Wrong, that is one of the capabilities of these chips but often, for convenience sake, the chip still contains the same information as the mag swipe in plain text. I have a chip card that I blocked non-encrypted transactions and the chip on the card simply doesn't work at any Wal Mart stores (it does at other stores), eventually (after 3 times chipping) the system will give in and allow me to swipe it.
There is no exception. Your chip still contains (in most cases in the US) the plain text version of your card information just in case you need to do a transaction when the system is offline (read and weep https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...).
I know because I have a chip reader for POS testing and I can often get the plain text information from both the mag swipe and the chip. The only difference with the chip is who gets to hold the responsibility in case it does get compromised.
Why horrified? What do you think your chip contains, a wireless connection to your private bank server? Chip-and-pin is no more secure than magswipes, it contains the same data and can often broadcast the data a 100m around you through RFID activation. A culture of accepting that anything makes your card more secure will allow CC companies to lay the blame solely with you in case it does get compromised.
I'd rather keep my mag swipe, in case it gets compromised or even a problem with the vendor (if they won't do a warranty return), my bank will happily take the charges off the card. Once I've entered a PIN or used any of their stupid 'security measures' (eg. Verified by Visa which is a horribly broken design), they assume I'm to blame for any problem with my card.
Win 7 SP1 EOL has already passed, it's in extended support meaning you have to pay them to fix anything about the OS. They'll release security updates but if your hardware doesn't work or the software doesn't do what it's supposed to do, they won't fix it nor will any new features be added.
Ubuntu support is a lot more extensive since it will fix software issues and integrate new features from upstream libraries for the extent of the support life. Plus you can still buy support for very early Ubuntu versions if you want too.
The original Razr (V3?) which was released a little before the iPhone but it was what we now consider a feature phone sold as a smartphone, it had everything (web, e-mail, bluetooth) but it was slow, had a bad camera, 5MB? storage. You could sync it over bluetooth with your computer but besides hacking in your own apps, it couldn't run what the company didn't already give you.
When the iPhone was released, I was using a full-fledged smartphone with WinMo. Again, it had everything (Internet Explorer, Outlook, Word, Excel...) but would crash and burn, it was unusable as it was a desktop OS on a tiny screen and I remember it would sync contacts only once in any circumstance and then break.
Actually, a computer with access to Google's databases may be able to. CaH is partially luck-based, partially meme based but also based upon understanding the round interpreter's background, emotional reactions, feelings, humor etc.
It might know better than anyone which card selection would resonate best with someone's senses as well as the groups' senses (because there is also a group pressure subject based around the group's laughter and what the group as a whole thinks is 'funny').
Ever played with super-religious older people? I have (thanksgiving family thing) and it doesn't work very well, in that case (until we ended the game after a few rounds) the 'cleaner' answers worked best.
Better as far as the relevant parts in the market go. Not necessarily better for hardcore geeks but better in workplaces and non-geek homes.
The iPod wasn't better than the Nomad but it was easier to use and didn't come with RealPlayer garbage. The iPhone wasn't better than the Moto or other smartphones on the market but it was easier to use than WinMo/BlackBerry, didn't crash like WinMo and didn't come with a load of garbage from the phone company (even though AT&T had a big fit about that) The MacBooks are objectively better than their Dell counterparts; cheaper feature-for-feature, easier to order, easier to manage and don't come with a bunch of garbage from the company. Sure, you can build a cheaper one yourself from Acer/Asus but who really wants to sink their time in that? All their products have excellent customer service, when you've dealt with Dell's "Gold" support (which costs ~$300/machine) vs AppleCare (~$180/machine), you'll quickly know the difference when it comes to long-term support.
If they're building the Apple Car in the nature of Jobs it wouldn't come with a $100/mo OnStar system or a continuously badgering Sirius "subscription", the cruise control would make sense (unlike Jeep/Chrysler's abomination), the media center would actually be useful (unlike VW Group/Hyundai's crap), you wouldn't have to pay an obscene premium for simple things like automatic car seats or leather interior (like Buick/Honda). Heck, most of the selections would be boiled down to 'basic' and 'premium'; sure you'll pay a bit more than a basic Hyundai but it will still be cheaper than any competitor's "advertised model". Heck, perhaps the "Apple brand oil change" wouldn't cost $280 (yes, that's what VW/Honda/etc charges, sometimes $500 or more if you have a Lexus/Mercedes/...) but more along the lines of $50 (still more than the $15 at your local gas station, but at least there won't be any hassle about them putting a thinned out oil in).
Again, that may be relevant to you (a very specific subset of people) but most people end up buying their laptop at WalMart/BestBuy and there it's: Here's a desktop, Core i3, 4GB RAM, 1TB hard drive: $399 Here's a laptop, Core i3, 6GB RAM, 500GB hard drive: $399
The fact that the Core i3's both have different model names or even from entirely different platforms is largely irrelevant, as long as the MHz is close and the GB matches, they're on par to most people. And some people will do the research and find out that for a laptop as powerful as the $399 desktop, they'll need to pay $499. And laptops are more convenient ergo, they buy the $499 or whatever the salesman has sold them up to, they'll also get the protection plan, just in case.
That IS how people choose these products, even a lot of semi-casual gamers will choose on a fairly similar thing. They'll match the specs of their desktop with the specs on their laptops and the price difference is again a little more, but an nVidia 980M == a regular 980 right? And the laptop is only $200 more (on a $1500 buy, not that much difference).
And you quote Arkham Knight which is specifically a very bad port which runs just fine on most "gaming" laptops/desktops unless you have specced out your rig to be SLI+ and want to run it on 2180p120 which it doesn't. It runs just fine on 720p24 (or whatever PS4's run at) and most people won't even know the difference.
Those things are irrelevant to most buyers. When laptops become more on-par with desktops as far as expense (and they're pretty damn close already), the desktop will be as good as dead.
IMHO getting off a mainframe in 10 years time isn't all that difficult. The reasons big companies fail at doing this is because they cheap out on hiring competent people or they outsource it.
Running your business (what mainframes and similar business processing systems like ERP, CMS, CRM etc do) is not something you should leave to another business. The other business has no reason to make it succeed, they don't care about your business processes or your business, they care about repeatability and catering to the largest common denominator among their clients, they care about profits and making you pay more money every year. So the details of your business get left by the wayside and replaced by "we did something like it with another client once, and it worked then (we promise)" and you still end up doing most of the work internally, but it gets pushed down from "outsourced IT" to the administrators who simply do it in Excel/Access (or Google Docs for the more tech-savvy ones).
I've seen it time and again. Mainframe gets replaced by big time IBM, HP, Oracle, PeopleSoft, (or a combination of them). Business processes get mangled to a 'standardized process'. The people in departments create shadow systems to get the old functionality back and you're back to square one.
Don't know about France, but in the EU/US you cannot be forced to change your business model to comply with new, onerous, anti-free-speech laws like this. These laws need to be challenged at the EU-level.
HFS has been upgraded to improve. On-the-fly compression, built-in backup/versioning and whole-disk-encryption being some of the more visible things lately. Antivirus has been built-in to OS X since I think 10.5 and two-factor authentication has also been possible since I think 10.3.
As far as repairs, the 'hard drive' is still replaceable but it's not a SATA thing it's a PCI card and there are several aftermarket options.
Cost, ease of use and accuracy. The sensor is already in the car, why get an additional device that does the same thing when you can just plug in a chip with an LCD screen and read out both current and historical data?
I block all 3rd party content on any website and I don't use 3rd party content on my own websites. If you require libraries, ads etc. you should host them yourself, a client should not have to trust a 3rd party to provide 'clean and safe' content because they simply cannot be trusted and it reflects badly on your own site.
If CNN provides malware through their ad system, it reflects on CNN, not on the 3rd party ad provider and thus those provider have no incentive nor intention to provide safer content.
The thing is that they're not plugging them. Microsoft gave them to the NFL not as a sponsored media campaign but in order to surreptitiously market their product in the viewers' eyes so that if they went to the store, they would subconsciously choose Surfaces over iPads.
The problem is that Surfaces are indeed "iPad-knockoffs". They look very similar but they are a lot worse when it comes down to the OS and the "apps" or even the ecosystem surrounding them. They feel like you just bought a Chinese iPad-knockoff with an Android version made to look like iOS but it won't run either Android or iOS software and the built-in apps barely work and there is no "app store" to speak off.
The worst thing about the Surfaces I think is that whenever you want to change something, you get dropped into the Windows 8 environment. Want to set up a network that deviates from the standard WEP/WPA2? Better get your glasses and a keyboard/mouse. Want to set up Bluetooth? Again, Config Panel. Oh, I have to install drivers for this gadget to work?
Prince v. Massachusetts is clear: Parents may be free to become martyrs themselves. But it does not follow they are free, in identical circumstances, to make martyrs of their children before they have reached the age of full and legal discretion when they can make that choice for themselves.
Oregon v. Smith likewise establishes that certain laws, specifically in regards to child welfare, should be followed.
The fact that many judiciaries have neglected or are working around the Supreme Court decision(s) doesn't make it legal if it were actually tested.
Why should a child be allowed to be excluded from basic education? That is tantamount to keeping your child at home and not educating them, which is child abuse.
There is basic science practice and scientific theories that evolve out of it. You teach science, not as a fact but as a process and from that process there is very little variation on a subject like evolution or climate change. You take into account that not all change is human-made and subtract the things we have seen from the things we see now.
Sure there are hypothesis out there that seem outlandish but that doesn't mean they're wrong, they just have not been tested yet. Perhaps we will change our current viewpoint on both evolution and climate change, but it won't be replaced by an entirely different theory just because it doesn't always fit, only built-upon. You don't throw out Newtonian physics because Einstein's Relativity explains more things more accurately.
If you're trying to avoid spying on any specific connection, you'd want to distribute and encrypt your data so not everything passes through a single link. There are a number of solutions for that, tracker-less BitTorrent being one of the more famous ones. You can buy a network of small servers all over the globe to serve your data, even partially hosted by Amazon, Google and other supposedly NSA-friendlies and you have a system that will be very hard to spy on.
You can never protect your (virtual) hardware from being seized however you can protect your data from being compromised in those situations. Running fully encrypted data stores is not that hard these days. Just keep up on the updates and use intrusion detection and you'll be pretty safe from your run-of-the-mill westerner inquiry. You can never protect yourself from a dedicated hacker entity though (ala China and North Korea), you will make mistakes at some point and they can be found with enough dedication; the west will just use legal-like tactics (jail time) to get you to divulge your password, the far-east not so much (they also may use large wrench tactics).
There are some hosting companies that promise they'll let you know when a warrant is executed, but those promises are empty when they are no longer allowed to tell you.
Then again, even if one intelligent species arose within life bearing solar systems, there must be billions of those out there. After running electricity through conductive elements, radio waves are probably the simplest forms of radiation to generate (a byproduct really of electricity through conduits). It is unlikely that a civilization will make the leap from morse code radio to encoded neutron beams without the discovery of the laws governing electromagnetism. So even if they did send out neutrinos now, they probably sent radio together or before that either intentionally or unintentionally.
Space is so massive and full of stuff that perhaps the only thing we will ever get is the WOW signal every couple of centuries. We've dismissed the WOW signal because it's been unproduced since but statistically, it is likely that it's the only thing we will ever see.
There is Visonic who creates Linux-based systems but they are ROM-based and have hard coded root passwords available over telnet. You can't tinker with it as the boot loader and kernel code is not released under GPL (Israeli based so good luck enforcing).
That is the only company I know that has Linux basis. You can do it yourself, good luck however getting an AHJ or insurance company to accept it. And in most jurisdictions you will need code compliant central fire, CO and smoke detection in the entire house the minute you renovate any space.
Even if they do, there is no alarm company in the world that will take it and as such no alerting of the authorities will be possible (and no, hooking it up to dial 911 is illegal).
Doing it yourself will also cost more than buying a system not to mention the time effort. You can get a Vista 21iP and Tuxedo console which allows you to install it yourself, tinker with the system over HTTP AND have the installation UL certified. That's what I did, the AHJ, alarm company, insurance and I am happy, it cost me less than $1000 and about $15/mo.
Depends on which Unreal engine. Older games on older engines could run on Linux even without official support, usually simply copying and renaming the binary.
If the Unreal engine were compiled for Linux, replacing the launchers would be relatively simple.
It eventually comes down to choice of rendering language. If you stuck to Directx for some reason, you'll be stuck with Windows (or Wine). The growing iOS, Android, Mac and Linux markets can't be reached. If you chose OpenGL, porting is simple.
Is there anyone still using a LiIon in their products? There are other options LiPoly for example that don't have those drawbacks. My devices with LiPoly even though thoroughly abused (which would destroy a lead-acid or LiIon - heat, partial charge, no charge,...) I still have the same devices 5 years later.
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Wrong, that is one of the capabilities of these chips but often, for convenience sake, the chip still contains the same information as the mag swipe in plain text. I have a chip card that I blocked non-encrypted transactions and the chip on the card simply doesn't work at any Wal Mart stores (it does at other stores), eventually (after 3 times chipping) the system will give in and allow me to swipe it.
There is no exception. Your chip still contains (in most cases in the US) the plain text version of your card information just in case you need to do a transaction when the system is offline (read and weep https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...).
I know because I have a chip reader for POS testing and I can often get the plain text information from both the mag swipe and the chip. The only difference with the chip is who gets to hold the responsibility in case it does get compromised.
Why horrified? What do you think your chip contains, a wireless connection to your private bank server? Chip-and-pin is no more secure than magswipes, it contains the same data and can often broadcast the data a 100m around you through RFID activation. A culture of accepting that anything makes your card more secure will allow CC companies to lay the blame solely with you in case it does get compromised.
I'd rather keep my mag swipe, in case it gets compromised or even a problem with the vendor (if they won't do a warranty return), my bank will happily take the charges off the card. Once I've entered a PIN or used any of their stupid 'security measures' (eg. Verified by Visa which is a horribly broken design), they assume I'm to blame for any problem with my card.
Idiocy and religion correlate.
Win 7 SP1 EOL has already passed, it's in extended support meaning you have to pay them to fix anything about the OS. They'll release security updates but if your hardware doesn't work or the software doesn't do what it's supposed to do, they won't fix it nor will any new features be added.
Ubuntu support is a lot more extensive since it will fix software issues and integrate new features from upstream libraries for the extent of the support life. Plus you can still buy support for very early Ubuntu versions if you want too.
The original Razr (V3?) which was released a little before the iPhone but it was what we now consider a feature phone sold as a smartphone, it had everything (web, e-mail, bluetooth) but it was slow, had a bad camera, 5MB? storage. You could sync it over bluetooth with your computer but besides hacking in your own apps, it couldn't run what the company didn't already give you.
When the iPhone was released, I was using a full-fledged smartphone with WinMo. Again, it had everything (Internet Explorer, Outlook, Word, Excel ...) but would crash and burn, it was unusable as it was a desktop OS on a tiny screen and I remember it would sync contacts only once in any circumstance and then break.
CIA? Really? This kind of crap has been around since the late 90's and is well described in books dating back decades ago.
Actually, a computer with access to Google's databases may be able to. CaH is partially luck-based, partially meme based but also based upon understanding the round interpreter's background, emotional reactions, feelings, humor etc.
It might know better than anyone which card selection would resonate best with someone's senses as well as the groups' senses (because there is also a group pressure subject based around the group's laughter and what the group as a whole thinks is 'funny').
Ever played with super-religious older people? I have (thanksgiving family thing) and it doesn't work very well, in that case (until we ended the game after a few rounds) the 'cleaner' answers worked best.
Better as far as the relevant parts in the market go. Not necessarily better for hardcore geeks but better in workplaces and non-geek homes.
The iPod wasn't better than the Nomad but it was easier to use and didn't come with RealPlayer garbage.
The iPhone wasn't better than the Moto or other smartphones on the market but it was easier to use than WinMo/BlackBerry, didn't crash like WinMo and didn't come with a load of garbage from the phone company (even though AT&T had a big fit about that)
The MacBooks are objectively better than their Dell counterparts; cheaper feature-for-feature, easier to order, easier to manage and don't come with a bunch of garbage from the company. Sure, you can build a cheaper one yourself from Acer/Asus but who really wants to sink their time in that?
All their products have excellent customer service, when you've dealt with Dell's "Gold" support (which costs ~$300/machine) vs AppleCare (~$180/machine), you'll quickly know the difference when it comes to long-term support.
If they're building the Apple Car in the nature of Jobs it wouldn't come with a $100/mo OnStar system or a continuously badgering Sirius "subscription", the cruise control would make sense (unlike Jeep/Chrysler's abomination), the media center would actually be useful (unlike VW Group/Hyundai's crap), you wouldn't have to pay an obscene premium for simple things like automatic car seats or leather interior (like Buick/Honda). Heck, most of the selections would be boiled down to 'basic' and 'premium'; sure you'll pay a bit more than a basic Hyundai but it will still be cheaper than any competitor's "advertised model". Heck, perhaps the "Apple brand oil change" wouldn't cost $280 (yes, that's what VW/Honda/etc charges, sometimes $500 or more if you have a Lexus/Mercedes/...) but more along the lines of $50 (still more than the $15 at your local gas station, but at least there won't be any hassle about them putting a thinned out oil in).
Again, that may be relevant to you (a very specific subset of people) but most people end up buying their laptop at WalMart/BestBuy and there it's:
Here's a desktop, Core i3, 4GB RAM, 1TB hard drive: $399
Here's a laptop, Core i3, 6GB RAM, 500GB hard drive: $399
The fact that the Core i3's both have different model names or even from entirely different platforms is largely irrelevant, as long as the MHz is close and the GB matches, they're on par to most people. And some people will do the research and find out that for a laptop as powerful as the $399 desktop, they'll need to pay $499. And laptops are more convenient ergo, they buy the $499 or whatever the salesman has sold them up to, they'll also get the protection plan, just in case.
That IS how people choose these products, even a lot of semi-casual gamers will choose on a fairly similar thing. They'll match the specs of their desktop with the specs on their laptops and the price difference is again a little more, but an nVidia 980M == a regular 980 right? And the laptop is only $200 more (on a $1500 buy, not that much difference).
And you quote Arkham Knight which is specifically a very bad port which runs just fine on most "gaming" laptops/desktops unless you have specced out your rig to be SLI+ and want to run it on 2180p120 which it doesn't. It runs just fine on 720p24 (or whatever PS4's run at) and most people won't even know the difference.
Those things are irrelevant to most buyers. When laptops become more on-par with desktops as far as expense (and they're pretty damn close already), the desktop will be as good as dead.
IMHO getting off a mainframe in 10 years time isn't all that difficult. The reasons big companies fail at doing this is because they cheap out on hiring competent people or they outsource it.
Running your business (what mainframes and similar business processing systems like ERP, CMS, CRM etc do) is not something you should leave to another business. The other business has no reason to make it succeed, they don't care about your business processes or your business, they care about repeatability and catering to the largest common denominator among their clients, they care about profits and making you pay more money every year. So the details of your business get left by the wayside and replaced by "we did something like it with another client once, and it worked then (we promise)" and you still end up doing most of the work internally, but it gets pushed down from "outsourced IT" to the administrators who simply do it in Excel/Access (or Google Docs for the more tech-savvy ones).
I've seen it time and again. Mainframe gets replaced by big time IBM, HP, Oracle, PeopleSoft, (or a combination of them). Business processes get mangled to a 'standardized process'. The people in departments create shadow systems to get the old functionality back and you're back to square one.
Don't know about France, but in the EU/US you cannot be forced to change your business model to comply with new, onerous, anti-free-speech laws like this. These laws need to be challenged at the EU-level.
HFS has been upgraded to improve. On-the-fly compression, built-in backup/versioning and whole-disk-encryption being some of the more visible things lately. Antivirus has been built-in to OS X since I think 10.5 and two-factor authentication has also been possible since I think 10.3.
As far as repairs, the 'hard drive' is still replaceable but it's not a SATA thing it's a PCI card and there are several aftermarket options.
Cost, ease of use and accuracy. The sensor is already in the car, why get an additional device that does the same thing when you can just plug in a chip with an LCD screen and read out both current and historical data?
I block all 3rd party content on any website and I don't use 3rd party content on my own websites. If you require libraries, ads etc. you should host them yourself, a client should not have to trust a 3rd party to provide 'clean and safe' content because they simply cannot be trusted and it reflects badly on your own site.
If CNN provides malware through their ad system, it reflects on CNN, not on the 3rd party ad provider and thus those provider have no incentive nor intention to provide safer content.
The thing is that they're not plugging them. Microsoft gave them to the NFL not as a sponsored media campaign but in order to surreptitiously market their product in the viewers' eyes so that if they went to the store, they would subconsciously choose Surfaces over iPads.
The problem is that Surfaces are indeed "iPad-knockoffs". They look very similar but they are a lot worse when it comes down to the OS and the "apps" or even the ecosystem surrounding them. They feel like you just bought a Chinese iPad-knockoff with an Android version made to look like iOS but it won't run either Android or iOS software and the built-in apps barely work and there is no "app store" to speak off.
The worst thing about the Surfaces I think is that whenever you want to change something, you get dropped into the Windows 8 environment. Want to set up a network that deviates from the standard WEP/WPA2? Better get your glasses and a keyboard/mouse. Want to set up Bluetooth? Again, Config Panel. Oh, I have to install drivers for this gadget to work?
Prince v. Massachusetts is clear: Parents may be free to become martyrs themselves. But it does not follow they are free, in identical circumstances, to make martyrs of their children before they have reached the age of full and legal discretion when they can make that choice for themselves.
Oregon v. Smith likewise establishes that certain laws, specifically in regards to child welfare, should be followed.
The fact that many judiciaries have neglected or are working around the Supreme Court decision(s) doesn't make it legal if it were actually tested.
Freedom of religion does not protect parents from neglecting their children. There is plenty of precedence about that.
Why should a child be allowed to be excluded from basic education? That is tantamount to keeping your child at home and not educating them, which is child abuse.
There is basic science practice and scientific theories that evolve out of it. You teach science, not as a fact but as a process and from that process there is very little variation on a subject like evolution or climate change. You take into account that not all change is human-made and subtract the things we have seen from the things we see now.
Sure there are hypothesis out there that seem outlandish but that doesn't mean they're wrong, they just have not been tested yet. Perhaps we will change our current viewpoint on both evolution and climate change, but it won't be replaced by an entirely different theory just because it doesn't always fit, only built-upon. You don't throw out Newtonian physics because Einstein's Relativity explains more things more accurately.
If you're trying to avoid spying on any specific connection, you'd want to distribute and encrypt your data so not everything passes through a single link. There are a number of solutions for that, tracker-less BitTorrent being one of the more famous ones. You can buy a network of small servers all over the globe to serve your data, even partially hosted by Amazon, Google and other supposedly NSA-friendlies and you have a system that will be very hard to spy on.
You can never protect your (virtual) hardware from being seized however you can protect your data from being compromised in those situations. Running fully encrypted data stores is not that hard these days. Just keep up on the updates and use intrusion detection and you'll be pretty safe from your run-of-the-mill westerner inquiry. You can never protect yourself from a dedicated hacker entity though (ala China and North Korea), you will make mistakes at some point and they can be found with enough dedication; the west will just use legal-like tactics (jail time) to get you to divulge your password, the far-east not so much (they also may use large wrench tactics).
There are some hosting companies that promise they'll let you know when a warrant is executed, but those promises are empty when they are no longer allowed to tell you.
Then again, even if one intelligent species arose within life bearing solar systems, there must be billions of those out there. After running electricity through conductive elements, radio waves are probably the simplest forms of radiation to generate (a byproduct really of electricity through conduits). It is unlikely that a civilization will make the leap from morse code radio to encoded neutron beams without the discovery of the laws governing electromagnetism. So even if they did send out neutrinos now, they probably sent radio together or before that either intentionally or unintentionally.
Space is so massive and full of stuff that perhaps the only thing we will ever get is the WOW signal every couple of centuries. We've dismissed the WOW signal because it's been unproduced since but statistically, it is likely that it's the only thing we will ever see.
There is Visonic who creates Linux-based systems but they are ROM-based and have hard coded root passwords available over telnet. You can't tinker with it as the boot loader and kernel code is not released under GPL (Israeli based so good luck enforcing).
That is the only company I know that has Linux basis. You can do it yourself, good luck however getting an AHJ or insurance company to accept it. And in most jurisdictions you will need code compliant central fire, CO and smoke detection in the entire house the minute you renovate any space.
Even if they do, there is no alarm company in the world that will take it and as such no alerting of the authorities will be possible (and no, hooking it up to dial 911 is illegal).
Doing it yourself will also cost more than buying a system not to mention the time effort. You can get a Vista 21iP and Tuxedo console which allows you to install it yourself, tinker with the system over HTTP AND have the installation UL certified. That's what I did, the AHJ, alarm company, insurance and I am happy, it cost me less than $1000 and about $15/mo.
Depends on which Unreal engine. Older games on older engines could run on Linux even without official support, usually simply copying and renaming the binary.
If the Unreal engine were compiled for Linux, replacing the launchers would be relatively simple.
It eventually comes down to choice of rendering language. If you stuck to Directx for some reason, you'll be stuck with Windows (or Wine). The growing iOS, Android, Mac and Linux markets can't be reached. If you chose OpenGL, porting is simple.
Is there anyone still using a LiIon in their products? There are other options LiPoly for example that don't have those drawbacks. My devices with LiPoly even though thoroughly abused (which would destroy a lead-acid or LiIon - heat, partial charge, no charge, ...) I still have the same devices 5 years later.