Something tells me they wouldn't both go on the same trip, given the risk.

yeah, their insurance company would be furious :)

just imagine the effects on Alphabet's stock price

they don't care, they own majority of voting rights and almost the stocks itself

I would maybe guess Branson and Bezos as a stunt promoting private space tourism and thereby their space companies :)

Wouldn't that be admitting defeat?

not 10 years but 10 000 hours of practice

Do you think that they want to make profit? Didn't Arrington said that the whole device will be open source?

Open source just means Arrington won't need to pay coders to write the software, and will get to enjoy discounts from people who have contacts to help build the hardware.

You say that like it's a bad thing.

just clarifying, since it sounded like he thought open source = non-profit

not a profit incentive. we just want cool hardware and want it to be open

I did a research about this subject and it could be done... even with price around 200$.

They will face two big problems: 1) touch screen - what type they would use? how it "lights"? weight? 2) battery - capacity? POSITION of battery! and few other problems such power supply (integrated?). CPU, RAM, SSD are not problems, they are cheap and really easili intergrated, OS is not problem too (already seen such devices with Linux).

And the last thing is design... lets face it. It's important how it will look and feel when carrying. And I'm not talking about catching the right size of it (in my research A4 is too big and A5 is too small).

So lets see what will happen... I offered I will try to help them, what about you?

+1 for assembla, I got there 3 projects

and 500MB of free space is great too!