justification for the too-creepy-even-for-congress Total Information Awareness stuff.
In a slightly different vein, his "The need for anonymity for in the latter case is critical to protect whistleblowers or dissidents. In the case of the former - online protests - I believe anonymity and the lack of personal accountability is absolutely corrupting what I think are some of the key tenets of lawful protest. These include personal sacrifice and a willingness for individuals to stand up and be associated with a cause or idea with boots on the ground, as it were." sure does sound nice, except for its implied premise that there are "whistleblowers or dissidents", the good guys, who can be clearly separated from mere "protesters" who had better be ready to wear nametags and stand neatly in the free speech zone. Fantastic... Earth to Aaron Barr... Entities being attacked always classify their attackers, whatever their means, as the most dangerous/evil category available. Nobody says "Well, gosh, I guess that the guy who just leaked our secret plans is just a good, honest, whistleblower. Good on him!".
For all his 'shades of grey' droning, assertions of 'liberalism', and whatnot, this guy is a dirty little cog doing his bit for surveillance society(but not to fear, he says he is a "white hat"). At best, he maintains the oh-so-not-at-all-daring position that other people's dissidents are good guys who are worthy of protection; but the(apparently not "dissident") actions of 'attacking' "Law Enforcement" and "Sony" are just evil criminal stuff. Apparently they are in the way of "Western Information Dominance"...
Is he implying, by the notion of "more constructive" that crushing him and shedding some light on his creepy private-sector-spook buddies was not, in fact, a valuable use of time?
If it were possible to do so more widely and efficiently that would certainly be "more constructive"; but I'm suspecting that he has something else entirely in mind...
I'm told that there is an eldrich evil beyond mortal understanding entombed under Nintendo's headquarters. If they don't release a '3-D' gimmick that sucks and craters every so often, it will be unleashed upon the world...
Somewhere between 2025 and 2026, it is expected that cracks in the earth will again start devouring interns and releasing mephitic vapors in the lower levels of their HQ, and they'll start development of the next one.
In between these so-called 'darkest blasphemy appeasement' periods, Nintendo will follow a sensible strategy of releasing fairly well designed and popular games on inexpensive hardware, in their selfless quest to remain solvent and stockpile enough cash to be able to survive their next round of saving humanity...
True facts.
In that case, TFA is even more of a non-story. 130W has been the informal-maximum-retail-TDP for parts from both Intel and AMD for ages now, without any notable cooling issues. Even multisocket 1Us can do that, at the price of being obnoxiously noisy.
What I find logically incomprehensible(though cynicism fills in nicely) is how an officer's conduct in an excessive force incident can be bad enough to deserve firing but some how not also be bad enough to automatically be turned into a criminal case.
Cops typically have comparatively broad latitude to apply violence during arrests, and internal review/oversight mechanisms are notoriously weak. If even internal affairs thinks the guy is worth firing, how can their not be substantial evidence that his actions amounted to a crime?
I'm pretty sure that smashing a guy's face in with a flashlight wouldn't be legal if I were to try it... (Ideally, of course, cops would be held to a higher standard, in recognition of the powers with which they are entrusted, and scum like this would just have 'Dirty Cop' tattooed across their faces before being left for the prison population to dispose of; but holding them to the same standards as everyone else under the law would be a nice start.)
Unfortunately, the bottom of the injunction against Samsung read "The Court So Rules. Sent From My iPad", so the judge may be a bit more lenient...
An injunction against Samsung's inferior copy was issued, protecting our sacred exclusive right to produce rectangular objects with touchscreens. Any evidence that contributed to this correct outcome was itself necessarily correct.
-S. Jobs
I don't know what the phone market looks like(a variety of pacific-rim mysteryphones are starting to ship with Android, probably not blessed by Google, rather than WinMo, probably not licenced from Microsoft; but I'm not sure of the provenance of the Android on carrier-blessed handsets...); but there are a number of devices in reasonably wide circulation running more or less completely non-Googled Android setups:
All the B&N Nook devices(dual-screen, color, and touch) are Android-based, albeit running a custom B&N application for more or less their entire interface. With a touch of poking, they are pretty much straight 2.2 underneath.
I'm assuming that most of their STB sales are bulk contract deals with cable companies, who would not take kindly to being yanked around just so that Google can spite Microsoft. Those sales will presumably continue for as long as the contracts run, quite possibly longer, if the profit is there.
However, the "Future developments we actually care about" team is probably downloading the Android SDK and getting ready for some Google TV action as we speak...
It's(with the exception of Google's own userspace applications) 'Open' as in 'released under an open license'; but it is pretty much straight 'cathedral' when it comes to development. Google has never even pretended that it is some sort of 'community-developed' thing; but, honeycomb aside, it was open after release to third parties. I'm just curious to see if that will remain...
The top-of-range extreme gear, as you say, is just enthusiast candy of minimal relevance to the rest of the market.
With one exception: This particular "Extreme" part, with its comparatively huge cache and ample supply of PCIe lanes, certainly sounds like it could be a viable close relative of a fairly mean 1-2 socket Xeon(it wouldn't be unprecedented, a number of "Extreme" enthusiast Intels have been Xeons without dual-socket capability, and some single-socket Xeons have been, basically, high end desktop parts with "Xeon" stamped on them so that they were acceptable to the low end workstation market). And that is a market where people do shell out for expensive processors, and one where AMD(with their comparatively cheap CPUs that have lots of cores and can handle plenty of RAM, great VM boxes...) has been holding out.
The "Extreme" SKUs are strictly for slightly nutty enthusiasts; but they often resemble pretty strongly what Intel has, or soon will have, in the low-socket-count Xeon market...
180watts is totally doable on air. You'll either need a fairly large heatpipes-n'-copper arrangement with a 120mm or two blowing over it, or something annoyingly noisy; but you'd only need water on that if you were pushing the clocks further and needed to keep temperatures down to keep it running stable or not-throttling.
Given that Intel chips have had thermal throttling protections since the P4(the effect makes for a cool demo: spin up something CPU intensive, pop the cooler off, and watch the slideshow start, pop the cooler back on, watch the FPS shoot back up...) chip death from pure overheating should be pretty rare(OEMs selling expensive chips with coolers that never actually allow them to run at full speed, on the other hand...)
The best way to cook a chip is found when you start fucking around with the supply voltage in order to get higher stable clock speeds. That can kill your CPU good and hard if done in excess, and in a way that not even a liquid-nitrogen immersion cooler can prevent.
Unless intel wants to incorporate some sort of voltage watchdog(either some tiny voltmeter, or a bunch of carefully calibrated fused/resistive elements that are tuned to blow at specific voltage steps to show the max voltage to which the chip was subjected over its operating life, or something of that nature), they probably won't be able to detect most of the real customer-error kills, and won't face too many purely thermal replacements.
This seems reasonable enough to me...
Particularly for high end or "extreme" CPUs, homebuilders virtually never stick with the stock cooler anyway. If they buy the retail box at all, rather than the OEM one, the cooler just goes in the trash/on ebay/cooling something else. Big OEM builders, on the other hand, frequently want a custom cooler that integrates with their toolless or minimal-tool easy maintenance cases, to cut repair costs. For everybody else, Intel is still offering a badged "official" cooler.
This really just seems like a sensible recognition that there really isn't much point investing in chasing the high-end cooler market(which isn't an enormous R&D burden or anything; by Intel standards; but churns pretty fast and is at least partially driven by aesthetics, which aren't Intel's strong suit.) and there also isn't much point in shoving a chunk of finned aluminum in every box if it is just going to get tossed out(also, with the increasingly large number of enthusiast CPUs that are probably being purchased online, or from locked cases at retail, making the packaging a lot smaller will make everybody happier. CPUs are tiny, CPU+Cooler+retaining plastic tray is a decent size box.
The only place where the Intel stock cooler ever made much sense was for lower-end homebuilders or OEMs too cheap to do their own case designs. Those segments can still buy the Intel-blessed coolers if they want, and everybody else can go with what they were already using anyway.
I'm sure that, by some strange logic, having another entrant into the wireless market would raise grave antitrust concerns, bring down the terrifying Exaflood apocalypse, and probably destroy access for poor and rural Americans(have I covered all the FCC/FTC pleading points?) in a way that, say, letting AT&T acquire T-Mobile would not...
I've never been quite sure if Verizon's cruft actually manages to make them enough money to make up for the universal loathing of it, or whether there is a deeply-frustrated 3rd-rate graphic designer embedded somewhere high in their structure who takes out his rage at his own failings by forcing them on the world...
They've got pretty much the best US cell network, which gives them a strong position to sell voice and data contracts at aggressive prices, why do they have to puke all over the devices that connect to it?
That, actually, could be one complication of this acquisition: Android has, historically, been largely open(with the caveats that the bestest-flagship-development-buddy of the moment often had pre-release access, and some of the new stuff *cough*Honeycomb*cough* takes its sweet time to be released); but that was at least in part because they had no pet OEM, and were willing to loss-leader the OS and some applications in order to get devices built and released.
Now that they do have a pet OEM, will Motorola simply be the permanent bestest-ever-flagship-development-buddy, or will Google take the gamble of alienating 3rd party OEMs and increasingly close/lengthy delay everything that isn't GPL2/Linux kernel, to improve their Android devices relative to 3rd party ones?
They don't have much of a choice about the Linux-derived stuff(unless they feel like migrating to an entirely different kernel, which wouldn't make much sense) or busybox, or about previously released Apache-license Android-specific components; but nothing obliges them to refrain from letting free releases of most of the Android userspace and libraries(ie. the stuff that actually makes Android useful as such, rather than as a slightly weird embedded linux variant) rot...(consider the OSX analogy: the Darwin kernel stuff and many of the underlying unixy bits are freely available as BSD or GPL; but everything that makes OSX OSX, rather than just a weirdo BSD fork, is closed up tight. Architecturally, nothing stops Google from doing the same with Android, if it suits them.)
I'm hoping that Motorola is going to be used as a 'model design'/flagship house, along with a source of defensive patents; with 3rd party OEMs and merry ROM-cookers getting more or less complete access; but that isn't a given.
I for one think that Google should stick to search engines.
It wouldn't too much surprise me if Google would actually prefer a world where they could do that. It's something that they are already good at, where getting patent-trolled seems to be less of a risk, and where their customer goodwill is probably at its highest.
Strategically, though, that tactic Has Problems in the medium to long term. If, increasingly "search" means something integrated into the shell of your lockdown iAppliance, or Microsoft OmniSuite 2012, Google becomes dependent on the goodwill of intermediaries, who have plenty of 'not as good; but they would tongue-wash our Ferrari for a chance to be our search provider' options to choose from.
Their various extensions into other markets, while probably driven partially by restless capital, also tend to be into areas that are calculated to enhance customer's abilities to continue to access core Google properties without involving intermediaries who have much to gain by either forcing Google out or forcing Google to pay for the privilege of remaining in.
The question is, if it's going to be Google owned, will this mean Motorola devices will be opened up as up until now they seemed to be the most locked down Android devices. Judging by the openness of the Nexus One etc. I'd imagine and hope this will be the case!
That will be interesting: I suspect that it will tell us whether the locked bootloader nonsense is actually a carrier demand(and, if so, a carrier demand that they want to stick to, or one that they'll bend on with a touch of pressure) or whether it was a 'hardware companies would prefer that software upgrades be accomplished by hardware replacement' problem...
Obviously Google doesn't want to lose money on their new hardware division; but it seems pretty unlike them(and poor strategy in the face of Apple's relentless hardware/software integration) to play nickel-and-dime software lock upgrade drive games to eke out a few extra handset sales at the expense of customer satisfaction and overall success of Android and the various web services that Google actually makes their money on.
On the other hand, if handset locking is some sort of carrier fetish(that they are only willing to make limited exceptions to, for the occasional flagship device), we might not see much change. Google's attempts to crack the carriers through direct sales have been underwhelming in their success so far, and Apple's sales number suggest that Joe Public isn't clamoring for an unlocked bootloader... At least Google is unlikely to cruft up stock Android too heavily.
Returning no light is a tall order: If you are an efficient absorber of light, you'll heat up, and emit black-body radiation.(Assuming you don't just happen to occlude your star from the perspective of an earth observer during part of your orbit and get picked up that way, where being darker actually makes detection easier...)
There are probably some chunks of fairly dark and very cold material floating virtually undetectable in the void, but if you've got a nearby star irradiating you, it's just a matter of a trade-off between reflecting light and emitting it...
It could just be a quirky, excessively tightly specified, phrasing during the 'dumb it down for the journalists' phase; but their might actually be a more astronomy-related reason:
If Kipping has had to get his hands dirty with any of the apparatus-side aspects of doing very precise optical telescope work, he may well have encountered substantially blacker-than-ordinary surface coatings being used to scrub unwanted light-scatter in sensitive optical gear. In the spirit of accuracy, he might have been emphasizing that your garden-variety "black paint" doesn't compare; but didn't want to just say "paint" because there are some very specialized black surface finishes that are less reflective still.(I think that the record is presently held by some curious carbon-nanotube arrangement that only reflects 0.045% of what falls on it.)
Getting it to look right on today's glossy and emissive displays is going to be real trouble, no matter what color we choose...
On the other hand, largely because of the efforts of team MPAA, even the vaguest hints of something resembling copyright infringement are your authorization to more or less auto-DMCA the target whenever they poke their heads up in parts of the internet under US jurisdiction...
It usually suggests that competitive pressures on the seller, at least in that segment, are sufficiently low that they derive greater benefit from improved price discrimination than they do harm from making their prices less competitive. Given their fab prowess vs. AMD, it isn't totally surprising that Intel sees themselves doing better by voluntarily cutting the value of low end parts, rather than letting higher-end buyers get away with paying less.
(Secondarily, and specific to this particular instance, it probably doesn't hurt that consumer PCs frequently get crufted up and 'slow' over their lifetime and Joe User has no idea why. It's rarely the processor's fault, so what Intel is selling won't help them; but "make your computer faster!" is a well established product line, and Intel's offering won't technically be a lie...)
Ah, the familiar stench of somebody who doesn't even know what conditions 'free market' implies; but attempts to passionately defend them...