Babel

Tracks, if he likes it HO-gauge

If proven true in court, this justifies a boycott of Oracle products by all us techies until Oracle produce an open salary audit proving no racial differentials between staff at the same locations. The allegation if true is disgraceful

Signature apps are what makes platforms. For an odd and interesting example, look up 'Torque App' - I wont provide a link as I'm not involved or any sort of freelance marketer - basically its an app that allows an Android smartphone or tablet to directly interact (via a US$10 bluetooth OBD2 adapter) with the ECUs of a running vehicle, allowing dynamic logging of hundreds of variables, live display of most of them, changing of vehicle settings on the fly, resetting of glitching systems, reading and clearing error codes, optimisation of fuel economy....

In the performance and economy/environmental motoring worlds as well as the home-based car repair fraternity this app has such a following it influences phone handset or tablet choice among whole forums. iPhone doesnt have a comparable app - well there's one but it requires a particular adapter that costs a lot, and doesnt do as much. Windows store also has a few apps but none of the have the following or the universal recognition, and some are reported as having problems with bluetooth adapters.

For me, what Windows store needs is the sorts of apps that are making waves already on mobile devices,not bastardised versions of Windows desktop apps. It may be too late.

Unfortunately Win8 and RT arent really compatible, they're barely even cross-compileable. Your developer would have to write / rewrite & maintain a separate RT version codebase of every app. Which has killed the main reason for Windows RT stone dead.

Seriously, there is so much freely available Unix derived code available with permissive licenses, and it works better than anything they could make from scratch or by improving the NT kernel. They should fork the BSD kernel, port the Windows 7 UI to it with the necessary upgrades, and write a Win32 emulation/compatibility mode for legacy apps. It can't be that hard, WINE et al were able to do it with zero help from MS.

Apple essentially did the same exact thing with less money and manpower than MS has at their disposal.

Absolutely true, if you're willing to plan it out ahead of time and use pre-emptive force. Libertarians can't use preemptive force, it's sort of their thing. They need the desperate poor to make the first move so they can kill them in self-defense. The response will of course be disproportional, but as long as its technically a reaction and not an initiation of force, it's kosher in their religion.

They'd rather pay the, as you pointed out, much greater costs of extermination/disposal of the "undesirables" because it's the ideologically pure position in their system of thought. Libertarians don't really care about outcomes, they obsess on keeping the process pure.

The end game of these libertarian fantasies is the literal wholesale murder of millions of poor "undesirables", either directly on the small scale and justified as self defense or the defence of property, or enmasse through isolation into ghettos and systematic starvation. It would dwarf the Holocaust in numbers of dead.

If you start with the premise (itself not unreasonable) that every individual has a right to defend themselves from harm and their property from theft, and you have millions of people with no ability to survive other than the appropriation of resources by force, you're going to end up with a lot of dead humans. And when the tent cities gather enough boldness and enough desperation to march on the proper cities, then you'd have the military and police slaughtering thousands at a time to protect the property rights of the middle and upper classes.

Horrifying to imagine, but there are some people who would not only be willing to go through this conflagration, but would practically welcome it. Indeed, some are even working in earnest to bring it about. They want to see the streets run red with the blood of the poor. The worst reflection I've ever had on the human condition is that some of them don't just see this nightmare as a horrible means justified by a glorious utopian end--the process itself satisfies some dark urge inside them to cause pain on the largest scale possible. If evil exists, this is it.

This is how I know you're lying. You should have stopped at the just plausible anecdote, but you couldn't resist overreaching and throwing some stereotypical beuracratic incompetence into your yarn.

You'll be happy to find out that SNAP (aka "food stamps") is already one of the best run programs our government has ever set up in terms of efficency and lack of fraud. It is a model for effective solutions to social problems. That fraud is rampant among SNAP receipients is simply a myth--and one that has been deliberatly crafted over generations to achieve certain political goals.

There will come a time when people who are guilty of nothing more than being born of mere average intelligence will not have any "meaningful" contributions to make to the scaffolding of society. We're already there for a lot of people. What do you propose we do about them? They're going to get their means of survival one way or another. I'd rather it be a peaceful and orderly process instead of violent anarchy. They may not have the technical skills to be computer programmers or engineers, nor the artistic talent to be great painters or composers, but guns, clubs, and jars of gasoline are technologies they'll readily understand and immediately grasp the utility of in their struggle to exist. Denied the opportunity to participate in the future economy by their unexceptional intelligence, they will not simply lay down and resign themselves to starving to death.

Incorrect I was unemployed for a month last year, claimed JSA and HB, both were paid direct to me every fortnight, separately. I am NOT in the experimental Universal credit area: You are wrong. This has been the standard for most claimants for over 2 years

Wouldnt dream of quoting that vile organ of bile - I'm well into the left of the spectrum, just more anti-gambling and anti-addiction than most liberals.

Currently, Housing Benefit (rent) is paid to the tenant by default; However, if the tenant falls more than 2 months behind then payments are switched to go direct to the Landlord.

This change was made under the last Labour government as a way of encouraging tenants to get some practice at budgeting for expenses; Naturally for a small and feckless proportion of the housing benefit recipients, the extra money paid direct was a windfall they spent on drink, gambling and drugs.

Should be added that for most recipients the total of housing benefit received is less than the total rent and they are expected to make up any excess from their unemployment or disability living allowance payments (where 'rents' include standing charges such as power, heating, council tax anyway) - so even if the landlord has a defaulting tenant and gets direct payments from the local authority, they only receive the element of the total rent that relates to actual rent, and must pursue the tenant for the rest.

this system has caused many UK landlords to refuse to rent premises to recipients on housing benefit (although of course if a tenant went from employed to HB and kept up the payments rather than defaulting, the landlord would never know, which is some shielding...)