Since this is/. and the upstairs kitchen is probably his mom's it's more likely telling him to take a shower because even the beer is trying to flee from his man cave.
That's how they catch people, if they're winning well... So they took down Silk Road 2.0, it's still a piss in the ocean to beating the drug industry. They take down The Pirate Bay, it's still a piss in the ocean to beating copyright infringement. From big to small, they can catch a shoplifter but shoplifting doesn't go away, they can bust a crime syndicate but organized crime doesn't go away either. And more often than not they're the mop-up crew, sure it's nice that murderers go to jail but the victim is still dead so it's a limited win. It's far from a lawless country but it's still way off from a lawful country, at least in some areas we can make an educated guess on how many criminals they don't catch because there's a victim and a crime scene but in others it's just guesswork. Particularly the kind that wears suits.
Well, if you made a list of fields TV portrays accurately it'd fit on a very small business card. We shake our heads at the use of computers and technology, doctors shake their heads at medicine and I bet cops and lawyers shake their heads at the depiction of police work and the law too. For that matter I bet drug dealers and the mafia shake their heads at Weeds and Sopranos too. I'm not saying that you're wrong but it's in the nature of television to wildly misrepresent reality for dramatic effect, even in the shows that have a superficial resemblance to actual professions. Asking for that to change is to try making water not wet, it's entertainment and it needs to be entertaining while reality is full of dreary, boring routine. It should never be confused with reality unless you're watching a documentary.
An electronics retailer in Europe held a contest, setting a cordon that people had to stay behind, more than 10 feet away from two televisions, and were asked which was the 4k tv and which was the 1080p. 98% of people correctly guessed which was which. Maybe people asked others who cheated, but it suggests that "most people can't tell" is bullshit.
This electronics retailer wouldn't happen to be in the business of selling people expensive new 4k TV sets by any chance? There's a lot of ways you could configure a 4K and 1080p TV to get that result like contrast, color and Netflix 4K probably got as many compression artifacts as an upscaled BluRay. I have a UHD monitor for gaming and such but TVs are way ahead of the content, I've no idea why 4K TVs are actually selling.
Well, one shortcoming of that chart is that it assumes 20/20 vision, that's the threshold for "normal" sight that doesn't need glasses but many people have better than that - 20/16 at least is not unusual - or can see better than that once they wear glasses/contact lenses. I think the most extreme cases are something like 20/8, meaning they can see from 20 feet what a normal person would have to be at 8 feet to see. I think it depends on source material and compression though, I've got a 28" UHD monitor (3840x2160) and done comparisons with a very high resolution, sharp image scaled down to UHD and 1080p respectively. It's noticable. It's not a huge difference, it's not like I think of 1080p as blurry. But when I watch the full resolution imagine it's more like wow, there's even more detail.
Sadly I think the SCOTUS applied the law correctly, which is not to say it's a good law. The ruling is quite clear that the test is not whether it's required by your employer, it's whether it is integral and indispensable to the performance of your work.
That view is fully consistent with an Opinion Letter the Department issued in 1951. The letter found noncompensable a preshift security search of employees in a rocket-powder plant " 'for matches, spark producing devices such as cigarette lighters, and other items which have a direct bearing on the safety of the employees,'" as well as a postshift security search of the employees done "'for the purpose of preventing theft.'"
If you need to wear protective gear for work then putting it on - but not waiting in line to put it on - is compensatable time because wearing it is integral to safe and efficient job performance, undergoing a security screening to make sure you're not carrying anything dangerous is apparently not. That's an odd place to draw the line, it's not a convenience and it's not something you can skip out of. But as it stands the employer can force you to jump through as many compulsory hoops as they want without compensation, as long as it doesn't directly relate to your job performance. Personally I'd call it bullshit, any compulsory checkpoints of whether you're ready to enter or leave work is clearly integral to your job activity but there's 60+ years of precedent that says otherwise.
Unless you're using encryption, it doesn't matter, since there are many points of 'interest" between the sender and receiver.
Yeah, for external mail no doubt. But for internal mail you probably wouldn't bother, then it's a pretty huge juicy target for sensitive information. Even when you're not passing the juiciest details by email like blueprints and source code there'll be tons of business information in attached presentations and so on.
The majority of "content producers" on the web have little to no cost and produce little to no original content, let alone worthwhile content. Even for the subset of content I personally enjoy, I recognize that it is worthless - I would not pay a single cent to access it. If it were paywalled I would simply go without it. Serving ads alongside content makes me enjoy the content less, so I block those ads. If you fight against this, your content becomes less enjoyable.
Except time. Sure work provides me with a desk, computer, power and lights but 99% of what they pay for is my time. Most of/. would be living on the streets if we couldn't put a price tag on that. Even if you're self-employed and don't cut yourself a paycheck doesn't mean anyone else has the right to demand you give it away for free. How are most blogs not original content? This diatribe is original content, I mean I don't expect to get paid for it but if I wanted to I could put it up on a blog and see if people would suffer some ads to read it. It's not like you have a right to read it for free just because I wrote it for free.
When I go shopping I think paying is a real downer, it would be so much more enjoyable if I could just go into the store and grab whatever I want to. Life's tough that way sometimes, strangely it doesn't revolve around me and what I'd like the most. I don't buy into the "not watching the ads is stealing" tripe, but arguing that turning an ad-based service into an ad-free service is reasonable simply because you enjoy it more is basically pulling a Darth Vader, "I'm altering the deal. Pray I don't alter it any further." without any moral justification for why you should be entitled to their content for free. Ad money is real money and you're actively avoiding rewarding their work.
Let's for argument's sake say the site turns to obnoxious ads and anti-blocking measures. You either stop reading or stop fighting the ads. If they lose you as a reader they lose you as a freeloader so what exactly have they lost, the privilege of you reading their blog? Talk about hubris. Or you end up watching ads and become a customer, they make money. You talk as if they they're the ones losing by pissing you off, but how could they lose anything when they got nothing from you in the first place? Aren't you just crying for yourself and when they shove you out the door you pout like a child crying "I didn't want to visit your stupid site anyway!"
And the most common way to avoid that has been third party file lockers, which is why they're going after Megaupload and such. Basically one person uploads the file via some safe, anonymous method and publishes the link for others to download. The site offers slow/limited/captcha/ad-supported download for free users and fast download for paying users, which is how they make their money. Since they aren't the ones uploading it and respond to DMCA takedowns they're mostly getting away with it, but it's certainly under attack. Personally I'm wondering when, if ever, anyone's going to be able to make Freenet style downloads usable to most people where there is no seed as such, you just cut a file into a million little encrypted pieces that are distributed among the entire network. It pretty much does away with the concept of a seed altogether.
I have an UHD monitor (3840x2160) and without exception the only games that change view like that are terrible games that have fixed UI elements that are x pixels wide, meaning that on a high def monitor the actual action happens with tiny ants in the 800x600 center with microbuttons and a lot of scenery. I decrease the resolution to get a "normal" gaming experience. Good games on the other hand look roughly the same on my 28" UHD screen as they looked on the 24" 1080p screen, only more detailed with the zoom level a feature of the game, not implicitly set by the resolution. So great feature I suppose if you want to feel the pains of crap HiDPI support without actually having a HiDPI monitor...
So Microsoft US employees, or at least some of them, seem to have direct access to worldwide Microsoft data.
And quite probably the other way around, this would create hell on all forms of international access/accounts as the Germans would find a person working for Microsoft Germany who'd be compelled to access documents on US servers in violation of US law. Let's also not forget that even if you're in your own country and relatively safe you are committing a crime abroad, which could be nasty if you ever decide to go on holidays to a country that has an extradition agreement with that country. Also, if you know people from Microsoft US are going to break the law and let them keep access then that should probably count as some kind of criminal conspiracy, like a security guard not sounding the alarm. I think the EU can shut these jokers down quite quick even if the US courts won't.
Your estimate was probably just a bit old, if I recall it was something like 800k when x.org took over from xfree86, they shaved off hundreds of thousands of lines of old cruft. And when they finally ran out of cruft that could be removed, they started writing Wayland. It's probably the only OSS project that's shrunk over the last 10 years,
. . . Then don't use it. Did someone steal your mouse???
No, but there's people who want to steal the interface. With the lines between tablet with attachable keyboard and touch-enabled laptop with detachable keyboard blurring out you'll almost certainly see lots of hybrid interfaces. Yes, you can use a keyboard and mouse but everything will be touch-friendly for screens 7-10" meaning big buttons and few menu options with the advanced features well hidden or removed because they're not touch friendly. And it'll work well enough on a 13-15" laptop that users won't complain too much, particularly if they hate the nub/touch pad and won't need to haul out an external mouse.
times are changing.
Yeah. But to the better for those who work on one or more 24"+ monitors? I doubt it. Not only are many of the mobile "features" like full screen apps or hot corners basically anti-features, but the oversize touch buttons for a 10" screen look ridiculously huge. And if you think developers are going to make things that scale nicely then clearly you've never played with DPI scaling, anything other than 100% and everything starts looking like shit. I really wish that Windows at least had a "this application is stupid, pixel double to 200%" override because applications that claim to support DPI scaling but really don't are totally broken.
Actually that would probably go under derivative works since you could sell those rights. The key thing about moral rights is that in most jurisdictions you can't sign them away. For example say that you sell the rights to a film based on your book, but they totally change the story to the point it violates your artistic integrity then in Europe you have a good chance of getting it stopped. Or someone buys the rights to a song from you and use it in nazi propaganda or rape porn or whatever, basically it's an escape hatch to say I sold it, but not for that.
Technically 10TB is probably possible but if you do the math, do you really want a $4-5000 SSD in your laptop? Or let me rephrase it, you want it but would you pay the price of a cheap used car before you even get to the rest of the machine? You know you wouldn't. And to be honest, I think if you're the kind of user where 1TB is not enough then 2TB is probably also not enough. If we could see a sales breakdown I'm guessing even 1TB is rare.
Initially I was told that the 850 EVO would come in 2TB capacity as well, but later on Samsung opted against it due to the limited demand.
Most likely because there's no savings whatsoever, if a 1TB drive is $500 then 2TB is probably like $980. They scale almost perfectly, all you need is an extra SATA port and you'd get a lot better performance with two in RAID0.
Well, with so many layers your process control must be extremely good which means a more mature process. Here's a good illustration, they're like little wells with regular gates down the sides.
You gest, but during WWI they actually had a Christmas truce in 1914 where the troops came out to play football. No, the kind played with your feet. The commanders in chief were not amused. In WWII the Germans overran the trenches with armor, so there was no time for that sort of thing. The actual people in the trenches were pretty much the same, called to war because your country asks you to. Cannon fodder meats cannon fodder.
To be fair, you couldn't do "anything you want" with a dead tree book either, at least not if it involved putting it a photocopier and share with a million friends. The problem with the DMCA is that it's a general umbrella against copying and everything else they don't like you to do with it. And through the decryption key license agreement they got all the companies making players by the balls.
On the other hand, modern TVs aren't the best thing to program on. Granted, they are sharper than old analog TVs we used to hook our 8-bits (bitters?) up to, but they still have non-square pixels making text fuzzy
What are you talking about? I think some very early plasma screens cheated on the horizontal resolution a bit, but otherwise any HDTV (720p or 1080p) uses square pixels.
You don't undo centuries and millenniums of cultural and linguistic separation in a day, that a few expressions buck the trend and never go beyond a small region doesn't change the overall trend that the world is trending towards speaking the same languages and towards more and more global cultural impressions. We've observed this both on a micro level (build a bridge to an island, the dialect normalizes) and macro level with marginal languages dying (or preserved like in a museum) and while there's still parts of the world struggling to get fluent in their first language there's a massive alignment of secondary language primarily towards English.
Besides, why should we think everybody wants to talk and write exactly the same? Ever since we got newspapers, radio, telegraph and telephone we could have worked to merge US and UK English back together again, but my impression is neither wants to give up their pronunciation, spelling and idioms and the Internet isn't going to change that. And I think it would be rather boring if we had one pan-global culture anyway, it's watering down how exotic it is if they eat McDonalds and listen to Justin Bieber too. It's nice to be able to be understood though, it's not that fun not knowing how to ask where the nearest toilet is.
Unfortunately that question should be split in two, "Where do we add value?" and "What is essential to be able to deliver that value?" I've seen quite a few cases where I feel they've signed away too much of their processes that aren't core business but is ruining it because it's not working well. Outsourcing development is an easy example, the core business is usually serving some particular market or function, not developing software as such. But no matter how much smart business functionality you've added it won't help if the software is buggy, unstable and unmaintainable. Or to use a car analogy, if you build a great car with crap brakes that'll ruin everything. They weren't supposed to add value, just be normal brakes but because they're not they're ruining the value you wanted to deliver and more.
There's no liability for patches (except for intentionally malicious ones) to an open source application. If there were, nobody would submit one.
In this context I think it means "nobody to pass the buck to", if Windows crashes you blame Microsoft, if RHEL crashes you blame Red Hat, if CentOS crashes you take the blame. Then again my impression is that very, very few have the kind of ultra-platinum support where the vendor will jump all over you to solve your problem, it's mostly your problem to solve anyway. It's just a blame shifting exercise, how badly you need it depends on how much shit is going to roll downhill. The technical merits of support is often secondary.
Meh, Intel wanted to buy enough market share that developers will make x86 Android builds and I think they succeeded. ASUS MeMO Pad, Acer Iconia, Dell Venue, Nokia N1 and a bunch of lesser brands now make x86 tablets which means you probably want to compile any native code for x86 not just ARM. That's their foot in the door, now that the contra revenue ends we'll see what they do with it.
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Since this is /. and the upstairs kitchen is probably his mom's it's more likely telling him to take a shower because even the beer is trying to flee from his man cave.
That's how they catch people, if they're winning well... So they took down Silk Road 2.0, it's still a piss in the ocean to beating the drug industry. They take down The Pirate Bay, it's still a piss in the ocean to beating copyright infringement. From big to small, they can catch a shoplifter but shoplifting doesn't go away, they can bust a crime syndicate but organized crime doesn't go away either. And more often than not they're the mop-up crew, sure it's nice that murderers go to jail but the victim is still dead so it's a limited win. It's far from a lawless country but it's still way off from a lawful country, at least in some areas we can make an educated guess on how many criminals they don't catch because there's a victim and a crime scene but in others it's just guesswork. Particularly the kind that wears suits.
Well, if you made a list of fields TV portrays accurately it'd fit on a very small business card. We shake our heads at the use of computers and technology, doctors shake their heads at medicine and I bet cops and lawyers shake their heads at the depiction of police work and the law too. For that matter I bet drug dealers and the mafia shake their heads at Weeds and Sopranos too. I'm not saying that you're wrong but it's in the nature of television to wildly misrepresent reality for dramatic effect, even in the shows that have a superficial resemblance to actual professions. Asking for that to change is to try making water not wet, it's entertainment and it needs to be entertaining while reality is full of dreary, boring routine. It should never be confused with reality unless you're watching a documentary.
An electronics retailer in Europe held a contest, setting a cordon that people had to stay behind, more than 10 feet away from two televisions, and were asked which was the 4k tv and which was the 1080p. 98% of people correctly guessed which was which. Maybe people asked others who cheated, but it suggests that "most people can't tell" is bullshit.
This electronics retailer wouldn't happen to be in the business of selling people expensive new 4k TV sets by any chance? There's a lot of ways you could configure a 4K and 1080p TV to get that result like contrast, color and Netflix 4K probably got as many compression artifacts as an upscaled BluRay. I have a UHD monitor for gaming and such but TVs are way ahead of the content, I've no idea why 4K TVs are actually selling.
Well, one shortcoming of that chart is that it assumes 20/20 vision, that's the threshold for "normal" sight that doesn't need glasses but many people have better than that - 20/16 at least is not unusual - or can see better than that once they wear glasses/contact lenses. I think the most extreme cases are something like 20/8, meaning they can see from 20 feet what a normal person would have to be at 8 feet to see. I think it depends on source material and compression though, I've got a 28" UHD monitor (3840x2160) and done comparisons with a very high resolution, sharp image scaled down to UHD and 1080p respectively. It's noticable. It's not a huge difference, it's not like I think of 1080p as blurry. But when I watch the full resolution imagine it's more like wow, there's even more detail.
Sadly I think the SCOTUS applied the law correctly, which is not to say it's a good law. The ruling is quite clear that the test is not whether it's required by your employer, it's whether it is integral and indispensable to the performance of your work.
That view is fully consistent with an Opinion Letter the Department issued in 1951. The letter found noncompensable a preshift security search of employees in a rocket-powder plant " 'for matches, spark producing devices such as cigarette lighters, and other items which have a direct bearing on the safety of the employees,'" as well as a postshift security search of the employees done "'for the purpose of preventing theft.'"
If you need to wear protective gear for work then putting it on - but not waiting in line to put it on - is compensatable time because wearing it is integral to safe and efficient job performance, undergoing a security screening to make sure you're not carrying anything dangerous is apparently not. That's an odd place to draw the line, it's not a convenience and it's not something you can skip out of. But as it stands the employer can force you to jump through as many compulsory hoops as they want without compensation, as long as it doesn't directly relate to your job performance. Personally I'd call it bullshit, any compulsory checkpoints of whether you're ready to enter or leave work is clearly integral to your job activity but there's 60+ years of precedent that says otherwise.
Unless you're using encryption, it doesn't matter, since there are many points of 'interest" between the sender and receiver.
Yeah, for external mail no doubt. But for internal mail you probably wouldn't bother, then it's a pretty huge juicy target for sensitive information. Even when you're not passing the juiciest details by email like blueprints and source code there'll be tons of business information in attached presentations and so on.
The majority of "content producers" on the web have little to no cost and produce little to no original content, let alone worthwhile content. Even for the subset of content I personally enjoy, I recognize that it is worthless - I would not pay a single cent to access it. If it were paywalled I would simply go without it. Serving ads alongside content makes me enjoy the content less, so I block those ads. If you fight against this, your content becomes less enjoyable.
Except time. Sure work provides me with a desk, computer, power and lights but 99% of what they pay for is my time. Most of /. would be living on the streets if we couldn't put a price tag on that. Even if you're self-employed and don't cut yourself a paycheck doesn't mean anyone else has the right to demand you give it away for free. How are most blogs not original content? This diatribe is original content, I mean I don't expect to get paid for it but if I wanted to I could put it up on a blog and see if people would suffer some ads to read it. It's not like you have a right to read it for free just because I wrote it for free.
When I go shopping I think paying is a real downer, it would be so much more enjoyable if I could just go into the store and grab whatever I want to. Life's tough that way sometimes, strangely it doesn't revolve around me and what I'd like the most. I don't buy into the "not watching the ads is stealing" tripe, but arguing that turning an ad-based service into an ad-free service is reasonable simply because you enjoy it more is basically pulling a Darth Vader, "I'm altering the deal. Pray I don't alter it any further." without any moral justification for why you should be entitled to their content for free. Ad money is real money and you're actively avoiding rewarding their work.
Let's for argument's sake say the site turns to obnoxious ads and anti-blocking measures. You either stop reading or stop fighting the ads. If they lose you as a reader they lose you as a freeloader so what exactly have they lost, the privilege of you reading their blog? Talk about hubris. Or you end up watching ads and become a customer, they make money. You talk as if they they're the ones losing by pissing you off, but how could they lose anything when they got nothing from you in the first place? Aren't you just crying for yourself and when they shove you out the door you pout like a child crying "I didn't want to visit your stupid site anyway!"
And the most common way to avoid that has been third party file lockers, which is why they're going after Megaupload and such. Basically one person uploads the file via some safe, anonymous method and publishes the link for others to download. The site offers slow/limited/captcha/ad-supported download for free users and fast download for paying users, which is how they make their money. Since they aren't the ones uploading it and respond to DMCA takedowns they're mostly getting away with it, but it's certainly under attack. Personally I'm wondering when, if ever, anyone's going to be able to make Freenet style downloads usable to most people where there is no seed as such, you just cut a file into a million little encrypted pieces that are distributed among the entire network. It pretty much does away with the concept of a seed altogether.
I have an UHD monitor (3840x2160) and without exception the only games that change view like that are terrible games that have fixed UI elements that are x pixels wide, meaning that on a high def monitor the actual action happens with tiny ants in the 800x600 center with microbuttons and a lot of scenery. I decrease the resolution to get a "normal" gaming experience. Good games on the other hand look roughly the same on my 28" UHD screen as they looked on the 24" 1080p screen, only more detailed with the zoom level a feature of the game, not implicitly set by the resolution. So great feature I suppose if you want to feel the pains of crap HiDPI support without actually having a HiDPI monitor...
So Microsoft US employees, or at least some of them, seem to have direct access to worldwide Microsoft data.
And quite probably the other way around, this would create hell on all forms of international access/accounts as the Germans would find a person working for Microsoft Germany who'd be compelled to access documents on US servers in violation of US law. Let's also not forget that even if you're in your own country and relatively safe you are committing a crime abroad, which could be nasty if you ever decide to go on holidays to a country that has an extradition agreement with that country. Also, if you know people from Microsoft US are going to break the law and let them keep access then that should probably count as some kind of criminal conspiracy, like a security guard not sounding the alarm. I think the EU can shut these jokers down quite quick even if the US courts won't.
Ooh, found it in this video from 15:03, allegedly it was 1.1 million but there's no repository dating that far back to check however:
xserver1.0.2: 879403 LOC
xserver now (july 2013): 562678 LOC
Your estimate was probably just a bit old, if I recall it was something like 800k when x.org took over from xfree86, they shaved off hundreds of thousands of lines of old cruft. And when they finally ran out of cruft that could be removed, they started writing Wayland. It's probably the only OSS project that's shrunk over the last 10 years,
. . . Then don't use it. Did someone steal your mouse???
No, but there's people who want to steal the interface. With the lines between tablet with attachable keyboard and touch-enabled laptop with detachable keyboard blurring out you'll almost certainly see lots of hybrid interfaces. Yes, you can use a keyboard and mouse but everything will be touch-friendly for screens 7-10" meaning big buttons and few menu options with the advanced features well hidden or removed because they're not touch friendly. And it'll work well enough on a 13-15" laptop that users won't complain too much, particularly if they hate the nub/touch pad and won't need to haul out an external mouse.
times are changing.
Yeah. But to the better for those who work on one or more 24"+ monitors? I doubt it. Not only are many of the mobile "features" like full screen apps or hot corners basically anti-features, but the oversize touch buttons for a 10" screen look ridiculously huge. And if you think developers are going to make things that scale nicely then clearly you've never played with DPI scaling, anything other than 100% and everything starts looking like shit. I really wish that Windows at least had a "this application is stupid, pixel double to 200%" override because applications that claim to support DPI scaling but really don't are totally broken.
Actually that would probably go under derivative works since you could sell those rights. The key thing about moral rights is that in most jurisdictions you can't sign them away. For example say that you sell the rights to a film based on your book, but they totally change the story to the point it violates your artistic integrity then in Europe you have a good chance of getting it stopped. Or someone buys the rights to a song from you and use it in nazi propaganda or rape porn or whatever, basically it's an escape hatch to say I sold it, but not for that.
Technically 10TB is probably possible but if you do the math, do you really want a $4-5000 SSD in your laptop? Or let me rephrase it, you want it but would you pay the price of a cheap used car before you even get to the rest of the machine? You know you wouldn't. And to be honest, I think if you're the kind of user where 1TB is not enough then 2TB is probably also not enough. If we could see a sales breakdown I'm guessing even 1TB is rare.
With increased density from 32 layers (despite larger feature size) why don't they have a 2tb (or 1920gb) model yet?
Anandtech wrote:
Initially I was told that the 850 EVO would come in 2TB capacity as well, but later on Samsung opted against it due to the limited demand.
Most likely because there's no savings whatsoever, if a 1TB drive is $500 then 2TB is probably like $980. They scale almost perfectly, all you need is an extra SATA port and you'd get a lot better performance with two in RAID0.
Well, with so many layers your process control must be extremely good which means a more mature process. Here's a good illustration, they're like little wells with regular gates down the sides.
You gest, but during WWI they actually had a Christmas truce in 1914 where the troops came out to play football. No, the kind played with your feet. The commanders in chief were not amused. In WWII the Germans overran the trenches with armor, so there was no time for that sort of thing. The actual people in the trenches were pretty much the same, called to war because your country asks you to. Cannon fodder meats cannon fodder.
To be fair, you couldn't do "anything you want" with a dead tree book either, at least not if it involved putting it a photocopier and share with a million friends. The problem with the DMCA is that it's a general umbrella against copying and everything else they don't like you to do with it. And through the decryption key license agreement they got all the companies making players by the balls.
On the other hand, modern TVs aren't the best thing to program on. Granted, they are sharper than old analog TVs we used to hook our 8-bits (bitters?) up to, but they still have non-square pixels making text fuzzy
What are you talking about? I think some very early plasma screens cheated on the horizontal resolution a bit, but otherwise any HDTV (720p or 1080p) uses square pixels.
You don't undo centuries and millenniums of cultural and linguistic separation in a day, that a few expressions buck the trend and never go beyond a small region doesn't change the overall trend that the world is trending towards speaking the same languages and towards more and more global cultural impressions. We've observed this both on a micro level (build a bridge to an island, the dialect normalizes) and macro level with marginal languages dying (or preserved like in a museum) and while there's still parts of the world struggling to get fluent in their first language there's a massive alignment of secondary language primarily towards English.
Besides, why should we think everybody wants to talk and write exactly the same? Ever since we got newspapers, radio, telegraph and telephone we could have worked to merge US and UK English back together again, but my impression is neither wants to give up their pronunciation, spelling and idioms and the Internet isn't going to change that. And I think it would be rather boring if we had one pan-global culture anyway, it's watering down how exotic it is if they eat McDonalds and listen to Justin Bieber too. It's nice to be able to be understood though, it's not that fun not knowing how to ask where the nearest toilet is.
Unfortunately that question should be split in two, "Where do we add value?" and "What is essential to be able to deliver that value?" I've seen quite a few cases where I feel they've signed away too much of their processes that aren't core business but is ruining it because it's not working well. Outsourcing development is an easy example, the core business is usually serving some particular market or function, not developing software as such. But no matter how much smart business functionality you've added it won't help if the software is buggy, unstable and unmaintainable. Or to use a car analogy, if you build a great car with crap brakes that'll ruin everything. They weren't supposed to add value, just be normal brakes but because they're not they're ruining the value you wanted to deliver and more.
There's no liability for patches (except for intentionally malicious ones) to an open source application. If there were, nobody would submit one.
In this context I think it means "nobody to pass the buck to", if Windows crashes you blame Microsoft, if RHEL crashes you blame Red Hat, if CentOS crashes you take the blame. Then again my impression is that very, very few have the kind of ultra-platinum support where the vendor will jump all over you to solve your problem, it's mostly your problem to solve anyway. It's just a blame shifting exercise, how badly you need it depends on how much shit is going to roll downhill. The technical merits of support is often secondary.
Meh, Intel wanted to buy enough market share that developers will make x86 Android builds and I think they succeeded. ASUS MeMO Pad, Acer Iconia, Dell Venue, Nokia N1 and a bunch of lesser brands now make x86 tablets which means you probably want to compile any native code for x86 not just ARM. That's their foot in the door, now that the contra revenue ends we'll see what they do with it.