Slashdot Mirror

Here's Trevor Loudon's book, "Barack Obama and the Enemies Within"
http://www.amazon.com/Trevor-L...
He also researched and wrote "The Enemies Within: Communists, Socialists and Progressives in the U.S. Congress"
http://www.amazon.com/THE-ENEM...

Here's Trevor Loudon talking about his research.
"Marxists in Congress and the Democratic Party"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

Now, the Scientific Method requires me to look at Loudon's evidence, and also look for counter-evidence that is objectively true (not mere pooh-poohing of Loudon based on 'gut instinct' or emotion). I'd be very interested if you know of flaws in Loudon's massive works. At the moment it seems that those that worked towards making the US more Marxist not only still there, they have more power than ever before: eg. see Hillary Clinton's relationship to Marxist Saul Alinsky, for example. Surprisingly, Harry Reid is not a Marxist. Corrupt for sure, but no Marxist according to Loudon.

Anyway, I hoped this piqued your interest and you look at it with an open mind. The Matrix is lying in plain sight :) And I welcome any objective facts you have to disprove Loudon's conclusions. Thanks.

There's a bloody dinosaur above you! And he's a perv!

Have none of you read Three Body Problem??? No spoilers in my post, but the answer is out there... (Yes, I'm going for funny)

Seriously, though that book is awesome and should win the Nebula this year. If you like hard SF you need to read it right now.

How come Soulskill always posts Identity Politics on Slashdot. He/she/it is kinda like those fake journalists that Gamergate exposed as pushing their political agenda on the wrong crowd.

Soulskill, please push your articles at Huffpost, they'll be appreciated there. We want News for Nerds, not the Neo-Marxist Narrative for Nerds.

ps. as someone who has submitted scientific papers they can be rejected for many reasons. Two women writing pseudo-science being rejected by a reviewer is not sexism - it shows the submitted article needed more work. Only a true sexist thinks otherwise (and only a sexist cares that the editor was a man). Think about it this way: if two men submitted a paper about the increasing misandry but their paper was rejected by a woman editor would that be evidence of sexism? or perhaps just they needed to do more work on their paper? or the current issue was full? etc.

Pushing articles that match the Leftist Narrative is a form of confirmation bias, intended to indoctrinate Slashdotters. It is very subtle. if enough articles push the Narrative from enough sources then people start to believe that the meme has some merit, despite the objective facts stating otherwise (which very few people bother to research or push back on, unlike the heroes of Gamergate).

This is a brilliant book how how this modern, subtle form of indoctrination is done. It's very cheap through Kindle:
"Disinformation" by Lt Gen Ion Mihai Pacepa (he is the highest-ranking Marxist defector to the West that explained how it was done):
http://www.amazon.com/Disinfor...

pps: I'm gonna be burnt with bad karma from the zombies that have swallowed the disinformation and now wage their Cultural Marxist Political Correctness war on others. But all I can do is say the truth as I understand it, and warn my fellow Slashdotters. Slashdot has become a sad place where Free Speech is pounded away by mod trolls.

I don't necessarily think of it as being beyond your abilities as much as outside of the scope of your abilities; is managing inherently more difficult than developing? For some people sure, but I think perhaps looking at the career ladder hierarchically is part of what leads us into this. My boss is not a great coder (he started out coding) but he is a great negotiator, salesman and organizer. It takes all sorts, right?

I don't know that it's inherently more difficult. It IS, however, a very DIFFERENT skillset. And just because I'm good at communicating with a computer (programming) doesn't mean I'm good at communicating with management. Indeed, if the Programmers' Stone is to be believed, programmers and managers are very different in how they comprehend stuff, not to mention how they communicate.

The truly gifted can speak both languages. Most of us speak only one. And we don't even realize there IS another way to comprehend/communicate. If/when we do, though, it result can be wonderful.

IMHO, the things every programmer-promoted-to-management needs to know are found in that link and in The Mythical Man-Month. I, routinely, run into situations where management still hasn't learned the lessons from that book. And life for me, as a programmer with ZERO interest in going into management, would be so much better if they would learn from that tome.

These will be popular........

http://www.amazon.com/Pimpolog...

http://www.amazon.com/Dealing-...

These will be popular........

http://www.amazon.com/Pimpolog...

http://www.amazon.com/Dealing-...

The book Woodworking With Your Kids http://www.amazon.com/Woodwork... has a misleading title. The kids in question are actually kids in his community and his school. The author set up a community and school workshop back in 1970 on a shoestring budget. He was teaching kids to make some pretty impressive furniture before they were old enough to drive.

We have additional tools now, but the same approach to setting up a maker space would still work.

You can get a gamestick with controller for $65 or you can buy pretty much any dual core (or better) Android tablet and use a wireless controller, Tigerdirect has so many they were selling a "buy one get one free" dual core tablet deal just the other day.

The problem with this idea is...well most mobile games really aren't designed to be played like a console, they are designed for touch tablets and for very short gameplay. This is pretty much the opposite of what those playing a console expect and so they are disappointed by the short gameplay, most of which is the FTP "pay to win" style which is further disappointing gameplay wise. I've tried a bunch of these mobile games and....yeah I can see why these things haven't taken off, most folks don't like playing games in 2-5 minute "bursts" and being constantly bugged for more money. Even when I've bought some of them through Steam, with all the extras included? The gameplay is still insanely short, with most seeming to follow a 3-5 minute "play on the shitter" model.

So if somebody asked me what kind of cheap console to get? You can get an X360 or PS3 used for less than $100 most places and you'll have better games and more fun than you will with these sticks and mini-consoles.

For example, the Avatar Sirius gaming tablet that I got cost $65 and it's amazing.

I looked at the product, and it doesn't appear to have any face buttons on it, unlike other Android tablets such as the Archos GamePad and various JXD gaming tablets. How do you do a reliable directional control and jump and fire controls for a game like Mega Man without buttons? I tried the on-screen controls of the free subset of Pixeline and the Jungle Treasure on my Nexus 7 (2012) tablet, and I kept missing jumps because my thumbs kept drifting from the area where the controls were. (The game worked once I paired an external Bluetooth keyboard.)

He may not be able to see the difference if he doesn't have this.

The holographic universe theory has been around for at least 25+ years

When you have famous astronomers and people such as

* "The stuff of the universe is mind-stuff" - Astronomer Arthur Eddington

* "... our brains mathematically construct hard reality by interpreting frequencies from a dimension transcending time and space. The brain is a hologram, interpreting a holographic universe." - Cyberneticist David Foster

* "Today there is a wide measure of agreement... that the stream of knowledge is heading towards a non-mechanical reality; the universe begins to look more like a great thought than like a great machine" - Astronomer James Jeans

saying the universe appears to function like a holographic mind then I find ANY sort of calculations that can give credence to this theory is definitely interesting.

Office 2003 may long be discontinued, but Microsoft didn't take my data with them when Office 2007 was released.

It goes MUCH further than that...

http://www.amazon.com/Microsof...

You may, if you are so inclined... buy a brand new in box copy of MS Office 2003 right now, today, and it will work perfectly fine...

You don't have that option with Google Service X...

Microsoft would do well to remember that when making their own cloud services. Everyone doesn't want to be on the "newest thing" and sometimes older products work well...

Not just Office 2013. Look for Corel Draw X6, Sony Vegas 12, Nero 2014, etc. Lots of old boxed software for sale, at cheaper prices than the latest and "greatest"

Nice idea. Now instead of putting in teeth-rotting sugar or another weird tasting artificial sweetener, try Xylitol. Not only is it good for the teeth and health (less than 50% calories of sugar), but unlike most or all of the alternative sweeteners, it also TASTES like real sugar. I bought some for myself to put on cereal, and also unlike other sweeteners, it doesn't have that bitter aftertaste.

I bought this one from the UK, but for the US, this one looks good.

Only a small percentage of people find trouble with it (it can have a laxative affect if you take too much for the first few days). Still 4.8/5 from 106 reviews (no 1 or 2 star) is mightily impressive if you ask me.

Okay, now I'm wondering how difficult it would be to sew one (assuming one had the ability to sew), because it looks like a universal KEYBOARD is available, sans case: http://www.amazon.com/Bluetoot...

I'm still waiting for someone (anyone) to release a new full QWERTY keyboard phone.

Did they stop making clip-on Bluetooth keyboards for phones or something? Amazon still appears to have slide-out keyboards in stock for iPhone 6.

Office 2003 may long be discontinued, but Microsoft didn't take my data with them when Office 2007 was released.

It goes MUCH further than that...

http://www.amazon.com/Microsof...

You may, if you are so inclined... buy a brand new in box copy of MS Office 2003 right now, today, and it will work perfectly fine...

You don't have that option with Google Service X...

Microsoft would do well to remember that when making their own cloud services. Everyone doesn't want to be on the "newest thing" and sometimes older products work well...

Actually, we did. Like most Americans, sadly, you know nothing of history beyond, say, 1980 or some such. If you did know some history, you would know ...

Like many people on Slashdot you seem to have a defective knowledge of history and the church.

If one were to look into the history they would find that you either grossly exagerate on these matters, or are simply wrong. Many of the early colonies were formed by religous sects coming from Europe. Once in America they adopted the European customs of institutionalizing the church with the government. Although in some colonies other sects were persecuted, few were killed. In any case it was nothing like the scale or severity of European persecution. Other colonies had different views. Rhode Island was formed with the ideal of religious tolerence, and other colonies were adopting laws for tolerance by 1650. Eventually all of the colonies adeopted the US Constitution, became states, and moved past that.

As to the "Christian justifications for the genocide against American Indians" I have to ask, what genocide are you referring to? There wasn't one.

Reject the Lie of White "Genocide" Against Native Americans
Were American Indians the Victims of Genocide?

As to your claims about "lines of Christian preachers submitted tons of briefs, all saying that their Christian God had deemed that black people were inherently inferior and not worthy of any basic human rights" in the case of Loving vs Virginia, which briefs are you referring to? The only brief I see listed from an organization claiming church affiliation was against Virginia's law.

LOVING v. VIRGINIA, 388 U.S. 1 (1967)

Briefs of amici curiae, urging reversal, were filed by William M. Lewers and William B. Ball for the National Catholic Conference for Interracial Justice et al.; [388 U.S. 1, 2] by Robert L. Carter and Andrew D. Weinberger for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, and by Jack Greenberg, James M. Nabrit III and Michael Meltsner for the N. A. A. C. P. Legal Defense & Educational Fund, Inc.

T. W. Bruton, Attorney General, and Ralph Moody, Deputy Attorney General, filed a brief for the State of North Carolina, as amicus curiae, urging affirmance

So it looks to me that your disparagement of Christians is based on what is essentially one half-truth and two whole lies.

Now that would be bad in and of itself, but you also overlook the many positive contributions made by Christians.

The abolition of slavery - Christian and churches drove the abolisionist movement. Perhaps you could start with this man:
      William Wilberforce - the story told in this wonderful movie: Amazing Grace, released in 2007
Higher Education - Many of America's first colleges were formed by churches.
Health Care - Many hospitals have been founded by churches, or with church backing.
The Civil Right movement - Once again many churches were participants in the Civil Rights movement

There are many more that could be added to that.

Yeah, you Christians are really, really superior to other religions....

Moving past the half-truth and falsehoods you wrote certainly seems to make for a better record to reflect upon.

This is why I always try to purchase the "Low Tox" antifreeze for my vehicles. Should I ever be stranded in a remote location without water, I could survive for days just by cracking the draincock on the radiator. Plus, I don't have to feel as bad about parking my car over the storm sewer and emptying out the cooling system when I do a flush!

Toss a few gallons of water in your trunk before you head to remote locations -- while the propylene glycol in the antifreeze may not kill you, the corrosion inhibitors and other ingredients plus possible oil and combustion product contamination is not going to be great for you.

This is why I always try to purchase the "Low Tox" antifreeze for my vehicles. Should I ever be stranded in a remote location without water, I could survive for days just by cracking the draincock on the radiator. Plus, I don't have to feel as bad about parking my car over the storm sewer and emptying out the cooling system when I do a flush!

And now they are producing their own entertainment a la Netflix.

And they are making money from providing the back end for Netflix. So Amazon is producing their own content a la Netflix, AND Netflix is writing them a fat check every month. Netflix even has a public case study about how they use AWS ... and contribute to making AWS better.

http://aws.amazon.com/solution...

http://www.fastcolabs.com/3013...

As opposed to a $300 watch? http://www.amazon.com/Motorola...

There are NO places where you can buy legal digital copies of movies without DRM.

I think I said that, actually.

That said, there currently exist no DRM-free legitimate sources for movies,

I then continued to clarify:

though there are many that work on all platforms, including Linux (and Android), which can not be said for iTunes.

Did you not read the sentence immediately preceding the one you quoted? Hmm?

So what you're saying is "people should pirate, or not have digital copies of movies"

Where did I say anything about piracy?

iTunes isn't any worse than any other mechanism

Except for the whole "doesn't work on Android" part.

The only other one I'm even aware of is Ultraviolet

How about Amazon? Or Google Play? In addition to Google's native support on Android (obviously), they both work in-browser and both have iOS apps available: Amazon Instant Video for iOS Google Play Movies & TV for iOS.

Platform support alone makes both of those better options than iTunes. I'm not sure if you missed my point or if you were simply ignoring it.

Amazon AWS offers 'dedicated instances' (ctrl-f for "Dedicated Instances") for security reasons.

for workloads where corporate policies or industry regulations require that your EC2 instances be physically isolated at the host hardware level from instances that belong to other customers

Anyone know if this attack would actually work today on, say, Amazon's shared-hosting?

Hmm... let's see... First off, you'll probably have better luck searching for C++ 11 than C++ 14, which were very subtle changes compared to 11, and not worth worrying about when first learning. You can read up on what changed in 14 later.

In a nutshell, I'd say that the biggest change is the notion that you should very rarely have to use raw pointers any more, meaning you generally shouldn't allocate or release memory with new or delete. By applying RAII principle and smart pointers, you can virtually eliminate all chances of accidental resource and memory leaks.

What's more, you get almost the same sense that you're using a language with managed memory, since you don't typically have to use delete, and even writing destructors becomes much more rare. So, I'd probably start by learning about the smart pointers and which versions to use when, how to properly cast them, and how to use the factory functions in place of 'new'.

I picked up a lot of information on the web via simple tutorial blogs about specific topics, but I also read through Stroustrup's book The C++ Programming Language (fourth edition) as a definitive reference.

Don't feel the need to rush into all the new features. Just start with the basics (nullptr, auto, smart pointers, class enum), and then move to more advanced topics (move semantics, lambas, etc).

Good luck!

Challende accepted:
http://www.amazon.com/Dragon-T...

First hit, $110 with micro-HDMI.

And as he said with screen "1280x800 IPS", just 1 GB of RAM but on the other hand also two cameras.

Anything more you want me to Google for you?

Honestly, the 'compute stick' makes zero sense for a TV-mounted device. It is far better to just go with a chrome cast stick or an AppleTV for airplay and using a pad or cell in your hand to control it if you want to throw a display up on the TV. Otherwise you will be fumbling around with a horrible remote or you have to throw together a bluetooth keyboard (etc...) and it just won't be a fun or convenient experience.

I have such a stick on my TV, and it works great! It's *not* an ideal general computing device, but it is pretty much ideal for a Smart TV thingie.

As far as input devices, we use either a bluetooth Logitech keyboard/touchpad device, or a "flying mouse" remote. Both work rather well. If you haven't one, you should check out a "flying mouse" remote on Amazon for under $20 and work by waving your hand. It's really easy and rather intuitive once you get past a 1 minute introduction. Oh, and it contains a full QWERTY keyboard too.

With the current incantation of Amazon Web Services (VPC),

IPv6 support is currently not available for load balancers in Amazon VPC (EC2-VPC).

http://docs.aws.amazon.com/Ela...

So there goes lots of the internet....

Facebook is a great company. Mark Zuckerburg is an inspiring leader.

So is Sheryl Sandberg, who wrote a great book.

And here's ; might as well pick up that one too!

- 15-year FB customer

Facebook is a great company. Mark Zuckerburg is an inspiring leader.

So is Sheryl Sandberg, who wrote a great book.

And here's ; might as well pick up that one too!

- 15-year FB customer

Nazis did not persecute blacks at all. There were perhaps 20,000 in Germany. They could not join german specific groups like the SS or hitler youth, and could not get into many university programs, but they were otherwise left alone. There was no segregation. They could hold most jobs, or join the regular german army.

A great personal account.

http://www.amazon.com/Destined...

Uh, you sure you were searching for the Intel 750? Because Amazon lists it for $471 for the 400GB model, or $1200 for the 1200GB model. Which is quite a bit inflated from NewEgg's pricing but not exactly the $2400 you listed.

Oh wait, I should have read the rest of your post first. You have absolutely no idea what you're talking about, do you?

Uh, you sure you were searching for the Intel 750? Because Amazon lists it for $471 for the 400GB model, or $1200 for the 1200GB model. Which is quite a bit inflated from NewEgg's pricing but not exactly the $2400 you listed.

Oh wait, I should have read the rest of your post first. You have absolutely no idea what you're talking about, do you?

Outside your own home, there is scarcely any place in a city you can avoid surveillance.

Your camera-equipped smart tv is watching you. So is your kinect. Your cell phone is tracking you all the time. Your internet usage is monitored. Your smart meter keeps an eye on your electric consumption. You are not free of surveillance unless you do like the guy in John Varley's "PRESS ENTER . . ."

Ben Rich, the second Skunk Works director after Kelly Johnson, said in Skunk Works:... that around the end of the F-117 project, that Federal regulations had become so oppressive that they wouldn't be able to duplicate their prior successes. The U-2 was contracted in 1954 and flew in 1955, the SR-71 was contracted at the end of 1962 and flew in 1964.

By way of contrast, after burning through $1 billion, the X-33 never flew and its engine was never built.

Your false assumption is that doctors, chemists and physicists get things right with any greater frequency. It's not that social scientists are misusing statistics but that a large number of scientists is most disciplines simply do a poor job of quantifying things. It's a little more obvious when it happens in social science, but accurate measurement is hard or often impossible, so bad proxy measures a pervasive feature of most scientific disciplines. That's one of may reasons why most "experts" usually get it wrong.

This isn't from the Onion?

No it's a tell-all article announcing a PARADYNE shift.
No silly, that's the trademarked name of a corporation. You mean PARADIGM shift.
What a crappy deal. 'Paradigm' looks like it would rhyme with 'jism' or 'pigeon'.
Whacha gonna do, it's Englitch. How do you pronounce GHOTI?
Okay so about the homeless people. What are they doing?
They're throwing open their trench-coats to reveal... a unique, affiliate-tagged barcode.
So no money actually changes hands, it winds up in an account somewhere.
Precisely. And it is going to change EVERYTHING.
Isn't this a lot like the Amazon Affiliate program? Where the purchase is tagged to the vendor?
No, no, no! This is a Google project!
Okay... but Amazon's involves just navigating to a specific URLright? So does this?
No it's different. You have to download an 'Real Change app' for it to work.
This is a good thing? Making it device-specific and having to install an app?
Yes. And besides, it is a Google project.
To acquire only this specific publication?
Yes. And besides, it is a Google project.
Walk me through this. What is this magazine about?
Real Change is an award-winning weekly newspaper that provides immediate employment opportunity and takes action for economic, social, and racial justice.
Sounds interesting. Any porn or cheat codes? Or maybe something about the Roman Empire? Romans ROCK.
Real Change is an award-winning weekly newspaper that provides immediate employment opportunity and takes action for economic, social, and racial justice.
I get it. So... why can't a homeless person be recommending books and presenting Amazon-tagged URLs to scan?
I wish you would dispense with the Amazon stuff. This is a Google Project.
I presume Real Change is ready to cash out every day, whereas Amazon makes you jump through bank and gub'mint hoops that homeless people cannot get through.
True.
Is this because Real Change is dealing out small amounts of cash to undocumented people, and has not yet attracted the attention of the IRS?
I'd rather not discuss that. They might be listening.
So the REAL problem then, that which requires the PARADIGM shift, is that homeless people cannot participate in the economy to the extent that they could use their individual personality, experience and selling skills to promote a wide range of products, such as those sold by Amazon, in a framework in which they earn affiliate money without incurring any risk to the buyer? And just perhaps, some community organization might be willing or able to assist these persons in setting up the accounts, choosing items, printing out books of tagged barcodes, and operating a clearing account so as Amazon deposits the funds they can dispense cash on a regular basis? And maybe convince Amazon to reconcile accounts daily?
No no no! Even if homeless people could get bank accounts it would not work. Amazon does not require an app.
And besides, what you suggest sounds vaguely Communist. I'd have to report you to the IRS.
So it's really about people palpating their silly little phones and app distribution then?
What else is there?

What, you don't purchase your frozen heads on e-Bay?!

You can get 8 Heads in a Duffel Bag from Amazon for $10 bucks.

If you haven't already, read An Astronaut's Guide To Life On Earth, but Chris Hadfield. Amazing book. It gave me a new found respect for NASA, the CSA, Roscosmos, and everybody else who helps make space exploration possible.

The reality is that if you buy an android, you are linked to Google.

That's not true. You most certainly can layer systems other than Google Play on top of Android. For example: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00OC...

The fact that something requires a developer (or more) just means it isn't designed for end users to do but rather manufacturers or service providers.

For up-to-date knowledge of all the variants in the Bible, just for the Catholic letters it costs 98 euro, which is about 105 USD. It would cost many thousands of dollars for the whole Bible. That doesn't even come close to including all of the apocrypha and patristics and everything else!

There's never been a decent critical edition of the Quran made. Keith E. Small did a partial one for just the tiny text of 14:35 to 41. It costs 29.85 USD on Amazon. I'm not sure, but I'm estimating that that is only about 1/1000 of the text of the Quran. So, extrapolating, it would be 30,000 for an up-to-date knowledge of Quran variants. And again, that doesn't even come close to including all of the hadiths and sira and everything else!

The "major" religions do not fare well at all for cheaply understanding their "history" and myths either.

Sources:

http://www.scholarly-bibles.co...

http://www.amazon.com/Textual-...

His credentials include co-founder of Earth Day and early computer bulletin boards.

http://www.amazon.com/Whole-Ea...

He proposes urban living, nuclear power, and GMO, to chargin of faux-liberals.

Yeah, they had a great R&D department, winning Nobel Prizes, inventing the transistor, discovering the cosmic background radiation. And they did NOTHING with all that knowledge to provide innovative services to their customers.

Are you kidding? You need to read The Idea Factory and get a clearer view of the issue. You're getting outraged over something you don't even understand.

Though come to think of it, most of the time people get outraged it's over things they don't understand.

A couple of BD-Rs stored in a safe deep deposit box or over at a relative's house.

My bank charges $60 a year for a box - that's less expensive than any of the online services for large quantities of data. The real costs are a function of how much data you want to backup and how much redundancy you want offsite. For instance, for the 6TB drives I'm using, to have two onsite and two offsite costs twelve hundred bucks now, which compares favorably with tape solutions. I tend to upgrade backup drives every other year and trickle down the backup drives to servers and workstations, so it's not a sunk cost necessarily.

I prefer ZFS mirroring over LUKS aes-xts devices, the security of which entirely depends on how good your passphrase is. So don't be stupid and lazy in that regard. If your passphrase is really good, you shouldn't worry about anybody getting ahold of your drive.

Btw, if you use the S3 calculator and look at the Glacier storage, it costs $0.01 per GB per month. Stick it in two regions and it rises to a whopping $0.02 per GB per month.

A fireproof safe is up in the hundreds of dollars. Though you could buy a fireproof HD... for a few hundred as well.

I have a home NAS and back the NAS up to the cloud just in case there's a fire in my house. If I was really paranoid I'd back it up to 2 different cloud providers (Amzn, Google, Azure, Rackspace).

This gets me thinking about what the most reliable data media would be to keep in my fire-rated home safe. CDs/DVDs/tapes could easily melt or warp rendering them useless

Ordinary fireproof safes are designed to keep papers from bursting into flames. Data rated fireproof safes keep the interior temperature under 125F/50C, like say this one so computer media survives just fine. In fact, this a "Why can't I be arsed to google this for five minutes?" question.

This is exactly my biggest concern with self-driving cars. First we'll have automate-able cars that can self-drive on-demand. Then we'll have fully automated cars. Then automated cars ONLY, for safety. For our own good. That will be the moment when we wave our freedom to travel bye-bye. Without freedom to travel the free exchange of ideas will be reduced, and all other wonderful things mentioned in 1984.

The transition will happen slowly. As more and more fully-automated cars will come on the market, fewer people will choose to get a driver's license. Eventually drivers will be such a small minority, outlawing manually-driven cars will be met with insignificant resistance. Then people will only be able to go where the cars will allow them to go.

This future is coming. We might even end up with a second NRA (National Roadster Association), for good reason.
---
Check out my book. Set in the future where technology such as self-driving cars is a double-edged sword.

I had this problem and after trying several things I finally found a solution: Buy an Anker USB cable. I tried just about everything else with my tablet. I have a USB power meter. The Nexus 7 2012 seems to be extremely sensitive to the resistance in the USB cable. The Anker cable is much fatter than most cables I've tried. Before I switched to this cable I've had my tablet go dead while plugged into the charger.

Here's what else I tried:
I replaced the USB connector on my tablet (fairly easy to do). This helped but I still had problems.
I tried numerous chargers including the Anker charger, which helped but didn't solve the problem.
I tried many different USB cables. Some would help briefly but none ever charged quickly, the best one was the stock one that came with the tablet, but even that didn't work too well.

Once I switched to the Anker cable I was able to charge at over 1A for the first time. None of the other cables came close and I tried a lot of cables, including the Amazon Basics cables (which are otherwise nice cables).

The assertion the Vine="buying reviews" is total, complete and utter unsubstantiated bull, regardless. I've personally received Amazon Vine products for review, written unfavorable (but I believe, through and well supported) reviews for them, and still been able to continue in the program

You have conveniently inserted the word "good." Vine allows producers to buy reviews by paying Amazon to put items into the hands of reviewers who are required - by the rules of the Vine program - to review the items they receive, lest they be cast off the freebie train:

Once they are invited into the program, to maintain their status as a Vine Voice, they must review all of the selected products within 30 days of receipt and continue to be among the reviewers with the highest ranks from Amazon to keep their status as a Vine member.

Whether or not these reviews are tilted towards the positive by the reception of free merch is open for discussion, but please don't pretend that these reviews weren't instigated by the receipt of free goods.

They should only allow reviews from people who actually purchased that product. Their reviews are already a mess, with tons of one star reviews for products that are really meant for the seller.

They already have a mechanism for this too: http://www.amazon.com/gp/commu...

They just need to purge all the other reviews. There's so many scams and agendas both for positive and negative reviews, that nowadays I only trust verified purchase reviews anyway.