One of you could vanish at any moment. You should take this opportunity to make out with yourself.

Hey, I patented the notion of a snarky patent-war prediction in a comment thread. I wants muh royalty check!

Well, there will be no limitations on installing your own software. (There wouldn't even be any benefit to this for Google, because the whole draw of this platform is going to be the massive number of awesome apps (see Breadcrumbz for my current favorite example) available for it... And many of these will likely be both libre (free as in speech) and gratis (free as in beer). Not only that, but since the entire system stack is OSS, removing any such limitations would be trivial and in short order everyone would be using the resulting version.)

In fact, I'm willing to bet that if Android's Market doesn't offer distribution for free apps, an installer.app for Android will be close behind it.

Actually, the Android SDK is so awesome, I'm going to start on one right now just in case (and for fun!). *fires up Eclipse*

What I wonder is whether Google's Android Market (or whatever it ends up being called) will also be available to distributors of free applications, or if it only makes sense in a "developer collects money, Google takes a cut of that" fashion.

Personally, I'm hoping this will be more like a user-friendly package manager with support for non-free(-as-in-beer) software purchases and fully open-source app downloads as well. Imagine something like a hybrid between a software marketplace and, say, the app downloader (which is a rather full-featured package manager) currently available for cracked iPhones.

Via is a lot bigger than Intel in the embedded world. They're probably second only to Motorola.

As for Intel's power consumption problems, most people think this was due to a brute force approach to speed simply because power draw increased over time as Intel's chips got faster. The actual cause of this was power loss due to quantum tunneling -- as the silicon dioxide approached a few atoms in thickness, the electrons in the circuit were tunneling right past the gate at an alarming rate under Netburst's design.

In fact, this was one of the major hurdles for the Penryn project, where their new hafnium (I think) gate material allows for a thicker barrier (thus cutting down on power loss due to tunneling) while facilitating a better conduction (which of course makes the circuit faster).

It's fascinating stuff. There's a detailed description of the Penryn innovation out there (I think I found it on Ars Technica). If you've suffered through some university-level chemistry or physics courses (and remember them, of course ^~), you'll probably have a fairly good idea of what it's talking about.

I, for one, am more excited about Larabee than I ever could be about Atom. I'm not even sure there's much point to Intel reaching into this market, given how determined Via is to hold onto it (it's really their only business after all) and how strong that hold is.

Of course, all this needs to be taken with a grain of NaCl -- these are first silicon, after all.

That is, without a doubt, the strangest analogy I have ever seen. =)

Actually, from a perspective of killing people this device has its colors backwards, doesn't it? I mean, normally green means go ahead, and red means stop.

Does yellow mean shoot him really fast if you think you can do it before it turns red?

"Is this red or yellow?"
"It looks more like an orange..."
"Yeah but it's sort of a reddish orange..."
"Maybe... tangerine?"

Finally, the drama of war meets the drama of the home pregnancy test.

I'm going to contact the IRS and request a refund of all taxes withheld this year on the grounds of misappropriation. Ugh.

there's a big difference between RFID itself (an extremely broad specification for identification over radio frequencies), which has no security whatsoever, and applications of RFID, which almost always include security measures of some sort.

True, most of these suck, but they can be very secure. The problem is any kind of major encryption technology requires some pretty beefy computation capability for a device with no internal power source and severely limited real estate. Asymmetric ciphers, for example, require both parties to store and work with three very large numbers (their public key, their private key, and the other party's public key), and the initial handshake (in which session keys are exchanged over the asymmetric cipher so faster, symmetric ciphers can take over) requires a mathematically complex operation (dividing, exponentiating, and calculating the modulus of these extremely large numbers).