Exactly. And it's not just the SV tech sector that's engaged in winner-take-all gambling posing as productive business. US tax policy is slated to encourage it. And it's not all just the Mitt Romney vs his secretary scenario.
Case in point. It used to be that capital gains from the sale of a home could be rolled over into a new one, and taxes would only need to be paid at the end of the line when you finally downsize or cash out, at which time gains over 250K would be taxed. Sometime in the 90's this changed so that you could take the 250K exemption on each sale - effectively eliminating the capital gains tax on real estate, with one catch. You need to sell every time your home appreciates by 250K or more, and because they eliminated the roll-over feature, you get penalized if you stay in your home long enough for it to appreciate beyond that. I only know this, because I bought a New York City apartment in '92, and have lived there ever since. Now I want to move, but because of the crazy run-up in NYC housing prices, I can't - that is, not without incurring a big tax bite, leaving me unable to afford a new place. So in the rush to reward housing speculators, the incentives in the housing market (which in part, dictate the pricing - whether you think those incentives should exist or not) have lined up to punish non-speculators.
And don't get me started on bank account interest rates. Used to be, you could leave your cash in the bank and at least keep rough pace with inflation. Now, you effectively get no interest at all - and are taxed full freight on even that pittance. Meanwhile more incentives to feed the stock market bubble that everyone will claim was obvious - after it bursts...
I'm using a non-free, but source-provided library called Clib-PDF. It's a pretty nice library with a pretty easy API, and even has PHP bindings (so it must've been a viable mainstream choice at one point). But somehow the company (or was it just a single guy) disappeared years ago. Luckily, we paid for and got the source, and I've been able to keep using it (and even fixing things in the source) without any ongoing support. So not quite open source, but not quite the disaster of discontinued closed source.
I suspect that the author of this library sold it to one of the commercial companies who proceeded to shut down a viable competitor. But who knows...
The thing that makes cellphones so expensive is the phone part. Why does a Nexus 7 cost less than a Nexus 5? I think it has something to do with all the (legitimate?) patents involved in making a smartphone a phone. The irony of it all, is that (for me, at least), the phone function is the one I use the least. But whenever you want a new 'personal communicator', you end up needing to buy a new cellphone, when you really don't need to upgrade the 'make a phone call' functionality. So, why not pay for that stuff once and keep it until it stops working (i.e., forever). Actually, I wonder if that's at least part of the impetus for the Ara project - getting around the patent monsters.
Anyway, I think it would be interesting if somebody made a 'cellphone' module as small as it can get that has no UI. Instead, have it tether to your pocket computer via bluetooth. Buy it once and carry it around on your key chain, purse or backpack. Then buy a new $200 pocket computer whenever the technology for the rest of the show improves to the point that you want one.
A negotiation in which you, presumably, had them over a barrel. You can bet your employers are kicking themselves for letting you become essential enough to be able to negotiate such a deal. I'm speaking from some experience, since I "negotiated" a 3-day workweek after mass layoffs and indescriminate outsourcing, the results of which finally proved to them that they indeed needed me there.
Why is it so hard to grasp the concept that public policy is a balancing act? Just because I say today's minimum wage is too low, doesn't mean you get to extrapolate and say that my argument is equivalent to suggesting a $25 minimum wage, and that would be a disaster, so no increase at all. That's asinine. But it's exactly the argument that so many right-wing pundits are making - and that you're parroting so faithfully here...
The drop in labor force is not a drop in minimum wage jobs. Those are being added at a steady clip - that's part of the problem. Those 'giving up' are giving up on trying to find a job that they're qualified - and not yet ready to stoop to the minimum wage jobs that are available. Y'know, the ones you're only supposed to take when you're still living in your parents' basement...
You have a point. Of course, there are differences. This gives you desktop apps on ARM, unlike Windows RT. And the mobile apps you get are Android ones - i.e., there are mobile apps. The joining of the two is just as awkward (perhaps even more so) than in windows 8. But at least you're getting the apps you want - and oh, by the way, it's all free. It would be nicer if they somehow managed to run Android apps windowed on the Debian side - kind of like Windows 9 is promising to do...
This whole attempt to steer the discussion to one of illegal immigration is a cute trick, but it skirts the real issue. The minimum wage (which hasn't been adjusted for inflation in decades) isn't enough for someone working 40 hours a week (whether picking fruit or stocking aisles at WalMart, etc) to live on without some form of public assistance. So either:
1) Accept this - and lobby for public assistance to make up the difference instead of against it. or 2) Accept that the wage needs to be raised, because it's more important to the American ideal for a full time worker to be able to support themselves - if not themselves plus their children, than it is for employers to be able to squeeze every last bit of profit from their labor. or 3) Admit that you're okay with America not being a place where all people who work can afford food, shelter and health care (i.e., perhaps not The Greatest Country On Earth (tm)).
But the point of the article is that the argument that 'raising the minimum wage will kill jobs' has been disproved. To continue to scream it is to lie. But many of those are the same ones still touting that 'lower tax rates raise revenue' - despite the fact that that's not really what the Laffer curve says - and experience shows that we're on the part of the curve where that's not true anyway. In other words, it's a lie, based on a fantasy and/or propaganda - in the face of actual experience that demonstrates the opposite. That letting gays marry will destroy marriage and hurt children. I could go on...
Easy. Because they all still have big businesses selling Windows desktops and laptops - and don't dare piss Microsoft off too much. That plus the fact that Linux lacks 3rd party app support - but so does the Mac to some extent. Essentially, though, there's not a big enough market for such a thing - certainly not big enough to invest in the capability to offer phone support. Between Windows desktops/laptops, Macs, iPhones/iPads, Android phones and tablets and Chromebooks, there's a lot of competition out there for a new platform. And they can still sell their hardware to Linux fans. Unfortunately, that means Linux fans still have to pay the Microsoft tax.
More like Microsoft tried to clone Comouserv, AOL, and whatever else was popular before the internet came along and showed how uncreative they were. And now they're still trying to clone Google...
WINE on the Mac uses XQuartz too. It works well, except when it doesn't. I've had it freeze up my display completely - happens when I exit my WIN32 app and then restart it. If I wait a while before restarting, it's okay. But if I restart it too soon, X launches and the screen goes all white. That's when you find out that the Mac's equivalent of Windows task manager is pretty crappy. It won't come up either, so you need to reboot...
All true, but this dynamic only works for a short time. Since it amounts to sabotage of any real value in the company, it also counts on a business plan that involves unloading the company after a few years - either by selling it to another company or going public. The real enablers of this crap are the companies that buy such destroyed hulks - and/or the banks that hype their IPO's. My company just got spun off from a public company to a private equity firm. That's after a 400 million dollar writeoff (the public company was sold a bill of goods several years back). Anyway, we're one year in, and the IPO wheels are already turning. Improvements in the company's outlook? Well, there's now a vision of 'moving everything to the cloud'. No viable path to accomplishing that, but obviously these jokers think it's enough to hang an IPO off of.
Incumbents will always have the publicity advantage - though that also applies to bad publicity. If you think that carpet bombing the public with corporate-funded messages is an appropriate way to counter that, then where's the room for non-corporate messages. Somebody's still got an unfair advantage. Candidates of all stripes are well enough versed in media manipulation to largely counter the encumbent's 'newsworthiness' advantage - though I guess the media (and the public) are slow to pay attention until a candidate manages to get nominated into a high-stakes race. Still, the problems of a corrupt and lazy media and a lazy electorate are nothing compared to the wholesale undermining of the principle of one person one vote democracy that we have now.
There's a class of application that will never make sense to be stand-alone, and for those apps, the cloud is probably the best paradigm. But the current state of HTM5/Javascript calls for a cloud with a ton of application logic running in the browser. I'd much rather see a single app running in the browser that isolates all the front-end specifics and makes it really easy to write fully server based apps that use the browser as a universal delivery system - and nothing else. Sure, you're not going to write video games that way. But I'm talking about apps that handle data input and output with a robust widget set that doesn't need to be programmed on the front end. A smart terminal that lets you generate, say, data to be displayed in a grid on the server and just send it to the terminal for display and manipulation.
I wrote something just like that a long time ago - though it doesn't run in a browser - so the smart terminal requires Windows or WINE to run. That no longer cuts it, but as a proof of concept it works really well (and is still in use). The data grid, for example takes grid layout instructions and a file in a 'CSV with flags' format that is produced on the server for display (and editing) in the terminal. Besides making the app easy to implement and debug, that level of abstraction has some nice side benefits. 'Printed' reports come for free, because the data and the instructions for laying it out in a grid are generated separately from the display logic, and it was easy to implement a printing module that takes that same info on the server side and uses it to generate a PDF or XLS file for download and native display/printing. I guess it's essentially splitting the MVC model so that only the View part (the part that has to run on the client) runs on the client.
I can't be the only one that's done something like this - but I'm curious why I don't see anyone trying to adapt that model as a browser-based application platform. Just because Javascript lets you write application code that runs in the browser, that doesn't mean it's a good idea - or that the end result is easy to write, debug and support. The browser's a really smart terminal, but maybe it would make sense to write a browser application that turns it into a somewhat dumber terminal - that only does terminal-like stuff.
Easy. Because Republicans put the idiots on the Supreme Court that just decided that your employer can dictate what kind of birth control you use your health insurance to buy. That's right - YOUR health insurance. The insurance that you received from your employer in lieu of cash to buy your own - which would be an even worse deal, since the insurance companies still only offer their best group plans to employers. And while Obama deserves at least some of the blame for letting insurance companies dictate such things, at least he saw to it that insurance companies can't deny you coverage outright - for which many people are quite grateful.
Anyway, until a mass movement votes the Congressional tools of the oligarchs out of office, you may as well vote for the guys who won't give the Court to folks who are intent on allowing Republicans to choose who gets to vote in the first place...
I guess you haven't been installing the various upgrades to your distro until you get new hardware then. Not that that's so bad either - but it's about 2 hours of downtime each time the distro upgrades. That is, as long as your desktop environment didn't decide to change its configuration files in some incompatible way, in which case it'll take you another hour or so to get things back the way you like 'em. And all of this assumes you kept/home on its own filesystem.
Not horrible, but not the best use of your time either. Then again, I don't think I've ever upgraded Windows on any machine I've owned. That's either because the OEM version was good enough to tide me over until I needed new hardware - or because my old hardware couldn't handle the ever-growing demands of a Windows 0S.
Nice way to miss my point. For any given house, there's a point where its insulated - you can't throw more insulation at it and hope to gain much. So yeah, insulate as much as you can. Then go solar. You get all the benefits of insulation, and you need less solar to cover the now reduced energy demand. I guess a carbon tax is the same as a reverse subsidy - and it may be the most efficient approach... today. But if subsidizing solar leads to efficiencies of scale down the road, a carbon tax may never get you there.
Not to mention that the entire witch hunt for IRS 'discrimination against right-wing groups' is a bogus, political sideshow. And beyond that, not to mention that *all* of these political groups shouldn't be tax-exempt - or certainly not in the way that allows their donors to be anonymous.
It never ceases to amaze me that presumably smart Slashdotters are so quick to subscribe to conspiracy theories (cue smarmy response about how non 'presumably smart' I am). And that they embrace nonsense just because they think they're libertarians and the issue at hand falls on the libertarian side of an issue. The wholesale compromise of U.S. democracy in favor of big cash contributions is a tragedy - for liberals, conservatives and libertarians alike. But the media love it. Ad sales spike like crazy around elections, and for TV stations, election season is probably what Christmas season has long been for retailers - a few months, without which they would operate in the red...
If you can cut a ton of carbon emissions by adding insulation - great. Do it. Then cut another ton by switching to solar... So now you've cut two tons for $60, which you couldn't do with insulation alone.
Who's going to prevent the fistfights when someone spots you getting into your car and waits for you to leave the space - and you just sit there. If I'm waiting for you to move and somebody else pulls up who insists on taking the space 'because he paid for it', it's not going to be pretty.
So even granting that Huffman's invention was worthy of a patent, that patent should be on the method of file compression - not on the compressed file format itself. Royalties should be collectible on the compression software (the part that implements the patent), not on the decompression software, which simply reads the file.
Popular file formats become de-facto standards, and a patent on the format that covers reading it becomes more than a monopoly on the format - it becomes a monopoly on the data contained in the file, which becomes inaccessible without paying patent royalties. So, sure, if you invent a great file format - patent it, and if it's really great, people will pay. But don't allow the fact that a video content provider chose to pay for a particular video compressor grant control of the video data to to the patent holder on the compressor. Or allow the fact that an SD card manufacturer chose to use a FAT32 filesystem (and paid a royalty to do that) prevent you as the purchaser of that card from reading the data you store on it from any device you want to plug it into.
What's wrong with the Google Nexus as a nerd-friendly hackable phone?
Mostly nothing - except for the Nexus One, which got orphaned at gingerbread after 18 months (vaguely understandable, since it was underpowered) and the Galaxy Nexus, which got orphaned at about 2 years (which stinks, because it still has plenty of power).
I'm on the Nexus 4, hoping it doesn't meet a similar fate. This thing has plenty of life left in it, and if Google/LG went with components for which drivers become unavaliable at the next major Android update, I'm giving up...
As I read it, this has nothing directly to do with music videos hosted on YouTube - except that they won't let you host them there unless you also sign up to host your music streams on Google Play music - or whatever their Spotify competitor is. That's kind of veering toward evil-ish. Nobody has to host videos on YouTube, but it became ubiquitous by allowing anybody to host stuff there. Now it's requiring you to support another Google site as a condition. Not cool. If the other Google site is good enough, it'll get content on its own...
No. Software is written, in the case of Apple, by programmers in the U.S. Then the resulting code magically becomes 'owned' by an Irish subsidiary that exists just to own this code and prevent that component of Apple's products from being taxed. I don't even think any money is transferred from the Irish subsidiary to US Apple which might count as income in the US. It's all a fiction to avoid taxation - which in turn requires the rest of us to pick up the slack.
I agree that long-term ABI stability is important. But on AIX, they've managed to maintain backward compatibility for years. Almost everything built on way old versions of AIX runs on the latest version. If they have to provide multiple versions of some libraries to handle broken old behaviors, they do that too. Maybe I'm missing something here - like maybe AIX includes a much smaller set of libraries than RedHat. But for the purposes of our apps, AIX has been a really nice, stable platform. Nothing flashy, but no surprises.
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Exactly. And it's not just the SV tech sector that's engaged in winner-take-all gambling posing as productive business. US tax policy is slated to encourage it. And it's not all just the Mitt Romney vs his secretary scenario.
Case in point. It used to be that capital gains from the sale of a home could be rolled over into a new one, and taxes would only need to be paid at the end of the line when you finally downsize or cash out, at which time gains over 250K would be taxed. Sometime in the 90's this changed so that you could take the 250K exemption on each sale - effectively eliminating the capital gains tax on real estate, with one catch. You need to sell every time your home appreciates by 250K or more, and because they eliminated the roll-over feature, you get penalized if you stay in your home long enough for it to appreciate beyond that. I only know this, because I bought a New York City apartment in '92, and have lived there ever since. Now I want to move, but because of the crazy run-up in NYC housing prices, I can't - that is, not without incurring a big tax bite, leaving me unable to afford a new place. So in the rush to reward housing speculators, the incentives in the housing market (which in part, dictate the pricing - whether you think those incentives should exist or not) have lined up to punish non-speculators.
And don't get me started on bank account interest rates. Used to be, you could leave your cash in the bank and at least keep rough pace with inflation. Now, you effectively get no interest at all - and are taxed full freight on even that pittance. Meanwhile more incentives to feed the stock market bubble that everyone will claim was obvious - after it bursts...
I'm using a non-free, but source-provided library called Clib-PDF. It's a pretty nice library with a pretty easy API, and even has PHP bindings (so it must've been a viable mainstream choice at one point). But somehow the company (or was it just a single guy) disappeared years ago. Luckily, we paid for and got the source, and I've been able to keep using it (and even fixing things in the source) without any ongoing support. So not quite open source, but not quite the disaster of discontinued closed source.
I suspect that the author of this library sold it to one of the commercial companies who proceeded to shut down a viable competitor. But who knows...
The thing that makes cellphones so expensive is the phone part. Why does a Nexus 7 cost less than a Nexus 5? I think it has something to do with all the (legitimate?) patents involved in making a smartphone a phone. The irony of it all, is that (for me, at least), the phone function is the one I use the least. But whenever you want a new 'personal communicator', you end up needing to buy a new cellphone, when you really don't need to upgrade the 'make a phone call' functionality. So, why not pay for that stuff once and keep it until it stops working (i.e., forever). Actually, I wonder if that's at least part of the impetus for the Ara project - getting around the patent monsters.
Anyway, I think it would be interesting if somebody made a 'cellphone' module as small as it can get that has no UI. Instead, have it tether to your pocket computer via bluetooth. Buy it once and carry it around on your key chain, purse or backpack. Then buy a new $200 pocket computer whenever the technology for the rest of the show improves to the point that you want one.
A negotiation in which you, presumably, had them over a barrel. You can bet your employers are kicking themselves for letting you become essential enough to be able to negotiate such a deal. I'm speaking from some experience, since I "negotiated" a 3-day workweek after mass layoffs and indescriminate outsourcing, the results of which finally proved to them that they indeed needed me there.
Why is it so hard to grasp the concept that public policy is a balancing act? Just because I say today's minimum wage is too low, doesn't mean you get to extrapolate and say that my argument is equivalent to suggesting a $25 minimum wage, and that would be a disaster, so no increase at all. That's asinine. But it's exactly the argument that so many right-wing pundits are making - and that you're parroting so faithfully here...
The drop in labor force is not a drop in minimum wage jobs. Those are being added at a steady clip - that's part of the problem. Those 'giving up' are giving up on trying to find a job that they're qualified - and not yet ready to stoop to the minimum wage jobs that are available. Y'know, the ones you're only supposed to take when you're still living in your parents' basement...
You have a point. Of course, there are differences. This gives you desktop apps on ARM, unlike Windows RT. And the mobile apps you get are Android ones - i.e., there are mobile apps. The joining of the two is just as awkward (perhaps even more so) than in windows 8. But at least you're getting the apps you want - and oh, by the way, it's all free. It would be nicer if they somehow managed to run Android apps windowed on the Debian side - kind of like Windows 9 is promising to do...
This whole attempt to steer the discussion to one of illegal immigration is a cute trick, but it skirts the real issue. The minimum wage (which hasn't been adjusted for inflation in decades) isn't enough for someone working 40 hours a week (whether picking fruit or stocking aisles at WalMart, etc) to live on without some form of public assistance. So either:
1) Accept this - and lobby for public assistance to make up the difference instead of against it.
or
2) Accept that the wage needs to be raised, because it's more important to the American ideal for a full time worker to be able to support themselves - if not themselves plus their children, than it is for employers to be able to squeeze every last bit of profit from their labor.
or
3) Admit that you're okay with America not being a place where all people who work can afford food, shelter and health care (i.e., perhaps not The Greatest Country On Earth (tm)).
But the point of the article is that the argument that 'raising the minimum wage will kill jobs' has been disproved. To continue to scream it is to lie. But many of those are the same ones still touting that 'lower tax rates raise revenue' - despite the fact that that's not really what the Laffer curve says - and experience shows that we're on the part of the curve where that's not true anyway. In other words, it's a lie, based on a fantasy and/or propaganda - in the face of actual experience that demonstrates the opposite. That letting gays marry will destroy marriage and hurt children. I could go on...
Easy. Because they all still have big businesses selling Windows desktops and laptops - and don't dare piss Microsoft off too much. That plus the fact that Linux lacks 3rd party app support - but so does the Mac to some extent. Essentially, though, there's not a big enough market for such a thing - certainly not big enough to invest in the capability to offer phone support. Between Windows desktops/laptops, Macs, iPhones/iPads, Android phones and tablets and Chromebooks, there's a lot of competition out there for a new platform. And they can still sell their hardware to Linux fans. Unfortunately, that means Linux fans still have to pay the Microsoft tax.
More like Microsoft tried to clone Comouserv, AOL, and whatever else was popular before the internet came along and showed how uncreative they were. And now they're still trying to clone Google...
WINE on the Mac uses XQuartz too. It works well, except when it doesn't. I've had it freeze up my display completely - happens when I exit my WIN32 app and then restart it. If I wait a while before restarting, it's okay. But if I restart it too soon, X launches and the screen goes all white. That's when you find out that the Mac's equivalent of Windows task manager is pretty crappy. It won't come up either, so you need to reboot...
All true, but this dynamic only works for a short time. Since it amounts to sabotage of any real value in the company, it also counts on a business plan that involves unloading the company after a few years - either by selling it to another company or going public. The real enablers of this crap are the companies that buy such destroyed hulks - and/or the banks that hype their IPO's. My company just got spun off from a public company to a private equity firm. That's after a 400 million dollar writeoff (the public company was sold a bill of goods several years back). Anyway, we're one year in, and the IPO wheels are already turning. Improvements in the company's outlook? Well, there's now a vision of 'moving everything to the cloud'. No viable path to accomplishing that, but obviously these jokers think it's enough to hang an IPO off of.
Incumbents will always have the publicity advantage - though that also applies to bad publicity. If you think that carpet bombing the public with corporate-funded messages is an appropriate way to counter that, then where's the room for non-corporate messages. Somebody's still got an unfair advantage. Candidates of all stripes are well enough versed in media manipulation to largely counter the encumbent's 'newsworthiness' advantage - though I guess the media (and the public) are slow to pay attention until a candidate manages to get nominated into a high-stakes race. Still, the problems of a corrupt and lazy media and a lazy electorate are nothing compared to the wholesale undermining of the principle of one person one vote democracy that we have now.
There's a class of application that will never make sense to be stand-alone, and for those apps, the cloud is probably the best paradigm. But the current state of HTM5/Javascript calls for a cloud with a ton of application logic running in the browser. I'd much rather see a single app running in the browser that isolates all the front-end specifics and makes it really easy to write fully server based apps that use the browser as a universal delivery system - and nothing else. Sure, you're not going to write video games that way. But I'm talking about apps that handle data input and output with a robust widget set that doesn't need to be programmed on the front end. A smart terminal that lets you generate, say, data to be displayed in a grid on the server and just send it to the terminal for display and manipulation.
I wrote something just like that a long time ago - though it doesn't run in a browser - so the smart terminal requires Windows or WINE to run. That no longer cuts it, but as a proof of concept it works really well (and is still in use). The data grid, for example takes grid layout instructions and a file in a 'CSV with flags' format that is produced on the server for display (and editing) in the terminal. Besides making the app easy to implement and debug, that level of abstraction has some nice side benefits. 'Printed' reports come for free, because the data and the instructions for laying it out in a grid are generated separately from the display logic, and it was easy to implement a printing module that takes that same info on the server side and uses it to generate a PDF or XLS file for download and native display/printing. I guess it's essentially splitting the MVC model so that only the View part (the part that has to run on the client) runs on the client.
I can't be the only one that's done something like this - but I'm curious why I don't see anyone trying to adapt that model as a browser-based application platform. Just because Javascript lets you write application code that runs in the browser, that doesn't mean it's a good idea - or that the end result is easy to write, debug and support. The browser's a really smart terminal, but maybe it would make sense to write a browser application that turns it into a somewhat dumber terminal - that only does terminal-like stuff.
Easy. Because Republicans put the idiots on the Supreme Court that just decided that your employer can dictate what kind of birth control you use your health insurance to buy. That's right - YOUR health insurance. The insurance that you received from your employer in lieu of cash to buy your own - which would be an even worse deal, since the insurance companies still only offer their best group plans to employers. And while Obama deserves at least some of the blame for letting insurance companies dictate such things, at least he saw to it that insurance companies can't deny you coverage outright - for which many people are quite grateful.
Anyway, until a mass movement votes the Congressional tools of the oligarchs out of office, you may as well vote for the guys who won't give the Court to folks who are intent on allowing Republicans to choose who gets to vote in the first place...
I guess you haven't been installing the various upgrades to your distro until you get new hardware then. Not that that's so bad either - but it's about 2 hours of downtime each time the distro upgrades. That is, as long as your desktop environment didn't decide to change its configuration files in some incompatible way, in which case it'll take you another hour or so to get things back the way you like 'em. And all of this assumes you kept /home on its own filesystem.
Not horrible, but not the best use of your time either. Then again, I don't think I've ever upgraded Windows on any machine I've owned. That's either because the OEM version was good enough to tide me over until I needed new hardware - or because my old hardware couldn't handle the ever-growing demands of a Windows 0S.
Nice way to miss my point. For any given house, there's a point where its insulated - you can't throw more insulation at it and hope to gain much. So yeah, insulate as much as you can. Then go solar. You get all the benefits of insulation, and you need less solar to cover the now reduced energy demand. I guess a carbon tax is the same as a reverse subsidy - and it may be the most efficient approach... today. But if subsidizing solar leads to efficiencies of scale down the road, a carbon tax may never get you there.
Not to mention that the entire witch hunt for IRS 'discrimination against right-wing groups' is a bogus, political sideshow. And beyond that, not to mention that *all* of these political groups shouldn't be tax-exempt - or certainly not in the way that allows their donors to be anonymous.
It never ceases to amaze me that presumably smart Slashdotters are so quick to subscribe to conspiracy theories (cue smarmy response about how non 'presumably smart' I am). And that they embrace nonsense just because they think they're libertarians and the issue at hand falls on the libertarian side of an issue. The wholesale compromise of U.S. democracy in favor of big cash contributions is a tragedy - for liberals, conservatives and libertarians alike. But the media love it. Ad sales spike like crazy around elections, and for TV stations, election season is probably what Christmas season has long been for retailers - a few months, without which they would operate in the red...
If you can cut a ton of carbon emissions by adding insulation - great. Do it. Then cut another ton by switching to solar... So now you've cut two tons for $60, which you couldn't do with insulation alone.
Who's going to prevent the fistfights when someone spots you getting into your car and waits for you to leave the space - and you just sit there. If I'm waiting for you to move and somebody else pulls up who insists on taking the space 'because he paid for it', it's not going to be pretty.
So even granting that Huffman's invention was worthy of a patent, that patent should be on the method of file compression - not on the compressed file format itself. Royalties should be collectible on the compression software (the part that implements the patent), not on the decompression software, which simply reads the file.
Popular file formats become de-facto standards, and a patent on the format that covers reading it becomes more than a monopoly on the format - it becomes a monopoly on the data contained in the file, which becomes inaccessible without paying patent royalties. So, sure, if you invent a great file format - patent it, and if it's really great, people will pay. But don't allow the fact that a video content provider chose to pay for a particular video compressor grant control of the video data to to the patent holder on the compressor. Or allow the fact that an SD card manufacturer chose to use a FAT32 filesystem (and paid a royalty to do that) prevent you as the purchaser of that card from reading the data you store on it from any device you want to plug it into.
What's wrong with the Google Nexus as a nerd-friendly hackable phone?
Mostly nothing - except for the Nexus One, which got orphaned at gingerbread after 18 months (vaguely understandable, since it was underpowered) and the Galaxy Nexus, which got orphaned at about 2 years (which stinks, because it still has plenty of power).
I'm on the Nexus 4, hoping it doesn't meet a similar fate. This thing has plenty of life left in it, and if Google/LG went with components for which drivers become unavaliable at the next major Android update, I'm giving up...
As I read it, this has nothing directly to do with music videos hosted on YouTube - except that they won't let you host them there unless you also sign up to host your music streams on Google Play music - or whatever their Spotify competitor is. That's kind of veering toward evil-ish. Nobody has to host videos on YouTube, but it became ubiquitous by allowing anybody to host stuff there. Now it's requiring you to support another Google site as a condition. Not cool. If the other Google site is good enough, it'll get content on its own...
No. Software is written, in the case of Apple, by programmers in the U.S. Then the resulting code magically becomes 'owned' by an Irish subsidiary that exists just to own this code and prevent that component of Apple's products from being taxed. I don't even think any money is transferred from the Irish subsidiary to US Apple which might count as income in the US. It's all a fiction to avoid taxation - which in turn requires the rest of us to pick up the slack.
I agree that long-term ABI stability is important. But on AIX, they've managed to maintain backward compatibility for years. Almost everything built on way old versions of AIX runs on the latest version. If they have to provide multiple versions of some libraries to handle broken old behaviors, they do that too. Maybe I'm missing something here - like maybe AIX includes a much smaller set of libraries than RedHat. But for the purposes of our apps, AIX has been a really nice, stable platform. Nothing flashy, but no surprises.