My thought on that aspect: they belatedly realized that they kinda already did "raise" her, by growing up with her as a best friend, and due to her influence on their lives, they couldn't go back and alter that. River's childhood already happened a certain way, and they even witnessed it already. It still doesn't account for ages zero through 8 or so, but causality and all that... *shrug*
Those are some lovely straw-man cases. A fan or other moving part is most failure prone in a fridge, and standard bolts allow access and cheap replacement. The digitizer screen and battery are the failure/damage prone parts of a phone, and it can be easy to access or hard to access to repair... if it's hard, is that design out of necessity, or is it on purpose, for nasty reasons? That's what this boils down to. I don't think people are complaining about surface mount electronics being involved in the phones or the dishwashers here, but cool story, bro. And as for locked up vs. open firmware, I'd pick open every time it's available, but that's still very rare.
Next time you clear compartments in your refrigerator, take a look around. Our 'fridge quit on us during the summer, and we were suddenly quite sad about the prospect of spending hundreds of dollars and dealing with shipping / moving a huge object. But there were proper, standard hex bolts in there. So I started disassembling. I found the fan had died. I ordered a replacement from amazon, re-installed, and it has worked great ever since.
Dishwasher manuals usually come with an exploded diagram of all their parts, so that a pump here or a valve there can be replaced, rather than the whole unit, even on the cheapest models.
The government actually got involved in regulating standards on cars to fight this trend. (i.e. standard OBDII tools can work on many vehicles and the cost has fallen under $20 for a very capable device)
Varying levels of difficulty do not a "walled garden" make. Manufacturers deliberately choose to construct the "walled garden" when they employ connectors that can't be disconnected without destruction, glues rather than screws, inventing new screw heads just to defeat those of us who already own a good variety of screwdriver bits...
Is repair / DIY for everyone? Hell no, but that's simply not the argument here. Anti-DIY and anti-repair choices (made for that purpose) on the part of manufacturers have some serious shadiness: They don't want the product to last, so customers are forced to buy more, sooner; they want to kill the used products market, less by innovation and more by quality degredation and irrepairability; they generate more waste, including rare and valuable materials; they drive people away from the joys and benefits of working for themselves and building / maintaining useful, money-saving skills.
Wrong. This is used to deter people from starting violent riots in the middle of peaceful protests by targeting specific people who are visibly and audibly inciting the crowd to start breaking things. There aren't enough of these for every police department to have them either, so they aren't really abused as much as you probably hope they are.
I don't like cops any more than most people, but come on.
Just like pepper spray and sonic weaponry and bean bag guns and rubber bullets and tazers and batons are only used so very properly, right? It's a nice thought you have, but any bit of reading on recent history of non-lethal weaponry used by police forces might make you rethink your assertion. Also google for some recent news articles about the random people at peaceful protests who start visibly and audibly inciting the crowd to start breaking things. The peaceful demonstrators usually complement the officer on his standard-issue shoes. Don't take my word for it or just reject it; go look it up.
And oddly enough, this isn't about disliking or liking cops. Cops are directed to do what they do. Their protocols and their attentions are directed by others. Bad cops are responsible for being bad cops, but bad systems are defined at another level. I'm not starting the "us vs them" mentality, and really, neither did the cops.
If you peaceably assemble for redress of grievances, you will face cruel and unusual punishment, sans any form of judicial action. Laaaaand of the Freeeeeee, and the Hoooome of the brrraaaave. Congratulations, USA.
Our school district doesn't allow most potato chips either. Sun Chips are okay, but Doritos or any type of potato chips you cannot have. They will take it away from your kids.
I attended elementary school in the '80s. Every time I see stuff like this, the school uniforms in public schools everywhere, the drug dogs and lockdowns, etc... it just makes me so sad. Also in the '80s, they were teaching us about the idealistic and practiced differences between our society and East Germany and the USSR, etc... US schools used to prepare children for factory jobs (schedule by bell ringing, etc...) Now US schools are preparing children for prison.
I am an Evangelical Christian and I think Santorum is a dangerous man whose basic ideology is antithetical to liberal democracy.
Out of curiosity, who do you feel does more damage to gaining / keeping adherents to Christianity: people like Santorum or vocal "against" parties like Penn Jillette? If the former, is there any brewing movement within Christian organizations to denounce approaches like that of Santorum?
they still don't want to be married to someone from the same sex
Actually, I think this is indeed the big, obvious reason. Theocrats constantly argue that they're "defending" marriage... that they need to protect their marriages from this "threat." So they do fear legalization of gay marriage, as they'd probably go get that gay marriage they secretly have always wanted and that would kinda ruin their current sham marriage. It's also very telling when they claim the irrelevant bit about "being gay is a choice!" Only the closeted or bisexual are making a choice, kids.
Until you can buy or print a tailored case made for this device, note that a Penguins or Altoids tin appears to be a perfect fit (after cutting holes for the ports that stick out).
Finally, a digital-world example of "stealing" data. The FBI in this case actually stole people's data... they took it and made it unavailable to the owners. Until now, every ass-hat who has talked about "stealing" in the contexts of "piracy" cases has been a completely inaccurate moron. Now they have their day and a legitimate example of how to steal data. Learn.
Here's the answer... here's why you don't understand:
There is an existing game, an existing set of rules for getting what is wanted out of the US government. (A) be an enormous corporation or a confederation of smaller ones, (B) buy legislation, and (C) make sure the populace doesn't riot by managing their "news" etc... about the important work done by the government.
The Internet is finally showing itself to be a major threat to the status quo. Arab Spring... Ron Paul's increasing popularity, Steissand Effects everywhere, Wikileaks, Anti-Sec... And so, while the rules of the game are still mostly in effect, the Game Players who have enjoyed successful ownership of the largest government on Earth are working to ensure they will maintain that ownership.
All unions, All PACs, all politicians participating in the election games, and definitely the media empires... all of them currently enjoy winning at the game with the current set of rules. A free Internet only provides benefits to their opponents in this game: us. Humans. People who care about how they're governed and dare disagree with how Sony wants us governed. So, there will be no media coverage. No major PAC, party, union, etc... with an interest in its long-term survival will dare bring SOPA up.
The actual battle is going to be technological. Legislation is a foregone conclusion.
With that verb choice, you insult hard-working courtesans all over the world. These disgusting creatures are selling other people's rights rather than their own labor.
Interesting concept... again, a brokered "deal" where a sitting government officer of some sort removes land from the public domain and sells it to a private entity... but "the people" are compensated with the cash exchanged for that land. Most government brokered "deals" are far shadier than that, but let's imagine that the money went into some other public domain investment. So there was an equitable trade: the people lost the public use of that land parcel and got a new bridge somewhere instead, for example. And the deal is done at that time. This is an actual exchange, honored by both parties... it's respectable. It's not at all like what has happened to copyright.
And of course, we're talking land, physical space, subject to scarcity, which is the opposite of information, infinitely copyable. Oddly enough, exclusive use rights of land are quite often overturned in the interest of the public... not just eminent domain either. There's various "squatters rights" laws that allow for a parcel to change ownership if it has been occupied by a new entity for enough years without being noticed and evicted by the previous owner. To continue making analogies and pursue your question, shouldn't every work that falls out of publication for some set duration enter the public domain for preservation of our culture? The law recognizes that land parcels shouldn't just sit, deteriorating, used by no one, due to a forgotten ownership claim, etc... So even with the widely disputed "information is property" concept in play, there's plenty of precedent for the public good to be considered.
A software developer is spending time, of her own volition, on the speculation that the time spent will be rewarded with purchases. This expectation driving her speculation comes from a very old social contract: copyright. An "agreement" between information producers and information users, brokered by governments, copyright offered content producers a limited period of exclusive copying so that they might profit from their work (not to guarantee it... quality and market would still matter), and to encourage content producers to make that speculation to promote "the useful arts and sciences" in our society. In exchange, the work would enter the public domain at the end of that limited period, benefiting all.
The social contract has been violated. Industrial alliances of gigantic corporate content copyright aggregators purchased laws from various governments, firstly, to extend the limited term, further and further, retroactively, until the point that to most living humans, the period of copyright is "permanent." Secondly, with the rise of better and better digital technologies, and the increased ease and lowered expense of information copying and distribution, the industrial alliances invented DRM to directly violate and damage the easily copied nature of information. The same alliances then purchased legislation against thwarting DRM, etc... Information restricted by DRM is information that cannot enter the public domain and become freely copyable, unless some non-DRM copy was stored in escrow or some such arrangement. Those who have violated the copyright social convention haven't even considered such an action, as their intention with regards to eroding the concept of "limited term" has become their way of life: hence the invention of the term "Intellectual Property."
The agreement a homeowner makes with a painter to paint the house is direct, simple, and real. House painters never purchased laws stating that they could, once hired at an hourly rate, paint half of the remaining job, each day, in perpetuity, and be paid for it. The "agreement" involved in the concept of copyright has been broken for a long time, by the content industries, and most people on the other end of that brokered-before-they-were-born "agreement" no longer support it and many rightly no longer honor it. Intelligent information producers have already started looking at other revenue models and incorporate the above facts in their speculative calculations before spending time on a work. So who gets "deprived" of something to which they have a "right?" The people are deprived of the public domain works they were due prior to every retroactive limit extension.
Those are good citations of other differences, but all areas in which the Pi is "better." I was addressing this question:
Would there be any reason to use Arduino if this comes to pass?
Like you say, apples and oranges, because the Arduino still fits some other requirements that the Pi can't... the Pi is not a superset of features of the Arduino.
Power consumption might show some major differences. The ARM chips sip power compared to x86 brethren, but the little Atmel chips sip even less. Plus, Arduinos can be simplified down to the chip itself, if you're prototyping and building custom devices... here's the best explanation of how simple you can go: http://www.instructables.com/id/The-RRRRRRRRRRBA-or-What-They-Dont-Teach-You-in-/
I don't think the Pi will be that cheap ($3), that low power-consumption, or that easily integrated into truly tiny custom devices.
I've been mostly unimpressed with Unity. Gnome3 is a bit unfinished for my tastes. I tried Kubuntu and felt like I was back in the '90s, but with widgets... I'm giving both Unity and Gnome3 a chance, only because I found a useful site with documentation on making them useablehttp://www.webupd8.org/ has tutorials and tips on how to make these new interfaces almost worth using. I would be done with Ubuntu by now, were it not for that site.
It is rare in large and medium-large companies to find any executive, or even high-level manager willing to say "I'm going to bet on my people's capabilities, rather than spend a lot of company money on the 'safe' (for my job) solution." Your CIO has the same two choices that countless IT managers, directors and CIOs are faced with: spend a significant amount of company money on an outside vendor, who can be blamed when all hell breaks loose, or rely on his or her team to do the job as well if not better and possibly take the flack when bad things happen. A nasty old phrase in IT was "nobody ever got fired for buying IBM." It worked until I knew the guy who did get fired for stubbornly going IBM when there were obvious better alternatives. Today, that "don't get fired" vendor is Microsoft. One day the axiom will fail them too.
Relying on internal staff requires a few things beyond thrift: keep your staff well trained, compensate them well enough that they don't quit too frequently, treat them well enough that their morale keeps them eager to do their jobs well, etc... All of those things benefit YOU. A thrifty-minded manager/director/executive who doesn't make sure to build good teams is a waiting scapegoat and will be out of your way soon enough.
In the bigger picture though, what trend do you want to see: safe-bet management that relies on treating internal staff in a mediocre fashion, massive outsourcing to "support companies" who can and will ship jobs out of your country, IT seen more and more as a cost center to minimize rather than the people who get vital company work done, and companies getting less and less effective with their IT solutions because every new project and every exploration of an idea requires going through the protocols and expense of consulting with another company? Why have highly-trained, highly-paid internal IT people while having pricey outside-vendor support subscriptions? The trend I've seen is reducing staff to an "account-manager" or two and getting rid of IT people by attrition if not outright layoffs.
Now, all that said, if your company is small, and the choice here is finding and hiring and relying upon one good support person (who might get hit by a bus or move across the country for love, etc...), or paying for a pool of proven support staff fully available on a defined protocol, well, you may have the better idea than your CIO. But the issues at hand are much greater than "CentOS is cheap" versus "RedHat is supported well," and worth discussing at those additional levels.
They're on a mission from God to protect us from "demon weed",
It's even simpler than some kind of religious psychosis: There are hundreds of thousands of jobs, maybe millions involved in the Drug War. There are very powerful and wealthy people deeply invested in the Drug War. The Drug War is not merely about one extra task for police officers. It's about millions of US dollars spent on turning our police forces into para-military organizations. It's about spending tax dollars on tech companies that produce infrared scanners to look through the walls of homes in search of grow lights. It's about keeping the prison industrial system growing and growing, despite violent crime falling and falling. It's about maintaining profits for drug companies who's offerings might be rejected in favor of banned drugs, were those alternatives not illegal and representing risk of arrest, job loss, etc... This applies to both "medical" drug companies as well as "recreational" ones like the alcohol and tobacco industries. How many thousands of attorneys specialize in defending or prosecuting drug cases? How much insane profit do the organized crime syndicates make due to drug illegality?
Alcohol Prohibition was a beta test. People figured out how to make amazing money in such an environment. This is about money and power, and not at all about protecting anyone from anything.
Except for the tiny fraction spent on our crumbling roads and schools, our tax dollars, by and large are spent on the "War on US Citizens."
How on earth could our government possibly spend fat tax dollars improving "transportation safety" in this country? Hmmm... most of our bridges are on the verge of collapse... and people need jobs... Let's molest more people!!! This bullshit is why people on both ends of the polarized, ridiculous US "political spectrum" are trying to get away from the major parties: those parties do not serve the people, and they're actively running this country into the ground. Occupy and Tea: keep trying, unite and try harder. This is your enemy.
I've inherited the job responsibilities of over 5 coworkers who've left my department and weren't replaced. I've kept roughly the same hours and workload. This is because I'm a programmer; I automate as much as I can. We didn't get the flying cars, but the Jetsons really really nailed the "press buttons all day" job description... and George's complaint about aching hands and fingers when he got home: Carpal Tunnel anyone?
In a sense, I've killed some jobs... but so did everyone who ever invented a time-saving technology. There's always something new to spend time on... perhaps one day in the US, they'll aim toward more leisure!
There is nothing the people can do about it. Like the person above in the DUI checkpoint, he took it calmly and was rewarded by random detainment. In West Memphis, AR, a couple men did not take a "papers please" stop calmly, and they brought out their weaponry. They were promptly killed and universally vilified locally. Anyone even questioning "why" did those men start shooting at the cops was branded an insane terrorist. Soap box-->"Damn dirty hippies with a stupid protest," Ballot Box-->"Pick which of the two same-nonsense parties you want," Ammo Box-->"You're dead in 5 minutes, and your legacy is that of deranged terrorist; zero change for your kids, nothing for you."
The solution is to move away and let the damn country burn to the ground. Or head to the hills and get really self-sufficient. After the country completely fails, perhaps the reboot will be decent. Sadly, meanwhile, those in the hills will be randomly attacked anyway, and other countries are actively pressured by US corporate/government agendas, often getting stupid US nonsense into law, even in "democracies" where well over half of the population opposes the US agenda. Thankfully, as a child raised in the "land of the free and the home of the brave" I was taught about our "enemy" countries and their evil practices like "papers please" checkpoints for internal travel and undercover "secret police" and assorted other massive internal-security departments, so I'm not sleepwalking into this. I'm also aware of the fate of those once-"enemy" countries. Get your head down and wait it out.
throughout the US the police won't do anything in any circumstance
Time and time again, this is what I see. And throughout the US, there's prohibitions against effectively protecting ones' self and property with the same type of force the police are legally allowed to use when they do choose to. Long-standing case law states that the police are not obligated to protect you or your property. They cannot be sued for failing to do so. And you aren't legally allowed to do so yourself... in some jurisdictions, there isn't even "castle doctrine" defense, and you must flee your home if it's intruded upon by armed attackers.
Why do I, a citizen, pay taxes for police? Why do I, a citizen, tolerate this mandated "service?" I'm not 100% down with the various demands I've seen from the Occupy groups, but it's pretty clear, every time, that "our" police are tasked with the demands of the 1% rather than the 99%. They're very busy with consensual "crimes" and "don't have the time or staffing" for real crimes.
Slashdot Mirror
My thought on that aspect: they belatedly realized that they kinda already did "raise" her, by growing up with her as a best friend, and due to her influence on their lives, they couldn't go back and alter that. River's childhood already happened a certain way, and they even witnessed it already. It still doesn't account for ages zero through 8 or so, but causality and all that... *shrug*
Those are some lovely straw-man cases. A fan or other moving part is most failure prone in a fridge, and standard bolts allow access and cheap replacement. The digitizer screen and battery are the failure/damage prone parts of a phone, and it can be easy to access or hard to access to repair... if it's hard, is that design out of necessity, or is it on purpose, for nasty reasons? That's what this boils down to. I don't think people are complaining about surface mount electronics being involved in the phones or the dishwashers here, but cool story, bro. And as for locked up vs. open firmware, I'd pick open every time it's available, but that's still very rare.
Next time you clear compartments in your refrigerator, take a look around. Our 'fridge quit on us during the summer, and we were suddenly quite sad about the prospect of spending hundreds of dollars and dealing with shipping / moving a huge object. But there were proper, standard hex bolts in there. So I started disassembling. I found the fan had died. I ordered a replacement from amazon, re-installed, and it has worked great ever since.
Dishwasher manuals usually come with an exploded diagram of all their parts, so that a pump here or a valve there can be replaced, rather than the whole unit, even on the cheapest models.
The government actually got involved in regulating standards on cars to fight this trend. (i.e. standard OBDII tools can work on many vehicles and the cost has fallen under $20 for a very capable device)
Varying levels of difficulty do not a "walled garden" make. Manufacturers deliberately choose to construct the "walled garden" when they employ connectors that can't be disconnected without destruction, glues rather than screws, inventing new screw heads just to defeat those of us who already own a good variety of screwdriver bits...
Is repair / DIY for everyone? Hell no, but that's simply not the argument here. Anti-DIY and anti-repair choices (made for that purpose) on the part of manufacturers have some serious shadiness: They don't want the product to last, so customers are forced to buy more, sooner; they want to kill the used products market, less by innovation and more by quality degredation and irrepairability; they generate more waste, including rare and valuable materials; they drive people away from the joys and benefits of working for themselves and building / maintaining useful, money-saving skills.
Wrong. This is used to deter people from starting violent riots in the middle of peaceful protests by targeting specific people who are visibly and audibly inciting the crowd to start breaking things. There aren't enough of these for every police department to have them either, so they aren't really abused as much as you probably hope they are.
I don't like cops any more than most people, but come on.
Just like pepper spray and sonic weaponry and bean bag guns and rubber bullets and tazers and batons are only used so very properly, right? It's a nice thought you have, but any bit of reading on recent history of non-lethal weaponry used by police forces might make you rethink your assertion. Also google for some recent news articles about the random people at peaceful protests who start visibly and audibly inciting the crowd to start breaking things. The peaceful demonstrators usually complement the officer on his standard-issue shoes. Don't take my word for it or just reject it; go look it up.
And oddly enough, this isn't about disliking or liking cops. Cops are directed to do what they do. Their protocols and their attentions are directed by others. Bad cops are responsible for being bad cops, but bad systems are defined at another level. I'm not starting the "us vs them" mentality, and really, neither did the cops.
If you peaceably assemble for redress of grievances, you will face cruel and unusual punishment, sans any form of judicial action. Laaaaand of the Freeeeeee, and the Hoooome of the brrraaaave. Congratulations, USA.
I attended elementary school in the '80s. Every time I see stuff like this, the school uniforms in public schools everywhere, the drug dogs and lockdowns, etc... it just makes me so sad. Also in the '80s, they were teaching us about the idealistic and practiced differences between our society and East Germany and the USSR, etc... US schools used to prepare children for factory jobs (schedule by bell ringing, etc...) Now US schools are preparing children for prison.
Out of curiosity, who do you feel does more damage to gaining / keeping adherents to Christianity: people like Santorum or vocal "against" parties like Penn Jillette? If the former, is there any brewing movement within Christian organizations to denounce approaches like that of Santorum?
Actually, I think this is indeed the big, obvious reason. Theocrats constantly argue that they're "defending" marriage... that they need to protect their marriages from this "threat." So they do fear legalization of gay marriage, as they'd probably go get that gay marriage they secretly have always wanted and that would kinda ruin their current sham marriage. It's also very telling when they claim the irrelevant bit about "being gay is a choice!" Only the closeted or bisexual are making a choice, kids.
Until you can buy or print a tailored case made for this device, note that a Penguins or Altoids tin appears to be a perfect fit (after cutting holes for the ports that stick out).
Finally, a digital-world example of "stealing" data. The FBI in this case actually stole people's data... they took it and made it unavailable to the owners. Until now, every ass-hat who has talked about "stealing" in the contexts of "piracy" cases has been a completely inaccurate moron. Now they have their day and a legitimate example of how to steal data. Learn.
Here's the answer... here's why you don't understand:
There is an existing game, an existing set of rules for getting what is wanted out of the US government. (A) be an enormous corporation or a confederation of smaller ones, (B) buy legislation, and (C) make sure the populace doesn't riot by managing their "news" etc... about the important work done by the government.
The Internet is finally showing itself to be a major threat to the status quo. Arab Spring... Ron Paul's increasing popularity, Steissand Effects everywhere, Wikileaks, Anti-Sec... And so, while the rules of the game are still mostly in effect, the Game Players who have enjoyed successful ownership of the largest government on Earth are working to ensure they will maintain that ownership.
All unions, All PACs, all politicians participating in the election games, and definitely the media empires... all of them currently enjoy winning at the game with the current set of rules. A free Internet only provides benefits to their opponents in this game: us. Humans. People who care about how they're governed and dare disagree with how Sony wants us governed. So, there will be no media coverage. No major PAC, party, union, etc... with an interest in its long-term survival will dare bring SOPA up.
The actual battle is going to be technological. Legislation is a foregone conclusion.
With that verb choice, you insult hard-working courtesans all over the world. These disgusting creatures are selling other people's rights rather than their own labor.
At least in Washington D.C. The Whore Capitol of the world.
You demean all sex workers. They provide services with their own assets. Those in D.C. are in much shadier business.
Interesting concept... again, a brokered "deal" where a sitting government officer of some sort removes land from the public domain and sells it to a private entity... but "the people" are compensated with the cash exchanged for that land. Most government brokered "deals" are far shadier than that, but let's imagine that the money went into some other public domain investment. So there was an equitable trade: the people lost the public use of that land parcel and got a new bridge somewhere instead, for example. And the deal is done at that time. This is an actual exchange, honored by both parties... it's respectable. It's not at all like what has happened to copyright.
And of course, we're talking land, physical space, subject to scarcity, which is the opposite of information, infinitely copyable. Oddly enough, exclusive use rights of land are quite often overturned in the interest of the public... not just eminent domain either. There's various "squatters rights" laws that allow for a parcel to change ownership if it has been occupied by a new entity for enough years without being noticed and evicted by the previous owner. To continue making analogies and pursue your question, shouldn't every work that falls out of publication for some set duration enter the public domain for preservation of our culture? The law recognizes that land parcels shouldn't just sit, deteriorating, used by no one, due to a forgotten ownership claim, etc... So even with the widely disputed "information is property" concept in play, there's plenty of precedent for the public good to be considered.
A software developer is spending time, of her own volition, on the speculation that the time spent will be rewarded with purchases. This expectation driving her speculation comes from a very old social contract: copyright. An "agreement" between information producers and information users, brokered by governments, copyright offered content producers a limited period of exclusive copying so that they might profit from their work (not to guarantee it... quality and market would still matter), and to encourage content producers to make that speculation to promote "the useful arts and sciences" in our society. In exchange, the work would enter the public domain at the end of that limited period, benefiting all.
The social contract has been violated. Industrial alliances of gigantic corporate content copyright aggregators purchased laws from various governments, firstly, to extend the limited term, further and further, retroactively, until the point that to most living humans, the period of copyright is "permanent." Secondly, with the rise of better and better digital technologies, and the increased ease and lowered expense of information copying and distribution, the industrial alliances invented DRM to directly violate and damage the easily copied nature of information. The same alliances then purchased legislation against thwarting DRM, etc... Information restricted by DRM is information that cannot enter the public domain and become freely copyable, unless some non-DRM copy was stored in escrow or some such arrangement. Those who have violated the copyright social convention haven't even considered such an action, as their intention with regards to eroding the concept of "limited term" has become their way of life: hence the invention of the term "Intellectual Property."
The agreement a homeowner makes with a painter to paint the house is direct, simple, and real. House painters never purchased laws stating that they could, once hired at an hourly rate, paint half of the remaining job, each day, in perpetuity, and be paid for it. The "agreement" involved in the concept of copyright has been broken for a long time, by the content industries, and most people on the other end of that brokered-before-they-were-born "agreement" no longer support it and many rightly no longer honor it. Intelligent information producers have already started looking at other revenue models and incorporate the above facts in their speculative calculations before spending time on a work. So who gets "deprived" of something to which they have a "right?" The people are deprived of the public domain works they were due prior to every retroactive limit extension.
Penguins and Altoids tins happen to be about that size as well... I wonder how well a populated Pi will fit... if so, awesome little PC cases!
Those are good citations of other differences, but all areas in which the Pi is "better." I was addressing this question:
Like you say, apples and oranges, because the Arduino still fits some other requirements that the Pi can't... the Pi is not a superset of features of the Arduino.
Power consumption might show some major differences. The ARM chips sip power compared to x86 brethren, but the little Atmel chips sip even less. Plus, Arduinos can be simplified down to the chip itself, if you're prototyping and building custom devices... here's the best explanation of how simple you can go: http://www.instructables.com/id/The-RRRRRRRRRRBA-or-What-They-Dont-Teach-You-in-/
I don't think the Pi will be that cheap ($3), that low power-consumption, or that easily integrated into truly tiny custom devices.
I've been mostly unimpressed with Unity. Gnome3 is a bit unfinished for my tastes. I tried Kubuntu and felt like I was back in the '90s, but with widgets... I'm giving both Unity and Gnome3 a chance, only because I found a useful site with documentation on making them useable http://www.webupd8.org/ has tutorials and tips on how to make these new interfaces almost worth using. I would be done with Ubuntu by now, were it not for that site.
It is rare in large and medium-large companies to find any executive, or even high-level manager willing to say "I'm going to bet on my people's capabilities, rather than spend a lot of company money on the 'safe' (for my job) solution." Your CIO has the same two choices that countless IT managers, directors and CIOs are faced with: spend a significant amount of company money on an outside vendor, who can be blamed when all hell breaks loose, or rely on his or her team to do the job as well if not better and possibly take the flack when bad things happen. A nasty old phrase in IT was "nobody ever got fired for buying IBM." It worked until I knew the guy who did get fired for stubbornly going IBM when there were obvious better alternatives. Today, that "don't get fired" vendor is Microsoft. One day the axiom will fail them too.
Relying on internal staff requires a few things beyond thrift: keep your staff well trained, compensate them well enough that they don't quit too frequently, treat them well enough that their morale keeps them eager to do their jobs well, etc... All of those things benefit YOU. A thrifty-minded manager/director/executive who doesn't make sure to build good teams is a waiting scapegoat and will be out of your way soon enough.
In the bigger picture though, what trend do you want to see: safe-bet management that relies on treating internal staff in a mediocre fashion, massive outsourcing to "support companies" who can and will ship jobs out of your country, IT seen more and more as a cost center to minimize rather than the people who get vital company work done, and companies getting less and less effective with their IT solutions because every new project and every exploration of an idea requires going through the protocols and expense of consulting with another company? Why have highly-trained, highly-paid internal IT people while having pricey outside-vendor support subscriptions? The trend I've seen is reducing staff to an "account-manager" or two and getting rid of IT people by attrition if not outright layoffs.
Now, all that said, if your company is small, and the choice here is finding and hiring and relying upon one good support person (who might get hit by a bus or move across the country for love, etc...), or paying for a pool of proven support staff fully available on a defined protocol, well, you may have the better idea than your CIO. But the issues at hand are much greater than "CentOS is cheap" versus "RedHat is supported well," and worth discussing at those additional levels.
It's even simpler than some kind of religious psychosis: There are hundreds of thousands of jobs, maybe millions involved in the Drug War. There are very powerful and wealthy people deeply invested in the Drug War. The Drug War is not merely about one extra task for police officers. It's about millions of US dollars spent on turning our police forces into para-military organizations. It's about spending tax dollars on tech companies that produce infrared scanners to look through the walls of homes in search of grow lights. It's about keeping the prison industrial system growing and growing, despite violent crime falling and falling. It's about maintaining profits for drug companies who's offerings might be rejected in favor of banned drugs, were those alternatives not illegal and representing risk of arrest, job loss, etc... This applies to both "medical" drug companies as well as "recreational" ones like the alcohol and tobacco industries. How many thousands of attorneys specialize in defending or prosecuting drug cases? How much insane profit do the organized crime syndicates make due to drug illegality?
Alcohol Prohibition was a beta test. People figured out how to make amazing money in such an environment. This is about money and power, and not at all about protecting anyone from anything.
Indeed... check out the graph in this article: http://nymag.com/news/9-11/10th-anniversary/patriot-act/
Except for the tiny fraction spent on our crumbling roads and schools, our tax dollars, by and large are spent on the "War on US Citizens."
How on earth could our government possibly spend fat tax dollars improving "transportation safety" in this country? Hmmm... most of our bridges are on the verge of collapse... and people need jobs... Let's molest more people!!! This bullshit is why people on both ends of the polarized, ridiculous US "political spectrum" are trying to get away from the major parties: those parties do not serve the people, and they're actively running this country into the ground. Occupy and Tea: keep trying, unite and try harder. This is your enemy.
I've inherited the job responsibilities of over 5 coworkers who've left my department and weren't replaced. I've kept roughly the same hours and workload. This is because I'm a programmer; I automate as much as I can. We didn't get the flying cars, but the Jetsons really really nailed the "press buttons all day" job description... and George's complaint about aching hands and fingers when he got home: Carpal Tunnel anyone?
In a sense, I've killed some jobs... but so did everyone who ever invented a time-saving technology. There's always something new to spend time on... perhaps one day in the US, they'll aim toward more leisure!
There is nothing the people can do about it. Like the person above in the DUI checkpoint, he took it calmly and was rewarded by random detainment. In West Memphis, AR, a couple men did not take a "papers please" stop calmly, and they brought out their weaponry. They were promptly killed and universally vilified locally. Anyone even questioning "why" did those men start shooting at the cops was branded an insane terrorist. Soap box-->"Damn dirty hippies with a stupid protest," Ballot Box-->"Pick which of the two same-nonsense parties you want," Ammo Box-->"You're dead in 5 minutes, and your legacy is that of deranged terrorist; zero change for your kids, nothing for you."
The solution is to move away and let the damn country burn to the ground. Or head to the hills and get really self-sufficient. After the country completely fails, perhaps the reboot will be decent. Sadly, meanwhile, those in the hills will be randomly attacked anyway, and other countries are actively pressured by US corporate/government agendas, often getting stupid US nonsense into law, even in "democracies" where well over half of the population opposes the US agenda. Thankfully, as a child raised in the "land of the free and the home of the brave" I was taught about our "enemy" countries and their evil practices like "papers please" checkpoints for internal travel and undercover "secret police" and assorted other massive internal-security departments, so I'm not sleepwalking into this. I'm also aware of the fate of those once-"enemy" countries. Get your head down and wait it out.
Time and time again, this is what I see. And throughout the US, there's prohibitions against effectively protecting ones' self and property with the same type of force the police are legally allowed to use when they do choose to. Long-standing case law states that the police are not obligated to protect you or your property. They cannot be sued for failing to do so. And you aren't legally allowed to do so yourself... in some jurisdictions, there isn't even "castle doctrine" defense, and you must flee your home if it's intruded upon by armed attackers.
Why do I, a citizen, pay taxes for police? Why do I, a citizen, tolerate this mandated "service?" I'm not 100% down with the various demands I've seen from the Occupy groups, but it's pretty clear, every time, that "our" police are tasked with the demands of the 1% rather than the 99%. They're very busy with consensual "crimes" and "don't have the time or staffing" for real crimes.
So why am I paying for it?