I pretty much do the same thing, but the file is called TODO and does not live in the repository. It gets backed up when my machine gets backed up, which is good enough. I don't want to air my dirty laundry in the source tree. Especially with all the swearing about browser bugs.
Within strict limits, perhaps. For example, if the government knows of a website where people trade child porn, it would make sense for them to infiltrate that website and monitor the situation to determine if new children are being actively harmed by anyone in that circle. If they determine that this is happening, then the government rightfully should try to track the people down and put them in jail.
What amazes me is how many waste their time with those stupid petitions.
It amazes me that anyone bothers to write them. It only takes five seconds to click "Sign". That's a fairly small amount of effort, so even if there is only an infinitesimal chance of any forward progress, it is worth spending those five seconds.:-)
In general, I would agree, but I would not agree that terrorists or pedophiles are "minor threats". The former is probably not a significant threat on U.S. soil, but is a very real threat to Americans living abroad in some places; the second is not a threat at all, but rather a type of person who should be subjected to greater scrutiny because there is an elevated risk that he or she might be a threat.
The EPA? When was the last time any individual found themselves being bullied and intimidated by the EPA? Seriously?
The purpose of law is not to protect the public from any plausible threat, but rather to prevent the strong from exploiting or destroying the weak. Thus, for example, laws governing what institutions with billions of dollars do with 350,000 tons of food waste should be much more strict than laws governing what Joe Lunchbox does with his tuna sandwich.
This is why the EPA primarily concerns itself with corporate abuse of the environment, rather than whether you remembered to recycle that mercury watch battery that you threw in the trash last week.
We are not, as a society, overregulated or overtaxed. We are incorrectly regulated and incorrectly taxed. Because those with power and wealth are very good at finding ways to keep it, taxes have a tendency to end up disproportionately getting paid by the people with the least ability to pay them. As a result, nearly all taxes other than personal income tax, property tax, and luxury tax become regressive in time. This is why the government needs to throw away old tax schemes and update them every few years, ensuring that it ceases to be easy for the rich to avoid paying their fair share as they do now.
Case in point, taxes on businesses made sense at the time. The problem was that businesses then realized that their cost of doing business had gone up, so to preserve the revenue reaching their stockholders, they raised the price of goods to accommodate those taxes. This is why taxing business is useless. The way to fix this problem is to do away with business taxes entirely, and replace them by taxing capital gains on stocks as ordinary income. This significantly reduces the businesses' incentive to raise the price of goods to cover the tax burden, which means that the poor don't get gouged as much when they go to the store, and the rich who are leeching off of those businesses are forced to pay their fair share. (The middle class with retirement accounts would pay slightly more, but that would largely be balanced out by having more money to put away for retirement up front.)
Similarly, this removes corporations' incentive to keep money overseas (because the stockholders would now pay taxes on the value regardless).
You could also remove the incentive to do manufacturing overseas by adding import duties equal to the labor cost difference between the producing country and the destination country. This would level the playing field and allow for fair global competition based on the quality of workers, the ability to innovate, and the ability to automate, rather than artificially devaluing the workers themselves.
Not necessarily. Bear in mind that when you're talking about accelerating to 4,000 MPH, you're limited to very-long-distance travel. Bear in mind, we're talking about Los Angeles to New York City in a little over half an hour. This wouldn't replace subways, but rather would replace jets and trains.
Also, when public transit is used by people who can afford cars, it is usually because driving is unholy in those cities. It would be more precise to say that public transit doesn't work unless the normal road system is hopelessly broken, which is not the case in the suburbs.
The paranoid part of me would point out that it can also detect various medical conditions at a distance. That's not necessarily a bad thing to find out about if you don't know you have cancer or whatever, but it has all sorts of ramifications, and falls under HIPAA....
That said, as long as it is not physically capable of producing a coherent image, it is significantly less invasive than the pedo porno scanners they use today, and really isn't that much different from the magnetometers except in the number of materials it can detect. I would view these as a significant improvement if these are physically incapable (because of hardware limitations, not software policies) of producing anything approaching an image.
If they can produce anything remotely approaching an image, then they are far worse than the porno scanners and should be banned. There's no valid reason for the device to be able to determine distance or even determine which direction the laser is pointing at any given moment if your only goal is to detect dangerous substances by their chemical signature.
I'm cautiously optimistic, yet very pessimistic all at once. On the one hand, this might be a significant improvement in privacy when going through an airport checkpoint. On the other hand this might significantly reduce privacy all the time, and knowing the DHS, if there is a way for them to screw things up so that they invade privacy more than necessary, they will find a way to do so. So the cynic in me says that this will probably turn out to be another few billion dollars of our money pissed down the toilet that should be spent on something more useful, like education, intelligence gathering, actual useful security changes, providing universal healthcare, feeding and clothing the poor, building highways, updating rail beds for high speed trains, or even just burning the cash for warmth....
IMO, IE 9's built-in debugging, ignoring the occasional (by which I mean frequent) long stall or crash, is way better than what is built into current release versions of Firefox if you don't install Firebug. IE still sucks, but at least they've made it a bit easier to debug when (not if) it bursts into flames. Firebug puts the two roughly on par with one another and with Chrome/Safari.
They're right. You can only push people so far before they lash out, and people who are already screaming about how the government is oppressing them are far more likely to be the first ones to cross that threshold. This is just common sense.
Ultimately, the only difference between a patriot/freedom fighter and a terrorist, ultimately, is which side won. Taken to extremes, those who would fight to defend their rights are more likely than nearly any other domestic group (other than complete lunatics) to commit acts of violence against their government. If that government still exists at the end of the day, those acts would be considered terrorist acts. The more stable people in those groups are a long way away from that point and will keep finding ways around the DHS's bullshit; because the government is more of a nuisance than a serious problem for them, they will allow themselves to be pushed for decades more before they snap and start blowing up federal buildings. The least stable people in those groups already did it seventeen years ago in Oklahoma City. The remaining people who value freedom lie in a continuum between those extremes.
The thing is, by repeatedly taking actions to erode our civil liberties, the DHS are largely responsible for fomenting that domestic terrorism, should it ever occur. They are driving people ever closer to the point where they feel that they have nothing to lose. Thus, the best thing we can do to prevent domestic terrorism is to cut off Homeland Security's balls, metaphorically speaking—in particular, dismantling groups like the TSA that provide material aid to terrorism by sowing the seeds of tyranny and eroding the roots of our democracy.
More to the point, we need to do it now, before domestic terrorism starts to become a serious problem. Once it does, it is too late. The reaction to a sufficient amount of domestic terrorism will cause everyone to become extremely scared, which will lead to more and more draconian laws that erode liberty and push more and more "freedom fighters" over the edge, leading to a rapidly decaying avalanche of tyranny, until one day we look outside and realize that the U.S. has become a third-world country run by militant warlords.
You cannot prevent terrorism by restricting the public. Doing so can only lead to eventual societal collapse. There is exactly one way to prevent terrorism, and that is to deny it battle—provide care for the poor and homeless, provide medical care for all (and in particular, mental health care), provide safety nets to ensure that no one ever gets into a situation where they feel that they have nothing to lose, and absolutely and completely refuse to allow such horrible acts to change the way we live our lives. Indeed, this can prevent or dramatically reduce the incidence of nearly all forms of crime, not just terrorism.
And this is why the Republicans must not be allowed to succeed in their goals. The Democrats may not always be on the right side of some issues, but nearly every plank of the Republicans' current campaign platform is detrimental to the stability of society—dismantling health care reform, scaling back Social Security and Medicare, scaling back Medicaid and food stamps, and increasing the budget for law enforcement and incarceration, etc. We desperately need a better choice than either party, but given what we have, the future safety and stability of this nation hinges upon ensuring that the Republicans' power is drastically curtailed, and soon. Otherwise, in just a few decades, we will live in a police state.
No, they can't be used to ignore laws already on the books. They can be used to prevent enforcement of laws already on the books. That's a subtle, but important difference. The government has to obey the law, but the government is under no obligation to enforce it against others.
What's interesting there is that if you add up all the different browsers that are really just wrappers around WebKit, they represent more users than IE and Firefox combined (by my quick in-my-head approximation). So if you're designing a new website that is even moderately complex, you should design it using a WebKit-based browser. Then, add support for Firefox because it is a lot easier to support than IE (even 9) and has about the same market share. Finally, support IE only if you absolutely have to support everybody. Otherwise, you should just require IE users to install Chrome Frame and then pretend IE doesn't even exist.
I think it is worth pointing out at this point that the blanket protection from prosecution that the government gave out for illegal wiretaps was not a license to continue violating privacy laws, and AFAIK did not extend to future crimes committed by these carriers. So the only real question that remains is which state's Attorney General is feeling litigious today?
When was the last time you heard of a CEO getting a traffic ticket?
Someone told me once that S.J. got them almost weekly for driving around without a license plate. Eventually, all the Cupertino cops recognized his car and didn't bother pulling him over anymore, but that took a few years.
In general, I'd say that anybody who designs his kernel modules for C++ is either
(a) looking for problems
(b) a C++ bigot that can't see what he is writing is really just C anyway
(c) was given an assignment in CS class to do so.
Feel free to make up (d).
Ironically, by the time he posted that, there was already a D: "writing drivers for Mac OS X."
The key to making C++ usable was to strip it down so that it was basically C with classes—no STL, no exceptions, no templates, no multiple inheritance, and no RTTI. Once you get rid of all those potential binary compatibility problems, fundamentally kernel-unsafe practices, and debugging headaches, C++ is actually not significantly worse for kernel programming than C, and is noticeably easier to read.
And yes, the poster who said C was assembler-like likely has never seen an assembler language, I would guess.
Oh, but it is. C is actually very, very close to assembly language, with only the most unimportant CPU-specific details abstracted away. The primitive types in C are almost always natively supported by the CPU in assembly language, with few exceptions. Instead of having to manage your own stack, it mostly manages it for you, but it still leaves plenty of room for shenanigans, particularly because it doesn't enforce the number of arguments any more than asm does. And if you use varargs, you pretty much are doing direct accesses to the stack using indexed addressing. Simple asm.
Accesses to a struct are just a tiny bit of syntactic sugar on top of an indexed load/store. Goto is a jmp, setjmp and longjmp just set a register and then perform a jump to that address The if/then commands have near exact ASM equivalents (albeit with a couple of extra jump instructions thrown in), and even while loops are just a couple of instructions (not counting whatever calculations must be performed to determine which path to take).
C abstracts away some stack management details, register quantity limits, etc., but it really is little more than portable assembly language, by design. It was intended for systems-level programming, and does that job well, in part because it is such a thin layer compared with most other languages.
Object-oriented code is a way of collecting functions and the data types they operate on into collections. Instead of having hundreds of functions that all operate on a particular data type, you group them together into a class—a collection of functions—so that you, the programmer, can easily see the relationship between them.
That's it. Inheritance is syntactic sugar around struct pointer casting. In C++, most of the OO could be approximated with "#define class struct" and slightly different syntax for the methods (use function pointers in C). It's not magic; it's just an organizational tool.
PCs are used by businesses because they're dirt cheap. As soon as it becomes cheaper to get a tablet than a computer/monitor combo, you're going to see a lot of businesses ditch their PCs en masse.
For most typical, non-high-tech businesses, there's almost nothing that a computer can do but an iPad can't. Heck, probably 90% of the business-critical systems out there could be reimplemented trivially as a server back-end and a web browser front end, at which point the actual hardware that employees use to do their work ceases to be important.
I've even seen restaurants and stores ditching their point-of-sale systems and replacing them with iPads and credit card readers, and that's just about as specialized as most business systems get, notwithstanding niche markets like industrial automation, software engineering, CAD, etc. For that matter, some of those niche tools will probably become available on tablet computing platforms eventually, though as a rule, the more obscure the tool, the longer it will take to appear on new platforms.
Anecdotally, I know a lot of people interested in buying iPads right now, and a fairly significant percentage of my non-work friends are leaning that direction. Admittedly, we're only talking about 30-40%, not 95%, but the problem is that there's a feedback loop hiding there. As more people switch, the functionality differences between the two will diminish and/or the cost differences will increase, making it more and more likely that people who don't really need a computer will choose the tablet.
I think the flood of angry responses to his comments pretty much ensured that this will not be happening in San Francisco.
More to the point, if it did, I suspect you'd see protests that would make the most violent moments of Occupy Oakland look downright peaceful. Look back at the LA riots to see what happens when a large enough minority of Californians feel that they are being systematically oppressed by the police.
As Jefferson put it, "A government afraid of its citizens is a democracy. Citizens afraid of government is tyranny."
Economies of scale. Right now, having lots of processing power on your desktop is cheap because of all the low-end users who subsidize the R&D costs by buying computers. Most of those users mainly browse CNN and play Zynga games on Facebook (slight exaggeration, but not much), and thus do not actually need all that computing power, but they buy mid-range computers because there hasn't historically been anything less powerful on the market that isn't junk.
Over time, though, many of those basic computer users are moving to tablets (and the iPad in particular). Thus, the current state of things is unlikely to persist for much longer. The high end will either skyrocket in cost or tumble in features. If people really need computing hardware to stay way ahead of tablet hardware in terms of performance, then the 5% of computer users who actually need that performance will end up paying $10,000+ per machine just as they did back when the computer market was nascent. It is more likely, however, that the "high end" machines will eventually degrade to the point that they are nothing more than tablets in a bigger case with a few extra peripheral ports, a keyboard, and a mouse, much as desktop CPUs these days are mostly just slight tweaks to laptop CPUs (more cache and support for parity bits).
Slashdot Mirror
I pretty much do the same thing, but the file is called TODO and does not live in the repository. It gets backed up when my machine gets backed up, which is good enough. I don't want to air my dirty laundry in the source tree. Especially with all the swearing about browser bugs.
Within strict limits, perhaps. For example, if the government knows of a website where people trade child porn, it would make sense for them to infiltrate that website and monitor the situation to determine if new children are being actively harmed by anyone in that circle. If they determine that this is happening, then the government rightfully should try to track the people down and put them in jail.
Drink Coke.
It amazes me that anyone bothers to write them. It only takes five seconds to click "Sign". That's a fairly small amount of effort, so even if there is only an infinitesimal chance of any forward progress, it is worth spending those five seconds. :-)
In general, I would agree, but I would not agree that terrorists or pedophiles are "minor threats". The former is probably not a significant threat on U.S. soil, but is a very real threat to Americans living abroad in some places; the second is not a threat at all, but rather a type of person who should be subjected to greater scrutiny because there is an elevated risk that he or she might be a threat.
The EPA? When was the last time any individual found themselves being bullied and intimidated by the EPA? Seriously?
The purpose of law is not to protect the public from any plausible threat, but rather to prevent the strong from exploiting or destroying the weak. Thus, for example, laws governing what institutions with billions of dollars do with 350,000 tons of food waste should be much more strict than laws governing what Joe Lunchbox does with his tuna sandwich.
This is why the EPA primarily concerns itself with corporate abuse of the environment, rather than whether you remembered to recycle that mercury watch battery that you threw in the trash last week.
We are not, as a society, overregulated or overtaxed. We are incorrectly regulated and incorrectly taxed. Because those with power and wealth are very good at finding ways to keep it, taxes have a tendency to end up disproportionately getting paid by the people with the least ability to pay them. As a result, nearly all taxes other than personal income tax, property tax, and luxury tax become regressive in time. This is why the government needs to throw away old tax schemes and update them every few years, ensuring that it ceases to be easy for the rich to avoid paying their fair share as they do now.
Case in point, taxes on businesses made sense at the time. The problem was that businesses then realized that their cost of doing business had gone up, so to preserve the revenue reaching their stockholders, they raised the price of goods to accommodate those taxes. This is why taxing business is useless. The way to fix this problem is to do away with business taxes entirely, and replace them by taxing capital gains on stocks as ordinary income. This significantly reduces the businesses' incentive to raise the price of goods to cover the tax burden, which means that the poor don't get gouged as much when they go to the store, and the rich who are leeching off of those businesses are forced to pay their fair share. (The middle class with retirement accounts would pay slightly more, but that would largely be balanced out by having more money to put away for retirement up front.)
Similarly, this removes corporations' incentive to keep money overseas (because the stockholders would now pay taxes on the value regardless).
You could also remove the incentive to do manufacturing overseas by adding import duties equal to the labor cost difference between the producing country and the destination country. This would level the playing field and allow for fair global competition based on the quality of workers, the ability to innovate, and the ability to automate, rather than artificially devaluing the workers themselves.
Pedantically speaking, smoking or burning anything causes some harm to anyone nearby. Lungs weren't really designed to inhale particulates.
Not necessarily. Bear in mind that when you're talking about accelerating to 4,000 MPH, you're limited to very-long-distance travel. Bear in mind, we're talking about Los Angeles to New York City in a little over half an hour. This wouldn't replace subways, but rather would replace jets and trains.
Also, when public transit is used by people who can afford cars, it is usually because driving is unholy in those cities. It would be more precise to say that public transit doesn't work unless the normal road system is hopelessly broken, which is not the case in the suburbs.
The paranoid part of me would point out that it can also detect various medical conditions at a distance. That's not necessarily a bad thing to find out about if you don't know you have cancer or whatever, but it has all sorts of ramifications, and falls under HIPAA....
That said, as long as it is not physically capable of producing a coherent image, it is significantly less invasive than the pedo porno scanners they use today, and really isn't that much different from the magnetometers except in the number of materials it can detect. I would view these as a significant improvement if these are physically incapable (because of hardware limitations, not software policies) of producing anything approaching an image.
If they can produce anything remotely approaching an image, then they are far worse than the porno scanners and should be banned. There's no valid reason for the device to be able to determine distance or even determine which direction the laser is pointing at any given moment if your only goal is to detect dangerous substances by their chemical signature.
I'm cautiously optimistic, yet very pessimistic all at once. On the one hand, this might be a significant improvement in privacy when going through an airport checkpoint. On the other hand this might significantly reduce privacy all the time, and knowing the DHS, if there is a way for them to screw things up so that they invade privacy more than necessary, they will find a way to do so. So the cynic in me says that this will probably turn out to be another few billion dollars of our money pissed down the toilet that should be spent on something more useful, like education, intelligence gathering, actual useful security changes, providing universal healthcare, feeding and clothing the poor, building highways, updating rail beds for high speed trains, or even just burning the cash for warmth....
IMO, IE 9's built-in debugging, ignoring the occasional (by which I mean frequent) long stall or crash, is way better than what is built into current release versions of Firefox if you don't install Firebug. IE still sucks, but at least they've made it a bit easier to debug when (not if) it bursts into flames. Firebug puts the two roughly on par with one another and with Chrome/Safari.
They're right. You can only push people so far before they lash out, and people who are already screaming about how the government is oppressing them are far more likely to be the first ones to cross that threshold. This is just common sense.
Ultimately, the only difference between a patriot/freedom fighter and a terrorist, ultimately, is which side won. Taken to extremes, those who would fight to defend their rights are more likely than nearly any other domestic group (other than complete lunatics) to commit acts of violence against their government. If that government still exists at the end of the day, those acts would be considered terrorist acts. The more stable people in those groups are a long way away from that point and will keep finding ways around the DHS's bullshit; because the government is more of a nuisance than a serious problem for them, they will allow themselves to be pushed for decades more before they snap and start blowing up federal buildings. The least stable people in those groups already did it seventeen years ago in Oklahoma City. The remaining people who value freedom lie in a continuum between those extremes.
The thing is, by repeatedly taking actions to erode our civil liberties, the DHS are largely responsible for fomenting that domestic terrorism, should it ever occur. They are driving people ever closer to the point where they feel that they have nothing to lose. Thus, the best thing we can do to prevent domestic terrorism is to cut off Homeland Security's balls, metaphorically speaking—in particular, dismantling groups like the TSA that provide material aid to terrorism by sowing the seeds of tyranny and eroding the roots of our democracy.
More to the point, we need to do it now, before domestic terrorism starts to become a serious problem. Once it does, it is too late. The reaction to a sufficient amount of domestic terrorism will cause everyone to become extremely scared, which will lead to more and more draconian laws that erode liberty and push more and more "freedom fighters" over the edge, leading to a rapidly decaying avalanche of tyranny, until one day we look outside and realize that the U.S. has become a third-world country run by militant warlords.
You cannot prevent terrorism by restricting the public. Doing so can only lead to eventual societal collapse. There is exactly one way to prevent terrorism, and that is to deny it battle—provide care for the poor and homeless, provide medical care for all (and in particular, mental health care), provide safety nets to ensure that no one ever gets into a situation where they feel that they have nothing to lose, and absolutely and completely refuse to allow such horrible acts to change the way we live our lives. Indeed, this can prevent or dramatically reduce the incidence of nearly all forms of crime, not just terrorism.
And this is why the Republicans must not be allowed to succeed in their goals. The Democrats may not always be on the right side of some issues, but nearly every plank of the Republicans' current campaign platform is detrimental to the stability of society—dismantling health care reform, scaling back Social Security and Medicare, scaling back Medicaid and food stamps, and increasing the budget for law enforcement and incarceration, etc. We desperately need a better choice than either party, but given what we have, the future safety and stability of this nation hinges upon ensuring that the Republicans' power is drastically curtailed, and soon. Otherwise, in just a few decades, we will live in a police state.
No, they can't be used to ignore laws already on the books. They can be used to prevent enforcement of laws already on the books. That's a subtle, but important difference. The government has to obey the law, but the government is under no obligation to enforce it against others.
Or encrypt it before you put it out on "the cloud". AES-128 ought to provide at least three or four years of protection.
What's interesting there is that if you add up all the different browsers that are really just wrappers around WebKit, they represent more users than IE and Firefox combined (by my quick in-my-head approximation). So if you're designing a new website that is even moderately complex, you should design it using a WebKit-based browser. Then, add support for Firefox because it is a lot easier to support than IE (even 9) and has about the same market share. Finally, support IE only if you absolutely have to support everybody. Otherwise, you should just require IE users to install Chrome Frame and then pretend IE doesn't even exist.
True. The friendliness of a language is directly proportional to the thickness of the layer of glaze.
I think it is worth pointing out at this point that the blanket protection from prosecution that the government gave out for illegal wiretaps was not a license to continue violating privacy laws, and AFAIK did not extend to future crimes committed by these carriers. So the only real question that remains is which state's Attorney General is feeling litigious today?
Someone told me once that S.J. got them almost weekly for driving around without a license plate. Eventually, all the Cupertino cops recognized his car and didn't bother pulling him over anymore, but that took a few years.
Ironically, by the time he posted that, there was already a D: "writing drivers for Mac OS X."
The key to making C++ usable was to strip it down so that it was basically C with classes—no STL, no exceptions, no templates, no multiple inheritance, and no RTTI. Once you get rid of all those potential binary compatibility problems, fundamentally kernel-unsafe practices, and debugging headaches, C++ is actually not significantly worse for kernel programming than C, and is noticeably easier to read.
Oh, but it is. C is actually very, very close to assembly language, with only the most unimportant CPU-specific details abstracted away. The primitive types in C are almost always natively supported by the CPU in assembly language, with few exceptions. Instead of having to manage your own stack, it mostly manages it for you, but it still leaves plenty of room for shenanigans, particularly because it doesn't enforce the number of arguments any more than asm does. And if you use varargs, you pretty much are doing direct accesses to the stack using indexed addressing. Simple asm.
Accesses to a struct are just a tiny bit of syntactic sugar on top of an indexed load/store. Goto is a jmp, setjmp and longjmp just set a register and then perform a jump to that address The if/then commands have near exact ASM equivalents (albeit with a couple of extra jump instructions thrown in), and even while loops are just a couple of instructions (not counting whatever calculations must be performed to determine which path to take).
C abstracts away some stack management details, register quantity limits, etc., but it really is little more than portable assembly language, by design. It was intended for systems-level programming, and does that job well, in part because it is such a thin layer compared with most other languages.
OO in a hundred words or less:
Object-oriented code is a way of collecting functions and the data types they operate on into collections. Instead of having hundreds of functions that all operate on a particular data type, you group them together into a class—a collection of functions—so that you, the programmer, can easily see the relationship between them.
That's it. Inheritance is syntactic sugar around struct pointer casting. In C++, most of the OO could be approximated with "#define class struct" and slightly different syntax for the methods (use function pointers in C). It's not magic; it's just an organizational tool.
PCs are used by businesses because they're dirt cheap. As soon as it becomes cheaper to get a tablet than a computer/monitor combo, you're going to see a lot of businesses ditch their PCs en masse.
For most typical, non-high-tech businesses, there's almost nothing that a computer can do but an iPad can't. Heck, probably 90% of the business-critical systems out there could be reimplemented trivially as a server back-end and a web browser front end, at which point the actual hardware that employees use to do their work ceases to be important.
I've even seen restaurants and stores ditching their point-of-sale systems and replacing them with iPads and credit card readers, and that's just about as specialized as most business systems get, notwithstanding niche markets like industrial automation, software engineering, CAD, etc. For that matter, some of those niche tools will probably become available on tablet computing platforms eventually, though as a rule, the more obscure the tool, the longer it will take to appear on new platforms.
Anecdotally, I know a lot of people interested in buying iPads right now, and a fairly significant percentage of my non-work friends are leaning that direction. Admittedly, we're only talking about 30-40%, not 95%, but the problem is that there's a feedback loop hiding there. As more people switch, the functionality differences between the two will diminish and/or the cost differences will increase, making it more and more likely that people who don't really need a computer will choose the tablet.
I think the flood of angry responses to his comments pretty much ensured that this will not be happening in San Francisco.
More to the point, if it did, I suspect you'd see protests that would make the most violent moments of Occupy Oakland look downright peaceful. Look back at the LA riots to see what happens when a large enough minority of Californians feel that they are being systematically oppressed by the police.
As Jefferson put it, "A government afraid of its citizens is a democracy. Citizens afraid of government is tyranny."
No, but if a supermajority wanted it, we could surrender our liberty by means of the amendment process. See also: prohibition/eighteenth amendment.
Economies of scale. Right now, having lots of processing power on your desktop is cheap because of all the low-end users who subsidize the R&D costs by buying computers. Most of those users mainly browse CNN and play Zynga games on Facebook (slight exaggeration, but not much), and thus do not actually need all that computing power, but they buy mid-range computers because there hasn't historically been anything less powerful on the market that isn't junk.
Over time, though, many of those basic computer users are moving to tablets (and the iPad in particular). Thus, the current state of things is unlikely to persist for much longer. The high end will either skyrocket in cost or tumble in features. If people really need computing hardware to stay way ahead of tablet hardware in terms of performance, then the 5% of computer users who actually need that performance will end up paying $10,000+ per machine just as they did back when the computer market was nascent. It is more likely, however, that the "high end" machines will eventually degrade to the point that they are nothing more than tablets in a bigger case with a few extra peripheral ports, a keyboard, and a mouse, much as desktop CPUs these days are mostly just slight tweaks to laptop CPUs (more cache and support for parity bits).