How is the modability of the Kindle firmware these days? I know earlier versions are relatively tamed at this point; but any time I see 'with offers' my loathing gland swells.
If my eyes were on their way out, such a small screen would be truly brutal; but if smallish print isn't an issue small screens really aren't bad(for texts that reflow well, PDFs, technical documentation, images/diagrams, etc. are a total clusterfuck). Back in the day, I burned through a lot of Project Gutenberg stuff with my Visor Edge(mine was silver; but same 160x160 pixel screen) and Weasel Reader. Slim, light, good battery life, backlight was alien-abduction-green but perfectly functional, and zTXT format stored a small library even in the teeny sliver of storage that classic PalmOS devices offered.
Barring the (legitimate and serious; but only if you are one) case of the visually impaired and dealing with documents that reflow poorly, you can do surprisingly well with seriously lousy specs.
Only a verifiable head case would write about a school shooting 900 years in the future. I have it on good authority that the last 'chemical/kinetic homicide' was recorded in the waning days of the Transcend Uprising in 2234. By 2914, the most common spree killings, by method, are 'engineered retroviruses', 'covert antimatter decanting', and nanoassembler override.
Also, ever since Heuristic Neural Patterning became economically viable in the mid 24th century, 'school' exists as little more than a footnote in some of the low level neural patterning modules. I'm not sure why you'd expect to find enough people for a mass casualty incident visiting one.
Oh, don't get me wrong, I have no expectation that this rollout will go well, at all. Y'know all those cautionary tales about throwing technological solutions at human problems? Well, Nigeria has a hell of a lot of human problems and I doubt that the technological solutions will work better than usual.
My observation was narrower: overt violence, imprisonment, or other radical life disruptions among debtors are symptoms of an immaturesystem of credit and interest extraction. Now, since large parts of Nigeria have symptoms that suggest such a system(high levels of local corruption, massive inequality, minimal social infrastructure and documentation, etc.), it is likely that such relatively primitive debt mechanisms will persist, at least for a time.
However, the cards are unlikely to be the ideal mechanism: electronic transactions are traceable, to a degree, and the only greater enemy of corruption than an honest man is a dishonest man's boss who is wondering why he isn't getting his cut of the take. This(as much as any rule of law) helps discourage excessively overt bribe-taking. There's always a bigger fish you'll have to pay off if it becomes clear that you are worth targeting. Ground-level corruption will prefer to deal in cash, or some 'cash equivalent'(if I had to bet, it'd be a local cigarette or phone top-up card, or some other item that is both intrinsically useful and relatively nonperishable if purchased and returned to local vendors: people who need to pay bribes will buy this good, people receiving bribes will receive them 'in kind'; but be able to return, likely minus a small restocking fee, any excess that they don't need. All electronic transactions legitimate, works even if cash if phased out, still transfers value. Something like what happens in prisons with commissary goods).
As for the rest, I stand by the basic conclusion: brutalizing your debtors is inefficient unless there is no other way of keeping them from escaping, or they are so helotized that their value as slave labor is about as high as it could be. Maximum efficiency is somebody able to live a 'normal' productive life while desperately paying the minimum balance on their credit card every month. (Note, I don't say that this is a good thing, it bloody well isn't; but it's the ideal and most advanced form of interest extraction. All other methods, even if scarier or more theatrical, are less efficient and ultimately contrary to the interest of the lender, if they can achieve this one.)
If your needs differ substantially from the server or compute markets (as with buying a cheap printer, or having laptop power saving actually work properly) you may indeed be pretty doomed. To the degree that you can overlap with the needs of server/compute on one end and embedded on the other, though, the market share of desktop boards isn't wildly relevant.
Yes, the SKUs differ; but nobody is going to go out of their way to make their product line more expensive to design and support by adding pointless differences(assorted features enabled or disabled, definitely; but playing NIH between product lines is rather pointless), so it's not clear what desktop Linux has to fear from low market share. If anything, things are far worse in mobile, where the market share is higher; but a substantial percentage of the hardware will do little more than boot a kernel and talk to a TTY somewhere unless you are using an Android BSP and a giant heap of blobs.
32-bit Atoms on UEFI boards are also to be avoided, though I think that they are all also PowerVR. They can be booted; but any normal distro with UEFI support assumes 64 bits and anything with 32bit support tends to assume BIOS. Not impossible; but best avoided.
They're about as vanilla as it's possible to get, which is what you have to do to get anything working with minimal kernel module hacking.
This is generally true, any Intel CPU using board is going to be mostly Intel silicon at the center, with other vendors twiddling around a bit with audio chipsets(unfortunately, as with AC 97 before it, there are...multiple creative ways...to be 'compatible' with Intel's "HD Audio" standard), NICs, extra USB or SATA controllers, and whatnot. Intel usually keeps it simple, stupid(barring the push for UEFI; but now that that's industry-wide you just pick your poison) and tends not to use really dire onboard junk on their midrange and up boards.
That said, you may or may not(mostly may not) be ready to go in Linux if you buy something on launch day. Intel will get it in-tree, probably reasonably quickly; but do yourself a favor and check, then check again with your distro of choice unless you feel like building your own kernels. If you are buying anything that isn't bleeding edge, this is unlikely to be a problem, with the sole exception of a couple of breeds of Atoms(the ones with 'GMA 500' graphics are totally fucked, and the ones with 32-bit UEFI that shipped in a few cheap Win8 tablets are just as fucked in the GPU department and about a factor of ten less fun to actually make boot...)
It's also the case(not just in Africa; but across jurisdictions) that if 'Oh, sure, just put it in the safe deposit box' is a sound strategy, your banking system is probably sufficiently un-doomed that bitcoins are mostly a hobby.
As best I can tell, 'credit check' either has, or is rapidly, mutating into a polite euphemism for 'background check with slight additional emphasis on personal finances'.
It's one thing that somebody might want a credit check if they are loaning me money; but anyone who won't STFU about it(or does; but then runs one anyway) if you offer to pay in cash or a suitably-blessed transfer from a reputable bank is either running directly from a script or interested in something other than credit-worthiness.
Why would you nuke an ID with a negative balance on it?
Even assuming arbitrary malice, it's just not efficient. A debt that the debtor can't afford to pay is a debt you don't get to collect.
In legally and organizationally primitive contexts, like premodern governments or Big Vinny's extralegal lending operation, you do see unproductive means used(debtor's prisons, kneecapping, death); because there simply isn't a way of keeping a debtor on the hook otherwise. In some premodern society where you can move a few towns over and nobody's ever heard of you, playing collections agent is unrewarding. If the loan was extended off the books and doesn't legally exist, your ability to get it paid back by anything other than extralegal means is similarly curtailed.
The ideal situation, for the lender, is one where the target's earning capacity is not impaired, so they'll be able to pay as much as possible; but where they find it either impossible or undesirable to just walk away from the situation. In the case of debt peonage, the debtors are usually at approximately slave levels of human capital investment anyway, so punitive measures don't reduce their(already miserable) earning capacity much; but in almost all cases of better qualified debtors, you really want to touch them as little as possible; but make it impossible to walk away from the debt.
A nice, functional, modern bureaucracy is perfect for that. Without a valid ID that correlates to a suitable history of references, educational credentials, clean criminal record, etc. your life gets a hell of a lot more difficult, and probably poorer, even if you can evade any formal state action against impersonation/non-documented-persons. This provides a considerable incentive to remain at the table; and makes it relatively hard to escape your past. Why shove somebody who owes you money out of that place(where they can still hold a job and make payments, and have a lot to lose if they try to fake their own death or something) and into the underground economy, where they'll probably earn next to nothing and have much less interaction with formalized institutions?
The ability to keep tabs on people across time and place, without necessarily imprisoning or killing them, is about the biggest advance in history for anyone looking to profit from credit.
I suspect that offering a nice, soothing, lumbar puncture to drain that pesky adenosine will be medically unhelpful; but lead to a sharp reduction in the number of employees nodding off while you can see them...
This is supposed to be the future! Why do I need 'sleep' to clear this adenosine from my brain when swarms of nanites in my bloodstream could be doing it instead? So much for progress.
Unfortunately, while not false (in the most obvious case, informants have a way of winding up dead if you are too obvious about their existence); your justification leaves two major issues unaddressed:
1. The government is not refusing to divulge the specific reasons and evidence that led to a particular person being added to the list(which quite plausibly might reveal specific informants, bugged computers, etc. and would likely merit an in camera review or something). They are refusing to divulge the general criteria and possible methods by which anyone could end up on the list. It's the difference between "Tell me exactly who ratted out Big Vinnie" and "What constitutes 'Racketeering' for the purposes of the US criminal code". One is a potential operational risk. The other is 'rule of law'.
2. The 'no fly list' is a bullshit twilight category without obvious protective value. Apparently there are people (and lots of them) so dangerous that they cannot be allowed on a passenger aircraft, even with some sort of enhanced screening; but so safe that apparently no other measures need be taken. It's a combination of state harassment(not being able to fly is a pretty big deal if you travel much) and absurd magical thinking. Too dangerous to fly; but safe enough to do basically anything else? Seriously? Why would that category even exist? Hijacking an airplane with a pointy object shouldn't work anymore(if we finished upgrading the doors), and anyone who can get bombs, firearms, or toxins doesn't need a plane to cause trouble.
The refusal to even outline how you fall into such a category, or why such a category exists, is a profound mockery of the notion of rule of law. No, not every specific detail of how every piece of evidence is gathered can be safely revealed; but that isn't the story here.
One doesn't have to see the value in stuff that isn't immediately applicable R&D(and I'm not here to debate the point, do as you will); but if you are OK with the concept of such research this actually seems like a pretty good idea:
The question of how and why ideas, 'culture', religions, new scientific hypotheses, etc. are transmitted and compete with one another is really a very long standing one. A lot of the historical study emphasizes 'elite' culture and theory(mostly because everything else was oral record only, and that doesn't keep well; but written works sometimes survive) or religious(high frequency of literacy, and proselytizing is a technology of considerable interest to contemporary religions); but there is also study of popular culture, folk mythologies, what the middle and lower classes were reading and watching(once that became common), and so on.
Cultural transmission is a very solid social science topic, and internet memes have the dual virtues of both potentially being novel(they might actually follow some traditional propagation pattern, might be something new, either way would be interesting to know) and being amenable to large-scale analysis because the internet is just so conveniently searchable and heavily cached in various places. You don't have to like the entire field; but this research project seems like a perfectly reasonable exercise.
You wouldn't even need to be having production issues. As with most vendors, Nvidia has a bunch of options for sale and the nicer ones cost more. Even if you have the capability to stuff boards with the nicer chips just as easily as the cheap ones, a bit of fraud will do wonders for your BoM costs.
It would be interesting for an intermediary to be involved since producing/obtaining correctly faked GPUs is a comparatively specialized task. Not rocket science, pick the cheapest Nvidia silicon that is close enough to not react horribly to drivers expecting the real thing, tamper with the identifying portions of the firmware, replace any packaging, stickers, or other labels; but it's hardly the old 'purchase thing from best buy, return brick in the box' scam.
This doesn't mean that it isn't one of the intermediaries; but if it is they are working with considerably more sophistication than the 'fell off the truck' level of supply chain skimming.
This doesn't apply to four post gear or anything that gets too toasty; but the fact that a lot of music related hardware is rackmount and has to survive roadies and touring makes rack hardware surprisingly attractive for mobile use. If the job is too big for a laptop and small enough for half depth hardware, just check out the local music supply place and pick out a nice portable rack. Quite sturdy and shock resistant, usually at least offers a front door that clips on well enough that you can ship it, available in a variety of heights(and typically stackable unless you go for a wheeled one). A very convenient overlap.
I doubt it would be trivial: you can sacrifice capacity for some speed by reducing the amount of platter area you use(and thus how far back and forth the read/write head assembly needs to move); but RPM is still a serious constraint, and bumping that tends to get rather costly. 15k RPM has been the effective ceiling for years, and while increases in data density improve best-case read and write speeds they have no effect on how long you have to wait for a given chunk of disk to finish its rotation and come back under the read head.
It also doesn't help that SSDs are aggressively moving into the high speed area. If you applied the engineering tricks used in ultracentrifuges you could probably build a damn fast HDD; but doing so for less than the price of a really nice SSD would be a great deal more challenging.
New Hampshire runs a very similar operation. I've never quite understood why a state whose motto is "Live Free or Die" lets The Man control their booze supply; but I imagine that the indirect tax of a state liquor monopoly is more popular than some direct tax levied elsewhere.
Between manufacturer avarice and customer stupidity I hold out very little hope; but it would warm my cold, black, shriveled, heart if somebody would standardize a key-fill interface (like the DS-101/DS-102 devices that the DoD has for connection to U-229 ports on communications gear and other things that need crypto keys; but actually remotely suitable for end users, unlike those systems) for dealing with this class of problems...
Right now, it seems like everything is either "Oh, totally wide open, maybe papered over with some pitiful little obfuscation attempt" or "So damn much asymmetric key crypto that you'll need to beg the vendor for permission to do anything"; but options are very, very, thin on the ground if you want something as secure as a mothership-bound lockdown device; but obedient to your crypto keys, not the ones burned in at the factory.
It's like the 'secure boot' controversy that erupted a while back. "Well, you can have Microsoft's keys and protection against certain types of OS tampering, or you can turn it off entirely(x86 only other restrictions may apply); but set your own root of trust? Ha!"
It's insane that it isn't easier to re-key/re-pair with a replacement device; but I suspect that it is otherwise very much for the best to move some functions to the iPod.
Apple has spent a Lot of money designing iDevices and perfecting them over multiple generations. Hard to say how much; but it's a large number. Conveniently for you, they'll sell 'em to you in quantities of 1 for a only a modest premium over production cost.
In an ideal world, the prosthesis would require no 'interface' at all(your arm doesn't, after all); but if it does, a company specializing in prosthetics doesn't have a prayer of delivering an interface device nearly as good as an iDevice or Android unit for less than they could just buy one and develop the necessary software on top of it. (In practice, they'd probably be lucky to develop something substantially worse for three powers of ten more, if they tried it.)
If it turns out that timing-critical control and feedback loop stuff is being done over bluetooth, by an 'app', somebody needs a hell of a beating; but if it's just a UI/Configuration/etc. interface using an off-the-shelf device is extremely logical.
It tends to be discouraged, out of concern that states aren't very good at it, or that they might be inclined to use their other powers to make themselves more competitive; but there isn't anything architecturally precluding a state from earning money. They can have employees, own and operate R&D and production facilities, sell products, same as a company.
There are reasons to discourage that, and have them focus on things that the private sector can't do or does poorly; but those are pragmatic considerations, not fundamental obstacles.
I'd be totally unsurprised by incredibly bad design; but that incredibly bad design would also tend to make it relatively trivial to access whatever memory holds the UID or key used to establish the pairing and blank or rewrite it to establish a new pairing with a new device. Probably not in the owner's manual; but likely something that an EE undergrad could do with access to a few hundreds to thousands of dollars worth of borrowed test equipment and a congratulatory couple of six-packs. Definitely for less than replacing the hardware.
Design that is both appallingly ill thought out and too ironclad to subvert would be fairly surprising. Now, if it were a prosthetic eye, and needed to appease the MPAA when handling Premium Content, I'd be more concerned...
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How is the modability of the Kindle firmware these days? I know earlier versions are relatively tamed at this point; but any time I see 'with offers' my loathing gland swells.
If my eyes were on their way out, such a small screen would be truly brutal; but if smallish print isn't an issue small screens really aren't bad(for texts that reflow well, PDFs, technical documentation, images/diagrams, etc. are a total clusterfuck). Back in the day, I burned through a lot of Project Gutenberg stuff with my Visor Edge(mine was silver; but same 160x160 pixel screen) and Weasel Reader. Slim, light, good battery life, backlight was alien-abduction-green but perfectly functional, and zTXT format stored a small library even in the teeny sliver of storage that classic PalmOS devices offered.
Barring the (legitimate and serious; but only if you are one) case of the visually impaired and dealing with documents that reflow poorly, you can do surprisingly well with seriously lousy specs.
Only a verifiable head case would write about a school shooting 900 years in the future. I have it on good authority that the last 'chemical/kinetic homicide' was recorded in the waning days of the Transcend Uprising in 2234. By 2914, the most common spree killings, by method, are 'engineered retroviruses', 'covert antimatter decanting', and nanoassembler override.
Also, ever since Heuristic Neural Patterning became economically viable in the mid 24th century, 'school' exists as little more than a footnote in some of the low level neural patterning modules. I'm not sure why you'd expect to find enough people for a mass casualty incident visiting one.
Oh, don't get me wrong, I have no expectation that this rollout will go well, at all. Y'know all those cautionary tales about throwing technological solutions at human problems? Well, Nigeria has a hell of a lot of human problems and I doubt that the technological solutions will work better than usual.
My observation was narrower: overt violence, imprisonment, or other radical life disruptions among debtors are symptoms of an immaturesystem of credit and interest extraction. Now, since large parts of Nigeria have symptoms that suggest such a system(high levels of local corruption, massive inequality, minimal social infrastructure and documentation, etc.), it is likely that such relatively primitive debt mechanisms will persist, at least for a time.
However, the cards are unlikely to be the ideal mechanism: electronic transactions are traceable, to a degree, and the only greater enemy of corruption than an honest man is a dishonest man's boss who is wondering why he isn't getting his cut of the take. This(as much as any rule of law) helps discourage excessively overt bribe-taking. There's always a bigger fish you'll have to pay off if it becomes clear that you are worth targeting. Ground-level corruption will prefer to deal in cash, or some 'cash equivalent'(if I had to bet, it'd be a local cigarette or phone top-up card, or some other item that is both intrinsically useful and relatively nonperishable if purchased and returned to local vendors: people who need to pay bribes will buy this good, people receiving bribes will receive them 'in kind'; but be able to return, likely minus a small restocking fee, any excess that they don't need. All electronic transactions legitimate, works even if cash if phased out, still transfers value. Something like what happens in prisons with commissary goods).
As for the rest, I stand by the basic conclusion: brutalizing your debtors is inefficient unless there is no other way of keeping them from escaping, or they are so helotized that their value as slave labor is about as high as it could be. Maximum efficiency is somebody able to live a 'normal' productive life while desperately paying the minimum balance on their credit card every month. (Note, I don't say that this is a good thing, it bloody well isn't; but it's the ideal and most advanced form of interest extraction. All other methods, even if scarier or more theatrical, are less efficient and ultimately contrary to the interest of the lender, if they can achieve this one.)
If your needs differ substantially from the server or compute markets (as with buying a cheap printer, or having laptop power saving actually work properly) you may indeed be pretty doomed. To the degree that you can overlap with the needs of server/compute on one end and embedded on the other, though, the market share of desktop boards isn't wildly relevant.
Yes, the SKUs differ; but nobody is going to go out of their way to make their product line more expensive to design and support by adding pointless differences(assorted features enabled or disabled, definitely; but playing NIH between product lines is rather pointless), so it's not clear what desktop Linux has to fear from low market share. If anything, things are far worse in mobile, where the market share is higher; but a substantial percentage of the hardware will do little more than boot a kernel and talk to a TTY somewhere unless you are using an Android BSP and a giant heap of blobs.
32-bit Atoms on UEFI boards are also to be avoided, though I think that they are all also PowerVR. They can be booted; but any normal distro with UEFI support assumes 64 bits and anything with 32bit support tends to assume BIOS. Not impossible; but best avoided.
They're about as vanilla as it's possible to get, which is what you have to do to get anything working with minimal kernel module hacking.
This is generally true, any Intel CPU using board is going to be mostly Intel silicon at the center, with other vendors twiddling around a bit with audio chipsets(unfortunately, as with AC 97 before it, there are...multiple creative ways...to be 'compatible' with Intel's "HD Audio" standard), NICs, extra USB or SATA controllers, and whatnot. Intel usually keeps it simple, stupid(barring the push for UEFI; but now that that's industry-wide you just pick your poison) and tends not to use really dire onboard junk on their midrange and up boards.
That said, you may or may not(mostly may not) be ready to go in Linux if you buy something on launch day. Intel will get it in-tree, probably reasonably quickly; but do yourself a favor and check, then check again with your distro of choice unless you feel like building your own kernels. If you are buying anything that isn't bleeding edge, this is unlikely to be a problem, with the sole exception of a couple of breeds of Atoms(the ones with 'GMA 500' graphics are totally fucked, and the ones with 32-bit UEFI that shipped in a few cheap Win8 tablets are just as fucked in the GPU department and about a factor of ten less fun to actually make boot...)
It's also the case(not just in Africa; but across jurisdictions) that if 'Oh, sure, just put it in the safe deposit box' is a sound strategy, your banking system is probably sufficiently un-doomed that bitcoins are mostly a hobby.
As best I can tell, 'credit check' either has, or is rapidly, mutating into a polite euphemism for 'background check with slight additional emphasis on personal finances'.
It's one thing that somebody might want a credit check if they are loaning me money; but anyone who won't STFU about it(or does; but then runs one anyway) if you offer to pay in cash or a suitably-blessed transfer from a reputable bank is either running directly from a script or interested in something other than credit-worthiness.
Why would you nuke an ID with a negative balance on it?
Even assuming arbitrary malice, it's just not efficient. A debt that the debtor can't afford to pay is a debt you don't get to collect.
In legally and organizationally primitive contexts, like premodern governments or Big Vinny's extralegal lending operation, you do see unproductive means used(debtor's prisons, kneecapping, death); because there simply isn't a way of keeping a debtor on the hook otherwise. In some premodern society where you can move a few towns over and nobody's ever heard of you, playing collections agent is unrewarding. If the loan was extended off the books and doesn't legally exist, your ability to get it paid back by anything other than extralegal means is similarly curtailed.
The ideal situation, for the lender, is one where the target's earning capacity is not impaired, so they'll be able to pay as much as possible; but where they find it either impossible or undesirable to just walk away from the situation. In the case of debt peonage, the debtors are usually at approximately slave levels of human capital investment anyway, so punitive measures don't reduce their(already miserable) earning capacity much; but in almost all cases of better qualified debtors, you really want to touch them as little as possible; but make it impossible to walk away from the debt.
A nice, functional, modern bureaucracy is perfect for that. Without a valid ID that correlates to a suitable history of references, educational credentials, clean criminal record, etc. your life gets a hell of a lot more difficult, and probably poorer, even if you can evade any formal state action against impersonation/non-documented-persons. This provides a considerable incentive to remain at the table; and makes it relatively hard to escape your past. Why shove somebody who owes you money out of that place(where they can still hold a job and make payments, and have a lot to lose if they try to fake their own death or something) and into the underground economy, where they'll probably earn next to nothing and have much less interaction with formalized institutions?
The ability to keep tabs on people across time and place, without necessarily imprisoning or killing them, is about the biggest advance in history for anyone looking to profit from credit.
I suspect that offering a nice, soothing, lumbar puncture to drain that pesky adenosine will be medically unhelpful; but lead to a sharp reduction in the number of employees nodding off while you can see them...
This is supposed to be the future! Why do I need 'sleep' to clear this adenosine from my brain when swarms of nanites in my bloodstream could be doing it instead? So much for progress.
Unfortunately, while not false (in the most obvious case, informants have a way of winding up dead if you are too obvious about their existence); your justification leaves two major issues unaddressed:
1. The government is not refusing to divulge the specific reasons and evidence that led to a particular person being added to the list(which quite plausibly might reveal specific informants, bugged computers, etc. and would likely merit an in camera review or something). They are refusing to divulge the general criteria and possible methods by which anyone could end up on the list. It's the difference between "Tell me exactly who ratted out Big Vinnie" and "What constitutes 'Racketeering' for the purposes of the US criminal code". One is a potential operational risk. The other is 'rule of law'.
2. The 'no fly list' is a bullshit twilight category without obvious protective value. Apparently there are people (and lots of them) so dangerous that they cannot be allowed on a passenger aircraft, even with some sort of enhanced screening; but so safe that apparently no other measures need be taken. It's a combination of state harassment(not being able to fly is a pretty big deal if you travel much) and absurd magical thinking. Too dangerous to fly; but safe enough to do basically anything else? Seriously? Why would that category even exist? Hijacking an airplane with a pointy object shouldn't work anymore(if we finished upgrading the doors), and anyone who can get bombs, firearms, or toxins doesn't need a plane to cause trouble.
The refusal to even outline how you fall into such a category, or why such a category exists, is a profound mockery of the notion of rule of law. No, not every specific detail of how every piece of evidence is gathered can be safely revealed; but that isn't the story here.
In fairness, have you ever seen a car seat that a horseshoe crab would find comfortable?
One doesn't have to see the value in stuff that isn't immediately applicable R&D(and I'm not here to debate the point, do as you will); but if you are OK with the concept of such research this actually seems like a pretty good idea:
The question of how and why ideas, 'culture', religions, new scientific hypotheses, etc. are transmitted and compete with one another is really a very long standing one. A lot of the historical study emphasizes 'elite' culture and theory(mostly because everything else was oral record only, and that doesn't keep well; but written works sometimes survive) or religious(high frequency of literacy, and proselytizing is a technology of considerable interest to contemporary religions); but there is also study of popular culture, folk mythologies, what the middle and lower classes were reading and watching(once that became common), and so on.
Cultural transmission is a very solid social science topic, and internet memes have the dual virtues of both potentially being novel(they might actually follow some traditional propagation pattern, might be something new, either way would be interesting to know) and being amenable to large-scale analysis because the internet is just so conveniently searchable and heavily cached in various places. You don't have to like the entire field; but this research project seems like a perfectly reasonable exercise.
You wouldn't even need to be having production issues. As with most vendors, Nvidia has a bunch of options for sale and the nicer ones cost more. Even if you have the capability to stuff boards with the nicer chips just as easily as the cheap ones, a bit of fraud will do wonders for your BoM costs.
It would be interesting for an intermediary to be involved since producing/obtaining correctly faked GPUs is a comparatively specialized task. Not rocket science, pick the cheapest Nvidia silicon that is close enough to not react horribly to drivers expecting the real thing, tamper with the identifying portions of the firmware, replace any packaging, stickers, or other labels; but it's hardly the old 'purchase thing from best buy, return brick in the box' scam.
This doesn't mean that it isn't one of the intermediaries; but if it is they are working with considerably more sophistication than the 'fell off the truck' level of supply chain skimming.
"Ve...haf vays... of making you valk...'
This doesn't apply to four post gear or anything that gets too toasty; but the fact that a lot of music related hardware is rackmount and has to survive roadies and touring makes rack hardware surprisingly attractive for mobile use. If the job is too big for a laptop and small enough for half depth hardware, just check out the local music supply place and pick out a nice portable rack. Quite sturdy and shock resistant, usually at least offers a front door that clips on well enough that you can ship it, available in a variety of heights(and typically stackable unless you go for a wheeled one). A very convenient overlap.
I doubt it would be trivial: you can sacrifice capacity for some speed by reducing the amount of platter area you use(and thus how far back and forth the read/write head assembly needs to move); but RPM is still a serious constraint, and bumping that tends to get rather costly. 15k RPM has been the effective ceiling for years, and while increases in data density improve best-case read and write speeds they have no effect on how long you have to wait for a given chunk of disk to finish its rotation and come back under the read head.
It also doesn't help that SSDs are aggressively moving into the high speed area. If you applied the engineering tricks used in ultracentrifuges you could probably build a damn fast HDD; but doing so for less than the price of a really nice SSD would be a great deal more challenging.
New Hampshire runs a very similar operation. I've never quite understood why a state whose motto is "Live Free or Die" lets The Man control their booze supply; but I imagine that the indirect tax of a state liquor monopoly is more popular than some direct tax levied elsewhere.
Between manufacturer avarice and customer stupidity I hold out very little hope; but it would warm my cold, black, shriveled, heart if somebody would standardize a key-fill interface (like the DS-101/DS-102 devices that the DoD has for connection to U-229 ports on communications gear and other things that need crypto keys; but actually remotely suitable for end users, unlike those systems) for dealing with this class of problems...
Right now, it seems like everything is either "Oh, totally wide open, maybe papered over with some pitiful little obfuscation attempt" or "So damn much asymmetric key crypto that you'll need to beg the vendor for permission to do anything"; but options are very, very, thin on the ground if you want something as secure as a mothership-bound lockdown device; but obedient to your crypto keys, not the ones burned in at the factory.
It's like the 'secure boot' controversy that erupted a while back. "Well, you can have Microsoft's keys and protection against certain types of OS tampering, or you can turn it off entirely(x86 only other restrictions may apply); but set your own root of trust? Ha!"
It's insane that it isn't easier to re-key/re-pair with a replacement device; but I suspect that it is otherwise very much for the best to move some functions to the iPod.
Apple has spent a Lot of money designing iDevices and perfecting them over multiple generations. Hard to say how much; but it's a large number. Conveniently for you, they'll sell 'em to you in quantities of 1 for a only a modest premium over production cost.
In an ideal world, the prosthesis would require no 'interface' at all(your arm doesn't, after all); but if it does, a company specializing in prosthetics doesn't have a prayer of delivering an interface device nearly as good as an iDevice or Android unit for less than they could just buy one and develop the necessary software on top of it. (In practice, they'd probably be lucky to develop something substantially worse for three powers of ten more, if they tried it.)
If it turns out that timing-critical control and feedback loop stuff is being done over bluetooth, by an 'app', somebody needs a hell of a beating; but if it's just a UI/Configuration/etc. interface using an off-the-shelf device is extremely logical.
It tends to be discouraged, out of concern that states aren't very good at it, or that they might be inclined to use their other powers to make themselves more competitive; but there isn't anything architecturally precluding a state from earning money. They can have employees, own and operate R&D and production facilities, sell products, same as a company.
There are reasons to discourage that, and have them focus on things that the private sector can't do or does poorly; but those are pragmatic considerations, not fundamental obstacles.
I'd be totally unsurprised by incredibly bad design; but that incredibly bad design would also tend to make it relatively trivial to access whatever memory holds the UID or key used to establish the pairing and blank or rewrite it to establish a new pairing with a new device. Probably not in the owner's manual; but likely something that an EE undergrad could do with access to a few hundreds to thousands of dollars worth of borrowed test equipment and a congratulatory couple of six-packs. Definitely for less than replacing the hardware.
Design that is both appallingly ill thought out and too ironclad to subvert would be fairly surprising. Now, if it were a prosthetic eye, and needed to appease the MPAA when handling Premium Content, I'd be more concerned...