Does p-doping Indium Gallium Nitride seem like a trivial process?
It's trivial with the right equipment and materials. Figuring out that you need to p-dope IGN to make an LED, on the other hand...
Reminds me of the story about the fancy car which, no matter what the shop mechanics tried, wouldn't start. So they call in an old mechanic buddy who had retired a few years ago to come take a look. He studies the engine carefully, making a note of the various fluid levels and temperatures as well as the sounds made by the engine. After going at it for a few minutes, he takes a bit of chalk, marks a spot on the engine, and then hits it with his hammer. With that, the engine roared to life.
He then handed the customer a bill for $100. Aghast, the customer replies, "I'm not paying you $100 for hitting the engine with a hammer!"
The old mechanic replies, "Hitting the engine was free. Knowing where to hit it is $100."
This guy managed to get it into 145 bytes (142 on his website, but he printed "Hi World" instead of "Hello world") with no external dependencies.
The smallest ELF executable I've seen is this 45 byte example. It doesn't print anything and it violates the ELF standard, but Linux (or at least his version) is still willing to execute it.
That said, there isn't much point in optimizing away libc except as an academic exercise. Yes, it's a few megabytes in size, but it's shared across every running userspace program (likely including init). Sluggish and bloated programs, in my experience, are almost always the result of poorly thought out algorithms, data structures, and use cases. (That said, the analysis on how to achieve the 45 byte ELF program is very interesting and educational.)
Not Bernoulli; Navier-Stokes. The flyheight is regulated in a manner similar to fluid flow between parallel plates; Bernoulli uses lift generated by flow around a single wing with differential path lengths.
At many companies, not giving two weeks notice will make you ineligible to be rehired. While you might not care, future employers might. It's a legal gray area, but one of the questions sometimes asked of former employers is, "Is X eligible for rehire?" as a way to skirt the we-can't-give-references issue. A "no" answer raises questions -- the impression it gives ranges from "Well, that company is just a bunch of jerks to their employees" to "He's has a bad attitude and makes it uncomfortable for everyone else" to "He was walking out the door with cash and half of their servers; they just couldn't catch him." If you're up for a position with multiple applicants, this could sink you.
While it might provide fleeting catharsis, not giving notice can't help you. At best it will do nothing; at worst, block you from a job you really want later on. Don't do it.
It's not a hoax -- it's an actual study being performed at 25 hospitals. No results yet; this article quotes September or October of this year for the release of preliminary results.
The lead for this is Sam Parnia, a critical care physician who just happens to be into this kind of near-death stuff.
See this page; the Campanile movie is from SIGGRAPH 97. How is Disney's tech different?
I saw similar technology at CMU in around that same timeframe (late 90s).
My memory will be obviously hazy here, but the resulting output was much less refined. A simple box-shaped house, for example, ended up having wickedly jagged walls. The technology showed promise, but it was far from realistic.
The Disney folks, while not inventing the tech itself, seem to have taken it a step further. Their key claim -- "Unlike other systems, the algorithm calculates depth for every pixel, proving most effective at the edges of objects" -- certainly jives with my memory.
They remain the property of NASA, and Bezos acknowledges as much: "If we are able to recover one of these F-1 engines[...], I imagine that NASA would decide to make it available to the Smithsonian for all to see. If we're able to raise more than one engine, I've asked NASA if they would consider making it available to the excellent Museum of Flight here in Seattle."
... but not due to the results; this is an example of good, solid science coming out of a secondary school with limited resources. Given what I could read of the translation, I don't think this is irresponsible journalism at all -- think of it more as journalism on the state of education, not science.
It is, of course, an extraordinary result, and will require extraordinary proof. I suspect the claims will not be reproduced; at the same time, I hope these kid-researchers keep their interest level in this experiment up regardless of outcome. From this, they'll learn about experimental errors, uncontrolled factors, and -- most importantly -- to divorce their ego from their results. That last bit is perhaps the hardest for most scientists to achieve.
They're only using the PCIe x8 physical connectors; the electrical signals do not resemble PCIe at all.
Presumably, they're also relocating the actual slot location to avoid stupid errors (like plugging one of these into an actual PCIe x8 slot or vice-versa).
Fahrenheit has its limit of 96 (not 100) set at body temperature (or what people believed it was before more accurate measurements), and 32 at the freezing point of water (i.e. an ice bath) for simple calibration of thermometers when they were being hand manufactured, since you can just split the difference between marks by eye in half to get to the single-degree markers.
More importantly, you can split the difference using geometrical constructions (compass and straightedge), which don't require another calibration source. The change from 96 to 98.6 actually occurred when the boiling point was recalibrated to exactly 212F. The actual original calibration points were 0F for the freezing point of a 1:1:1 water/ice/ammonium chloride mixture, 32F for a 1:1 water/ice mixture.
The development of the Fahrenheit scale is quite an interesting read, and it shows why the seemingly arbitrary points weren't arbitrary at all but dealt with the limited precision of the tools of the day. Not that this is any excuse to keep using it; we've have no need to split coins eight equal pieces for currency exchange and discarded our use of "pieces-of-eight" centuries ago, and a decimalized scale is so much more convenient.
I can see the benefit in doing this for desktops: most cases are non-standard, which means throwing it out when upgrade time comes around. I've toyed with the idea of making a standard ATX case out of paper pulp.
But servers? Ideally, they would be mostly caseless: think blades, or using the rack as the case; just slap a face on the front (to maintain proper airflow), and you're done.
Now, if we could make circuit boards more recyclable, that would be terrific. Though FR4 is already fiberglass; I suppose it could be dissolved in hydrofluoric acid and the metals recovered, though I have no idea how environmentally (un)friendly that is.
IBM PCs of the era had a similar option: attach the RAM to the ISA bus via an add-on card. Like the Amiga (and most computers of that era), the expansion bus was the processor bus (with a bit of buffering and maybe a tad bit of glue logic, but not much more).
As processor speeds increased, this became a problem. Many peripherals just weren't designed for the increased speed, so they divorced the bus speed from the processor speed by making it a fraction of the processor speed (ISA) or going asynchronous (Amiga Zorro III). This became quite pronounced with PCI (max 66MHz, even if you're running a 3.0GHz CPU); you can add memory onto the bus, but it will slow you down if you try to use it as main memory.
That doesn't mean it can't be used at all these days. The cluster computer folks have a concept called NUMA, or non-uniform memory access, where memory isn't considered necessarily equal in speed. Or you could treat it like a very fast SATA drive, provided you have the necessary means of keeping power to it during power failure events (or use it only as temp or swap space).
From Ted Ts'o's commentary, it's an optimization ("jbd2: don't write superblock when if its empty") gone awry:
The reason why the problem happens rarely is that the effect of the
buggy commit is that if the journal's starting block is zero, we fail
to truncate the journal when we unmount the file system. This can
happen if we mount and then unmount the file system fairly quickly,
before the log has a chance to wrap.
Basically, this optimization has the side effect of not updating the transaction log in this rare case. You can end up replaying old transactions after new ones, which will scramble metadata blocks. Given the rather unique conditions needed to hit this one, I'm not going to lose any sleep over any servers running without Ted's fix (though I'll certainly apply it once RedHat releases the patch).
Aereo is doing this for their TV-to-internet service: each user gets his/her own antenna, in the hopes that it avoids legal issues. They create stacks of mini antenna arrays and set them up somewhere in Brooklyn. The wavelength for TV is 30 cm to 5 m, depending on the channel; both dimensions are much larger than the dime-sized antenna shown there.
How this exactly works, well, I can't exactly say. Although I am an electrical engineer, I have to admit that antenna design has always been out of my league.
I wouldn't quite say "simple" for a lot of folks, myself included. There are two reasons why I ended up going with a unibody MacBook Pro (2009-era) when my last laptop died: It has a decently sturdy build quality (much better than the Dell I gave up) and, when something goes wrong, I can take it to a human, point out exactly what's wrong, and say, "Fix it" rather than play phone and shipping tag with some contracted-out support company. At the time, upgradability didn't factor into my decision; it was just as upgradeable as every other system I considered. Since I purchased this machine, I've upped the RAM from 4 GB to 8 GB and swapped the rotational hard drive for an SSD. I've also had to use the Genius Bar to address a charging issue (1 hour of my time, vs. 2-3 months getting the run-around with Toshiba for my wife's previous laptop; there's a brand I'll never touch again).
(Mac OS? It's nice because it has the Unix command line utilities I'm accustomed to; Cygwin and Interix are clunky at best. UI isn't as nice as Windows 7, though.)
Now that Apple has removed the upgradability feature, I'm not quite sure where I'll go next.
This is why I've built my own desktops for over 15 years, because not only do I get a better quality system at a cheaper price, but I can have it the way I want it, not the way some OEM thinks is best.
Oh, I definitely build my own desktops. Laptops are a different beast, though; because the form factors are non-standard, it's difficult to find parts which play nicely. You can't just add a dedicated graphics card, for example, and the motherboard+screen+case are pretty much a unit (though your example of replacing the EEE's screen for a touch-enabled one is impressive).
If they're under 13 (elementary and middle school age range), they're not allowed to access Facebook due to their terms of service and (in the US, at least) COPPA.
This is due to the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act, which requires verified parental consent before children can provide information to the website. While this does not impact you directly (that is, the FTC isn't going to knock on your door), you could get some heat from parents or administrators for allowing it at all.
Personally, I think the law is too draconian, but I wouldn't put my position in jeopardy to protest it.
The main issue I have with devices in the size-range of the Galaxy Nexus (I have a Droid Razr Maxx) is the ability to grip and use it one handed (hitting buttons with your thumb). It's not something I need to do terribly often, but I had gotten used to this coming from 6+ years of owning a BlackBerry. If it were closer to an iPhone in size, I'd be ecstatic. (I'm still quite happy with it: a nice, long battery life, Gorilla Glass, and I can toy with Android development on it.)
That said, I don't see this as such a huge deal that I would go on a rant about it.
Because I last week I thought that
making an -rc7 was not necessarily realy required, except perhaps
mainly to check the late printk changes. But then today and yesterday,
I got a ton of small pull requests, and now I find myself releasing an
-rc7 that is actually bigger than rc6 was.
My main beef with the clamshell design is it's difficult to use from your average economy seat on an airplane. If you have the keyboard at a comfortable typing distance, the screen has to tilt forward to not hit the seat in front of you. Getting it to a proper angle means pulling the keyboard uncomfortably close to your body.
The Vadem Clio had an interesting design where the screen was mounted in the middle on arms that attached to the back. Thus, it could hover over the keyboard and still tilt back. I never got a chance to see or use one, but I had hopes this design would alleviate the airplane seat problem. Alas, it seems to have disappeared from the market, and the patents for this design are either not being licensed out or nobody wants to take this risk.
Credit unions are exempt from federal income tax [...] because they are not-for-profit and thus exempt from federal corporate income tax. A corporation that does not make a profit has no income on which to pay federal corporate income tax.
Not sure if the wording was accidental, but non-profit != does not make a profit. The main limitation is that surplus revenues (what would normally be "profit") must be used to further the organization's goals, not benefit investors (via dividends) or employees (via profit-sharing). In fact, a well-run non-profit should be bringing in extra income and expanding its programs and services. The Wikipedia article on this is well-written.
Conversely, a business can be for-profit but still not have income (or even lose money). Within the U.S., the distinction is whether your organization is recognized by the IRS as a 501(c) entity; there are a number of tests it must pass (along with a few forms which need to be sent in).
This made me curious, so I did a bit of digging (a few minutes on Google) and turned up this article about the keyhole satellites, which supposedly (no citations given) have a resolution of 5-6 inches from a 200 mile orbit. Assuming they could be brought down to 80 miles and everything scales (which is a crazy assumption, but this is all speculation and guesswork, anyway), that would be a resolution of 2-2.5 inches.
Enough to identify the writing on a cigarette? No. But one could probably rule out certain brands based on color, size, shape, etc., at that point. Without better data (which, I'm guessing, we're unlikely to come by for obvious reasons), I'd call this plausible.
I don't think that's the target. Look what Apple has done with Thunderbolt: it's their primary docking adapter for their laptops and they've made their new monitors the equivalent of docking stations. Basically, it has just enough bandwidth to carry a DisplayPort signal plus USB.
I have a 2009 MacBook Pro which commutes with me to and from the office. It's a tad annoying to have to plug in six different cables every time I get to my desk and unplug them when I leave (which is a few times a day due to meetings). I've wished for a decent docking station; Apple seems to be averse to including a connector for this purpose, and the third-party solutions I've tried are as kludgy as one might expect. The addition of Thunderbolt doesn't have me rushing out to replace my laptop (obviously), but I'll be happy to have it when the time comes to retire this machine.
(As for why I have a MacBook vs. a Windows laptop... well, it's rather well built (and has survived a few drops to date), is Unix-y enough to allow me to develop on it and still deploy the results to our Linux servers, and has built-in grep and zsh.)
Normally these CA servers stand in highly secured room, with no network connection whatsoever. [...] So it's not really surprising they could just pay a disgruntled employee, or hack into the building, or doing some James Bond stuff, or god knows what, to get their hands on these certificates.
I'm a bit skeptical about the seriousness that the hardware vendors treat security. Depending on how rushed to market the product is, a lot of corners are cut in both hardware and software development -- and Realtek seems to be no exception in my experience. We see malware on fresh-from-the-factory hard drives and USB drives, tagging a ride on drivers, etc., all the time.
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Does p-doping Indium Gallium Nitride seem like a trivial process?
It's trivial with the right equipment and materials. Figuring out that you need to p-dope IGN to make an LED, on the other hand...
Reminds me of the story about the fancy car which, no matter what the shop mechanics tried, wouldn't start. So they call in an old mechanic buddy who had retired a few years ago to come take a look. He studies the engine carefully, making a note of the various fluid levels and temperatures as well as the sounds made by the engine. After going at it for a few minutes, he takes a bit of chalk, marks a spot on the engine, and then hits it with his hammer. With that, the engine roared to life.
He then handed the customer a bill for $100. Aghast, the customer replies, "I'm not paying you $100 for hitting the engine with a hammer!"
The old mechanic replies, "Hitting the engine was free. Knowing where to hit it is $100."
This guy managed to get it into 145 bytes (142 on his website, but he printed "Hi World" instead of "Hello world") with no external dependencies.
The smallest ELF executable I've seen is this 45 byte example. It doesn't print anything and it violates the ELF standard, but Linux (or at least his version) is still willing to execute it.
That said, there isn't much point in optimizing away libc except as an academic exercise. Yes, it's a few megabytes in size, but it's shared across every running userspace program (likely including init). Sluggish and bloated programs, in my experience, are almost always the result of poorly thought out algorithms, data structures, and use cases. (That said, the analysis on how to achieve the 45 byte ELF program is very interesting and educational.)
Not Bernoulli; Navier-Stokes. The flyheight is regulated in a manner similar to fluid flow between parallel plates; Bernoulli uses lift generated by flow around a single wing with differential path lengths.
At many companies, not giving two weeks notice will make you ineligible to be rehired. While you might not care, future employers might. It's a legal gray area, but one of the questions sometimes asked of former employers is, "Is X eligible for rehire?" as a way to skirt the we-can't-give-references issue. A "no" answer raises questions -- the impression it gives ranges from "Well, that company is just a bunch of jerks to their employees" to "He's has a bad attitude and makes it uncomfortable for everyone else" to "He was walking out the door with cash and half of their servers; they just couldn't catch him." If you're up for a position with multiple applicants, this could sink you.
While it might provide fleeting catharsis, not giving notice can't help you. At best it will do nothing; at worst, block you from a job you really want later on. Don't do it.
It's not a hoax -- it's an actual study being performed at 25 hospitals. No results yet; this article quotes September or October of this year for the release of preliminary results.
The lead for this is Sam Parnia, a critical care physician who just happens to be into this kind of near-death stuff.
See this page; the Campanile movie is from SIGGRAPH 97. How is Disney's tech different?
I saw similar technology at CMU in around that same timeframe (late 90s).
My memory will be obviously hazy here, but the resulting output was much less refined. A simple box-shaped house, for example, ended up having wickedly jagged walls. The technology showed promise, but it was far from realistic.
The Disney folks, while not inventing the tech itself, seem to have taken it a step further. Their key claim -- "Unlike other systems, the algorithm calculates depth for every pixel, proving most effective at the edges of objects" -- certainly jives with my memory.
They remain the property of NASA, and Bezos acknowledges as much: "If we are able to recover one of these F-1 engines[...], I imagine that NASA would decide to make it available to the Smithsonian for all to see. If we're able to raise more than one engine, I've asked NASA if they would consider making it available to the excellent Museum of Flight here in Seattle."
... but not due to the results; this is an example of good, solid science coming out of a secondary school with limited resources. Given what I could read of the translation, I don't think this is irresponsible journalism at all -- think of it more as journalism on the state of education, not science.
It is, of course, an extraordinary result, and will require extraordinary proof. I suspect the claims will not be reproduced; at the same time, I hope these kid-researchers keep their interest level in this experiment up regardless of outcome. From this, they'll learn about experimental errors, uncontrolled factors, and -- most importantly -- to divorce their ego from their results. That last bit is perhaps the hardest for most scientists to achieve.
They're only using the PCIe x8 physical connectors; the electrical signals do not resemble PCIe at all.
Presumably, they're also relocating the actual slot location to avoid stupid errors (like plugging one of these into an actual PCIe x8 slot or vice-versa).
Fahrenheit has its limit of 96 (not 100) set at body temperature (or what people believed it was before more accurate measurements), and 32 at the freezing point of water (i.e. an ice bath) for simple calibration of thermometers when they were being hand manufactured, since you can just split the difference between marks by eye in half to get to the single-degree markers.
More importantly, you can split the difference using geometrical constructions (compass and straightedge), which don't require another calibration source. The change from 96 to 98.6 actually occurred when the boiling point was recalibrated to exactly 212F. The actual original calibration points were 0F for the freezing point of a 1:1:1 water/ice/ammonium chloride mixture, 32F for a 1:1 water/ice mixture.
The development of the Fahrenheit scale is quite an interesting read, and it shows why the seemingly arbitrary points weren't arbitrary at all but dealt with the limited precision of the tools of the day. Not that this is any excuse to keep using it; we've have no need to split coins eight equal pieces for currency exchange and discarded our use of "pieces-of-eight" centuries ago, and a decimalized scale is so much more convenient.
What does Gooood need... with crashing a spaceship?
He was trying to keep us from killing him...
I can see the benefit in doing this for desktops: most cases are non-standard, which means throwing it out when upgrade time comes around. I've toyed with the idea of making a standard ATX case out of paper pulp.
But servers? Ideally, they would be mostly caseless: think blades, or using the rack as the case; just slap a face on the front (to maintain proper airflow), and you're done.
Now, if we could make circuit boards more recyclable, that would be terrific. Though FR4 is already fiberglass; I suppose it could be dissolved in hydrofluoric acid and the metals recovered, though I have no idea how environmentally (un)friendly that is.
IBM PCs of the era had a similar option: attach the RAM to the ISA bus via an add-on card. Like the Amiga (and most computers of that era), the expansion bus was the processor bus (with a bit of buffering and maybe a tad bit of glue logic, but not much more).
As processor speeds increased, this became a problem. Many peripherals just weren't designed for the increased speed, so they divorced the bus speed from the processor speed by making it a fraction of the processor speed (ISA) or going asynchronous (Amiga Zorro III). This became quite pronounced with PCI (max 66MHz, even if you're running a 3.0GHz CPU); you can add memory onto the bus, but it will slow you down if you try to use it as main memory.
That doesn't mean it can't be used at all these days. The cluster computer folks have a concept called NUMA, or non-uniform memory access, where memory isn't considered necessarily equal in speed. Or you could treat it like a very fast SATA drive, provided you have the necessary means of keeping power to it during power failure events (or use it only as temp or swap space).
From Ted Ts'o's commentary, it's an optimization ("jbd2: don't write superblock when if its empty") gone awry:
Basically, this optimization has the side effect of not updating the transaction log in this rare case. You can end up replaying old transactions after new ones, which will scramble metadata blocks. Given the rather unique conditions needed to hit this one, I'm not going to lose any sleep over any servers running without Ted's fix (though I'll certainly apply it once RedHat releases the patch).
Aereo is doing this for their TV-to-internet service: each user gets his/her own antenna, in the hopes that it avoids legal issues. They create stacks of mini antenna arrays and set them up somewhere in Brooklyn. The wavelength for TV is 30 cm to 5 m, depending on the channel; both dimensions are much larger than the dime-sized antenna shown there.
How this exactly works, well, I can't exactly say. Although I am an electrical engineer, I have to admit that antenna design has always been out of my league.
May have taken a bit longer. He was required to use MS Paint.
The answer is simple enough....don't buy Apple.
I wouldn't quite say "simple" for a lot of folks, myself included. There are two reasons why I ended up going with a unibody MacBook Pro (2009-era) when my last laptop died: It has a decently sturdy build quality (much better than the Dell I gave up) and, when something goes wrong, I can take it to a human, point out exactly what's wrong, and say, "Fix it" rather than play phone and shipping tag with some contracted-out support company. At the time, upgradability didn't factor into my decision; it was just as upgradeable as every other system I considered. Since I purchased this machine, I've upped the RAM from 4 GB to 8 GB and swapped the rotational hard drive for an SSD. I've also had to use the Genius Bar to address a charging issue (1 hour of my time, vs. 2-3 months getting the run-around with Toshiba for my wife's previous laptop; there's a brand I'll never touch again).
(Mac OS? It's nice because it has the Unix command line utilities I'm accustomed to; Cygwin and Interix are clunky at best. UI isn't as nice as Windows 7, though.)
Now that Apple has removed the upgradability feature, I'm not quite sure where I'll go next.
This is why I've built my own desktops for over 15 years, because not only do I get a better quality system at a cheaper price, but I can have it the way I want it, not the way some OEM thinks is best.
Oh, I definitely build my own desktops. Laptops are a different beast, though; because the form factors are non-standard, it's difficult to find parts which play nicely. You can't just add a dedicated graphics card, for example, and the motherboard+screen+case are pretty much a unit (though your example of replacing the EEE's screen for a touch-enabled one is impressive).
If they're under 13 (elementary and middle school age range), they're not allowed to access Facebook due to their terms of service and (in the US, at least) COPPA.
From Facebook's terms of service:
You will not use Facebook if you are under 13.
This is due to the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act, which requires verified parental consent before children can provide information to the website. While this does not impact you directly (that is, the FTC isn't going to knock on your door), you could get some heat from parents or administrators for allowing it at all.
Personally, I think the law is too draconian, but I wouldn't put my position in jeopardy to protest it.
The main issue I have with devices in the size-range of the Galaxy Nexus (I have a Droid Razr Maxx) is the ability to grip and use it one handed (hitting buttons with your thumb). It's not something I need to do terribly often, but I had gotten used to this coming from 6+ years of owning a BlackBerry. If it were closer to an iPhone in size, I'd be ecstatic. (I'm still quite happy with it: a nice, long battery life, Gorilla Glass, and I can toy with Android development on it.)
That said, I don't see this as such a huge deal that I would go on a rant about it.
My main beef with the clamshell design is it's difficult to use from your average economy seat on an airplane. If you have the keyboard at a comfortable typing distance, the screen has to tilt forward to not hit the seat in front of you. Getting it to a proper angle means pulling the keyboard uncomfortably close to your body.
The Vadem Clio had an interesting design where the screen was mounted in the middle on arms that attached to the back. Thus, it could hover over the keyboard and still tilt back. I never got a chance to see or use one, but I had hopes this design would alleviate the airplane seat problem. Alas, it seems to have disappeared from the market, and the patents for this design are either not being licensed out or nobody wants to take this risk.
Credit unions are exempt from federal income tax [...] because they are not-for-profit and thus exempt from federal corporate income tax. A corporation that does not make a profit has no income on which to pay federal corporate income tax.
Not sure if the wording was accidental, but non-profit != does not make a profit. The main limitation is that surplus revenues (what would normally be "profit") must be used to further the organization's goals, not benefit investors (via dividends) or employees (via profit-sharing). In fact, a well-run non-profit should be bringing in extra income and expanding its programs and services. The Wikipedia article on this is well-written.
Conversely, a business can be for-profit but still not have income (or even lose money). Within the U.S., the distinction is whether your organization is recognized by the IRS as a 501(c) entity; there are a number of tests it must pass (along with a few forms which need to be sent in).
This made me curious, so I did a bit of digging (a few minutes on Google) and turned up this article about the keyhole satellites, which supposedly (no citations given) have a resolution of 5-6 inches from a 200 mile orbit. Assuming they could be brought down to 80 miles and everything scales (which is a crazy assumption, but this is all speculation and guesswork, anyway), that would be a resolution of 2-2.5 inches.
Enough to identify the writing on a cigarette? No. But one could probably rule out certain brands based on color, size, shape, etc., at that point. Without better data (which, I'm guessing, we're unlikely to come by for obvious reasons), I'd call this plausible.
I don't think that's the target. Look what Apple has done with Thunderbolt: it's their primary docking adapter for their laptops and they've made their new monitors the equivalent of docking stations. Basically, it has just enough bandwidth to carry a DisplayPort signal plus USB.
I have a 2009 MacBook Pro which commutes with me to and from the office. It's a tad annoying to have to plug in six different cables every time I get to my desk and unplug them when I leave (which is a few times a day due to meetings). I've wished for a decent docking station; Apple seems to be averse to including a connector for this purpose, and the third-party solutions I've tried are as kludgy as one might expect. The addition of Thunderbolt doesn't have me rushing out to replace my laptop (obviously), but I'll be happy to have it when the time comes to retire this machine.
(As for why I have a MacBook vs. a Windows laptop... well, it's rather well built (and has survived a few drops to date), is Unix-y enough to allow me to develop on it and still deploy the results to our Linux servers, and has built-in grep and zsh.)
Normally these CA servers stand in highly secured room, with no network connection whatsoever. [...] So it's not really surprising they could just pay a disgruntled employee, or hack into the building, or doing some James Bond stuff, or god knows what, to get their hands on these certificates.
I'm a bit skeptical about the seriousness that the hardware vendors treat security. Depending on how rushed to market the product is, a lot of corners are cut in both hardware and software development -- and Realtek seems to be no exception in my experience. We see malware on fresh-from-the-factory hard drives and USB drives, tagging a ride on drivers, etc., all the time.
And the Stuxnet architects said it best: "It turns out there is always an idiot around who doesn't think much about the thumb drive in their hand."