So no country could "produce a crap load of gold [...] controlling the value of gold [...] offering to supply gold cheap, or flooding the market with gold" since total mining in all countries in the world adds up to less than 2% of all the gold in the world.
The rate at which gold is mined depends on the value of gold for obvious reasons. If gold was used as a currency in a major way it'd have to be worth a lot more and there'd be more incentive to mine it.
Why not just refer to people as "human" and be done with it?
Because there are racist assholes out there who do actually treat people differently based on their race, and it's kind of hard to describe the effects of this when the only term you have to talk about people is "human"?
If it's so easy to upload an image, shouldn't there be a responsibility to make it just as easy to take one down?
Not really. Otherwise you make it far too easy for groups like Scientology to take down material critical of them through untraceable false copyright claims.
IANAL, but as far as I recall the DMCA safe harbour only applies if you're not aware of the infringing content. Since Funnyjunk couldn't plausibly claim not to be aware of it once they'd sent a letter threatening to sue for libel over The Oatmeal's discussion of it, they basically had to take it down.
As others have said, it's presumably for the same reason as the iPad has an absurdly high resolution - since Mac OS X isn't resolution independent, they'll be using pixel-doubling to pretend it's a rather more conventional 1440x900 screen to existing applications.
But I don't understand why you blame Kickstarter. It is totally not their fault.
Kickstarter pre-approve every project that gets to launch on the site and take a 5% cut of the proceeds. They don't even have to pay merchant fees or chargeback fees or anything like that from their 5% cut - those are all taken from the project's slice of the money. So, for instance, they made a cool $17k out of helping ZionEyez fleece their backers for a third of a million dollars.
It's not fundamentally different from gambling or the stock market?
It's like gambling where the best case is that you get out something worth the amount of money that you put in and the worst case is that you lose it all, you don't know the odds, and there's no regulator.
Even if they did create a HFT program that everyone could use, and even if it didn't require colocation in the exchange's server room thanks to the speed of light (which it does), and even if it did manage to outsmart the existing trader's software, the big traders would just find some way to have them arrested and convicted of fraud just like they did with the last group who tried that without inside contacts and political influence. You see, apparently it's fraud to do HFT in a way that confuses someone else's transing algorithms - but only if you're an upstart and they're an established player.
The Raspberry Pi has somewhere between 2 and zero PWM outputs for motor speed control (the documentation isn't terribly helpful) and slightly fussy power supply requirements.
The Raspberry Pi's not a completely homogenous environment either - you've got fun stuff like SD card compatibility (varies between supposedly identical cards), monitor compatibility, keyboard/mouse/WiFi adapter compatibility (varies between different Pi's in the same batch!)...
In fact, due to Mono providing a lot of its own handy but implementation-specific features, it's pretty easy to end up with an app that only runs on Mono.
There are actually Mono-developed libraries - such as one of their sets of SQLite bindings - that now only work under Microsoft.Net and not under any recent version of Mono. I know about this because a C#-based project I occasionally use relied on them and then suddenly stopped working under Mono for everyone after an update.
Raspberry Pi is quite closed itself. For instance, according to the docs the audio output is emulated in closed-source PWM code running on the undocumented VideoCore hardware. I don't think there's even working open source code that uses audio out on there yet; last I heard the ALSA driver was horribly broken.
It also can't boot without a closed-source bootloader running on the VideoCore hardware which has a license agreement forbidding you from running it on anything other than a Raspberry Pi. So even if you somehow get your hands on the processors used in the Pi and integrate one of them into your project, there's no legal way to run the code you'd developed on it.
Cheap made-in-China USB to TTL interfaces have been a lot less than $10-20 for a while which is probably why most Arduino clones have a USB programming interface built in...
From what I've seen the Pi community seems to be fairly toxic. They're utterly hostile to anyone that has difficulty getting it working - including journalists - or who doesn't buy into the hype.
Even more unfortunately, NVidia have realised this and have been paying off video game developers not to test their games on AMD graphics cards prior to release and not to allow AMD access to pre-release versions to do it themselves.
They wouldn't because it's designed by Broadcom staff. Now, if some hardware hacker in Shenzen was designing a Chinese Raspberry Pi equivalent then they might well stick an Allwinner A10 SoC in it.
Apparently modern high-speed SD cards didn't originally work at all due to a bug. As in, the system wouldn't even boot with one in the SD card slot. That's supposedly fixed but only by disabling the fastest modes on the SD interface; the developers reckon it's physically impossible to support them without a major hardware redesign.
One of Google's updates to PageRank did downrank so-called vertical search engines. They kind of needed too because they were effectively rendering search unusable - you'd search for information or reviews about some product and just get page after page of links to searches on other websites, most of which hadn't managed to find anything. It made trying to use Google an exercise in frustration that reminded me of the bad old days and why the other search engines lost out to them in the first place. Honestly, if anything they haven't been aggressive enough about it.
Using Mono to make it easier to port applications developed for Windows to Linux is something that even RMS doesn't particularly object to. The reason why it was controversial was because the Mono developers were trying to push it as a platform to develop new Linux desktop applications, which exposed the Linux desktop to legal risk from Microsoft and their patent portfolio and meant that the applications actually worked better under Windows than Linux. In fact, I think this is the first Windows application I've come across that's been successfully ported to Linux using Mono rather than the otther way around.
UK postcodes generally identify a particular street, or even a particular section of a street if it's particularly long or has a large number of houses.
They may be "built using unreliable hardware and software", but expensive commercial maps are apparently often pretty badly wrong - including "dangerous" things like mislabelled one-way streets, roads that head into lakes, and other errors that could cause serious accidents, many of them unfixed for years!
Bitcoinica also holds a whole bunch of US dollars that belong to their customers. They still have those dollars, just without any way of knowing which customers they belong to.
It does not help that many of these operations started out being run by rank amateurs.
Probably because anyone else has some understanding of the difficulty of what they're doing and the risks involved, and so wouldn't set up a site like Bitcoinica.
Slashdot Mirror
So no country could "produce a crap load of gold [...] controlling the value of gold [...] offering to supply gold cheap, or flooding the market with gold" since total mining in all countries in the world adds up to less than 2% of all the gold in the world.
The rate at which gold is mined depends on the value of gold for obvious reasons. If gold was used as a currency in a major way it'd have to be worth a lot more and there'd be more incentive to mine it.
The broker promised that they would cover the losses. They haven't actually paid up yet from what I've heard.
Why not just refer to people as "human" and be done with it?
Because there are racist assholes out there who do actually treat people differently based on their race, and it's kind of hard to describe the effects of this when the only term you have to talk about people is "human"?
If it's so easy to upload an image, shouldn't there be a responsibility to make it just as easy to take one down?
Not really. Otherwise you make it far too easy for groups like Scientology to take down material critical of them through untraceable false copyright claims.
IANAL, but as far as I recall the DMCA safe harbour only applies if you're not aware of the infringing content. Since Funnyjunk couldn't plausibly claim not to be aware of it once they'd sent a letter threatening to sue for libel over The Oatmeal's discussion of it, they basically had to take it down.
As others have said, it's presumably for the same reason as the iPad has an absurdly high resolution - since Mac OS X isn't resolution independent, they'll be using pixel-doubling to pretend it's a rather more conventional 1440x900 screen to existing applications.
But I don't understand why you blame Kickstarter. It is totally not their fault.
Kickstarter pre-approve every project that gets to launch on the site and take a 5% cut of the proceeds. They don't even have to pay merchant fees or chargeback fees or anything like that from their 5% cut - those are all taken from the project's slice of the money. So, for instance, they made a cool $17k out of helping ZionEyez fleece their backers for a third of a million dollars.
It's not fundamentally different from gambling or the stock market?
It's like gambling where the best case is that you get out something worth the amount of money that you put in and the worst case is that you lose it all, you don't know the odds, and there's no regulator.
Even if they did create a HFT program that everyone could use, and even if it didn't require colocation in the exchange's server room thanks to the speed of light (which it does), and even if it did manage to outsmart the existing trader's software, the big traders would just find some way to have them arrested and convicted of fraud just like they did with the last group who tried that without inside contacts and political influence. You see, apparently it's fraud to do HFT in a way that confuses someone else's transing algorithms - but only if you're an upstart and they're an established player.
The Raspberry Pi has somewhere between 2 and zero PWM outputs for motor speed control (the documentation isn't terribly helpful) and slightly fussy power supply requirements.
The Raspberry Pi's not a completely homogenous environment either - you've got fun stuff like SD card compatibility (varies between supposedly identical cards), monitor compatibility, keyboard/mouse/WiFi adapter compatibility (varies between different Pi's in the same batch!)...
In fact, due to Mono providing a lot of its own handy but implementation-specific features, it's pretty easy to end up with an app that only runs on Mono.
There are actually Mono-developed libraries - such as one of their sets of SQLite bindings - that now only work under Microsoft .Net and not under any recent version of Mono. I know about this because a C#-based project I occasionally use relied on them and then suddenly stopped working under Mono for everyone after an update.
Raspberry Pi is quite closed itself. For instance, according to the docs the audio output is emulated in closed-source PWM code running on the undocumented VideoCore hardware. I don't think there's even working open source code that uses audio out on there yet; last I heard the ALSA driver was horribly broken.
It also can't boot without a closed-source bootloader running on the VideoCore hardware which has a license agreement forbidding you from running it on anything other than a Raspberry Pi. So even if you somehow get your hands on the processors used in the Pi and integrate one of them into your project, there's no legal way to run the code you'd developed on it.
Cheap made-in-China USB to TTL interfaces have been a lot less than $10-20 for a while which is probably why most Arduino clones have a USB programming interface built in...
From what I've seen the Pi community seems to be fairly toxic. They're utterly hostile to anyone that has difficulty getting it working - including journalists - or who doesn't buy into the hype.
Even more unfortunately, NVidia have realised this and have been paying off video game developers not to test their games on AMD graphics cards prior to release and not to allow AMD access to pre-release versions to do it themselves.
They wouldn't because it's designed by Broadcom staff. Now, if some hardware hacker in Shenzen was designing a Chinese Raspberry Pi equivalent then they might well stick an Allwinner A10 SoC in it.
3. Slow IO. SD cards are not very speedy.
Apparently modern high-speed SD cards didn't originally work at all due to a bug. As in, the system wouldn't even boot with one in the SD card slot. That's supposedly fixed but only by disabling the fastest modes on the SD interface; the developers reckon it's physically impossible to support them without a major hardware redesign.
One of Google's updates to PageRank did downrank so-called vertical search engines. They kind of needed too because they were effectively rendering search unusable - you'd search for information or reviews about some product and just get page after page of links to searches on other websites, most of which hadn't managed to find anything. It made trying to use Google an exercise in frustration that reminded me of the bad old days and why the other search engines lost out to them in the first place. Honestly, if anything they haven't been aggressive enough about it.
Using Mono to make it easier to port applications developed for Windows to Linux is something that even RMS doesn't particularly object to. The reason why it was controversial was because the Mono developers were trying to push it as a platform to develop new Linux desktop applications, which exposed the Linux desktop to legal risk from Microsoft and their patent portfolio and meant that the applications actually worked better under Windows than Linux. In fact, I think this is the first Windows application I've come across that's been successfully ported to Linux using Mono rather than the otther way around.
UK postcodes generally identify a particular street, or even a particular section of a street if it's particularly long or has a large number of houses.
They may be "built using unreliable hardware and software", but expensive commercial maps are apparently often pretty badly wrong - including "dangerous" things like mislabelled one-way streets, roads that head into lakes, and other errors that could cause serious accidents, many of them unfixed for years!
Bitcoinica also holds a whole bunch of US dollars that belong to their customers. They still have those dollars, just without any way of knowing which customers they belong to.
This service handled lots of US dollars too, and their records of their customers' US dollar balances appear to have been lost as well.
It does not help that many of these operations started out being run by rank amateurs.
Probably because anyone else has some understanding of the difficulty of what they're doing and the risks involved, and so wouldn't set up a site like Bitcoinica.