That's a relatively old problem, though. Certainly housebuilders have been building homes on flood plains here in the UK for at least a decade, probably longer. I saw a really hilarious incident a while ago when they insisted that their new homes weren't at risk of flooding and the building site flooded spectacularly part-way through building them - and the company kept on insisting there was no problem!
Intel actually had to write an ARM emulator for their Android stuff because ARM has a very definitive software advantage over x86 there. Sure, there's lots of x86 desktop applications, but how many of them are usable on a tablet? On a phone? For that matter, how many of them can be used without adding the substantial cost and system resource usage of a full Windows install?
Not anymore, apparently. They removed that feature. Now the only way to send someone you don't know a message, even just one explaining how you know them, is to pay Facebook money.
Have you heard of something called network effects? At this point you basically have to be on Facebook if you want to be at all social because everyone else uses it. It doesn't matter how much they fuck users over or how awful their services is, within reason, because what're you going to do - move to another service that none of your friends use?
Also, in many cases people will not be able to send someone a friend request at no charge. I just visited Facebook and they pestered me to update my privacy options with a really obnoxious pop-up. The privacy options they're encouraging me to lock down are the people who can send me friend requests (from anyone to only friends of friends) and who can send me messages without paying them money (from friends and others I may know to only friends). They're not trying to get me to change anything that might reduce their ability to profit from this, such as who can look me up on Facebook, just the options that would force more people to pay them money in order to contact me.
Of course, they can't actually explain where they met you and why they want to be friends anymore without paying Facebook money to allow you to message them. Facebook removed messages from friends requests.
From what I can tell, the CIA were practically bragging about how clever they were for disguising their operatives as health workers doing polio vaccinations to anyone in the media that would listen. The only way you could've missed it is if you were living in a cave somewhere when Osama was assassinated.
Manufacturing generally requires access to and/or ownership of significant additional infrastructure and resources, which you may not wish to buy, or which others may have access to on more favourable terms.
This. For example, ASICs like the hypothetical Bitcoin mining ones are produced by chip fabs using a number of pieces of equipment produced by many different companies, and all of that equipment is required to make chips. There's no one organisation that has the tools, knowledge and resources to manufacture all the different bits of equipment required to set up a chip fab.
- Plug the Rpi into a LAN, and connect it to the serial console of a piece of equipment with a USB to serial cable - old router, telephone equipment, radio broadcast transmitter, fill in the blank. SSH into the thing if you need to get at the console instead of doing a site trip.
Does that actually work now? I know that for ages USB-to-serial cables were completely broken due to bugs in the USB controller on the Pi, and the RasPi Foundation publicly blamed all the problems on people using the wrong power supplies and banned anyone who suggested they should perhaps be a bit more forward with this information. (USB keyboards and mice were also horribly unreliable due to different controller bugs.)
Obama's statement about his beliefs there looks - to me at least - very much like the statement of a Christian who does actually believe the scientific evidence as to the age of the Earth and the creation of the universe, and who doesn't see any contradiction between that and his Christianity. That's probably why no-one really objected;
Video on the other hand, is a real bitch on Linux. Frameworks like Qt rely on platform specific backends (phonon) and there is no de facto standard of a video player on Linux, let alone that the phonon plugin is installed.
Ugh. I hate it when game developers rely on platform-specific video frameworks even on Windows, because if you have a slightly different set of codecs installed from the one they're expecting stuff breaks in weird ways.
In a more industrial context, the USSR tried to "optimize" production of all sorts of goods by doing exactly what you say the software industry ought to be doing: standardize on one design, build one big factory.
Funny, I'd read the exact opposite - that they insisted on local production of goods even when it'd make more sense to centralize them in one big factory, and that's what did them in.
Actually, Android does depend on some userspace components that are GPLv2 (BlueZ, for instance) but I'm pretty sure they have a policy that no GPLv3 components are allowed.
Requiring full quid pro quo for access to socal infrastructure (outlaw charity) would place very strong natural selection pressure on humans to either exist without those services, or to always equally transact when getting those services.
Which still wouldn't solve the problem, and indeed the article in TFA points out why. There are major groups of people (e.g. CEOs, politicians, the sprawling and wealth former aristocracy of various states...) where there's little or no selection for intelligence and which wouldn't be harmed if all charity was banned; while they are supporting themselves off the backs of the actually-competent, they're doing it through economics and not charity. In fact they might actually benefit from this - it's hard to negotiate your wage on an equal footing if you end up starving on the street if you don't find a job, after all.
And of course eugenics wasn't even effective, for basically the same reason that he's claiming human intelligence peaked - eugenicists actually forcibly sterilized and murdered people based on the colour of their skin, poverty, and in at least one important US case because she got pregnant as a result of being raped. I mean, do you honestly think any eugenics movement would affect the wealthy, CEOs and politicians? No it wouldn't, just like they aren't affected by their own screw-ups now.
Don't worry, soon all those CPU-hogging animated advertisments and horrible "I wish I was a real application" user interfaces will be implemented as native HTML 5.
I suspect part of the reason they're upgrading is because you can't get screens as shit as their old one for a reasonable price anymore. Seriously. The last time I looked, 320x240 colour screens actually appeared to be cheaper.
More than that, it's impossible to come up with a warning that convinces people that these toys genuinely are dangerous. On every post about this on/. and Hacker News, there have been apparently-bright people who obviously don't seem to grasp how much more hazardous these are than other swallowed objecs, even after reading all the warning labels and the explanation of why they're particularly dangerous and knowing they resulted in a number of kids having to get surgery to remove them.
You can't, unless you prepared in advance by saving a copy of the signature file required to install iOS 5 on your device before Apple stopped signing installation requests for iOS 5. You can't even reinstall it on devices that were already running it if the OS gets screwed up and you need to recover it - in fact, that's apparently what forced this person to upgrade to iOS 6 in the first place. Apple have put a lot of effort into stopping users from downgrading their iDevices.
Not only that, it appears that they've turned off the normal redirect from apple.com to the UK website and aren't displaying it on the main apple.com website for UK visitors, so it's not actually visible even with scrolling to most of the people it's meant to reach. They're literally begging to be found in contempt.
How is taxing income that comes with risk (investment income) more than income that comes with no risk (salary) fair?
I'd say there's plenty of risk associated with earning a salary. Every time you change jobs to increase your salary there's the risk of the company you work for going under and you being unable to get a new job. Then there's the risk of getting a mortgage or long-term lease near enough to your job that you can actually get to work, of buying a car so you can get to work, of money invested in education...
What's more, even the unlikely event that a wealthy person who's earning income through investment does lose it all, they're still not any worse off than the salaried worker who never had it in the first place! In fact they're probably better off - they have better contacts, are less likely to have student loan debts, may well still own assets like their home outright with no mortgage...
That is a load of steaming, ideologically-driven bullshit.
rigorous enforcement of housing mandates such as theCommunity Reinvestment Act
Ironically, part of the reason we ended up in this mess is that the Community Reinvestment Act didn't go far enough. Have you looked at what it actually required? It banned the practice of redlining, where banks oughtright refused to offer mortgages to people living in poor and/or racial minority areas even if they had a good credit rating, a good job, and would have been eligible if they lived anywhere else. That's all it changed - it didn't require banks to offer ninja loans or subprime mortgages or lend to people with bad credit ratings or any of the other stuff that conservatives blame on it. Banks did that all by themselves for entirely commercial reasons. Most of the banks that did it weren't even covered by the CRA.
Why do I think the CRA didn't go far enough, then? Because the banks went and targetted the exact same groups they'd screwed over before - poor people and black people - and mis-sold them expensive subprime mortgages when they were actually eligible for much cheaper prime mortgages which would also have posed a lower risk of non-repayment. This was actually a contributing factor to the financial crisis. There is literally no way in which this helped drive home ownership up - in fact, more people would've bought homes if they'd been offered the proper mortgages - but like every single other decision it helped to drive bank profits through the roof. If it wasn't for the CRA they could've and would've gone further and outright denied prime loans to these people, not because the banks thought they were actually a financial risk, but because they'd make more money that way.
by prodding mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to make loans to people with lower credit scores (and to buy loans that had been made by banks and, later, “innovators” like Countrywide).
That had rather less to do with "driving homeownership rates up" and more to do with greed. Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were relatively late to the game here compared with the commercial financial sector, and basically wound up doing it because they weren't competitive with commercial players and were missing out on a bunch of apparently-profitable opportunities.
Slashdot Mirror
That's a relatively old problem, though. Certainly housebuilders have been building homes on flood plains here in the UK for at least a decade, probably longer. I saw a really hilarious incident a while ago when they insisted that their new homes weren't at risk of flooding and the building site flooded spectacularly part-way through building them - and the company kept on insisting there was no problem!
Intel actually had to write an ARM emulator for their Android stuff because ARM has a very definitive software advantage over x86 there. Sure, there's lots of x86 desktop applications, but how many of them are usable on a tablet? On a phone? For that matter, how many of them can be used without adding the substantial cost and system resource usage of a full Windows install?
Not anymore, apparently. They removed that feature. Now the only way to send someone you don't know a message, even just one explaining how you know them, is to pay Facebook money.
Have you heard of something called network effects? At this point you basically have to be on Facebook if you want to be at all social because everyone else uses it. It doesn't matter how much they fuck users over or how awful their services is, within reason, because what're you going to do - move to another service that none of your friends use?
Also, in many cases people will not be able to send someone a friend request at no charge. I just visited Facebook and they pestered me to update my privacy options with a really obnoxious pop-up. The privacy options they're encouraging me to lock down are the people who can send me friend requests (from anyone to only friends of friends) and who can send me messages without paying them money (from friends and others I may know to only friends). They're not trying to get me to change anything that might reduce their ability to profit from this, such as who can look me up on Facebook, just the options that would force more people to pay them money in order to contact me.
They can send you a friend request at no charge.
Of course, they can't actually explain where they met you and why they want to be friends anymore without paying Facebook money to allow you to message them. Facebook removed messages from friends requests.
From what I can tell, the CIA were practically bragging about how clever they were for disguising their operatives as health workers doing polio vaccinations to anyone in the media that would listen. The only way you could've missed it is if you were living in a cave somewhere when Osama was assassinated.
Atheros ath9k and ath5k mini-PCIe cards are not exactly exotic hardware...
Manufacturing generally requires access to and/or ownership of significant additional infrastructure and resources, which you may not wish to buy, or which others may have access to on more favourable terms.
This. For example, ASICs like the hypothetical Bitcoin mining ones are produced by chip fabs using a number of pieces of equipment produced by many different companies, and all of that equipment is required to make chips. There's no one organisation that has the tools, knowledge and resources to manufacture all the different bits of equipment required to set up a chip fab.
- Plug the Rpi into a LAN, and connect it to the serial console of a piece of equipment with a USB to serial cable - old router, telephone equipment, radio broadcast transmitter, fill in the blank. SSH into the thing if you need to get at the console instead of doing a site trip.
Does that actually work now? I know that for ages USB-to-serial cables were completely broken due to bugs in the USB controller on the Pi, and the RasPi Foundation publicly blamed all the problems on people using the wrong power supplies and banned anyone who suggested they should perhaps be a bit more forward with this information. (USB keyboards and mice were also horribly unreliable due to different controller bugs.)
Obama's statement about his beliefs there looks - to me at least - very much like the statement of a Christian who does actually believe the scientific evidence as to the age of the Earth and the creation of the universe, and who doesn't see any contradiction between that and his Christianity. That's probably why no-one really objected;
Video on the other hand, is a real bitch on Linux. Frameworks like Qt rely on platform specific backends (phonon) and there is no de facto standard of a video player on Linux, let alone that the phonon plugin is installed.
Ugh. I hate it when game developers rely on platform-specific video frameworks even on Windows, because if you have a slightly different set of codecs installed from the one they're expecting stuff breaks in weird ways.
In a more industrial context, the USSR tried to "optimize" production of all sorts of goods by doing exactly what you say the software industry ought to be doing: standardize on one design, build one big factory.
Funny, I'd read the exact opposite - that they insisted on local production of goods even when it'd make more sense to centralize them in one big factory, and that's what did them in.
Actually, Android does depend on some userspace components that are GPLv2 (BlueZ, for instance) but I'm pretty sure they have a policy that no GPLv3 components are allowed.
Requiring full quid pro quo for access to socal infrastructure (outlaw charity) would place very strong natural selection pressure on humans to either exist without those services, or to always equally transact when getting those services.
Which still wouldn't solve the problem, and indeed the article in TFA points out why. There are major groups of people (e.g. CEOs, politicians, the sprawling and wealth former aristocracy of various states...) where there's little or no selection for intelligence and which wouldn't be harmed if all charity was banned; while they are supporting themselves off the backs of the actually-competent, they're doing it through economics and not charity. In fact they might actually benefit from this - it's hard to negotiate your wage on an equal footing if you end up starving on the street if you don't find a job, after all.
And of course eugenics wasn't even effective, for basically the same reason that he's claiming human intelligence peaked - eugenicists actually forcibly sterilized and murdered people based on the colour of their skin, poverty, and in at least one important US case because she got pregnant as a result of being raped. I mean, do you honestly think any eugenics movement would affect the wealthy, CEOs and politicians? No it wouldn't, just like they aren't affected by their own screw-ups now.
Don't worry, soon all those CPU-hogging animated advertisments and horrible "I wish I was a real application" user interfaces will be implemented as native HTML 5.
I suspect part of the reason they're upgrading is because you can't get screens as shit as their old one for a reasonable price anymore. Seriously. The last time I looked, 320x240 colour screens actually appeared to be cheaper.
More than that, it's impossible to come up with a warning that convinces people that these toys genuinely are dangerous. On every post about this on /. and Hacker News, there have been apparently-bright people who obviously don't seem to grasp how much more hazardous these are than other swallowed objecs, even after reading all the warning labels and the explanation of why they're particularly dangerous and knowing they resulted in a number of kids having to get surgery to remove them.
button batteries
Senate bill seeks regulation for button-cell batteries. (There are already regulations restricting the use of button batteries in children's toys.)
plastic bags
Generally designed with holes these days for safety reasons.
bottled water
That one mainly gets adults in trouble, kids usually know better.
chairs
Fairly tightly regulated
phone cord
Hasn't this been banned from kids playsets altogether because of the safety hazard?
According to TFA, at least one kid has been killed by these in the US.
You can't, unless you prepared in advance by saving a copy of the signature file required to install iOS 5 on your device before Apple stopped signing installation requests for iOS 5. You can't even reinstall it on devices that were already running it if the OS gets screwed up and you need to recover it - in fact, that's apparently what forced this person to upgrade to iOS 6 in the first place. Apple have put a lot of effort into stopping users from downgrading their iDevices.
Not only that, it appears that they've turned off the normal redirect from apple.com to the UK website and aren't displaying it on the main apple.com website for UK visitors, so it's not actually visible even with scrolling to most of the people it's meant to reach. They're literally begging to be found in contempt.
How is taxing income that comes with risk (investment income) more than income that comes with no risk (salary) fair?
I'd say there's plenty of risk associated with earning a salary. Every time you change jobs to increase your salary there's the risk of the company you work for going under and you being unable to get a new job. Then there's the risk of getting a mortgage or long-term lease near enough to your job that you can actually get to work, of buying a car so you can get to work, of money invested in education...
What's more, even the unlikely event that a wealthy person who's earning income through investment does lose it all, they're still not any worse off than the salaried worker who never had it in the first place! In fact they're probably better off - they have better contacts, are less likely to have student loan debts, may well still own assets like their home outright with no mortgage...
That is a load of steaming, ideologically-driven bullshit.
rigorous enforcement of housing mandates such as theCommunity Reinvestment Act
Ironically, part of the reason we ended up in this mess is that the Community Reinvestment Act didn't go far enough. Have you looked at what it actually required? It banned the practice of redlining, where banks oughtright refused to offer mortgages to people living in poor and/or racial minority areas even if they had a good credit rating, a good job, and would have been eligible if they lived anywhere else. That's all it changed - it didn't require banks to offer ninja loans or subprime mortgages or lend to people with bad credit ratings or any of the other stuff that conservatives blame on it. Banks did that all by themselves for entirely commercial reasons. Most of the banks that did it weren't even covered by the CRA.
Why do I think the CRA didn't go far enough, then? Because the banks went and targetted the exact same groups they'd screwed over before - poor people and black people - and mis-sold them expensive subprime mortgages when they were actually eligible for much cheaper prime mortgages which would also have posed a lower risk of non-repayment. This was actually a contributing factor to the financial crisis. There is literally no way in which this helped drive home ownership up - in fact, more people would've bought homes if they'd been offered the proper mortgages - but like every single other decision it helped to drive bank profits through the roof. If it wasn't for the CRA they could've and would've gone further and outright denied prime loans to these people, not because the banks thought they were actually a financial risk, but because they'd make more money that way.
by prodding mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to make loans to people with lower credit scores (and to buy loans that had been made by banks and, later, “innovators” like Countrywide).
That had rather less to do with "driving homeownership rates up" and more to do with greed. Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were relatively late to the game here compared with the commercial financial sector, and basically wound up doing it because they weren't competitive with commercial players and were missing out on a bunch of apparently-profitable opportunities.