there is no more money in arduino hardware anymore. its a fact.

business model is hard. the value is the software and libs and user content (MOSTLY user content! its all about the libraries and examples that let us all do rapid prototyping).

I bought some 328 arduino italy boards when I first started, at $30 or so, each. maybe more, I forget. but they were expensive and I stopped buying them once I could do my own boards. and now, even my own boards do not make as much sense; since I can buy a usb nanon 3.0 board for $5. sure, it has crap ftdi fake chips on it (sigh) but newer ones are using non-ftdi chips and so that's good progress.

the size of a nano v3 module is great, its all there and its hard to argue with that kind of easy integration. but no one buys italy or official nano modules. they exist and i'm sure they are better made with real parts, but they cost too much!

I hope they can find a good business model. the arduino guys did a big thing to help the world get into controllers (major game changer; they deserve full credit) but now that chinese clones are out there, the hardware side is 'solved'. sad but true.

arguing over who sells the hardware is a lose/lose game.

At least the patents on DVDs are expiring if not already expired. The first DVD player was sold in 1996, and patents can be good for up to 20 years from the filing date, so it would seem that by late next year, all necessary patents should have expired.

This is HORRIBLE legal advice. Patent laws were different before 1996, that's why MP3 patents are still around (and will be until 2017) despite the fact that specifications were published back in 1991!

In the United States, "patents filed prior to 8 June 1995 expire 17 years after the publication date of the patent, but application extensions make it possible for a patent to issue" quite a few years after initial filing.

MP3 patents have mostly expired, though one US patent expires later this year.

I wish that was true, but it's certainly not:

http://www.tunequest.org/a-big...

lol, yeah KB not MB.

damn, how far we really have come. amazing when you think about how many orders of mag we've seen in our life time.

stuff like "hi, my name's romney." or "hi, my name is bush." or any other super rich person.

they really are different from the rest of us little people.

Well, no, I don't. That's why I asked. It sounds like the answer to my question is yes?

Right. Don't buy them. They specifically moved the Golf back to Wolfsberg. Be careful, though, because I think they moved it back to Mexico more recently. You can get e.g. a "VAG VIN Decoder" app for Android, or just memorize which place in the VIN to look at and a handful of plant codes. Then you'll know precisely where the vehicle was produced.

If that's all the variable is used for, won't the compiler optimize it out of existence anyway? Or is that too fancy yet?

Welcome to the party, it began several years ago.

Please tell me you already feel this way about Gawker.

Not because you were the most qualified applicant? That means the company you work for hired you not because they should have, but because they were strong-armed into it. In fact, they should not have had to have hired you, they should have been able to hire the best-qualified applicant.

The reality is that you are asking employers to pay for that, but making children isn't their business. If society needs children, then society should pay for children, through income redistribution. Oh wait, guess what? We already give people a tax break for having children. I've known people who made more than me but paid no taxes because of their children. Now you want employers to pay again?

Or you could argue that people who do have kids don't deserve to get paid for their time off. A person who doesn't have kids is worth more to their employer. If people can't afford to survive while they have kids (they can) and we need more people (we don't) then it would be worth it to pay people to have kids. Big problem with that is there are too many humans on this planet already, at least while we operate in our current mode. You want more people made, but that's the opposite of what we need.

No, completely unlike those VWs built in Mexico, which are built like shit. The only thing more embarrassing to my heritage than how shit UAW puts together cars is how shit Mexico puts together cars. It's interesting that you mention Volkswagen because Mexicans are known to be particularly bad at that. When VW brought USDM Golf production to Mexico, reliability plummeted. When they took production back to Wolfsberg, it came right back up to the German standards that we know and love.

Anyone who buys a VW built in Mexico is a moron. All of my imports to date have been built in their designing nation, and came over here on a boat fully assembled. Started with imports with a 240SX, then I had an Impreza GC5, couple of 300SDs (still have one) and an A8. That last has electrical problems but the mechanicals are good, anyway. And there's the rub with VW; their electrical is a bit garbage, even out of Germany.

"I know he can GET the job, but can he DO the job? I'm not arguing that with you. I'm not arguing that with you!"

(memorable quote from a really funny movie)

"we're sorry we have to let you go from amazon. but here, please accept this free extra month of amazon prime for your trouble. acceptance of free month constitutes agreement not to sue our sorry asses."

Absent interference in the market by governments and/or corporations, price is determined by supply and demand, not capability. I can't think of any rational reason for anybody to interfere with the market for PDP8s, so I'm going to assume it's a free market. Although economic theory with its neat little graphs might give one the impression that it's some kind of science, the actual shape of the supply and demand graphs (and thus the equilibrium price) are determined by emotional "ugly bags of mostly water".

Scrolled down for this. I would add, "time and testing" and "testing" usually involves wide distribution. Yes, JPEG, PNG and Open Source compression libraries have had bugs, sometimes very serious ones. I still consider it some of the best code out there. I don't think being able to read the code matters. That's a red herring, unless you need to work on it. If everybody needs to work on it, it's too unfinished to be particularly good code. The only thing I've read in some of these libraries is the headers, and mostly the comments in there. It was literally self-documenting in comments the last time I looked at it. That's some good code.