Of course, it's because a developer in Texas can just buy the land and build a wind farm.
No, it's because California has
A) been on a green kick so long that the majority of the areas suitable for wind farms have already been used.
B) Texas has a lot more wind, period. It's just geographically lucky.
C) California is much richer in sun than wind, and so, is expanding into the slightly more expensive field of solar power, rather than adding a bit more wind.
D) Texas has much smaller of a population, so it's much easier to barely try, and hit a large-sounding PERCENTAGE, though much less in absolute terms.
E) California has much more hydro to draw on, as much as 1/3rd of all power used in the state 2 years ago (a lesser percantage now, as power demand has increased).
F) You will use any opportunity, to shill for your anti-regulation cause, no matter how twisted the logic required.
This is why I believe they should stop ALL money going to huge multi-national corps (who have their own R&D money anyway) and focus on getting micro-loans to smaller businesses who can't offshore their work as easily. Start preferring the little guy trying to start something on a local corner by his house instead of a corporation that really has no home or loyalty whatsoever.
While you might have something vis-a-vis "loyalty", it's certainly NOT true that only large multinationals off-shore their labor force.
You'd be amazed by the number of times I've been hired for some consultant work by a tiny company, only to find my interaction with the 1 or 2-man IT department severely hampered by lack of knowledge and time zone differences, because they were located in India.
And that's nothing compared to call centers. If you're looking to contract-out your orders or support work, you have 99 Indian companys to choose from, for every 1 domestic company. And the deals work out better for small companies, because the cost is based on the call volume, not a fixed per-hour rate.
Irrelevant. Zilog has a lot of processors out there, too... They're not competing in the same market. ARM is working on breaking-in, MIPS is already there, as is x86 (Geode and ULV Pentiums more than Atom just yet).
(frankly those Chinese netbooks are probably less powerful than an iPhone with it's ARM).
Yes, the several-years-old, absolutely dirt cheap, 400MHz MIPS CPU used in cheap Chinese-made netbooks is likely slightly less powerful than the nice new and expensive ARM CPU found in the similarly expensive iPhone... So what?
Take a look at the 3rd generation Dragon Chip if you want power. Super-scalar, competing with desktop chips, still in a minuscule power envelope. Much faster than anything ARM has to offer.
Though, PowerPC chips tend to put them both to shame, while in the same ultra-low-power category.
MIPS could have been the standard mobile CPU but it never was. Why?
A very good question... considering that MIPS WAS in fact the standard mobile CPU for YEARS.
"Through the 1990s, the MIPS architecture was widely adopted by the embedded market" "it was estimated that one in three RISC microprocessors produced were MIPS"
modern ARM smartphones are able to run a web browser (with fancy HTML5 features) and other real applications at a reasonable speed with far lower power usage (=longer battery life) than an x86 processor
Software development priorities have INFINITELY more to do with it than the CPU. Firefox is a dog. It should be 100X faster.
ARM processors can be very useful in that they are fast enough (or getting there) for a lot of people's everyday usage and they use far less power than x86 processors.
Yes, but you're talking about saving a couple watts, in a device which uses 20+. You wouldn't much notice if the CPU was completely eliminated.
And besides, I was simply refuting the parent's ridiculous assertion.
For months the New York Times (as well as other "legitimate" news outlets (I'm not counting the Fox network)) beat the drums of war. They helped stampede the US into the Iraqi invasion and discounted dissenting opinion and facts.
The big-three TV networks all spent their air time debunking every bit of faulty evidence supplied by the White House. What more could you expect than that?
Its solvable by a simple law- no employee of a corporation may be paid more than 10x the average employee.
Simple Solution: Bob the janitor is now the CEO of Microsoft. The former executives were all hired by the independent MikroSoft Corp., an independent consulting firm which does nothing but manage other firms... their only client, Microsoft, pays them quite well for their valuable service. Of course all 100 of them are paid quite well.
It also stops outsourcing, as if the CEO wants to make megabucks, he has to pay those workers as much as he would US workers.
See above. Nobody hires an employee in other countries. No. They contract out their phone center to Bangaledeshi Teleproto Corp. for a fee, and have no knowledge or interest in how many individuals are employed.
At least ARM have actually been highly successful. PowerPC and MIPS - they aren't the embedded champions so why bring them up?
MIPS has been a lot more successful in this space than ARM ever has. Cheap PCs all over China are using MIPS CPUs which rival 1GHz x86 CPUs. <$150 Netbooks have been available for a couple years now, using MIPS chips, a market ARM has been making a lot of noise about, but has only just now entered, and not even near the price point...
Perhaps the reason why ARM did well is because it really did have a clever idea or two and everyone else was too arrogant to have considered the market that they all now want to enter.
See above. ARM has been making a hell of a lot of PR noise, but that's the only thing they've done with any success.
Oh, and I have seen ARM Smartbook prototypes that take 1-2 watt TOTAL (including the Tegra GPU), and run pretty close to the 2 GHz already, with my own eyes. So don't tell me, something I have seen myself, can not possibly exist.
100% MHz-myth idiocy.
Your 2GHz ARM Smartbook would probably compare decently to a 200MHz PentiumII, but a 2GHz Core2 would make your 2GHz ARM CPU look like it's standing still. Just look-up the DMIPS rating of the ARM chip, and an x86 chip...
Better yet, ask yourself: "Why aren't there any supercomputers on the TOP500 which are based on ARM CPUs? Why are they all x86 or POWER?"
The performance of ARM is all smoke and mirrors. They're designed to be impressively low-power, and compete well with slower microcontrolers, but don't hold a candle to real CPUs.
I used to run FreeSCO on an old P-133 box. Then one day I realized I was using about $50/yr in electricity just so I could have a "free" replacement for a $59.99 router.
1) Your elecricity cost estimate is high, that $60 router is also going to draw power. You calculated electricity including taxes, but the router without so it's even more expensive. I'd call it 3+ years before you make-up the purchase price... hope it works that long.
2) There's nothing stopping you from underclocking and undervolting that PC until it draws very little power. I bought a 550MHz AMD K6-3 with motherboard on eBay for $20 shipped, and stuck it in an old case, underclocked it to 100MHz (drawing all of 5 watts), running with just one fan powered by the 5V rail, an old compact-flash card for a HDD, running COMPLETELY silent. It's worked perfectly for several years now.
3) While a PC may use more electricity, at least it actually works. How many times a week are you power-cycling your $60 router? Plus, the PC allows installing ANY SOFTWARE YOU COULD POSSIBLY WANT. Being able to use a REAL stateful firewall is worth far more than the difference in power usage.
A large number of planes in service today (at least for domestic flights within the US) aren't wired for electrical service to passenger seats.
I don't remember having to pull out a match to ignite the reading light over my head the last time I flew, so it's not gas/oil. And it instantly turns on/off, so it's not chemical either.
Yes, I'm serious: Ban everything, and force passengers to maybe, I don't know, read a book perhaps?
Just wait until they figure out that paper is flammable... No more books.
The question isn't electronics or books, it's personal entertainment versus in-flight multimedia systems. $20 headphones so you can listen to the same 5 genre cliche songs over and over... $5/minute for a phone call... Lowest-common-denomination TV and movies, selected for those that won't possibly stimulate nervous passengers in any way... etc.
If I could exchange my laptop for seats that are twice the size, and planes that are only 3/4ths full like they used-to be, I'd gladly do it. If the choice is smaller seats & no entertainment, I'll stop flying for even cross-continental trips, and take the train in nice large comfortable seats, with a HVAC system which can easily handle being parked in direct sunlight, peace and quiet without the whining turbines, with all my electronic devices, with a wall outlet so I don't even NEED batteries, and so much personal and cargo room you can pack your motorcycle in your luggage and nobody will care. Never mind no security checks.
Why would you buy that when you can get a 10" Dell mini
Well, 2X the price would be one good reason... Once you upgrade to the larger battery, solid-state HDD, and including shipping and taxes, you're paying almost 2X the price, most certainly NOT "almost the same price"
which runs every x86 app in existence through Windows, Ubuntu Preinstalled or Hackintosh?
If you want Windows, go for the Dell. If you want Linux, you'll barely even notice you're on a different architecture... All the same apps will work. The only big one many people use being Flash, and there are some alternatives for that.
What's your experience with the speed of files in and out of the Buffalo device?
Absolutely TERRIBLE, no question about it. You'll get much better performance out of the oldest system you can snag off ebay for $20.
Even if you get one for free, I would recomend NOT using it. They made some of the most horrendous design decision ever. First is vastly underpowering the system. Second is giving it anything more than 10BaseT networking, and advertising it as if there's a snowball's chance in hell it'll be able to utilize it... Third, is not providing ANY WAY for the end user to access the underlying system, so when the array gets completely hosed for no reason (and it will! No question.) you can't get in, anywhere, to fix anything, and only a hacked firmware image will save you... Fourth and perhaps most significantly, is cheaping-out on $1 worth of flash, and instead storing the OS image on the HDDs, leaving it vulnerable to data corruption, and a huge pain in the ass to bootstrap with fresh drives (requiring Windows, or at least WINE to run the firmware updater app).
I posted on a forum somewhere about all the typos I found in the firmware of my unit... "ehco" is a good extensive one in the software-raid scripts, ensuring nobody can actually get the reports of a few specific errors, should they occur. And this is in a commercial product.
Netflix would print out a catalog every year, and mail a copy to each member. Several pre-paid postcards would be included, where you scribble down the ID# of the movies you want in your queue. A few large internet retailer concentration sites like Buy.com, Amazon, etc., would put out a magazine every year as well, and send out a few smaller inserts every month or so to subscribers.
Option #2 BBS
All large internet sites get phone banks, which people can dial-in to. Dial-up to Netflix to reorder your queue. Dial-in to Google to find the product you want (which lists the phone number of the company of course), then disconnect and dial-in to the best company to place your order. Dial-in to UPS to track the status of your package.
Option #3 Tape-swap
Netflix catalogs are distributed to all subscribers by mailing CDs every few months. People can print-out their queue, or mail back a mini-CD.
Wikipedia lives on by interested parties mailing a self-addressed stamped envelope with a flash drive inside to Jimmy Wales. Volunteers dump an up-to-date copy of the Wiki onto each flash drive. Also included are a handful of applications for various operating systems which allow locally viewing and editing your local copy of the Wiki. After you've made a significant number of changes, you again mail your SASE + flash drive to Jimmy, and get your updates merged, and your Wiki updated.
Option #4 UUCP Web companies band together to come up with an offline electronic message distribution system. Companies adapt their online presence into something workable via a USENET system. Updates are asynchronously distributed in a hierarchical fashion from group to group, and city to city, and then back up the chain again. Lengthy delays are involved, but the messages get through most of the time.
Google becomes a directory of USENET groups, Netflix barely changes, Amazon changes their product catalog slightly, but continues to operate. Dupes on Slashdot have plausible excuses. Facebook/MySpace continue as before, with even less privacy. Twitter continues to be a popular way to distribute messages despite being completely unrecognizable, and having no advantages over standard messaging. RIAA/MPAA as pissed off as ever as the movies and music continues to flow.
However, now that cars are a major part of the fabric of our everyday lives, it would be substantially more painful to give them up completely now.
It wouldn't be too bad. Bicycles work as well now as they ever did. Without cars filling up the streets, we'd have plenty of open road to bike to/from work, stores, etc.
Supply and demand would kick in, and in short order, instead of mega shopping malls on the edge of cities, there would be a large number of smaller stores throughout each town. Instead of people driving 60 miles each day to work, they'd stick to slightly lower-paying jobs in-town, or else move to the city where they work... Horror of horrors, I know.
Of course, these analogies all fall down because you can't single out an object, and remove it. The technology behind it will just be developed into slightly different imitators (bicycles with gas engines, or computer WANs simply being interconnected in a more ad-hoc way). You really can't get rid of device X without getting rid of the decades of technological development that created it.
"No bastard ever won a war by dying for his country. He won it by making the other poor dumb bastard die for his country."
A quote by Gen. George S. Patton. Likely the most over-hyped military leader in all of US Military History. The only thing he was particularly good at was PR. He's a completely mediocre commander otherwise.
As long as the OS isn't completely locked down from the user, there will be malware.
If you operate as a non-privileged user, and there aren't gaping local root exploits, malware is pretty damn toothless.
Sure, it could still send out some e-mails, record your keystrokes, etc., but it will show up in `ps` just like any other process, and it will have to launch itself from a few standard few locations available, where it will be easy to find, and stop from running.
So, yes, Linux could have malware, but it would be the minor nuisance type, rather than the "everyone's infected, it's impossible to remove, and the internet is being brought to its knees" type.
Additionally, the problem with Linux viruses is that people get their software from a central repository, with cryptographic checksums and the like. The world would be very different if Windows users got all their software through WindowsUpdate, instead of constantly downloading crap from random websites.
They could even distribute an Android OS distro with a crypto key that is bonded to that phone's serial#, which is needed by any app to run or even to decompress/decrypt from the distribution package, so military apps can't be used or inspected outside the military's own phones.
If you want to encrypt an app so it can't be opened without the proper key, you can just encrypt it with ANYTHING. PGP seems the best candidate. You don't need any special hardware or software configuration.
If you, instead, expect an application to determine the environment it is running in, and decide whether or not it is a valid device... That is called DRM, and it is both theoretically and practically impossible.
Chargers being able to supply 5 volts at 2A won't blow up anything and recharge devices four times faster
If you design a phone to be charged at 5V@2,000mA, and plug it into an adapter or USB port which can only provide 5V@500mA, your adapter (or USB port) will soon catch fire, or burn out.
The device has no way to know what current the power supply can provide, and only high-end power supplies have any form of current regulation/overload protection built-in.
Now all we need is a universal standard of (in the words of Douglas Adams) 'little dongly things' for everything else
Scott Adams is a comedian, not an electrical engineer.
The amperage only matters if it isn't high enough... A 10amp wall-wart can power your low-power devices just fine.
That just leaves polarity, connector, and voltage. There are PLENTY of universal power supplies out there which come with a dozen connectors, and the ability to switch polarity and voltages from 1 to 12 volts, covering just about everything but laptops...
Slashdot Mirror
No, it's because California has
A) been on a green kick so long that the majority of the areas suitable for wind farms have already been used.
B) Texas has a lot more wind, period. It's just geographically lucky.
C) California is much richer in sun than wind, and so, is expanding into the slightly more expensive field of solar power, rather than adding a bit more wind.
D) Texas has much smaller of a population, so it's much easier to barely try, and hit a large-sounding PERCENTAGE, though much less in absolute terms.
E) California has much more hydro to draw on, as much as 1/3rd of all power used in the state 2 years ago (a lesser percantage now, as power demand has increased).
F) You will use any opportunity, to shill for your anti-regulation cause, no matter how twisted the logic required.
While you might have something vis-a-vis "loyalty", it's certainly NOT true that only large multinationals off-shore their labor force.
You'd be amazed by the number of times I've been hired for some consultant work by a tiny company, only to find my interaction with the 1 or 2-man IT department severely hampered by lack of knowledge and time zone differences, because they were located in India.
And that's nothing compared to call centers. If you're looking to contract-out your orders or support work, you have 99 Indian companys to choose from, for every 1 domestic company. And the deals work out better for small companies, because the cost is based on the call volume, not a fixed per-hour rate.
Irrelevant. Zilog has a lot of processors out there, too... They're not competing in the same market. ARM is working on breaking-in, MIPS is already there, as is x86 (Geode and ULV Pentiums more than Atom just yet).
Yes, the several-years-old, absolutely dirt cheap, 400MHz MIPS CPU used in cheap Chinese-made netbooks is likely slightly less powerful than the nice new and expensive ARM CPU found in the similarly expensive iPhone... So what?
Take a look at the 3rd generation Dragon Chip if you want power. Super-scalar, competing with desktop chips, still in a minuscule power envelope. Much faster than anything ARM has to offer.
Though, PowerPC chips tend to put them both to shame, while in the same ultra-low-power category.
A very good question... considering that MIPS WAS in fact the standard mobile CPU for YEARS.
"Through the 1990s, the MIPS architecture was widely adopted by the embedded market"
"it was estimated that one in three RISC microprocessors produced were MIPS"
Software development priorities have INFINITELY more to do with it than the CPU. Firefox is a dog. It should be 100X faster.
Yes, but you're talking about saving a couple watts, in a device which uses 20+. You wouldn't much notice if the CPU was completely eliminated.
And besides, I was simply refuting the parent's ridiculous assertion.
That seems unlikely. There are a large number of neat-freaks in the world.
Janitor is a disrespected job because anyone can and will do it, so the pay is crap.
The big-three TV networks all spent their air time debunking every bit of faulty evidence supplied by the White House. What more could you expect than that?
Simple Solution: Bob the janitor is now the CEO of Microsoft. The former executives were all hired by the independent MikroSoft Corp., an independent consulting firm which does nothing but manage other firms... their only client, Microsoft, pays them quite well for their valuable service. Of course all 100 of them are paid quite well.
See above. Nobody hires an employee in other countries. No. They contract out their phone center to Bangaledeshi Teleproto Corp. for a fee, and have no knowledge or interest in how many individuals are employed.
MIPS has been a lot more successful in this space than ARM ever has. Cheap PCs all over China are using MIPS CPUs which rival 1GHz x86 CPUs. <$150 Netbooks have been available for a couple years now, using MIPS chips, a market ARM has been making a lot of noise about, but has only just now entered, and not even near the price point...
See above. ARM has been making a hell of a lot of PR noise, but that's the only thing they've done with any success.
100% MHz-myth idiocy.
Your 2GHz ARM Smartbook would probably compare decently to a 200MHz PentiumII, but a 2GHz Core2 would make your 2GHz ARM CPU look like it's standing still. Just look-up the DMIPS rating of the ARM chip, and an x86 chip...
Better yet, ask yourself: "Why aren't there any supercomputers on the TOP500 which are based on ARM CPUs? Why are they all x86 or POWER?"
The performance of ARM is all smoke and mirrors. They're designed to be impressively low-power, and compete well with slower microcontrolers, but don't hold a candle to real CPUs.
1) Your elecricity cost estimate is high, that $60 router is also going to draw power. You calculated electricity including taxes, but the router without so it's even more expensive. I'd call it 3+ years before you make-up the purchase price... hope it works that long.
2) There's nothing stopping you from underclocking and undervolting that PC until it draws very little power. I bought a 550MHz AMD K6-3 with motherboard on eBay for $20 shipped, and stuck it in an old case, underclocked it to 100MHz (drawing all of 5 watts), running with just one fan powered by the 5V rail, an old compact-flash card for a HDD, running COMPLETELY silent. It's worked perfectly for several years now.
3) While a PC may use more electricity, at least it actually works. How many times a week are you power-cycling your $60 router? Plus, the PC allows installing ANY SOFTWARE YOU COULD POSSIBLY WANT. Being able to use a REAL stateful firewall is worth far more than the difference in power usage.
I don't remember having to pull out a match to ignite the reading light over my head the last time I flew, so it's not gas/oil. And it instantly turns on/off, so it's not chemical either.
Just wait until they figure out that paper is flammable... No more books.
The question isn't electronics or books, it's personal entertainment versus in-flight multimedia systems. $20 headphones so you can listen to the same 5 genre cliche songs over and over... $5/minute for a phone call... Lowest-common-denomination TV and movies, selected for those that won't possibly stimulate nervous passengers in any way... etc.
If I could exchange my laptop for seats that are twice the size, and planes that are only 3/4ths full like they used-to be, I'd gladly do it. If the choice is smaller seats & no entertainment, I'll stop flying for even cross-continental trips, and take the train in nice large comfortable seats, with a HVAC system which can easily handle being parked in direct sunlight, peace and quiet without the whining turbines, with all my electronic devices, with a wall outlet so I don't even NEED batteries, and so much personal and cargo room you can pack your motorcycle in your luggage and nobody will care. Never mind no security checks.
The OpenBSD guys wrote and maintain OpenSSH, which uses OpenSSL. The OpenBSD guys don't have anything to do with OpenSSL.
Well, 2X the price would be one good reason... Once you upgrade to the larger battery, solid-state HDD, and including shipping and taxes, you're paying almost 2X the price, most certainly NOT "almost the same price"
If you want Windows, go for the Dell. If you want Linux, you'll barely even notice you're on a different architecture... All the same apps will work. The only big one many people use being Flash, and there are some alternatives for that.
If Microsoft was anywhere near that capable, and insightful, people wouldn't be endlessly complaining about how lousy Windows is.
Ask DEC how well their non-x86 version of Windows worked out...
Absolutely TERRIBLE, no question about it. You'll get much better performance out of the oldest system you can snag off ebay for $20.
Even if you get one for free, I would recomend NOT using it. They made some of the most horrendous design decision ever. First is vastly underpowering the system. Second is giving it anything more than 10BaseT networking, and advertising it as if there's a snowball's chance in hell it'll be able to utilize it... Third, is not providing ANY WAY for the end user to access the underlying system, so when the array gets completely hosed for no reason (and it will! No question.) you can't get in, anywhere, to fix anything, and only a hacked firmware image will save you... Fourth and perhaps most significantly, is cheaping-out on $1 worth of flash, and instead storing the OS image on the HDDs, leaving it vulnerable to data corruption, and a huge pain in the ass to bootstrap with fresh drives (requiring Windows, or at least WINE to run the firmware updater app).
I posted on a forum somewhere about all the typos I found in the firmware of my unit... "ehco" is a good extensive one in the software-raid scripts, ensuring nobody can actually get the reports of a few specific errors, should they occur. And this is in a commercial product.
Option #1 Sears & Roebuck:
Netflix would print out a catalog every year, and mail a copy to each member. Several pre-paid postcards would be included, where you scribble down the ID# of the movies you want in your queue.
A few large internet retailer concentration sites like Buy.com, Amazon, etc., would put out a magazine every year as well, and send out a few smaller inserts every month or so to subscribers.
Option #2 BBS
All large internet sites get phone banks, which people can dial-in to. Dial-up to Netflix to reorder your queue. Dial-in to Google to find the product you want (which lists the phone number of the company of course), then disconnect and dial-in to the best company to place your order. Dial-in to UPS to track the status of your package.
Option #3 Tape-swap
Netflix catalogs are distributed to all subscribers by mailing CDs every few months. People can print-out their queue, or mail back a mini-CD.
Wikipedia lives on by interested parties mailing a self-addressed stamped envelope with a flash drive inside to Jimmy Wales. Volunteers dump an up-to-date copy of the Wiki onto each flash drive. Also included are a handful of applications for various operating systems which allow locally viewing and editing your local copy of the Wiki. After you've made a significant number of changes, you again mail your SASE + flash drive to Jimmy, and get your updates merged, and your Wiki updated.
Option #4 UUCP
Web companies band together to come up with an offline electronic message distribution system. Companies adapt their online presence into something workable via a USENET system. Updates are asynchronously distributed in a hierarchical fashion from group to group, and city to city, and then back up the chain again. Lengthy delays are involved, but the messages get through most of the time.
Google becomes a directory of USENET groups, Netflix barely changes, Amazon changes their product catalog slightly, but continues to operate. Dupes on Slashdot have plausible excuses. Facebook/MySpace continue as before, with even less privacy. Twitter continues to be a popular way to distribute messages despite being completely unrecognizable, and having no advantages over standard messaging. RIAA/MPAA as pissed off as ever as the movies and music continues to flow.
It wouldn't be too bad. Bicycles work as well now as they ever did. Without cars filling up the streets, we'd have plenty of open road to bike to/from work, stores, etc.
Supply and demand would kick in, and in short order, instead of mega shopping malls on the edge of cities, there would be a large number of smaller stores throughout each town. Instead of people driving 60 miles each day to work, they'd stick to slightly lower-paying jobs in-town, or else move to the city where they work... Horror of horrors, I know.
Of course, these analogies all fall down because you can't single out an object, and remove it. The technology behind it will just be developed into slightly different imitators (bicycles with gas engines, or computer WANs simply being interconnected in a more ad-hoc way). You really can't get rid of device X without getting rid of the decades of technological development that created it.
A quote by Gen. George S. Patton. Likely the most over-hyped military leader in all of US Military History. The only thing he was particularly good at was PR. He's a completely mediocre commander otherwise.
If you operate as a non-privileged user, and there aren't gaping local root exploits, malware is pretty damn toothless.
Sure, it could still send out some e-mails, record your keystrokes, etc., but it will show up in `ps` just like any other process, and it will have to launch itself from a few standard few locations available, where it will be easy to find, and stop from running.
So, yes, Linux could have malware, but it would be the minor nuisance type, rather than the "everyone's infected, it's impossible to remove, and the internet is being brought to its knees" type.
Additionally, the problem with Linux viruses is that people get their software from a central repository, with cryptographic checksums and the like. The world would be very different if Windows users got all their software through WindowsUpdate, instead of constantly downloading crap from random websites.
If you want to encrypt an app so it can't be opened without the proper key, you can just encrypt it with ANYTHING. PGP seems the best candidate. You don't need any special hardware or software configuration.
If you, instead, expect an application to determine the environment it is running in, and decide whether or not it is a valid device... That is called DRM, and it is both theoretically and practically impossible.
If you design a phone to be charged at 5V@2,000mA, and plug it into an adapter or USB port which can only provide 5V@500mA, your adapter (or USB port) will soon catch fire, or burn out.
The device has no way to know what current the power supply can provide, and only high-end power supplies have any form of current regulation/overload protection built-in.
Scott Adams is a comedian, not an electrical engineer.
The amperage only matters if it isn't high enough... A 10amp wall-wart can power your low-power devices just fine.
That just leaves polarity, connector, and voltage. There are PLENTY of universal power supplies out there which come with a dozen connectors, and the ability to switch polarity and voltages from 1 to 12 volts, covering just about everything but laptops...
Sure they do. Note that NASA, as you said, uses the highest frequencies they practically can. Distance has a lot to do with it.
Yeah, same thing happened to me when I first discovered Craigslist.
That was a crazy weekend... I love the internet!