It seems to me the poor reputation is because they charge near-audiophile prices for cheap mass-market gear. You don't see companies like Panasonic getting a bad reputation this way, because they don't do this: they sell cheap mass-market gear, at cheap mass-market prices. It's hard to fault someone for paying low-end prices for a low-end product, as that might be all they can afford, and a lot of mass-market stuff really isn't that bad these days (it has a lot of "bang for your buck").
It's like paying Aston-Martin prices for a Ford. Car snobs who own Ferraris aren't going to bash people for buying a Kia or a Ford Fiesta, because they know not everyone can afford a Ferrari like them. But if someone somehow convinced a bunch of people to pay Ferrari prices for a car no better than a Fiesta, a lot of people would be bashing that company for that.
Paper cone speakers aren't really a bad thing: there's a reason paper has been used for speakers for so long: it's stiff, lightweight, and cheap. With a speaker cone, the first two qualities are of the greatest importance. Stiffness is important for accurate sound reproduction, and lightweightness is important for efficiency (the heavier the cones, the more energy is required to move them with the speaker coils, meaning you need a more powerful amplifier to generate the same volume of sound). And of course since consumer equipment needs to be affordable, cheapness is good. There are other materials that have been used for speaker cones, but they usually have some big deficiency: they might be heavier, thus requiring a much more powerful amplifier, or they might be horribly expensive, making them unaffordable.
Now in Bose's case, it's really not excusable. The reason paper is good is because it works decently well and is dirt cheap. But Bose charges ridiculous, boutique prices, so you should be getting better materials for your money. If you're going to pay high-end prices, you should at least get high-end materials.
I'm a EE who moved into the software field a decade ago, but moved back to start my own company.
From what I can tell, EE in the US is going two ways: 1) there's still a lot of EEs employed by companies like Intel. However, they don't deal with circuits or soldering irons or anything like that; they do nothing but design RTL code in Verilog, or write software to validate that RTL. Basically, EE degrees are mostly useless for these people, because the only thing they really need to know is digital logic and Verilog coding. They sure as hell don't need EM fields classes, control theory, analog electronics, heck they could probably do fine without even learning Ohm's Law and Kirchoff's Laws.
2) For everything that doesn't involve Verilog, it's all moved to Asia. US companies don't design electronics any more, they outsource all the work to contract manufacturers and ODMs in Taiwan and China, and focus on parts of the software. At one company I worked at a few years ago, they designed an all-new product that had an embedded computer, touchscreen, etc.; the electronics design was all done by the CM/ODM, and much of the software was outsourced as well. The only stuff they kept in-house was some of the encryption software (this device had to be PCI compliant (that's Payment Card Industry, not the bus)). They had one EE on staff, only one, and he quit to start his own company; they didn't miss him at all, or bother to replace him. There was a bit of microcontroller code (for some security chip that was embedded into some of the products) that he was responsible for maintaining which was handed over to me as I was also a EE with some microcontroller experience, but then I never did anything with it. After I quit it was probably completely forgotten about.
"Real" EE work has all gone to Asia these days, because that's where all the manufacturing is. The only exception might be in the defense industry, but do you really want to work for an evil government that drone-bombs children, tortures people, and spies on citizens more than the Stasi? In private (non-defense-related) industry, you don't have to set aside your morals, but there's really not much work left there except at very small companies working in niche industries, and the pay at small companies usually isn't very good.
It's a lot easier to analyze the past and present than to accurately predict the future. How many future predictions have come true, versus how many have been wildly wrong? The guy obviously did a pretty good job of analyzing the existing state of affairs and critiquing it, pointing out its problems and inequities. Lots of historians have done the same with various topics, such as the fall of the Roman Empire which many have written about, or the writings of Jared Diamond. Then he tried to singlehandedly devise a new system to replace it, and obviously failed completely as he failed to account for many variables.
Unfortunately, Marx's failed ideas about a new utopian system get all the attention, diminishing his much-better work in critiquing capitalist economic systems. Compare this to Jared Diamond: he's famous for his books like Guns, Germs and Steel, but imagine if he tried to devise some new social system that some country adopted, with terrible results. Then history would only remember that, and forget about his other works which were spot-on.
IT pros are not representative of the population; they have a lot more money to spend on computers, and are pickier about them. Also, I've seen plenty of people running Linux on their MacBooks (in a VM usually), and of course Windows runs on Mac too (with a VM).
Typical home users and corporate users are not like this: they aren't going to pony up the cash that Macs require, and lots of companies are locked into MS infrastructure (Active Directory, SharePoint, MS Office, Outlook, etc.).
That's odd, I set my (WinXP-using) wife up with it when we finally got sick of all the problems Windows had, and she hasn't had any problems at all. Of course, she isn't using a lot of the features it offers (workspaces, "activities", etc.), but for her it works just fine and she's fairly non-technical, coming from a secretarial background. The only thing she bitches about is some things in LibreOffice not being like (2000-era) MS Office; when she does that, I tell her she'd be horrified if she had to use the new "ribbon" UI in Office. But she's quite happy to not have Windows problems, or have to pay anything.
I really don't see why anyone (who comes from a WinXP/Vista/7 background) would get "lost" in KDE, unless they're messing around with all the configuration options. And if they're doing that, there's a simple answer: don't do that!
That only matters if you're trying to run Windows software. These days, there's tons of people who do absolutely nothing with their computer except 1) browse the internet, and perhaps 2) some very light office work, usually just word processing. For those people, Linux plus Firefox and LibreOffice is more than sufficient. There aren't that many people left who actually do anything more specialized than that with their computers. This is why tablets have gotten so popular: they don't have all the hassles that MS Windows does, and handle these use-cases satisfactorily for many people (who apparently don't mind on-screen keyboards, or haul around one of those bluetooth keyboards).
Where'd you ever get the idea that Mint is the most popular? Most figures I've seen rank it quite low (but still mugh higher than the other small distros), much lower then Fedora and Ubuntu. Hint: distrowatch.com is not a reliable source of Linux usage statistics; it's only reliable at reporting what distros the people who bother to browse distrowatch.com use.
Worse, Mint has more than MATE, it also has Cinnamon, KDE, and XFCE. You're a Windows user and know nothing about Linux: which one do you choose? Answer: none of them, you choose the one distro that everyone, even Windows users, has heard about, which is Ubuntu. Then you get to try out the horror that is Unity, and decide that it's much easier to just stick with Windows, and that even Windows 8's shitty Metro UI is better than Unity.
The problem with that is that Mexico is even worse than the US, much much worse. If you think the cops in the US are bad, you haven't seen anything. Large parts of the country are mostly lawless, and under the control of violent drug cartels. Mexico is a failed state.
If you want to move south to escape the US, and get to someplace that isn't even worse, you'll have to skip over Mexico and go someplace like Costa Rica.
Sorry, no. 1) Canada has the same problems with police brutality and the growing police state mentality that the US does. 2) You can't emigrate to Canada unless you have particular skills they want, and have a job offer from a Canadian firm (that has tried to hire a Canadian for the job and failed), OR you have $300K ready to deposit into a Canadian bank account.
Maybe, but that's completely unenforceable after someone's left the country. It totally assumes that that person is planning to return at some point, so it's aimed at people who, for instance, go to shitholes like Saudi Arabia or Nigeria for temporary work and will only be gone a year or three.
Apple only got the marketing right with their mobile devices, the iPod, then iPhone, then iPad. MacOS X still has very low marketshare; not many people have switched to it. People were OK with adopting Apple's UI on small mobile limited-use-case devices (mainly because the existing offerings at the time totally sucked, especially MS's horrible offerings that tried to shove a Win95-style UI onto a tiny touchscreen), but they never did so for their desktop and laptop PCs.
If the Desktop Linux bunch had spent time making Desktop Linux a closer replacement for Windows XP, very many organizations and people would have moved over when Vista came out. More so with Windows 8.
Instead they do weird stuff to make Desktop Linux even less unattractive to people who don't want change.
The sad fact is that the newest version of KDE is a the perfect DE for anyone wanting to switch from Windows (XP, Vista, 7) to Linux: it's fast, full-featured, and looks and works much like the regular Windows desktop interface. Moreover, it's highly customizable and configurable, so a distro could easily make a theme for it that looks even more like Windows, and sets even more options to work by default just like Windows (but let users change from those defaults if they desire). The software is already here, minus that last bit to make the transition even easier for Windows refugees.
But instead of adopting KDE and pushing it as a Windows replacements, the mainstream distros are all dead-set on sticking with Gnome3 or Unity, interfaces which don't look or work remotely like Windows. Anyone who complains about this is met with comments like "Linux needs to be a pioneer, not copy someone else", and so Linux remains stuck in obscurity. And why Linux users so strongly want a DE that discourages configurability and modification, I have no idea; I thought Linux was supposed to be more attractive to tinkerers, but Gnome3's developers hate people who try to modify their holy UI.
The intent of the Stasi was to look for any kind of "traitors" or subversives, not just people trying to escape; the NSA's mission was the same: spy on the populace.
If the USA was right next door to a country that was a much better place to live, and accepted any escapees with open arms, and enough people started emigrating there that it seriously affected the economy, then the US would certainly ban emigration. It doesn't have to because it has no reason to at this point; there aren't a lot of places that are significantly better, none of them are nearby, and those that are aren't highly friendly to immigrants unless they have valuable skills or a lot of money in the bank, plus for the moment the employment situation for those people with valuable skills is still pretty decent here. When the economy crashes even harder in the next few years, and if any countries start courting our tech workers (causing a "brain drain"), you can bet your ass that emigration out of the US will be forbidden.
How many of these are still problems now, as opposed to in earlier versions of the language/interpreter? Perl is another language that wasn't all that well designed at first, but was added onto later as it grew into popularity and was used in roles that were unthinkable in its early days.
It is pretty obvious that PHP started out small and grew into its present form, which can be seen with the inconsistency with library function names; obviously they didn't want to break compatibility arbitrarily so they stuck with the old names, but there's several functions that have been deprecated, such as the old MySQL interface library.
I'm not saying PHP is the greatest language ever (or even a great language), but it seems to get the job done for smaller sites, and there don't seem to be many really good alternatives that are well-supported, or so easy to embed into HTML like PHP does. It'd be nice if they'd fix some of these issues that seem to mostly stem from legacy issues, but I guess that conflicts with the goal of backwards compatibility so that's probably why that isn't done so quickly.
Honestly, I don't understand what all the complaining is about. It just seems like a lot of language snobbery to me. I used PHP on my small website because every cheap web host out there supports it, there's tons of example code, and it's easy to learn if you have a C/C++ background. It seems to work just fine. Is it suitable for a gigantic website like Facebook? I have no idea really, and I don't care, just like I don't care that bash shell scripts probably aren't suitable for writing, for instance, a full-featured application like a spreadsheet or a video editor, as shell scripts work quite well for the things I do use them for.
No, that's a business decision by the only national book selling chain remaining. And IIRC, that was the standard policy at all the previous bookselling chains too, years ago (B Dalton, Waldenbooks, Borders, etc.).
Wrong: go to any Barnes & Noble store, and buy a book. Look at the MSRP on the book, and compare that to the price you paid at the register. They're the same.
See, for traditional brick-and-mortar booksellers like B&N, the MSRP has long been the "real price". They just charge whatever the publisher writes on there. Amazon was the first large place to change that, and the b&m sellers are sitting around wondering why people don't buy books there any more.
What are you talking about? They were at warp speed lots of time in battles in Star Trek. Without warp speed, it'd take minutes to hours just to cross a small distance within a star system, such as the distance between Earth and Mars (roughly 15 light-minutes IIRC).
Since you're going to refer to memory-alpha.org, maybe you should read the phasers article there. Here's an important excerpt; see the second sentence in particular. Apparently, ST didn't handle this whole topic with the greatest consistency.
Dialogue in the 1991 episode TNG: "The Mind's Eye" concerning the internal mechanics of a type 3 phaser rifle confirm, canonically, all the elements as they were established in the Manual. However, in Star Trek, phasers have been regularly used while starships travel at warp speeds, so the beam must also be traveling at faster-than-light velocities. Beginning with the 1993 episode TNG: "Inheritance", instead of being labeled as EM weapons, as the reference works have stated, phasers have been consistently referred to as particle beam weapons on screen. This information was also included in the 1994 Star Trek: Voyager Technical Manual - Writer's Guide, and has been corroborated in such episodes as "Time and Again", "Memorial" and "Endgame".
Even though the phaser beam was canonically established as not a beam of pure EM energy but a particle beam of nadions, the 1998 reference book Star Trek: Deep Space Nine Technical Manual still goes on to describe the phaser beam as an EM energy beam. According to page 84 of the Manual, a phaser beam can be delivered at warp speeds due to an annular confinement beam jacket and other advances in subspace technology. These are stated to be new inventions in the late-24th century. However, considering that first on-screen uses of phasers at warp occurred as early as the first season of The Original Series, this timeline for the invention would be inconsistent with canon. Furthermore, according to page 92 of the Manual, when phasers are fired by a ship with deflector shields active, the beam is frequency locked to the second-order harmonics of the shield emissions. This prevents the beam impacting on the shields and overloading them, or rebounding back at the firing ship.
If you've written the FPGA logic in a standard language like Verilog, then there's not much keeping you from moving the code between different FPGA chips, or even chips from different vendors.
Of course, the idea of using FPGAs in a laptop seems rather silly to me; the whole point of having a laptop is to have something small which can be powered by a battery for a reasonable length of time. Using FPGAs instead of real ASICs and CPUs would drastically lower your run time. You might as well give up on the laptop idea if you're going to do that, and just make your own FPGA-based mini/microATX/miniITX motherboard and use standard desktop parts instead. Then you can plug in any monitor you want, and most of the other parts are commodity as well.
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It seems to me the poor reputation is because they charge near-audiophile prices for cheap mass-market gear. You don't see companies like Panasonic getting a bad reputation this way, because they don't do this: they sell cheap mass-market gear, at cheap mass-market prices. It's hard to fault someone for paying low-end prices for a low-end product, as that might be all they can afford, and a lot of mass-market stuff really isn't that bad these days (it has a lot of "bang for your buck").
It's like paying Aston-Martin prices for a Ford. Car snobs who own Ferraris aren't going to bash people for buying a Kia or a Ford Fiesta, because they know not everyone can afford a Ferrari like them. But if someone somehow convinced a bunch of people to pay Ferrari prices for a car no better than a Fiesta, a lot of people would be bashing that company for that.
Paper cone speakers aren't really a bad thing: there's a reason paper has been used for speakers for so long: it's stiff, lightweight, and cheap. With a speaker cone, the first two qualities are of the greatest importance. Stiffness is important for accurate sound reproduction, and lightweightness is important for efficiency (the heavier the cones, the more energy is required to move them with the speaker coils, meaning you need a more powerful amplifier to generate the same volume of sound). And of course since consumer equipment needs to be affordable, cheapness is good. There are other materials that have been used for speaker cones, but they usually have some big deficiency: they might be heavier, thus requiring a much more powerful amplifier, or they might be horribly expensive, making them unaffordable.
Now in Bose's case, it's really not excusable. The reason paper is good is because it works decently well and is dirt cheap. But Bose charges ridiculous, boutique prices, so you should be getting better materials for your money. If you're going to pay high-end prices, you should at least get high-end materials.
I don't know why MIT holds him up as some kind of great engineer; his real skill was obviously in marketing.
I'm a EE who moved into the software field a decade ago, but moved back to start my own company.
From what I can tell, EE in the US is going two ways:
1) there's still a lot of EEs employed by companies like Intel. However, they don't deal with circuits or soldering irons or anything like that; they do nothing but design RTL code in Verilog, or write software to validate that RTL. Basically, EE degrees are mostly useless for these people, because the only thing they really need to know is digital logic and Verilog coding. They sure as hell don't need EM fields classes, control theory, analog electronics, heck they could probably do fine without even learning Ohm's Law and Kirchoff's Laws.
2) For everything that doesn't involve Verilog, it's all moved to Asia. US companies don't design electronics any more, they outsource all the work to contract manufacturers and ODMs in Taiwan and China, and focus on parts of the software. At one company I worked at a few years ago, they designed an all-new product that had an embedded computer, touchscreen, etc.; the electronics design was all done by the CM/ODM, and much of the software was outsourced as well. The only stuff they kept in-house was some of the encryption software (this device had to be PCI compliant (that's Payment Card Industry, not the bus)). They had one EE on staff, only one, and he quit to start his own company; they didn't miss him at all, or bother to replace him. There was a bit of microcontroller code (for some security chip that was embedded into some of the products) that he was responsible for maintaining which was handed over to me as I was also a EE with some microcontroller experience, but then I never did anything with it. After I quit it was probably completely forgotten about.
"Real" EE work has all gone to Asia these days, because that's where all the manufacturing is. The only exception might be in the defense industry, but do you really want to work for an evil government that drone-bombs children, tortures people, and spies on citizens more than the Stasi? In private (non-defense-related) industry, you don't have to set aside your morals, but there's really not much work left there except at very small companies working in niche industries, and the pay at small companies usually isn't very good.
It's a lot easier to analyze the past and present than to accurately predict the future. How many future predictions have come true, versus how many have been wildly wrong? The guy obviously did a pretty good job of analyzing the existing state of affairs and critiquing it, pointing out its problems and inequities. Lots of historians have done the same with various topics, such as the fall of the Roman Empire which many have written about, or the writings of Jared Diamond. Then he tried to singlehandedly devise a new system to replace it, and obviously failed completely as he failed to account for many variables.
Unfortunately, Marx's failed ideas about a new utopian system get all the attention, diminishing his much-better work in critiquing capitalist economic systems. Compare this to Jared Diamond: he's famous for his books like Guns, Germs and Steel, but imagine if he tried to devise some new social system that some country adopted, with terrible results. Then history would only remember that, and forget about his other works which were spot-on.
Yep, we were all brought up with that idea. We thought our country was above all that, that it could never happen here.
IT pros are not representative of the population; they have a lot more money to spend on computers, and are pickier about them. Also, I've seen plenty of people running Linux on their MacBooks (in a VM usually), and of course Windows runs on Mac too (with a VM).
Typical home users and corporate users are not like this: they aren't going to pony up the cash that Macs require, and lots of companies are locked into MS infrastructure (Active Directory, SharePoint, MS Office, Outlook, etc.).
That's odd, I set my (WinXP-using) wife up with it when we finally got sick of all the problems Windows had, and she hasn't had any problems at all. Of course, she isn't using a lot of the features it offers (workspaces, "activities", etc.), but for her it works just fine and she's fairly non-technical, coming from a secretarial background. The only thing she bitches about is some things in LibreOffice not being like (2000-era) MS Office; when she does that, I tell her she'd be horrified if she had to use the new "ribbon" UI in Office. But she's quite happy to not have Windows problems, or have to pay anything.
I really don't see why anyone (who comes from a WinXP/Vista/7 background) would get "lost" in KDE, unless they're messing around with all the configuration options. And if they're doing that, there's a simple answer: don't do that!
That only matters if you're trying to run Windows software. These days, there's tons of people who do absolutely nothing with their computer except 1) browse the internet, and perhaps 2) some very light office work, usually just word processing. For those people, Linux plus Firefox and LibreOffice is more than sufficient. There aren't that many people left who actually do anything more specialized than that with their computers. This is why tablets have gotten so popular: they don't have all the hassles that MS Windows does, and handle these use-cases satisfactorily for many people (who apparently don't mind on-screen keyboards, or haul around one of those bluetooth keyboards).
Where'd you ever get the idea that Mint is the most popular? Most figures I've seen rank it quite low (but still mugh higher than the other small distros), much lower then Fedora and Ubuntu. Hint: distrowatch.com is not a reliable source of Linux usage statistics; it's only reliable at reporting what distros the people who bother to browse distrowatch.com use.
Worse, Mint has more than MATE, it also has Cinnamon, KDE, and XFCE. You're a Windows user and know nothing about Linux: which one do you choose? Answer: none of them, you choose the one distro that everyone, even Windows users, has heard about, which is Ubuntu. Then you get to try out the horror that is Unity, and decide that it's much easier to just stick with Windows, and that even Windows 8's shitty Metro UI is better than Unity.
The problem with that is that Mexico is even worse than the US, much much worse. If you think the cops in the US are bad, you haven't seen anything. Large parts of the country are mostly lawless, and under the control of violent drug cartels. Mexico is a failed state.
If you want to move south to escape the US, and get to someplace that isn't even worse, you'll have to skip over Mexico and go someplace like Costa Rica.
Sorry, no.
1) Canada has the same problems with police brutality and the growing police state mentality that the US does.
2) You can't emigrate to Canada unless you have particular skills they want, and have a job offer from a Canadian firm (that has tried to hire a Canadian for the job and failed), OR you have $300K ready to deposit into a Canadian bank account.
Maybe, but that's completely unenforceable after someone's left the country. It totally assumes that that person is planning to return at some point, so it's aimed at people who, for instance, go to shitholes like Saudi Arabia or Nigeria for temporary work and will only be gone a year or three.
Apple only got the marketing right with their mobile devices, the iPod, then iPhone, then iPad. MacOS X still has very low marketshare; not many people have switched to it. People were OK with adopting Apple's UI on small mobile limited-use-case devices (mainly because the existing offerings at the time totally sucked, especially MS's horrible offerings that tried to shove a Win95-style UI onto a tiny touchscreen), but they never did so for their desktop and laptop PCs.
If the Desktop Linux bunch had spent time making Desktop Linux a closer replacement for Windows XP, very many organizations and people would have moved over when Vista came out. More so with Windows 8.
Instead they do weird stuff to make Desktop Linux even less unattractive to people who don't want change.
The sad fact is that the newest version of KDE is a the perfect DE for anyone wanting to switch from Windows (XP, Vista, 7) to Linux: it's fast, full-featured, and looks and works much like the regular Windows desktop interface. Moreover, it's highly customizable and configurable, so a distro could easily make a theme for it that looks even more like Windows, and sets even more options to work by default just like Windows (but let users change from those defaults if they desire). The software is already here, minus that last bit to make the transition even easier for Windows refugees.
But instead of adopting KDE and pushing it as a Windows replacements, the mainstream distros are all dead-set on sticking with Gnome3 or Unity, interfaces which don't look or work remotely like Windows. Anyone who complains about this is met with comments like "Linux needs to be a pioneer, not copy someone else", and so Linux remains stuck in obscurity. And why Linux users so strongly want a DE that discourages configurability and modification, I have no idea; I thought Linux was supposed to be more attractive to tinkerers, but Gnome3's developers hate people who try to modify their holy UI.
The intent of the Stasi was to look for any kind of "traitors" or subversives, not just people trying to escape; the NSA's mission was the same: spy on the populace.
If the USA was right next door to a country that was a much better place to live, and accepted any escapees with open arms, and enough people started emigrating there that it seriously affected the economy, then the US would certainly ban emigration. It doesn't have to because it has no reason to at this point; there aren't a lot of places that are significantly better, none of them are nearby, and those that are aren't highly friendly to immigrants unless they have valuable skills or a lot of money in the bank, plus for the moment the employment situation for those people with valuable skills is still pretty decent here. When the economy crashes even harder in the next few years, and if any countries start courting our tech workers (causing a "brain drain"), you can bet your ass that emigration out of the US will be forbidden.
The people working for the Stasi thought they were doing the "right thing" too.
How many of these are still problems now, as opposed to in earlier versions of the language/interpreter? Perl is another language that wasn't all that well designed at first, but was added onto later as it grew into popularity and was used in roles that were unthinkable in its early days.
It is pretty obvious that PHP started out small and grew into its present form, which can be seen with the inconsistency with library function names; obviously they didn't want to break compatibility arbitrarily so they stuck with the old names, but there's several functions that have been deprecated, such as the old MySQL interface library.
I'm not saying PHP is the greatest language ever (or even a great language), but it seems to get the job done for smaller sites, and there don't seem to be many really good alternatives that are well-supported, or so easy to embed into HTML like PHP does. It'd be nice if they'd fix some of these issues that seem to mostly stem from legacy issues, but I guess that conflicts with the goal of backwards compatibility so that's probably why that isn't done so quickly.
Honestly, I don't understand what all the complaining is about. It just seems like a lot of language snobbery to me. I used PHP on my small website because every cheap web host out there supports it, there's tons of example code, and it's easy to learn if you have a C/C++ background. It seems to work just fine. Is it suitable for a gigantic website like Facebook? I have no idea really, and I don't care, just like I don't care that bash shell scripts probably aren't suitable for writing, for instance, a full-featured application like a spreadsheet or a video editor, as shell scripts work quite well for the things I do use them for.
No, that's a business decision by the only national book selling chain remaining. And IIRC, that was the standard policy at all the previous bookselling chains too, years ago (B Dalton, Waldenbooks, Borders, etc.).
How are they not the same? B&N's policy is to simply honor the MSRP on all their products.
The SELinux stuff is open-source, just like the rest of the kernel, so it's available for anyone to do a security audit on.
I don't know if anyone's actually bothered, of course, but the code is there in the open.
A MSRP printed on the book is not "real".
Wrong: go to any Barnes & Noble store, and buy a book. Look at the MSRP on the book, and compare that to the price you paid at the register. They're the same.
See, for traditional brick-and-mortar booksellers like B&N, the MSRP has long been the "real price". They just charge whatever the publisher writes on there. Amazon was the first large place to change that, and the b&m sellers are sitting around wondering why people don't buy books there any more.
What are you talking about? They were at warp speed lots of time in battles in Star Trek. Without warp speed, it'd take minutes to hours just to cross a small distance within a star system, such as the distance between Earth and Mars (roughly 15 light-minutes IIRC).
Since you're going to refer to memory-alpha.org, maybe you should read the phasers article there. Here's an important excerpt; see the second sentence in particular. Apparently, ST didn't handle this whole topic with the greatest consistency.
If you've written the FPGA logic in a standard language like Verilog, then there's not much keeping you from moving the code between different FPGA chips, or even chips from different vendors.
Of course, the idea of using FPGAs in a laptop seems rather silly to me; the whole point of having a laptop is to have something small which can be powered by a battery for a reasonable length of time. Using FPGAs instead of real ASICs and CPUs would drastically lower your run time. You might as well give up on the laptop idea if you're going to do that, and just make your own FPGA-based mini/microATX/miniITX motherboard and use standard desktop parts instead. Then you can plug in any monitor you want, and most of the other parts are commodity as well.