Why did they "have" to start taking drugs in the first place? If you take drugs and get addicted, that's your responsibility. Not anyone else's.

Well, some of them were under 18 at the time. As a society, we've decided you cannot really be held responsible for many of your actions when under 18. So it certainly is difficult to condemn teenagers to a lifetime of addiction because you were too cheap and on too high a moral horse to help them out.

But beyond that, in many cases, such as with student loans, we hold that society has not just a right to protect you from others, but to help enable you to improve yourself. Certainly, that seems cheaper to society than trying to punish people in prison for something they may wish they could give up.

Lastly, while you may wish that everyone was solely responsible for their actions, and their actions solely affected them, neither is ever the case. It's a good bumper sticker philosophy, but it falls apart once you start asking questions.

If you take drugs and get addicted, that's your responsibility. Not anyone else's.

Think so? I can introduce you to some former surgery patients and war veterans among others who were introduced to opiates to control pain by their physicians for very real pain problems and as a result were unable to avoid addiction

The ADA claims there are zero cases of that.

They do so by separating dependency with addiction, by specifying that addiction requires a pleasureable aspect. So. You can be dependent on insulin, but probably not addicted. Morphine could be either depending on your situation.

How much of that is linguistic bullshittery to avoid feeling bad for hooking people on pills, I do not know.

now that rich white people have drug problems (ie, "real" people), maybe we can muster up some sympathy for other addicted people now?

Sure we can. We can feel sympathy for all those who were addicted due to a doctor's incompetence in prescribing drugs (it's not their fault!) Or for those valiantly sacrificing their health to pay for the 47% moochers' share.

</I wish I was joking >

The fact is, cocaine and pain-killers have always been an upper-class drug; and the penalties and stigmas surrounding both reflect that.

The one surprising thing was the accusation of meth use; but I feel like that's likely purposeful conflation with other amphetamines by someone with a vested interest in exaggerating the problem.

I'm at year 13, and I've learned those lessons you said earning your degree taught you.... but I (lucky for me) didn't need college to teach me humility and how to be receptive to learning

Yeah, I'm gonna say no. Humility, recognizing the depths of your ignorance, being open to new ideas, dealing with new people, being exposed to other things, etc. are all a continuum, not binary.

That said, you may be advanced for your age. But you seem to think that means you crossed the finish line early. What it means is, if you don't squander it, you can go much farther.

I wish you luck.

Different tool chains are not used, because it is a client-server architecture, but because regularly one develops for different platforms using different technologies.

That's the idea I don't get. Why oh why do different platforms try to/actually encourage and enforce this? Cross-platform code is good. I suppose it behooves the dominant player (I suppose iOS) to not be compatible with, say, Windows Phone. But doesn't that mean Windows Phone should be made to be compatible with iOS?

Watch Google punt on the ADT bundle as soon as they take Android Studio out of beta.

I also expect to see the second coming of Jesus riding unicorns at that point. Beta is the new Gold Master

I'd love to see a single UI that works across 4" phones and 7" tablets with gorilla glass, and 13" laptops and 10" convertibles with membrane keyboards, and 24" desktops with 101-keyboards, and 60" XBox Ones with controllers but I'm not holding my breath.

OS != UI.

The OS has so much more. Hell, a lot of programs only talk to other programs, and those instantly work regardless of form factor. I think it would be great if the future was just make... what, 4..., UI profiles was sufficient to be cross platform

It would be kind of ironic if it were a software-only patent, since one of the reasons H.264 is amazing is the hardware acceleration built into everything.

By the time the patents on one codec have run out, bandwidth constraints cause providers of non-free media to switch to a new freshly patented codec

That seems silly.

Bandwidth is one of those commodities (like processor cycles) that gets cheaper as time marches on. Bandwidth now is easily a couple of orders of magnitude higher than a decade ago (and moving towards gigabit), and that was several orders of magnitude higher than the decade before that.

Further, its a cost center now. If you could halve Netflix's bandwidth costs, you'd be quite wealthy.

The real limits are a) on the decoding side: How much processor power, RAM, etc. does it take to create an image, and b) the quality of the decompressed video, esp. against theoretical limits

. Unfortunately for Verison disabilities activists can be INCREDIBLY noisy when they are shat upon, so I doubt our deaf friends are going to tolerate this guff at all.

But how would they know?

Go deaf dudes!

Hear, hear! <-- What I actually wrote before I figured out it was ironic, which would be fine, and probably insensitive, which is not. But I will echo your sentiment: Go dead dudes!

Cisco heard your concerns and has responded: Development and maintenance will be overseen by a board from industry and the open source community.

The source is open: you can read it, you can compile it and compare binaries, etc.

In fact, it is BSD licensed.

But that only covers the copyright. The patent is not opened (nor owned by Cisco), and seem to prevent derivative works.

Cisco paid the fees to use the patent in this one application, and open-sourced it to the world. Seems like a great solution, security-wise, and clever legally.

And, it becomes just more BSD code when the patent expires in... what, a decade? Or if the new Supreme Court ruling is found to invalidate the patent.

I'm not sure what I would do to protect my device (I'm not smart enough to make a device, so it's a moot point)

But I do know that it would be a toss up between trying to keep Google from opening the box, and trying to develop a tamper-evident prove that they did. I have no idea if the lawsuit would be worth enough to justify the costs... and whether I could patent it anyway.

Why update the browser at all then?

So they gave analytics teams an easier way to send info, so they don't have to rely on really iffy hacks that often cause all sorts of stability and performance issues?

You mean like cookies? Why are cookies not the appropriate solution to a standardized way to track users if they choose to allow themselves to be tracked.

if you had a good solution to Canvas tracking then why didn't you tell them?

Sure. Disable readback from the Canvas. Done.

If FireFox took a stand against stupid bullshit that costs more than it benefits, they could kill it. They're big enough to do so.