If you get SWATed by mistake, you won't even get a chance to "be calm" - the first thing you'll know is your door being broken in and a flashbang flying in. Go ahead, stay calm.

Don't forget that states themselves can initiate an amendment (through convention). Then you basically just need 3/4 of the states - first to submit the amendment, and then to ratify it.

Here's a fun fact: because of the disparity in state size and population, it's actually possible for the Constitution to be amended with less than 50% of electorate in favor, so long as they are all in smaller states (if you take the list of states and sort by population, you'll see that the top 1/4 adds up to more than 50%).

Exactly.

And any law enacted that restricts citizens' speech (whether it is directed against government, or other citizens, or something else entirely), is enacted by the government. By Congress, specifically.

And the Constitution specifically prohibits the government to enact such laws.

Seriously, you're arguing against the literal meaning of the amendment. Even ignoring the centuries of precedence on the subject (which convincingly say that you're wrong - have a look at Brandenburg v. Ohio), even just the text itself makes it blatantly clear: Congress shall make no law. Don't embarrass yourself.

In the fact that it happened in every other communist country to date that has underwent a similar process.

No, but I trust their government to be pragmatic. It's easier to rule over fed people than it is to rule over hungry people. And when there's a fresh new revenue stream, and not even crumbs from it get to the people, the latter get restless, and restlessness leads to riots. Any smart and successful dictator knows that. Judging by how long the Castros have been going, they're not deficient on both counts. So yes, they will share. Not much, perhaps, but even a little helps.

And it did help, of course. If everyone would embargo Cuba, it would be as much of a shithole as DPRK is. But it's not.

Note that $500 is about 300 pounds - right in line with the story. And smaller cities in Zhejiang typically are 20-30% less than the Shanghai area. I know in Suzhou my factories tend to pay around 2500 RMB for a 1-2 year experienced worker, with performance bonuses adding up to 1000 RMB on top of that.

Really? I think you don't know China, nor do you do any business there. Zhejiang has the highest minimum wage, and it peaks in Ningbo at 1550 RMB per month (this information is out of date a bit, but pretty close to current conditions). That's 160 pounds sterling. Given that only inexperienced/brand new workers will earn minimum wage, the range of 200 to 300 pounds sterling is completely understandable and expected (that's about 2000 to 3000 RMB per month).

Additionally, new sales staff/office trainees in places like Shanghai run about 3500 RMB per month (low-level white collar) and a fresh acoustical engineering grad from the University of Nanjing (top Chinese school) in the top 10% of his class earns 4500 RMB (about 450 pounds sterling) per month. A very experienced (8 year) office manager with excellent English skills and 5 years experience working for Western companies earns 8000 RMB per month. How do I know? I just returned 4 days ago from Shanghai, where I signed contracts for all those positions.

Factory workers in China in the East rarely start at more than minimum wage. 1500 to 2000 RMB is a very good starting wage, and line bosses/leads may earn double that amount. Well below your 5000 RMB per month minimum salary.

But they can only do that if I've had my phone on since 2003. :-D

What? It will happen automatically when I turn it back on? *sigh*

All drivers on OS X are already required to tell the operating system ahead of time that a device is about to DMA to memory. That's how that VT-d is able to configure the IOMMU hardware to allow those devices to access RAM without worrying about 64-bit address spaces. So the OS already knows precisely which pages of physical RAM should be accessible by PCIe devices using DMA. If other pages of RAM are accessible, that's a bug.

Similarly, making the Thunderbolt controller's IOMMU mappings be driven by that part of the kernel should not break any drivers at all, by definition, because PCIe devices shouldn't be issuing DMA requests except at driver-preapproved locations. So AFAIK, the only way such a fix could break any device would be if that device was trying to do something really dangerous, like reprogramming one of the PCI bus bridges, or reflashing the computer's EFI firmware....

I mean, I suppose that some drivers might be inadvertently configuring a mapping for a page of memory that also contains executable code or class instances (with function pointers), in which case fully fixing this would also require Apple to modify the IOMemoryDescriptor class to ensure that the DMA-enabled pages are whole pages owned by the descriptor, but that should still be pretty minor, and should result in only a modest amount of wired kernel memory bloat.

In the worst case, such a change might require a CPU-driven copy-on-prepare and/or copy-on-complete to work around drivers that provide their own virtual addresses for a memory descriptor that aren't page-aligned, which would cause a big performance hit for those few drivers, but I'd expect most driver developers to quickly fix those design mistakes to eliminate the performance hit. (And that's assuming this isn't done already—for some reason, I thought those buffers had to be page aligned or you'd get a panic, but I'm not seeing anything about it in the docs, so I might be remembering wrong.)

Oh, to boot, I can hit A8 on my guitar fretboard. That's 7,000+ Hz.

I don't think you know anything about overtones and harmonics. Go ahead, run your guitar through a spectral analyzer. I'll be waiting here.

'It should be safe to conclude that humans can see frame rates greater than 24 fps."

We can go even faster than that.

While this video I just shot won't show it very well due to FPS limitations, you can easily perceive much faster than anyone here assumes. In the frequency range I'm playing in, you've got THOUSANDS of hertz in difference on some of these notes. The LED setup makes it REALLY easy to see in real time.

Are they guaranteeing throughput? Then it's meaningless for most folks. It's like putting tires rated for 200 MPH on your care and assuming it will now go 200 MPH.

Presidents, governors and mayors all do this kind of thing -- call up private businesses and ask them to do stuff. The mayor may call a local business and ask it to reconsider withdrawing its sponsorship of the local youth baseball league. The governor might call up union leaders and senior management in a strike, particularly if it affects things lots of people need like transit or health care.

This is the exercise of *soft* power, of influence rather than of compulsion. Obama can't call Apple and compel them to change their stance. But he can call Tim Cook and *persuade* him, possibly with more success than Michael Lynton, particuarly given that the two may be having some kind of dispute. Ego *does* play a role in CEO decision making.

Are you forgettingelectrical signals don't propagate at light speed? Bring that up a few more ns. Now toss in all your processing, etc in a digital solution.

" Mackie 1404"

Not eeeeeeven close, but at least you got the brand right. You're missing the digital /SPDIF and optical outputs on the back - I've timed this from the same equipment and different outputs. Digital adds latency like mad.

 

Even if 1% of that money gets to the people (and, pragmatically speaking, more of it will for sure), then they are going to be better off.

More importantly, if it prompts economic reforms along the lines of what most other communist countries did - the closest example here probably being Vietnam - the people are going to be vastly better off even if the authoritarian political system remains in place.

Either way, while we can only guess what will happen without sanctions, we know full well what happens with the sanctions: absolutely nothing. So what exactly is their purpose then?

Blame them for feeling that way, no (well, it depends on who they were before Castro; if it's one of Batista's cronies, or the members of the top ruling elite supporting him, I'd say they can suck it and go cry in a corner; I have no sympathy for people robbing others under gunpoint when they get robbed themselves in a similar fashion). But I will blame them for letting that emotion guide their political decisions, and especially for pushing the same onto others.

Oh, as for my comfy chair. I was born in a communist country. Don't try that "you rich American asshole can't understand" on me.