Thankfully, you can save money on maintenance and improve evaporation pond efficiency if you don't bother to actually make sure that the impermeable liner of the pond is impermeable... Win-Win, baby!
Only for you peasants. Since the drillers are under no clearly enforceable obligation to compensate anybody for their mess(and are, indeed, kindly and specifically exempted from the clean water act...), their costs remain satisfactorily low, and their production abundant.
Sure, a bunch of powerless people get to drink carcinogens; but that's an externality, and doesn't show up on their balance sheets.
The real problem here is that a bunch of people have been given alarmingly broad rights to shove costs onto others, without their consent, which has made substantially destructive practices highly cost effective. It is indefensible from basically every position between(and including) libertarian and certified green party; but since "Plutocrat" is the position actually calling the shots, we are unlikely to see much effective opposition.
Anecdotally, the first person in a given area is paid relatively well. Their neighbors are then politely reminded, off the record, that they can either accept the er, generous, offer being made, or they can end up with poisoned groundwater anyway, and the drillers will just have to wait a bit longer for the gas under their property to diffuse through the porous substrata toward the wells next door...
If pollutants respected property lines, this would be much less of a problem...
The terms "water pollution" and "risk to human health" are so very anti-business and job-killing. We prefer to say that the invisible hand is incentivizing the purchase of bottled water at the present time...
Yes and no. At home, the difference between 100mb and gigE only comes up on the rare occasion that I need to do a full backup of an entire machine. Most everything else is either local, or media streaming(and even blu-ray only supposes a maximum read-rate of 54mb/s, so uncompressed rips should work just fine over ethernet).
At the office, where basically everything but the OS is done from network storage, for backup and easy-availability-from-any-PC purposes, 100mb is OK; but for working on larger files you can definitely tell "Ok, that file is on my local drive" or "ah, that would be a network location..." It is hardly unusable; but 100mb is a bit too slow to make local and remote storage indistinguishable in practice(obviously, latency will forever be worse with distance; but with higher link speed the real-world experience of interacting with a file on a fancy SAN should be better than the experience of interacting with the same file on a lowest-bidder local disk...)
You can get gigabit+ wireless today; but only from highly directional, fixed-location gear, usually marketed as a cheaper alternative to a redundant fiber path between buildings. A perfectly fine solution to the risk of backhoe-induced packet loss; but not exactly laptop ready.
The assorted 802.11 standards are substantially slower even in theory, and their quoted bandwidth numbers are usually absurdly inflated.
Running the cable is the part that requires the effort, unfortunately. There are things that help(ie. if underground, lay a larger diameter conduit than you think you'll need; because you will end up needing it. Leave a fish line so that you can pull the next bundle through, etc.); but for anything longer than an in-room patch, the cost of getting more cable run can go up quickly. In building, you need to run the stuff so as not to damage any fire barriers(and ideally avoid having to tear up any walls...) Underground, there are the joys of trenching or pulling recalcitrant cables through existing pipes. If running on utility poles, the proximity to high voltage means you'll probably need linesmen, even though fiber is electrically harmless.
When you can, you 'plan for expandability' by pulling as many strands of fiber in a single bundle as they'll let you get away with. The cost of each strand is comparatively small. The cost of pulling a bundle, whether it be two strands or 128 strands, is comparatively huge. You then just leave the ones you don't immediately need dark until you do need them.
For very nasty runs(undersea cables, backbones of large landmasses, etc.) I'm told that there is some emphasis on designing new transmitter/receiver systems that can squeeze more bandwidth out of the strands you already have(when the alternative is laying another fiber bundle across the Pacific Ocean almost arbitrarily expensive endpoint hardware starts to look like a solid plan...) Such matters are well beyond my personal experience, though.
At least until it becomes very much cheaper, anything faster than gigabit is mostly about reducing the cable mess in high density situations.
For instance, if you are doing server virtualization, cheap multicore CPUs and cheap RAM means that it isn't at all implausible or uncommon to have numerous VMs all living in a single 2U, with the bandwidth demands of whatever it is that they are doing, plus the bandwidth demands brought about by the fact that there isn't any room for disks in there, so all their storage I/O is happening over iSCSI. You end up with every expansion slot filled with 4 port gigE cards and a real rat's nest.
I suspect that, given that Intel specifically designed EFI, and has AMT, their own proprietary PXE-on-Steroids setup; their incentive to support coreboot is relatively small. If somebody shoved a giant pile of cash in their face and said "100,000 Xeon cluster; but only with Coreboot", they might consider doing a custom job; but their roadmap is pretty clearly not in Coreboot's direction.
While that is an issue for people who want Coreboot and Intel, it is arguably an advantage in making AMD play nice. If intel has a variety of proprietary-secret-sauce-but-useful-and-tasty features, AMD will want something to compete. If they decided to support coreboot in order to add these sorts of advanced modern BIOS features, it's a win for both parties. AMD gets powerful preboot features, Coreboot doesn't have to painstakingly reverse-engineer support for every single board they want to run on...
I'm sure that there will be a variety of horrid messes lurking under the surface; a man could lose his sanity plunging too deep into the dark corners of motherboard ACPI details and the like.
However, if AMD is planning to "support Coreboot on all upcoming processors", they presumably wouldn't bother doing that if the announcement didn't cover the accompanying chipsets as well(whatever chipset isn't included on die these days, that is). Between the CPU and its embedded peripherals, and the AMD chipset, that hardly assures 100% support(some wacky WinRAID half-baked option ROM? You have fun with that.); but it should make the basic "Boot, bring up some basic I/O, and figure out where the hell you are from there" step a great deal easier...
I assume that didn't turn down the chance to bring in an intelligence asset lightly, so I'm sure that the situation made taking him alive risky or untenable. Even in the case of basic boring warrant-serving, things sometimes end in violence.
My point was just addressed at the "What would be the point of capturing him?" question. The value of capturing somebody is not absolute, and there are a number of circumstances under which it isn't worth it; but my contention is, under ideal circumstances, bringing somebody alive and as undamaged as possible to face a court is better than killing them. Clearly, some circumstances are not ideal; and that is to be understood; but it is to be understood that such outcomes are unfortunate deviations from the ideal, not ideal outcomes.
Oh, I don't mean to imply that taking the suspect alive is higher than all other considerations, and given the US' historical enthusiasm for capturing people believed to be of intelligence value, I assume that they left with just a body because that was the option they had.
My response was to anyone who argues that just shooting him was the best outcome, rather than a second-best alternative to which we apparently had to resort, or that letting the legal process play out is somehow 'weaker' than just shooting whoever you think the perp is. It was not intended to suggest that all suspects must be taken alive, regardless of circumstance(as, indeed, many much less interesting ones aren't, when they pose sufficient danger).
Capturing somebody is what gives you the chance to deny them a 'heroic' death on the battlefield and subject them to the humiliating banalities of being treated like a common criminal by an opponent so much more powerful than you that they can, in fullness of power, afford to give you your day in court. In addition to being good social policy, subjecting a a malefactor to trial accords them a much lower status than does treating them as a dangerous military enemy who has to be stopped in the field...
Honestly, I think that international relations would be a much nicer game if the bulk of the casualties were among the upper echelons of political and military power, on all sides, rather than concentrated among a mixture of civilians and common soldiers who are allocated the overwhelming majority of the killing and the dying.
I agree, I mean taking credit for 3,000+ deaths in one swoop who were also unarmed should give him the right to a fair trial
A few considerations:
First, if in fact somebody is particularly, notoriously, heinous, surely they won't exactly be looking forward to a fair trial? All those cases where the 'obvious' guilt of the suspect offends the public should be cakewalks for the prosecution, given the value of rule of law, is the short procedural delay really a big deal?
Second, there are situations(almost certainly not his; but that isn't the point) where the public/media are incorrect. That's sort of the reason that rule of law is considered superior to lynch mobs.
The third is more pragmatic: Against certain classes of opponent(internationally notorious mediagenic terrorist figureheads definitely being among them) fair trials are among the most powerful things you can do to them, the more boring, the better. You don't want the last few pages of their upcoming hagiography to be something out of an action thriller: 'went down in hail of bullets during a shootout with sinister international assassin squad, a true martyr of the movement'. You want it to be as unbelievably dull as possible. 'Taken into custody, charged with X,Y,Z, went before FOO district court, convicted, sentenced, just like any common criminal.' Obviously, getting shot kind of ruins your day; but it buffs the hell out of your legacy. Only cool people get assassinated. They more shadowy and badass the assassins, the better. Getting tried and convicted like any common scumbag, though, especially if the authorities stubbornly treat you neither better nor worse than anybody else being processed through the system, is basically the most banal exit possible.
Eh, those were just illegal enemy combatants, hardly to be afforded the protections of the Geneva convention that hadn't been written yet. Whatever was necessary to drag Jefferson Davis out of his spider hole, and all that. 4/11/61! Never Forget!
My suspicion(totally without any unusual knowledge, of course) is that it is a mixture: The core penetrations, and the exfiltration of CC details and other identity-thefty stuff look a lot like the usual commercially motivated electronic criminal activity. However, the sorts of people who do that are opportunists, and generally not morons: Sony's current deep unpopularity with a segment of ideological hackers/bored 4channers likely provides both a certain amount of 'free' security testing done by third parties and then dumped into forums and chatrooms, there for the taking, and provides a certain amount of concealment: If only through sheer bulk, wading through all the not-too-competent attacks mounted by assorted under-18s who would probably get a month in juvy and are barely worth hunting down, in order to pick out the sophisticated operators is going to be rather more difficult than just finding the sophisticated operators.
As for the support/goodwill thing, I suspect that those doing the attacks aren't really interested in that. The professional thieves, of course, don't care; because they are there for the money. Any ideological attackers don't care because they are there to make Sony bleed and/or clearly demonstrate the vulnerability of services and hardware cryptographically locked to a single service. The support of Sony's customers is worthless to them; because(by design) Sony's customers have basically no power. Creating as much angst and suffering among those customers, on the other hand(in addition to any amusement that might be derived) hurts Sony's commercial standing.
I suspect that one General Sherman's er... enthusiasticremoval of southern legacy hardware really helped speed up the transition. He did have a real air of resolve when it came to dealing with insurgents.
I'm inclined to wonder if the track is either particularly long, or particularly tortuous, or the constraints imposed by the rules especially arduous. While getting good range out of electric vehicles turns out to be a nasty piece of work, electric motors are practically god's gift to short-range high-speed work. Electric motors achieve their highest torque at stall, so you acceleration is limited mostly by your tires or the desire to not melt any power busses. Such motors can also be used for braking, again limited largely by your tires or desire not to melt anything.
Unless the track is particularly hairy, where the increased mass of a battery pack on wheels would be an issue, or the rules substantially constrain the mass of batteries carried, I would expect electrics to utterly terminate internal combustion units in closed course exercises where cost is a very limited object and endurance measured in minutes isn't a big deal.
I'm afraid that the poster is simultaneously correct, and totally missing the point.
Is it overwhelmingly the case that games are trending toward(and many are already there) a place where they will be somewhere between crippled and bricked when some ill-thought-out online integration or financially shaky company bites the bullet? Hell yeah. Are those same games increasingly likely to be locked down as hard as the publisher can lock them, ensuring that hacking together a 3rd party equivalent will be pretty tricky? Yup. In that sense, he is entirely correct.
However, he seems to be under the impression that this is some sort of honest mistake, a product of over-enthusiasm for cool gizmos among developers. Wouldn't that be nice. Beyond whatever bare minimum is required to sell the thing, longevity is a defect, not a virtue, from the perspective of the seller. After they get paid, you are a cost center, not a customer(Obviously, rank incompetence like having your walled garden go down during a major launch isn't in the seller's interest; but things like that are only a major deal because multiplayer functions are increasingly being forcibly centralized, rather than made a server offering that any player can run). People happily playing classic games are of no financial utility. I suspect that we will see much more of this, and it will not be by accident.
A quick bit of research suggests that the unit price of the cheapest Atom is $19. ION is substantially further up the food chain(and rather more power hungry).
Indeed. I was just emphasizing that(between composite on the low end and HDMI elsewhere) the ability to coax video out of this thing has really trickled down. The only really gaping hole, ironically enough, would be having a VGA out to drive all the aging CRTs and cheapy early model LCDs that you might be most likely to find in a school with budget issues or scrounge for cheap somewhere.
The gaping hole in your strawman is that, under the laws of this jurisdiction, the kiddie porn is inherently illegal, to possess or distribute. There are absolutely no recognized legitimate applications(aside from law enforcement's evidence stash). The limewire client, on the other hand, contains no inherently illegal material whatsoever, and is capable of both licit and illicit uses, by the person downloading it.
I wonder if the SoC they chose lacked a RAMDAC or something. I imagine that, if you are trying to hit that size and price point, you don't really have the luxury of tacking on more support chips than you absolutely need, and most of the ARM chips of the world with any display support at all are presumably mostly designed to deal with legacy/embedded mini LCD screens, or to cope with the contemporary/near future set top box/TV-cellphone connection, etc. use cases.
If only for the chance to cheaply increase my toy stash, I hope that you are wrong, and the modest step-down in spec somehow does it; but I would be wholly unsurprised if you turned out to be correct.
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Thankfully, you can save money on maintenance and improve evaporation pond efficiency if you don't bother to actually make sure that the impermeable liner of the pond is impermeable... Win-Win, baby!
Only for you peasants. Since the drillers are under no clearly enforceable obligation to compensate anybody for their mess(and are, indeed, kindly and specifically exempted from the clean water act...), their costs remain satisfactorily low, and their production abundant.
Sure, a bunch of powerless people get to drink carcinogens; but that's an externality, and doesn't show up on their balance sheets.
The real problem here is that a bunch of people have been given alarmingly broad rights to shove costs onto others, without their consent, which has made substantially destructive practices highly cost effective. It is indefensible from basically every position between(and including) libertarian and certified green party; but since "Plutocrat" is the position actually calling the shots, we are unlikely to see much effective opposition.
Anecdotally, the first person in a given area is paid relatively well. Their neighbors are then politely reminded, off the record, that they can either accept the er, generous, offer being made, or they can end up with poisoned groundwater anyway, and the drillers will just have to wait a bit longer for the gas under their property to diffuse through the porous substrata toward the wells next door...
If pollutants respected property lines, this would be much less of a problem...
The terms "water pollution" and "risk to human health" are so very anti-business and job-killing. We prefer to say that the invisible hand is incentivizing the purchase of bottled water at the present time...
Yes and no. At home, the difference between 100mb and gigE only comes up on the rare occasion that I need to do a full backup of an entire machine. Most everything else is either local, or media streaming(and even blu-ray only supposes a maximum read-rate of 54mb/s, so uncompressed rips should work just fine over ethernet).
At the office, where basically everything but the OS is done from network storage, for backup and easy-availability-from-any-PC purposes, 100mb is OK; but for working on larger files you can definitely tell "Ok, that file is on my local drive" or "ah, that would be a network location..." It is hardly unusable; but 100mb is a bit too slow to make local and remote storage indistinguishable in practice(obviously, latency will forever be worse with distance; but with higher link speed the real-world experience of interacting with a file on a fancy SAN should be better than the experience of interacting with the same file on a lowest-bidder local disk...)
You can get gigabit+ wireless today; but only from highly directional, fixed-location gear, usually marketed as a cheaper alternative to a redundant fiber path between buildings. A perfectly fine solution to the risk of backhoe-induced packet loss; but not exactly laptop ready.
The assorted 802.11 standards are substantially slower even in theory, and their quoted bandwidth numbers are usually absurdly inflated.
Running the cable is the part that requires the effort, unfortunately. There are things that help(ie. if underground, lay a larger diameter conduit than you think you'll need; because you will end up needing it. Leave a fish line so that you can pull the next bundle through, etc.); but for anything longer than an in-room patch, the cost of getting more cable run can go up quickly. In building, you need to run the stuff so as not to damage any fire barriers(and ideally avoid having to tear up any walls...) Underground, there are the joys of trenching or pulling recalcitrant cables through existing pipes. If running on utility poles, the proximity to high voltage means you'll probably need linesmen, even though fiber is electrically harmless.
When you can, you 'plan for expandability' by pulling as many strands of fiber in a single bundle as they'll let you get away with. The cost of each strand is comparatively small. The cost of pulling a bundle, whether it be two strands or 128 strands, is comparatively huge. You then just leave the ones you don't immediately need dark until you do need them.
For very nasty runs(undersea cables, backbones of large landmasses, etc.) I'm told that there is some emphasis on designing new transmitter/receiver systems that can squeeze more bandwidth out of the strands you already have(when the alternative is laying another fiber bundle across the Pacific Ocean almost arbitrarily expensive endpoint hardware starts to look like a solid plan...) Such matters are well beyond my personal experience, though.
At least until it becomes very much cheaper, anything faster than gigabit is mostly about reducing the cable mess in high density situations.
For instance, if you are doing server virtualization, cheap multicore CPUs and cheap RAM means that it isn't at all implausible or uncommon to have numerous VMs all living in a single 2U, with the bandwidth demands of whatever it is that they are doing, plus the bandwidth demands brought about by the fact that there isn't any room for disks in there, so all their storage I/O is happening over iSCSI. You end up with every expansion slot filled with 4 port gigE cards and a real rat's nest.
I suspect that, given that Intel specifically designed EFI, and has AMT, their own proprietary PXE-on-Steroids setup; their incentive to support coreboot is relatively small. If somebody shoved a giant pile of cash in their face and said "100,000 Xeon cluster; but only with Coreboot", they might consider doing a custom job; but their roadmap is pretty clearly not in Coreboot's direction.
While that is an issue for people who want Coreboot and Intel, it is arguably an advantage in making AMD play nice. If intel has a variety of proprietary-secret-sauce-but-useful-and-tasty features, AMD will want something to compete. If they decided to support coreboot in order to add these sorts of advanced modern BIOS features, it's a win for both parties. AMD gets powerful preboot features, Coreboot doesn't have to painstakingly reverse-engineer support for every single board they want to run on...
I'm sure that there will be a variety of horrid messes lurking under the surface; a man could lose his sanity plunging too deep into the dark corners of motherboard ACPI details and the like.
However, if AMD is planning to "support Coreboot on all upcoming processors", they presumably wouldn't bother doing that if the announcement didn't cover the accompanying chipsets as well(whatever chipset isn't included on die these days, that is). Between the CPU and its embedded peripherals, and the AMD chipset, that hardly assures 100% support(some wacky WinRAID half-baked option ROM? You have fun with that.); but it should make the basic "Boot, bring up some basic I/O, and figure out where the hell you are from there" step a great deal easier...
I assume that didn't turn down the chance to bring in an intelligence asset lightly, so I'm sure that the situation made taking him alive risky or untenable. Even in the case of basic boring warrant-serving, things sometimes end in violence.
My point was just addressed at the "What would be the point of capturing him?" question. The value of capturing somebody is not absolute, and there are a number of circumstances under which it isn't worth it; but my contention is, under ideal circumstances, bringing somebody alive and as undamaged as possible to face a court is better than killing them. Clearly, some circumstances are not ideal; and that is to be understood; but it is to be understood that such outcomes are unfortunate deviations from the ideal, not ideal outcomes.
Oh, I don't mean to imply that taking the suspect alive is higher than all other considerations, and given the US' historical enthusiasm for capturing people believed to be of intelligence value, I assume that they left with just a body because that was the option they had.
My response was to anyone who argues that just shooting him was the best outcome, rather than a second-best alternative to which we apparently had to resort, or that letting the legal process play out is somehow 'weaker' than just shooting whoever you think the perp is. It was not intended to suggest that all suspects must be taken alive, regardless of circumstance(as, indeed, many much less interesting ones aren't, when they pose sufficient danger).
Capturing somebody is what gives you the chance to deny them a 'heroic' death on the battlefield and subject them to the humiliating banalities of being treated like a common criminal by an opponent so much more powerful than you that they can, in fullness of power, afford to give you your day in court. In addition to being good social policy, subjecting a a malefactor to trial accords them a much lower status than does treating them as a dangerous military enemy who has to be stopped in the field...
Honestly, I think that international relations would be a much nicer game if the bulk of the casualties were among the upper echelons of political and military power, on all sides, rather than concentrated among a mixture of civilians and common soldiers who are allocated the overwhelming majority of the killing and the dying.
I agree, I mean taking credit for 3,000+ deaths in one swoop who were also unarmed should give him the right to a fair trial
A few considerations:
First, if in fact somebody is particularly, notoriously, heinous, surely they won't exactly be looking forward to a fair trial? All those cases where the 'obvious' guilt of the suspect offends the public should be cakewalks for the prosecution, given the value of rule of law, is the short procedural delay really a big deal?
Second, there are situations(almost certainly not his; but that isn't the point) where the public/media are incorrect. That's sort of the reason that rule of law is considered superior to lynch mobs.
The third is more pragmatic: Against certain classes of opponent(internationally notorious mediagenic terrorist figureheads definitely being among them) fair trials are among the most powerful things you can do to them, the more boring, the better. You don't want the last few pages of their upcoming hagiography to be something out of an action thriller: 'went down in hail of bullets during a shootout with sinister international assassin squad, a true martyr of the movement'. You want it to be as unbelievably dull as possible. 'Taken into custody, charged with X,Y,Z, went before FOO district court, convicted, sentenced, just like any common criminal.' Obviously, getting shot kind of ruins your day; but it buffs the hell out of your legacy. Only cool people get assassinated. They more shadowy and badass the assassins, the better. Getting tried and convicted like any common scumbag, though, especially if the authorities stubbornly treat you neither better nor worse than anybody else being processed through the system, is basically the most banal exit possible.
Eh, those were just illegal enemy combatants, hardly to be afforded the protections of the Geneva convention that hadn't been written yet. Whatever was necessary to drag Jefferson Davis out of his spider hole, and all that. 4/11/61! Never Forget!
My suspicion(totally without any unusual knowledge, of course) is that it is a mixture: The core penetrations, and the exfiltration of CC details and other identity-thefty stuff look a lot like the usual commercially motivated electronic criminal activity. However, the sorts of people who do that are opportunists, and generally not morons: Sony's current deep unpopularity with a segment of ideological hackers/bored 4channers likely provides both a certain amount of 'free' security testing done by third parties and then dumped into forums and chatrooms, there for the taking, and provides a certain amount of concealment: If only through sheer bulk, wading through all the not-too-competent attacks mounted by assorted under-18s who would probably get a month in juvy and are barely worth hunting down, in order to pick out the sophisticated operators is going to be rather more difficult than just finding the sophisticated operators.
As for the support/goodwill thing, I suspect that those doing the attacks aren't really interested in that. The professional thieves, of course, don't care; because they are there for the money. Any ideological attackers don't care because they are there to make Sony bleed and/or clearly demonstrate the vulnerability of services and hardware cryptographically locked to a single service. The support of Sony's customers is worthless to them; because(by design) Sony's customers have basically no power. Creating as much angst and suffering among those customers, on the other hand(in addition to any amusement that might be derived) hurts Sony's commercial standing.
I suspect that one General Sherman's er... enthusiastic removal of southern legacy hardware really helped speed up the transition. He did have a real air of resolve when it came to dealing with insurgents.
I'm inclined to wonder if the track is either particularly long, or particularly tortuous, or the constraints imposed by the rules especially arduous. While getting good range out of electric vehicles turns out to be a nasty piece of work, electric motors are practically god's gift to short-range high-speed work. Electric motors achieve their highest torque at stall, so you acceleration is limited mostly by your tires or the desire to not melt any power busses. Such motors can also be used for braking, again limited largely by your tires or desire not to melt anything.
Unless the track is particularly hairy, where the increased mass of a battery pack on wheels would be an issue, or the rules substantially constrain the mass of batteries carried, I would expect electrics to utterly terminate internal combustion units in closed course exercises where cost is a very limited object and endurance measured in minutes isn't a big deal.
I'm afraid that the poster is simultaneously correct, and totally missing the point.
Is it overwhelmingly the case that games are trending toward(and many are already there) a place where they will be somewhere between crippled and bricked when some ill-thought-out online integration or financially shaky company bites the bullet? Hell yeah. Are those same games increasingly likely to be locked down as hard as the publisher can lock them, ensuring that hacking together a 3rd party equivalent will be pretty tricky? Yup. In that sense, he is entirely correct.
However, he seems to be under the impression that this is some sort of honest mistake, a product of over-enthusiasm for cool gizmos among developers. Wouldn't that be nice. Beyond whatever bare minimum is required to sell the thing, longevity is a defect, not a virtue, from the perspective of the seller. After they get paid, you are a cost center, not a customer(Obviously, rank incompetence like having your walled garden go down during a major launch isn't in the seller's interest; but things like that are only a major deal because multiplayer functions are increasingly being forcibly centralized, rather than made a server offering that any player can run). People happily playing classic games are of no financial utility. I suspect that we will see much more of this, and it will not be by accident.
A quick bit of research suggests that the unit price of the cheapest Atom is $19. ION is substantially further up the food chain(and rather more power hungry).
Indeed. I was just emphasizing that(between composite on the low end and HDMI elsewhere) the ability to coax video out of this thing has really trickled down. The only really gaping hole, ironically enough, would be having a VGA out to drive all the aging CRTs and cheapy early model LCDs that you might be most likely to find in a school with budget issues or scrounge for cheap somewhere.
The gaping hole in your strawman is that, under the laws of this jurisdiction, the kiddie porn is inherently illegal, to possess or distribute. There are absolutely no recognized legitimate applications(aside from law enforcement's evidence stash). The limewire client, on the other hand, contains no inherently illegal material whatsoever, and is capable of both licit and illicit uses, by the person downloading it.
I wonder if the SoC they chose lacked a RAMDAC or something. I imagine that, if you are trying to hit that size and price point, you don't really have the luxury of tacking on more support chips than you absolutely need, and most of the ARM chips of the world with any display support at all are presumably mostly designed to deal with legacy/embedded mini LCD screens, or to cope with the contemporary/near future set top box/TV-cellphone connection, etc. use cases.
If only for the chance to cheaply increase my toy stash, I hope that you are wrong, and the modest step-down in spec somehow does it; but I would be wholly unsurprised if you turned out to be correct.