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There is 0 evidence that what we call a "black hole" is an actual real class of objects that really exist.

Black holes is a prediction of our theory which matches observations so far. A recent example is the black hole merger causing the gravitational waves detected at LIGO.

Unless we find a different theory which matches observations better and which says that black holes are in fact not black holes but something else, we will think of these objects as black holes.

Theory suggests that black holes cannot form because they would require infinite time to collapse.

This is plain wrong. The collapse happens in a very short time, in the proper frame of reference.

See for example http://physics.stackexchange.c... for more details.

You could not travel somewhere and return before you left, therefore there is no time travel.

No, you are incorrect. See the first answer here, or a more thorough explanation here. When reading the latter, keep in mind that "FTL signal" and "FTL spacecraft" are equivalent for these purposes.

Causality doesn't say that it was time travel to appear to leave after you arrived at a location.

Special Relativity equates FTL to time travel, but that would be a violation of causality in any case. Causality means that all causes must precede their effects. Special relativity says that the ordering of events is dependent on the observer. The combination of the two means that in order to preserve causality, all causes must be observed to precede their effects in all reference frames. Since the destination in your example would observe the travel of the ship in reverse order, that would violate causality. Visiting your own past is also possible under SR, but I'll defer to the linked explanations there.

Did you forget that the other news agencies filed amicus briefs supporting Fox?

Why don't you look up the f**king case and see what it was about instead of talking out of your a$$.

Among a million other sources: http://skeptics.stackexchange....

In other words, you implemented the plug-in model where each app provides a service to the main app. But how does your main app trigger the installation of sub-apps on the user's device? I thought the user had to confirm installation of all packages through the Google Play Store app unless the user turns on developer-oriented options, such as "Unknown sources" or "Enable USB debugging". Or does turning on a feature that requires a sub-app present a notice of what is about to happen next and then take the user to the sub-app's page in Google Play Store to complete the installation?

$10-$20 is certainly for fedex :) The price range is more in the 4.000$ to 13.000$ per Kg for sending stuff at LEO. It has been said that spaceX could break the 1.000$/Kg barrier.

No it is not. Most of the stuff involved is 99% efficient, so I simply averaged it to 90%.

Sources? Here are mine:

1) In the USA, transmission and distribution losses are estimated at 6% by the EIA. However, India (the subject of the original post) has really bad infrastructure, in comparison. Their losses are estimated at about 30% by the World Energy Council. So, I was actually way too generous when I said "90% efficient" for this part.

2) The Tesla Roadster is said to have a battery pack charge/discharge efficiency of 86% in an article from Stanford University, which claims to be drawing from a source published by Tesla itself.

3) The National Electrical Manufacturers Association requires a minimum efficiency of about 92% for some large induction motors. However, I found an answer on the Electrical Engineering Stack Exchange site indicating that Tesla uses a slightly less efficient type of motor, and also that a ~97% efficient power controller is required, which brings the real efficiency down to ~88%.

Using the exact numbers I sourced, above: 88% of 86% of 70% of 42% = 22%, which is even worse for a coal-powered electric car than what I originally posted (because I was intentionally rounding up a bit to allow for future improvements).

That link about the Prius Engine is nice! However keep in mind: that would require all new cars to use engines like this. Which they hopefully do in not to distant future.

The extremely aggressive CAFE standards recently set by the Obama administration are already pushing things hard in that direction in the USA. Admittedly, India probably won't be buying many ICE cars produced for the US market in the next decade - but then, they won't be buying fancy electrics like a Tesla, either.

Heartbleed would've been caught much much faster if they hadn't insisted on using their homegrown memory allocator. Basically, they weren't even using malloc() calls, much less calloc() calls.

OpenBSD's malloc implementation clears the memory on unallocation, for example.

https://security.stackexchange...

Realtek is really bad. Cheap chips made in a tight budget FULL of bugs, from dropping connections to stop working for seconds due to heating... http://unix.stackexchange.com/...

Actually, I agree with you. The guns by themselves may not help much if we ignore all our other rights, and yes, we have issues there.

I think we put people in prison for too long, take away their rights to vote too easily, and so fourth.

I think the government is kidding itself about encryption, the bad guys will just use other options besides the ones the government wants, but frankly a lot of people high up in the government don't understand technology, so that it what it is.

My point is that without guns, you're just subjects because you don't even have the option to revolt. I consider the Declaration of Independence just as important as the US Constitution, even if it isn't a legal document.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

"When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation."

^ That is hard to do without guns, sad to say. Humans are a rather violent species. :(

http://law.stackexchange.com/q...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
https://petitions.whitehouse.g...

In short, the US Government has said "If the people of Texas want to leave, they'll have to go to war to force the issue."

They already know there is nothing on it but selfies but they want to get people used to the idea of 'Feds' extracting data from people's iPhones, or else just give would-be terr'ists the idea that their data is secure, when Apple has in fact implemented a backdoor years ago

Over at the Security section of Stack Exchange, the idea of anything of value being on the device is almost taboo, and deemed a political issue, not a security issue:
http://security.stackexchange....

> When the planet's surface is 60% water the meteors are going to hit water 60% of the time.

Not exactly true. There seems to be a relationship between the fall rate and latitude.

Also, the northern hemisphere has proportionally more land than the southern hemisphere (68% vs 32%), you'd expect about twice as many NH impacts on land than in the SH.

See G4v Gravitational Wave vs General Relativity vs LIGO Observation for a more likely revolution in the theory of extreme gravitation currently being tested by the Advanced LIGO system that recently detected gravity waves.

The single most exciting thing about Advanced LIGO is that it is designed not merely to confirm General Relativity, but to discriminate between competing theories, one of which is General Relativity. A theory competing with General Relativity is a spin-off of the engineering that went into the device rendering the text you are reading now: very large scale integrated circuitry design.

That theory has been christened "G4v". Remember that acronym. It may become headline news.

G4v is a new gravitational theory produced by Kip Thorne's old CalTech colleague, Carver Mead. Carver Mead wrote the original text book on very large scale integrated circuit design. Over the course of his career, he became increasingly dissatisfied with conventional formulations of electronics -- primarily Maxwell's Laws -- at its interface with quantum mechanics. As the first PhD student of Richard Feynman, Mead was intimately familiar with Feynman's Nobel Prize winnig work on Quantum Electrodynamics (QED) with its emphasis on an arcane physical quantity known as "the vector potential". Mead's book "Collective Electrodynamics" presents his reformulation in terms of the vector potential (the physical dimension of momentum per unit charge). It was through this reformulation, combined with an obscure paper by Einstein, that Mead realized Einstein may have just barely missed a more elegant physical theory than GR. At first, Mead thought this alternate theory may have been, what he calls "a poor man's General Relativity" -- which is to say it would make all the same predictions in a different formulation. However, in conjunction with Kip Thorne, he was able to determine that this was no mere reformulation of General Relativity -- it predicted that gravitational waves would have polarization that could be discriminated from that predicted by GR.

BS. If they were so confident they could do it, they wouldn't have to do it with THAT phone. They could decrypt the phone of some independent 3rd party willing to arbiter the contest. The judge didn't order decryption of THAT phone. It ordered Apple to surrender information sufficient to give FBI ability to decrypt ANY phone. And I believe (could be wrong on that) Apple's position is that it's not able to do it under the current encryption scheme (even if did it in the past, it may not be able to do it now). Here's http://crypto.stackexchange.co... a discussion of someone trying to understand why brute force isn't possible even if they take apart the phone.

Being pedantic, but there is no 'sufficiently complex' about a one-time pad. Either the pad is actually random or it is not, and either it is used properly (ie never reused), or it is not.

If it is actually random and never reused, the cipherhtext is beyond virtually unbreakable -- it absolutely unbreakable. The message can be decoded with equal probability into anything.

seed from 8 bytes to 24 bytes to be reasonably secure.

This is not a OTP, it is something else. Your seed is the input to a pseudorandom number generator which is creates the encryption key. Since it is a PRNG it does not achieve the perfect security of a true random OTP. http://crypto.stackexchange.co... describes the issue with trying to generate a OTP with a PRNG.

Given your statement about seed strength but not knowing what tool it is, I'd be very concerned that your effective key strength is significantly less than commodity GPG offers.

The "everything is traveling at c" bit is a view for which supporting math can be found, but I wouldn't make a strong claim that it's physical.

You seem to be a sophisticated crank, but justtthinkit is unfortunately the more garden-variety.

That chart is correct and follows best-practices. Only column charts must have the axis at zero.
It is okay not to start your y axis at zero
When should the y axis of a graph start at zero?

And a fun one:
The most misleading charts of 2015: fixed

How about the ones that start windows popping up all over the place? Or start playing at obnoxiously loud levels? Or the four videos that start sucking down cpu.

And it doesn't help that I tend to pop open a few articles to read (or questions on StackExchange (disclaimer: I'm one of the moderators on Open Data)), and if a video starts playing, I'd have to look through all of my tabs and figure out which one it was to shut it down.

And that's not the disturbing ones that seem to be tracking other sites I've been to (we saw you were shopping for (x), so now it's going to follow you around for the next three months).

... and then there's the malware.

A few years ago, there was an article about the FBI spoofing websites to foist their spyware on people ... and I commented that it'd be easier for them to start up their own ad network, and they'd be able to just wait for the right person to visit. I have no idea if law enforcement is doing it, but I'm pretty sure that the criminals are.

I hear ya... Who wants to steal a crappy car with a manual transmission anyway?

I buy the manual because it's cheaper and lasts longer and I'm only interested in getting to point a to point b for as long as possible as cheaply as possible. Nobody want's my car because it's a bare bones pile of loosely related scrap metal and used car parts for most of the time I drive it.

Actually... it isn't the transmission that deters thieves. It's the car. But keep telling yourself that.

Manual transmission BOXES last much longer than automatics. The clutches, however, vary with the driver. If the driver is good, then the manual is just as good as the automatic. If not, then the automatic's clutches will last longer.
http://mechanics.stackexchange...

I see that you didn't haul out the old "manual is better on gas" myth. It used to be true, but the newer CVT and 8/9 speed engines are better.

Personally, I can drive a stick shift. My first car had a manual transmission. The most annoying part for me was holding it on hills. I had no problems doing it, it was just annoying. One of the cool things is that you can start it with a dead battery by just pushing it or rolling down hill (It was small enough that I could push it myself). It was great in College when I didn't have money for a new battery.

See this excellent answer on stackexchange http://astronomy.stackexchange... for a really good explanation of why Pluto had to become a dwarf planet. Basically, if they didn't create a new category we would end up with 10 or twenty new "planets" that fitted very similar physical criteria to Pluto.

The biggest advantage of the Moon is that you can fasten your telescope down and use the mass of the Moon to absorb heat and vibration.

Really? I wouldn't have thought the Moon would be any better at absorbing heat than the earth (which is generally terrible at it). Also, what would be generating the heat?

As for vibrations, what is moving that would cause the telescope to vibrate? Certainly hubble had some vibrations (caused by the doors opening and shutting) but you could get around that by re-designing the doors (or designing them out of equation).

There are also designs for small-scale processing units that will make "mooncrete" from lunar dust (and a small percentage of additives) or extract aluminium, which might be useful for the structure.

I've done some research: this is the only site I could find with an actual treatment on how aluminium extraction would work: in short, exactly as it does on earth, a process with a prohibitively high energy budget.

There are crater bottoms at the South pole of the moon which are in permanent darkness with nearby mountain peaks in permanent light (for power collection).

But again, wouldn't placing a telescope in a crater mean that a large portion of the sky is blocked by the moon?

You also have the prospect of astronauts visiting if you need repairs/upgrades your robot can;t do.

Hard to imagine a repair that a robot couldn't perform better than an astronaut - it is actually quite difficult for humans to operate on things in space, owing to the impediment of the suit.

Earth-sun L2 (where Gaia) is, is the other serious contender -- a very stable environment, but out of reach for humans and requiring a little fuel for station-keeping.

True, but then there's no reason for humans to go there (or anywhere in space other than LEO, come to think of it). An Ion engine might suffice to keep it in place for a reasonable time. Perhaps if we had a collection of craft nearby they could be refueled by a refueling drone of some sort.

reverse voltage is actually somewhat rare.

All power supply input pins should be protected against reverse voltage. It's simple, and comprises a single FET. See here, for instance. There's not really any excuse for failing to protect internal components against reverse voltage, other than being cheap. I think we can thank the endless race to the bottom that consumer electronics is infamous for.

I recently bought my first e-reader after having borrowed a family members Kindle for a while. I liked the display, but everything about Amazons software and ecosystem was locked down, frustrating, and clunky (when it wasn't out-right broken).

After returning the Kindle to its owner, I did some research online and ended up buying a Kobo, in part because you actually can add your own fonts.

The whole experience has been much better, as long as you can overlook Amazon's ebook prices. It's almost as if Kobo understands that I own the reader.

It's such a little thing to fix, and it drives me crazy. I'll be looking at the front page, reading a story, when... bang! The browser window goes blank, then reloads, jumps around a few times in the process, and after 5-10 seconds finally settles down somewhere that's different from where I was, so I have to scroll back to find the story I was reading. If I want to reload the page, I'll hit the reload button!

Do a web search for "prevent slashdot automatic reloading", and you'll find lots of pages with people complaining about this problem and suggesting not very satisfactory solutions to it. For example, https://webapps.stackexchange....

That used to annoy me too. So I found it, killed it using Adblock Plus and wrote it up here:
http://webapps.stackexchange.c...

If the firehose is what's responsible for all of the crap that makes it to the front page these days, I'd agree that it needs to go.

The problem is, 'wisdom of the crowd' really sucks. Anyone who's been in a meeting of 20+ people to redesign a website knows that. Sometimes you actually *do* need an editor. (and by that, I mean someone to make real choices about what to promote through ... although someone who can actually fix bad links / typos / make the summary actually readable would be a skill that a few of the current 'editors' seem to be lacking).

The firehose is a way of taking less responsibility in what gets posted to the front page. (although we've also had past editors mention that they post stuff that will 'generate discussion', which I suspect is why we end up with so many front page articles that are basically trolling these days). It might've had good intention -- it seemed to come in around when Digg was getting crazy valuations, and most of the first posts here were 'this was on Digg 2 days ago'.

But Digg also did policing of its users to keep certain voting blocs from taking over the front page. I'm not aware of /. doing the same, as we end up with so many posts that seem to come from relatively few people. It's changed over the years, but the ones that stand out to me these days are the coondoggie ones (rewrite of some press release, w/ only links back to Network World ... at least Ronald Guillemette started adding links other than just to his blog)

Although I can only assume it's the editors that turned /. into a soapbox for Bennett Haselton -- I could understand CmdrTaco using this as his personal blog once in a while, but maybe the firehose isn't such a bad approach if it stops the uninformed editorial ramblings from showing up.

(Note: I was formerly an admin on Fark, and have moderated other online communities; currently a moderator on StackExchange's Open Data site and admin for a few moderately sized (50-500 people) mailing lists)

Somewhere between 50-130 GPa, apparently.

I love the idea in theory, but you are most likely correct about the weight... http://aviation.stackexchange....

There could also be the problem of failed parts seizing up the wheels upon landing. When you introduce abilities to recapture energy and to rotate the wheel through a motor, you greatly increase the chance of wheel problems. If such a problem happened with your Prius, it might not be too major. However, bringing a 150,000 object out of the sky at 150 miles per hour, I think you would want more every assurance available that this thing is going to work.

Yes please! Check out my sig, this has been a really annoying issue for quite some time. Also, please encode in UTF-8 if you can. UTF-16 is dangerous - namely because the vast majority of characters are only two bytes, but in rare cases they're four, so these cases usually slip past testing; often even libraries are broken in UTF-16, let alone individual programs, when it comes to 4-byte characters.

Other things to keep in mind:

  * This is a site of nerds, so if someone posts a small chunk of code, it should display properly. Don't go all crazy on trying to "parse" and "prettify" posted text.

  * For your sake, don't make the site vulnerable to injection (aka, *never* just paste a string from a user into one used internally). This is, again, a site full of nerds; they'll notice. And the less scrupulous will take advantage of it. Don't write your own sanitization functions, use internal library functions - preferably parameter binding and the such. And don't forget that injection is not just about SQL, it can affect any user string inserted into another that subsequently goes through a parser - there's XML injection, HTML injection, BASH injection, and so forth.

* If there's some coding project that you think would help the site but you don't have the resources to do it, turn to your readers. For example, if the site was being hit by spam bots in the comments or whatnot, I'm sure you could get more than a few volunteers who would contribute code if it means not having to read the spam.

* People screw up, that's normal. If you accidentally post a duplicate, just take it off the front page. You don't have to delete the comments (you could even put it back on firehose), but just try to keep the front page duplicate free.

* I'm not a big "oh, this site is inherently bad!" person, but a lot of people are, and they get angry when they see links to articles on certain sites (such as, for example, Forbes, due to their adblocker policy and malware history). Be aware of what sites are unpopular and try to avoid linking them, if you can. Most news is available from multiple outlets.

If you do this sort of stuff, people here will be very happy :)

Radiation is an issue that gets talked about, it just doesn't end up on the front page.
I've seen calculations that suggest 500 kW of electric power would be enough to drive a decent magnetic shield. The ISS solar arrays supply about 120 kW of peak power.
A water jacket on even a small ship ends up being very heavy. If you attach two ISS modules to each other for a volume of 3.5 x 20 m, you need 1000 tons of water for a shield 2 m thick.

Electromagnetic shielding tech is up to this task. Per my link, "no bigger than a large desk". Now that the USA is finally spinning back up RTG production, paintable solar cells, Tesla's advancement in battery tech, etc we COULD do quite a bit more than we are.

With the BEAM idea, we could relatively easily build this and include electromagnetic shielding to guard against cosmic rays. Inflatable modules could be built en-mass, there is no reason we couldn't use them to make several Deep Space Habitats. All that's lacking is the political will power and vision.

I mean, who the hell needs a caps-lock key placed in such a convenient place, these days? Back in the day when computers were first sold to businesses, their target audience must have been stenographers. They expected the caps-lock (actually "Shift lock") to be there. But no one else needs it there. I mean, who uses that key nowadays, and why should be taking up such a vital piece of keyboard real estate?

As for emacs, I use it daily. If you're a programmer, it's the most efficient way to type code. Sure, it would be nice to have it more integrated into an IDE, but I can live with that. If you absolute are addicted to things like intellisense, there are add-ons for emacs that kinda do that: http://emacs.stackexchange.com...

Most is fine (at least here in the US) and here's a citation for the latter: http://english.stackexchange.c...

Thank you for taking the time to offer correction because I actually continually work on my grammar.

So, I stand by my calling them an idiot. ;-) I don't normally do that but I'll make an exception.

http://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/10150/does-unicef-use-less-than-14-of-the-donated-money-for-the-advertised-causes

and

https://www.unicefusa.org/about/finances

What the Slashdot summary doesn't say (and a lot of commenters on meta.stackexchange.com also didn't really take into account) is that this licensing change affects not only StackOverflow but the whole StackExchange network, including sites like Code Review and Programming Puzzles and Code Golf where people do post substantial blocks of code over which they wish to assert their moral rights.

What the Slashdot summary doesn't say (and a lot of commenters on meta.stackexchange.com also didn't really take into account) is that this licensing change affects not only StackOverflow but the whole StackExchange network, including sites like Code Review and Programming Puzzles and Code Golf where people do post substantial blocks of code over which they wish to assert their moral rights.

Here's an actual debate on this topic on SO: http://meta.stackexchange.com/...

Accepted answer: Anything that you post to Stack Overflow will be under the terms of the Creative Commons license

Top comments seems to be about using "Unlicense" (instead of "Public Domain") and to just avoid cut-paste (good luck with that if you're dealing with an offshore team). I pretty much use #2, renaming everything and usually swapping some of the decision logic to create something that looks original enough to pass a smell test when I cut/paste. It's work, but it's still significantly less work than writing it from scratch.

There's a quote from Jeff Atwood in that debate that I think is very relevant - "I would hope that people are not posting giant blocks of code at SO, making it more of a quote / fair use type situation.".

That's the way I view anything I post on SO; they are just code fragments to illustrate a concept or a language quirk and not something I feel the need to claim ownership over. And that's also how I read SO; I'm looking to learn, not copy/paste big chunks of code. If folks are really posting blocks of code big enough to be copyright-able then they probably shouldn't.

This doesn't sound onerous to me at all. It doesn't require anything in public documentation, help pages, or otherwise like the MIT license. It simply requires a single URL in a code comment.

This sounds perfectly fine to me--in general, I and my team already does this because it's helpful to know WHY we chose a course of action, especially when it was complicated enough to require SO's help.

http://meta.stackexchange.com/...

What is reasonable attribution?

A URL as a comment in your code is reasonable attribution.

There are certainly other forms of reasonable attribution, depending on use, and you are welcome to go above and beyond what’s required and include username, date, and anything else if you like.

You are also welcome to use the MIT License as it is traditionally interpreted: by preserving the full license with relevant fields (copyright year and copyright holder) completed.

Here's an actual debate on this topic on SO:
http://meta.stackexchange.com/...

Accepted answer: Anything that you post to Stack Overflow will be under the terms of the Creative Commons license

Top comments seems to be about using "Unlicense" (instead of "Public Domain") and to just avoid cut-paste (good luck with that if you're dealing with an offshore team). I pretty much use #2, renaming everything and usually swapping some of the decision logic to create something that looks original enough to pass a smell test when I cut/paste. It's work, but it's still significantly less work than writing it from scratch.

I just did an interview over google hangouts, w/o a phone number.

Then how'd you get a Google account with which to use Hangouts? Or, like me, do you get in early enough before Google started requiring new users to provide a mobile phone number to act as an additional means of account recovery and as a means of increasing spammers' cost to sign up?

Stallman has always had the right idea IMHO

How was it a "right" idea? The society — and generations of programmers — were spending considerable efforts on software, which could not be used by all. This caused a substantial duplication of efforts and repulsed a substantial body of programmers, who preferred the truly free BSD-license instead. Instead of cooperating, people and groups ended up competing. And when the original GPL proved to not be "enough" — for example, it was still possible to use GPL2-licensed gcc in a BSD-project, Stallman doubled down with GPL3, forcing FreeBSD, for example, to switch from gcc to BSD-licensed clang.

put up against Corp Profit will never win sadly

Yep, these denunciations of "profit" is the very core of the problem. Generations of young idiots do not realize, that profit is simply a reward for doing something people want. There is nothing wrong or shameful about it and all efforts to "fight" it are misguided and destructive.

How do shorts work?

They keep your private parts in place and warm under your shirt.

Now to others interested in your original question: You can short a stock by borrowing shares from someone else and selling them. To set up a short position, you'll likely need to upgrade your brokerage account to a tier allowing short selling, and you'll need to keep a lot of margin in that account that can be liquidated in case the stock pays dividends or its price rises. The process is described Wikipedia and Personal Finance Stack Exchange.

Short sales of real estate are unrelated, being more similar to foreclosure of an underwater property.

If it is only a small part of data, that actually needs encryption — the password and the credit card number — you can do that (using the well-known and studied protocols) in JavaScript.

What you describe is similar to what Tloz proposes in the question "How to replace SSL/TLS?". But using client-side script to encrypt passwords has three drawbacks:

• It breaks on machines whose owners have configured them not to run JavaScript. But perhaps people who refuse to enable JavaScript can be filed with the "web sites ought to be static and apps ought to be native" extremists.
• It leaves the server hosting the script itself open to compromise by a man in the middle.
• Once the password is set, an HTTP cookie is normally set to mark subsequent HTTP requests as authenticated. But this leaves the site open to a "Firesheep"-style session cookie cloning attack.

http://android.stackexchange.c... - You USB fanboys are such a hoot.

http://metro.co.uk/2015/08/11/...

http://www.hasbro.com/en-us/pr...

http://scifi.stackexchange.com...

Upper Turret clearly visible.

Good point. Half the time he would have no shot while the Tie Fighters would have a big fat plate shaped target to shoot at.

Last Soyuz fatality was in 1971. The Shuttle program began in 1977. So, "at that time" there were no fatal Soyuz failures.

To date there's been over 940 successful launches of Soyuz with a total of 2 fatal accidents involving 4 astronauts. The Shuttles over their two accidents killed 14 astronauts.

There were 9 total (fatal or nonfatal) dangerous accidents on Soyuz missions over its 940+ launches, so below 1%.
There were 10 total dangerous accidents involving the Shuttles. So above 13%. (source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...)

My friend used to work at Broadcom, and told the following story:

Broadcom had a video decoder chip, but there was a lower limit on chip size due to the space needed to connect the terminals. So there was unused silicon; they stuck an ARM core there.

See also here about how it boots:
http://raspberrypi.stackexchan...

I can't say how it works where you are but in the US money has value because if you don't accept it as payment you'll find yourself in legal trouble. The government swinging its hammer is a persuasive force.

That's not quite true. The US government does not force anyone to accept dollars as payments. If you want to open a barter shop and trade goats as your only form of "payment," you can do so.

What the government does say is the following:

(1) US money (dollars) is "legal tender" for all debts. That means if you already owe something to someone, legally you can repay that debt in dollars, and they must accept it. If you go to a store, you generally don't "owe debt" in advance. If you want to acquire goods from the store, you'll have to agree to the terms of their payment contract, whatever they are. Most contracts are implicitly created by exchange of dollars, but if your store has a contract that says, "I'll give you this slaughtered and processed cow in exchange for five goats," that's perfectly valid. If you don't show up with the goats, and the guy gives you the cow anyway, then you now are "in debt," and legally the guy must accept a dollar valuation of his payment if he sues you in court.

But you can't compel him to give you the cow in the first place just by offering the amount of dollars that "five goats" should be worth.

(2) Taxation laws still apply, though. If you start entering into such contracts on a large scale and making "profits" (even in goats), you'll still owe the government taxes on your gains. And the government generally doesn't accept goats as payment for taxes. So the real reason most businesses are forced to deal in cash is because they ultimately must pay taxes in cash. Even if they wanted to use a barter system to deal with everyday transactions, eventually they need to get their hands on some significant dollars to pay the taxes.

From a practical standpoint, any large-scale business that tried to operate without cash transactions would be flagged for close monitoring by the IRS, and unless you had detailed documentation of the valuation of assets you were trading in lieu of cash, you'd end up with tax penalties or in prison for tax fraud.

That's the real reason most businesses deal in cash in the US. And thus the real reason the US currency has (a certain minimum) value has fundamentally to do with taxation policies.

I bet that there, the government has the legal authority to do this, so what's the big deal? Here we have that pesky thing called the constitution, and the government still does the same even though they knew it was sketchy at best, but probably illegal.

Peter.

Oops, the NSA already has their cert installed in Firefox, IE, Chrome, and other web browsers as well by default:
http://security.stackexchange....

So this is an issue of Kazakhstan just catching up to the US.

For the other 99% of the population Linux is awesome, if installed and configured by a competent Linux professional.

How would one go about finding a local GNU/Linux professional? Are Linux user groups still a thing in the fourth quarter of 2015?

Most people who "need" photoshop don't really need it. They just don't want to deal with the learning curve for a new tool, such as The GIMP.

Or, just as likely, they don't want to deal with retraining their entire team from Photoshop to GIMP so that they can collaborate in XCF instead of PSD. Besides, GIMP reportedly won't get adjustment layers any time before 3.2. (In Photoshop, an adjustment layer is a layer that makes a copy of what's below it, applies a filter, and automatically updates itself whenever anything below the layer changes.)