I agree that they should have expanded Medicare to cover everyone who wanted it - that's by far the most efficient system with the highest patient satisfaction. Much better than private insurance, so likely the competition would have forced insurers to become at least marginally efficient and improve coverage.
That being said, I don't follow your comment about your private insurance. The only thing that happened to your private insurance is that the worst abuses were now outlawed, so (for example) insurance companies aren't allowed to waste more than 20% of what you pay them, resulting in $billions in refunds being sent to customers who were previously being really ripped off. Well, and you also indirectly benefitted in that the exchanges are so competitive that private insurance rates are going up much more slowly than they have in the past, so you're probably having money paying a 2-3% annual increase (that's the average post-ACA) compared to the historical 7-9% annual increases.
Nobody said that ACA would make everyone's health insurance cheaper. That being said, due to the competitive exchanges prices are going up (on average) much more slowly (2-3%) post-ACA than they went up for previous decades (7-9%). So if you compare your insurance costs to what would have happened if the rates had gone up as fast as they had previously, you're probably saving money.
But the real benefit of ACA is that the worst abuses by the insurance companies are outlawed. They can't waste more than 20% of what they collect. They can't refuse to provide healthcare coverage for people who've paid for it. And, of course, they can't refuse insurance to people who have a "pre-existing condition" when they change jobs. Those benefits apply to over 200m people. And over 10m people that had no healthcare coverage before do so now!
It turns out that when health care is free, costs go down. Yes, immediately after healthcare becomes free costs go up for due to pent-up healthcare needs that were unmet. But longer-term, costs go down because people go to the doctor sooner and get things taken care of when it's easier and less expensive to treat. For example, detecting diabetic trends and changing your diet is much cheaper than taking insulin for the rest of your life.
And if it's literally free, you eliminate massive overhead. The cost of actually delivering healthcare in the US is less than the cost of administration piled on top of it. Not just the direct cost of money wasted paying insurance companies, but also the huge administrative overhead of doctors paying for a huge staff to try to get paid by the insurance companies, pharma companies' overhead, doctors being forced by insurance companies to perform medically unnecessary testing, paperwork dragging out over months and even years to try to get approvals, the cost of providing extremely expensive ER treatment instead of much cheaper, more effective medical care (not the same thing!), etc. All that waste is covered by inflated rates paid for by everyone.
If all we paid for is the salary of medical caregivers and the cost of their supplies, we'd save $trillions! That's how other countries manage to have superior medical outcomes than the US, and 1/2 the cost or less.
Question: Not a single Republican voted for Obamacare, so exactly how does it make it their "wet dream"?
Answer: Because Obama adopted the Republican plan in an attempt to unify the parties in implementing healthcare reform. The Democratic plan was Single Payer, which was cheaper, simpler, and more effective. Obama agreed to the more expensive, complex and ineffective Republican plan in an attempt to get Republicans to engage in the reform.
Unfortunately, Republicans immediately turned against their own plan, because they cared more about preventing reform than in their own reform plans.
The shame is that the Democrats didn't then go back to their own plan and push that through. Unfortunately there were enough Democrats tied to the insurance industry (Lieberman....) that, combined with 100% Republican obstruction, they were able to force the country to waste $trillions on insurance company waste. Because what's waste to us is record profits for insurance companies.
"Not sure how well the mobile part works when you actually have to pay for the insurance"
ACA helps because when you switch jobs, you know that you can get reasonably priced insurance afterwards. And because the insurance companies can no longer use the job change to declare any current medical conditions "pre-existing" and deny you insurance.
Previously there are _many_ people trapped in jobs for the health insurance, because if they went to a startup or became an independent consultant they had to pay absurdly high rates for insurance. Or because they had any medical condition that the new insurance company didn't want to cover they'd be denied insurance completely if they change jobs.
That's already included in the total. The number of people shot in a house, including shootings by people who don't live there, goes up by 5x if you own a gun. So while some people may be protected by the gun in the house, in total they are 5x more likely to be shot, so obviously the number of "saves" is much, much smaller than the number of people shot by people who live in the house with you.
This is consistent with the data. The leading case of shooting deaths is suicides (2/3rds of shooting deaths), and having a gun promotes suicide deaths. The remaining 1/3rd are people shooting each other, and after that most shootings are by friends and family. Random criminals breaking in is a small percentage of shootings, so reducing that while promoting suicides and shootings by family members is bad math, leading to lots of deaths.
Not "no big deal" but much less likely to end up dead.
Note also that this includes the effect of having a gun in the house protecting the people in the house from someone coming in and shooting them. That may happen, but in total the people in a house are in much more danger of being shot if you have a gun than if you don't. Apparently people get angry and shoot each other much more often than they use the gun to save everyone from an invader.
Nope, it turns out that the whole "IRS Scandal" consisted of a conservative Republican IRS administrator who put in place a consistent rule for identifying groups that had political terms in their names and thus were inspected more closely for trying to illegally apply for tax-exempt status as a non-political social welfare group, as required by Congress. The list had many more non-conservative than conservative terms in it, and many more non-conservative than conservative groups were looked into because of the system. And it wasn't done by Obama or the White House, or even approved of by them. Using an explicit list instead of inspector judgement was an attempt to be more fair and consistent. It was politically stupid, because some politicians took the list and manipulated it, ignoring 70% of the terms on the list to try to spin it as an anti-conservative attack. If that was "using the IRS against enemies of the white house" it was also, twice as often, using the IRS against friends of the white house, so it wasn't much of a political weapon.
"Why should this end up in court"? Because markets consist of people, who make agreements in contracts, and sometimes they disagree, or cheat, and that's where courts come in. If you take laws and courts out of the picture, the market turns into anarchy and collapses. "Why do you think that would be a good thing?"
Vs. Get cash from your pocket, hand to cashier, receive change. Familiar and anonymous, but carrying and handling cash is less convenient than digital payment. Most secure, in that you can only lose the cash you're carrying, and then only to a local attach - people on the internet can't take your cash.
Because NFC (esp. Apple Pay) really is more convenient, and it's more secure than everything but paying cash. Wave the phone you're already holding at the sensor, see transaction, press the button to accept it, see confirmation of payment. Also, the buyer is anonymous (like cash), with no central transaction capture. No credit card number, one-time IDs instead.
Vs: Google Wallet app launching, PIN, etc. Google gets all the transaction data, and secured by PIN entry instead of fingerprint, but otherwise fairly similar to Apple Pay. No credit card number, one-time ID instead.
Vs. Credit Card dig out of wallet, swipe, press buttons on reader. Sometimes hand over ID. Not anonymous, weak security - merchants get your credit card number, ID, etc. They still use magnetic strips, which is embarrassing from a security perspective.
Vs. Debit Card dig out of wallet, swipe, enter PIN. This doesn't go through credit card companies, though of course the payment gateway, merchant bank, and customer bank all charge fees, so it's not free.
Like many BBC products, this game appears only to be accessible within the UK. I'm in the US, and i'd happy buy a copy / access - this game would be a huge hit with my family! When I tried to go there, they directed me to the BBC Store site, which only sells physical goods. Come on, BBC!
Technology has a way of improving over time. They're trying to address the issue now, so that in a few years when printers and printable gun designs are that much more effective, the law is already in place.
All caused by one idiot in the US making a lot of noise about 3d printing guns.
If drunk driving is punished by job loss, it's de facto not a minor infraction. Perhaps they just disagree with you about priorities, and take deaths from car accidents more seriously than you do? That doesn't make things they care about, that you don't, "slight".
It's also not why the 2nd Amendment was written. The Constitution gives the States the right to form well regulated militias, not for people to form private armies to oppose the elected government. The founders called the latter treason, and they shot people who tried.
Gun owners are the most likely demographic to shoot people. If you have a gun in your house, the people in your house are 5x more likely to be shot than if you don't. The relationship is pretty obvious - people occasionally get very angry or depressed. If they have a gun, that can turn into shooting someone, including yourself. If you don't have a gun, it turns into a fist fight, knifing, etc., all of which are much less likely to result in a death.
People who don't own guns don't shoot people, because they don't have guns.
If they're your patents, issued before they hire you, then whether they hire you isn't relevant. Simply hiring you gives them no right to your existing IP. If they want to use the patents, there has to be some sort of contract giving them that right. And they should know this.
One caveat: some employment contracts will have overly broad IP terms, so if there's a contract at all, make sure that it doesn't give them any claims to anything invented before you worked there, or done on your own time on your own equipment. That's the law for California, so common in the software industry, so their lawyers should be familiar with those terms. If there's no contract, there's no issue.
My advice would be to talk about the patents because that's a valuable achievement, proving that you know how to file patents and you have invented things that were patentable. But I wouldn't be the one raise an issue around licensing the patents, because that sends the wrong message - if you're too worried about defending your IP from them, rather than focusing on how you can help them succeed, that tells them that you don't trust them, and you're more concerned about what you get than what they get, and companies want to hire people who bring value to the company, not just extract payment. If they value the patents, they'll ask you about them, and when the time is right you can discuss terms if appropriate. But don't do it in the interview process - that's premature.
There's no such operating system as "RTOS". It's a description of a kind of OS - a Real Time Operating System. I know what an RTOS is, which is why I mentioned that the Pi could use one. I've built QNX apps - very nice OS. But it's not ported to the Raspberry Pi.
I've never heard of ChibiOS/RT before - good to know it's there. Does anyone actually using it? I couldn't find anything on the project web site.
How does it compare to FreeRTOS? FreeRTOS is a mature realtime OS, but it's not well supported on the Pi - https://github.com/jameswalmsl... is "a very basic port of FreeRTOS to Raspberry pi. It includes a demo application that use 2 FreeRTOS tasks to flash the LED on and off." So I'm not sure I'd trust it, but at least it's based on a reliable RTOS.
Comparing the records (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_spaceflight-related_accidents_and_incidents#Astronaut_fatalities_during_spaceflight ) the US and Russian/USSR space programs have fairly similar safety percentages - "About two percent of the manned launch/reentry attempts have killed their crew, with Soyuz and the Shuttle having almost the same death percentage rates."
The main difference that I see is that the US has launched many more launches, and many more astronauts, and in particular the two Space Shuttle disasters, with 7 person crews, feel very different than the USSR's much smaller crews.
"About five percent of people who have been launched have died doing so. As of November 2004, 439 individuals have flown on spaceflights: Russia/Soviet Union (96), USA (277), others (66). Nineteen have died while in flight: one on Soyuz 1, one on X-15-3, three on Soyuz 11, seven on Challenger, and seven on Columbia. By space program, 16 NASA astronauts (5.8%) and four Soviet cosmonauts (4.1% of all the people launched) died while in a spacecraft."
But the main thing that strikes me reading the list of events is that space travel is amazingly complex and dangerous, and a huge number of things can result in death. And while safety is important, so is exploration, even if it's dangerous. Or, as test pilot I worked with put it - "everyone dies, I'd rather die in an airplane, doing something nobody's done before, than get hit by a bus."
I would have said that I didn't want to use HDMI cables to connect a display for embedded apps, since the cable is bulky and expensive. But now there are cheap displays that plug right into the GPIO lines, so that issue is gone. And four USB ports is plenty (on the new model), and the expanded GPIO lines mean you don't need to add in an Arduino just for I/O. So after that it's just the usual - faster and/or cheaper are always nice.
The only real thing missing is quite hard - an ability to do realtime I/O control. That's not really in the Pi, but the Linux OS. If there were a good realtime option, then the Pi would be an awesome controller (e.g. for 3d printing, CNC, etc.). As it is, you need an Arduino control I/O so you have precise timing, which adds complexity as you have to program two devices to coordinate, which is much harder than one. Not impossible, obviously, but simpler/easier is better.
If you see the Russian spacecraft, it's amazing how determined they were to compete, relatively successfully with the US space program, despite the fact that their manufacturing capabilities were not really up to the task. But they used whatever they had, and pushed hard. So, for example, while US spacecraft are beautiful, with aluminum skins with countersunk rivets to reduce drag, etc., the Russian vehicles looked like tractors - thick sheet metal and bolts, getting into space through sheer determination. It was particularly striking with how they got a third astronaut into their two-man ship, so they matched Apollo, by taking the third man and jamming him in upside down. They made the lead engineer who came up with that idea take the first flight, so he had the incentive to actually make it work. And their venus probes - those guys just didn't give up! But definitely playing by different rules than the US - after a vehicle failure, and we shut everything down and analyzed to make it safer. With the Russians, a vehicle failure meant re-writing the history books (to remove the failed flight, erase astronauts from photos, etc.) and launching _more_.
Based on user surveys, there's actually a strong correlation between music "piracy" and music sales. The fans of the band that pirate their music also tend to buy their music and merchandise, because they're the dedicated fans that want the boxed set, the T-shirt, go to the concerts, etc.
The problem the music labels have is that they make money on the music sales, and not (generally) on anything else. And it's the "everything else" that isn't getting "pirated". So if the label fronts the production and marketing money for a band, then the fans "pirate" the music that the label makes money on, but buys merchandize and concert tickets that the band makes money on, the label doesn't get any money back for their investment. To address this, the labels have been trying to do "360 deals" where they get a cut of everything, but obviously the bands, managers, etc., aren't thrilled with that. Though since the biggest pirates also tend to buy the most music, it's an unclear argument in any case.
Keep in mind that watching a video on YouTube that uses a song in the soundtrack that isn't properly licensed is (according to the RIAA's lawyers) illegal downloading, since streaming makes a copy (into your computer's RAM). And nobody on YouTube bothers to license their music, other than the tiny number who go out of their way to use "open" music. So that eliminates pretty much everyone who's not a complete technophobe.
Slashdot Mirror
I agree that they should have expanded Medicare to cover everyone who wanted it - that's by far the most efficient system with the highest patient satisfaction. Much better than private insurance, so likely the competition would have forced insurers to become at least marginally efficient and improve coverage.
That being said, I don't follow your comment about your private insurance. The only thing that happened to your private insurance is that the worst abuses were now outlawed, so (for example) insurance companies aren't allowed to waste more than 20% of what you pay them, resulting in $billions in refunds being sent to customers who were previously being really ripped off. Well, and you also indirectly benefitted in that the exchanges are so competitive that private insurance rates are going up much more slowly than they have in the past, so you're probably having money paying a 2-3% annual increase (that's the average post-ACA) compared to the historical 7-9% annual increases.
Nobody said that ACA would make everyone's health insurance cheaper. That being said, due to the competitive exchanges prices are going up (on average) much more slowly (2-3%) post-ACA than they went up for previous decades (7-9%). So if you compare your insurance costs to what would have happened if the rates had gone up as fast as they had previously, you're probably saving money.
But the real benefit of ACA is that the worst abuses by the insurance companies are outlawed. They can't waste more than 20% of what they collect. They can't refuse to provide healthcare coverage for people who've paid for it. And, of course, they can't refuse insurance to people who have a "pre-existing condition" when they change jobs. Those benefits apply to over 200m people. And over 10m people that had no healthcare coverage before do so now!
"When health care is 'free' costs go up. "
It turns out that when health care is free, costs go down. Yes, immediately after healthcare becomes free costs go up for due to pent-up healthcare needs that were unmet. But longer-term, costs go down because people go to the doctor sooner and get things taken care of when it's easier and less expensive to treat. For example, detecting diabetic trends and changing your diet is much cheaper than taking insulin for the rest of your life.
And if it's literally free, you eliminate massive overhead. The cost of actually delivering healthcare in the US is less than the cost of administration piled on top of it. Not just the direct cost of money wasted paying insurance companies, but also the huge administrative overhead of doctors paying for a huge staff to try to get paid by the insurance companies, pharma companies' overhead, doctors being forced by insurance companies to perform medically unnecessary testing, paperwork dragging out over months and even years to try to get approvals, the cost of providing extremely expensive ER treatment instead of much cheaper, more effective medical care (not the same thing!), etc. All that waste is covered by inflated rates paid for by everyone.
If all we paid for is the salary of medical caregivers and the cost of their supplies, we'd save $trillions! That's how other countries manage to have superior medical outcomes than the US, and 1/2 the cost or less.
Question: Not a single Republican voted for Obamacare, so exactly how does it make it their "wet dream"?
Answer: Because Obama adopted the Republican plan in an attempt to unify the parties in implementing healthcare reform. The Democratic plan was Single Payer, which was cheaper, simpler, and more effective. Obama agreed to the more expensive, complex and ineffective Republican plan in an attempt to get Republicans to engage in the reform.
Unfortunately, Republicans immediately turned against their own plan, because they cared more about preventing reform than in their own reform plans.
The shame is that the Democrats didn't then go back to their own plan and push that through. Unfortunately there were enough Democrats tied to the insurance industry (Lieberman....) that, combined with 100% Republican obstruction, they were able to force the country to waste $trillions on insurance company waste. Because what's waste to us is record profits for insurance companies.
"Not sure how well the mobile part works when you actually have to pay for the insurance"
ACA helps because when you switch jobs, you know that you can get reasonably priced insurance afterwards. And because the insurance companies can no longer use the job change to declare any current medical conditions "pre-existing" and deny you insurance.
Previously there are _many_ people trapped in jobs for the health insurance, because if they went to a startup or became an independent consultant they had to pay absurdly high rates for insurance. Or because they had any medical condition that the new insurance company didn't want to cover they'd be denied insurance completely if they change jobs.
That's already included in the total. The number of people shot in a house, including shootings by people who don't live there, goes up by 5x if you own a gun. So while some people may be protected by the gun in the house, in total they are 5x more likely to be shot, so obviously the number of "saves" is much, much smaller than the number of people shot by people who live in the house with you.
This is consistent with the data. The leading case of shooting deaths is suicides (2/3rds of shooting deaths), and having a gun promotes suicide deaths. The remaining 1/3rd are people shooting each other, and after that most shootings are by friends and family. Random criminals breaking in is a small percentage of shootings, so reducing that while promoting suicides and shootings by family members is bad math, leading to lots of deaths.
Not "no big deal" but much less likely to end up dead.
Note also that this includes the effect of having a gun in the house protecting the people in the house from someone coming in and shooting them. That may happen, but in total the people in a house are in much more danger of being shot if you have a gun than if you don't. Apparently people get angry and shoot each other much more often than they use the gun to save everyone from an invader.
Or, of course, she received some files that she felt needed explaining.
Nope, it turns out that the whole "IRS Scandal" consisted of a conservative Republican IRS administrator who put in place a consistent rule for identifying groups that had political terms in their names and thus were inspected more closely for trying to illegally apply for tax-exempt status as a non-political social welfare group, as required by Congress. The list had many more non-conservative than conservative terms in it, and many more non-conservative than conservative groups were looked into because of the system. And it wasn't done by Obama or the White House, or even approved of by them. Using an explicit list instead of inspector judgement was an attempt to be more fair and consistent. It was politically stupid, because some politicians took the list and manipulated it, ignoring 70% of the terms on the list to try to spin it as an anti-conservative attack. If that was "using the IRS against enemies of the white house" it was also, twice as often, using the IRS against friends of the white house, so it wasn't much of a political weapon.
"Why should this end up in court"? Because markets consist of people, who make agreements in contracts, and sometimes they disagree, or cheat, and that's where courts come in. If you take laws and courts out of the picture, the market turns into anarchy and collapses. "Why do you think that would be a good thing?"
Vs. Get cash from your pocket, hand to cashier, receive change. Familiar and anonymous, but carrying and handling cash is less convenient than digital payment. Most secure, in that you can only lose the cash you're carrying, and then only to a local attach - people on the internet can't take your cash.
Because NFC (esp. Apple Pay) really is more convenient, and it's more secure than everything but paying cash. Wave the phone you're already holding at the sensor, see transaction, press the button to accept it, see confirmation of payment. Also, the buyer is anonymous (like cash), with no central transaction capture. No credit card number, one-time IDs instead.
Vs: Google Wallet app launching, PIN, etc. Google gets all the transaction data, and secured by PIN entry instead of fingerprint, but otherwise fairly similar to Apple Pay. No credit card number, one-time ID instead.
Vs. Credit Card dig out of wallet, swipe, press buttons on reader. Sometimes hand over ID. Not anonymous, weak security - merchants get your credit card number, ID, etc. They still use magnetic strips, which is embarrassing from a security perspective.
Vs. Debit Card dig out of wallet, swipe, enter PIN. This doesn't go through credit card companies, though of course the payment gateway, merchant bank, and customer bank all charge fees, so it's not free.
Don't forget http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W... .
Like many BBC products, this game appears only to be accessible within the UK. I'm in the US, and i'd happy buy a copy / access - this game would be a huge hit with my family! When I tried to go there, they directed me to the BBC Store site, which only sells physical goods. Come on, BBC!
Technology has a way of improving over time. They're trying to address the issue now, so that in a few years when printers and printable gun designs are that much more effective, the law is already in place.
All caused by one idiot in the US making a lot of noise about 3d printing guns.
What makes you think that hunting licences can only acquired by "the rich or well connected"?
If drunk driving is punished by job loss, it's de facto not a minor infraction. Perhaps they just disagree with you about priorities, and take deaths from car accidents more seriously than you do? That doesn't make things they care about, that you don't, "slight".
It's also not why the 2nd Amendment was written. The Constitution gives the States the right to form well regulated militias, not for people to form private armies to oppose the elected government. The founders called the latter treason, and they shot people who tried.
Gun owners are the most likely demographic to shoot people. If you have a gun in your house, the people in your house are 5x more likely to be shot than if you don't. The relationship is pretty obvious - people occasionally get very angry or depressed. If they have a gun, that can turn into shooting someone, including yourself. If you don't have a gun, it turns into a fist fight, knifing, etc., all of which are much less likely to result in a death.
People who don't own guns don't shoot people, because they don't have guns.
If they're your patents, issued before they hire you, then whether they hire you isn't relevant. Simply hiring you gives them no right to your existing IP. If they want to use the patents, there has to be some sort of contract giving them that right. And they should know this.
One caveat: some employment contracts will have overly broad IP terms, so if there's a contract at all, make sure that it doesn't give them any claims to anything invented before you worked there, or done on your own time on your own equipment. That's the law for California, so common in the software industry, so their lawyers should be familiar with those terms. If there's no contract, there's no issue.
My advice would be to talk about the patents because that's a valuable achievement, proving that you know how to file patents and you have invented things that were patentable. But I wouldn't be the one raise an issue around licensing the patents, because that sends the wrong message - if you're too worried about defending your IP from them, rather than focusing on how you can help them succeed, that tells them that you don't trust them, and you're more concerned about what you get than what they get, and companies want to hire people who bring value to the company, not just extract payment. If they value the patents, they'll ask you about them, and when the time is right you can discuss terms if appropriate. But don't do it in the interview process - that's premature.
There's no such operating system as "RTOS". It's a description of a kind of OS - a Real Time Operating System. I know what an RTOS is, which is why I mentioned that the Pi could use one. I've built QNX apps - very nice OS. But it's not ported to the Raspberry Pi.
I've never heard of ChibiOS/RT before - good to know it's there. Does anyone actually using it? I couldn't find anything on the project web site.
How does it compare to FreeRTOS? FreeRTOS is a mature realtime OS, but it's not well supported on the Pi - https://github.com/jameswalmsl... is "a very basic port of FreeRTOS to Raspberry pi. It includes a demo application that use 2 FreeRTOS tasks to flash the LED on and off." So I'm not sure I'd trust it, but at least it's based on a reliable RTOS.
Comparing the records (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_spaceflight-related_accidents_and_incidents#Astronaut_fatalities_during_spaceflight ) the US and Russian/USSR space programs have fairly similar safety percentages - "About two percent of the manned launch/reentry attempts have killed their crew, with Soyuz and the Shuttle having almost the same death percentage rates."
The main difference that I see is that the US has launched many more launches, and many more astronauts, and in particular the two Space Shuttle disasters, with 7 person crews, feel very different than the USSR's much smaller crews.
"About five percent of people who have been launched have died doing so. As of November 2004, 439 individuals have flown on spaceflights: Russia/Soviet Union (96), USA (277), others (66). Nineteen have died while in flight: one on Soyuz 1, one on X-15-3, three on Soyuz 11, seven on Challenger, and seven on Columbia. By space program, 16 NASA astronauts (5.8%) and four Soviet cosmonauts (4.1% of all the people launched) died while in a spacecraft."
But the main thing that strikes me reading the list of events is that space travel is amazingly complex and dangerous, and a huge number of things can result in death. And while safety is important, so is exploration, even if it's dangerous. Or, as test pilot I worked with put it - "everyone dies, I'd rather die in an airplane, doing something nobody's done before, than get hit by a bus."
I would have said that I didn't want to use HDMI cables to connect a display for embedded apps, since the cable is bulky and expensive. But now there are cheap displays that plug right into the GPIO lines, so that issue is gone. And four USB ports is plenty (on the new model), and the expanded GPIO lines mean you don't need to add in an Arduino just for I/O. So after that it's just the usual - faster and/or cheaper are always nice.
The only real thing missing is quite hard - an ability to do realtime I/O control. That's not really in the Pi, but the Linux OS. If there were a good realtime option, then the Pi would be an awesome controller (e.g. for 3d printing, CNC, etc.). As it is, you need an Arduino control I/O so you have precise timing, which adds complexity as you have to program two devices to coordinate, which is much harder than one. Not impossible, obviously, but simpler/easier is better.
If you see the Russian spacecraft, it's amazing how determined they were to compete, relatively successfully with the US space program, despite the fact that their manufacturing capabilities were not really up to the task. But they used whatever they had, and pushed hard. So, for example, while US spacecraft are beautiful, with aluminum skins with countersunk rivets to reduce drag, etc., the Russian vehicles looked like tractors - thick sheet metal and bolts, getting into space through sheer determination. It was particularly striking with how they got a third astronaut into their two-man ship, so they matched Apollo, by taking the third man and jamming him in upside down. They made the lead engineer who came up with that idea take the first flight, so he had the incentive to actually make it work. And their venus probes - those guys just didn't give up! But definitely playing by different rules than the US - after a vehicle failure, and we shut everything down and analyzed to make it safer. With the Russians, a vehicle failure meant re-writing the history books (to remove the failed flight, erase astronauts from photos, etc.) and launching _more_.
Based on user surveys, there's actually a strong correlation between music "piracy" and music sales. The fans of the band that pirate their music also tend to buy their music and merchandise, because they're the dedicated fans that want the boxed set, the T-shirt, go to the concerts, etc.
The problem the music labels have is that they make money on the music sales, and not (generally) on anything else. And it's the "everything else" that isn't getting "pirated". So if the label fronts the production and marketing money for a band, then the fans "pirate" the music that the label makes money on, but buys merchandize and concert tickets that the band makes money on, the label doesn't get any money back for their investment. To address this, the labels have been trying to do "360 deals" where they get a cut of everything, but obviously the bands, managers, etc., aren't thrilled with that. Though since the biggest pirates also tend to buy the most music, it's an unclear argument in any case.
Keep in mind that watching a video on YouTube that uses a song in the soundtrack that isn't properly licensed is (according to the RIAA's lawyers) illegal downloading, since streaming makes a copy (into your computer's RAM). And nobody on YouTube bothers to license their music, other than the tiny number who go out of their way to use "open" music. So that eliminates pretty much everyone who's not a complete technophobe.