Actually, the Linux patch is to put things back, and to recognize an illegal PID (per the USB spec.) anyway.

FTDI doesn't own the PID, they own the VID; they weren't changing the VID (it would have been OK if they had changed the VID to 6666, which is the recognized experimental device VID, rather than effectively bricking the device until there's semi-substantial driver changes to allow an otherwise illegal PID to be used).

It was an intentional bricking that requires bit-bang mode to correct the EEPROM contents, which they overwrote with the invalid PID, before it can be used again.

Actually, this isn't how McDonalds corporate works.

The way McDonalds works is it picks your location for you, buys it, builds a McDonalds there, and guarantees you your franchise buy-in back in one year. The franchise buy-in is $1M, which you get back in one year, and then you make that each year thereafter.

They *do* sell you trade dress items - fry boxes with the 'M' on them, and they sell you food supplies - but their primary profit actually comes from their real estate holdings, the fact that they are your landlord, and franchise fees.

Once they do sell you a franchise, they dictate your trade dress, which means corporate pays for remodeling the individual franchise stores (after all, McDonalds themselves owns the property), and when they tell you remodel, expect the crews to show up and just do it, you are at best granted minor choices on things like arrangement of the bathrooms, and the manager's office, and so on. Otherwise, they dictate. This is a typically good thing, since they know how many people will go through in a given amount of time, max, because they have a PhD in mathematics who understands queuing theory work it out.

In addition, you can't buy a franchise unless you have been a store manager, and you can't be a store manager unless you've been an assistant manager, and you can't be an assistant manager unless you've been a shift lead, and you can't be a shift lead unless you've been an ordinary employee. In other words, every step in responsibility requires that you be able to do all the jobs at the previous step in responsibility. This is why when they have walkouts, they typically don't close down over them.

So it's not like this will change the need for employees, from the line on up, or they'll have no new franchise owners, unless they totally rework their entire model. Which they won't do, since their primary profit comes from real estate, them being your landlord, and franchise fees.

This really has nothing to do with the Minimum Wage issue; that's just because the author of the opinion section piece that the OP referenced, since they could care less.

They did however throw $200M in venture funding behind the company providing the automation software and equipment a few years back. Time to recoup their investment there.

Not everyone is educable. Not everyone has value to society that's sufficient for them to support themselves.

If you are attacked by said unemployed maximized minimum wage person, perhaps you should just beat them with your buggy whip until they back off.

The qualification that in order to get an L1-B, they had to have worked for EFI for 18 months, were presumably already bound by an NDA, wanted to keep their jobs when they got back, and were already familiar with "You will do it this way because this way is the way EFI does things". How long, exactly, do you think it takes for a new employee to get up to speed on company specific policies and procedures for wiring closets and server rooms, particularly for a company that, among other things, sells outsourced compute infrastructure?

Nope. I don't. Not without a buttload of hassle, if the intent was a work visa. I think they could send you there, though, and you would be able to do the work anyway because of reciprocity agreements between the U.S. and India. IBM frequently does that sort of thing because technically, you're being paid in the U.S., so it doesn't matter that you're working remotely at an IBM facility somewhere else.

Surely, instead of spending money on smart tanks, they should have all those former Nokia employees laid off by Microsoft build them feature tanks instead?

PS: I'm still wondering why they need soldiers *inside* then, rather than having them be drive-by-wire, just like airborne drones?

You're acting like a social network is a web site. It's not, it's a fabric. If you want to be able to do this type of editing, fine, put up a web page, but don't try to pretend that you posting something that makes you look like an asshole, and then me commenting on it, calling you out for being an asshole, and then you changing the original posting so that it looks like I'm the asshole for engaging in an ad hominim attack, is somehow OK.

What the OP has suggested is more or less the old Usenet, but with a single point of failure for me being able to access the shared history of the gestalt of people who were engaged in the conversation or conversations that resulted in that gestalt in the first place. If I'm connected to you and Bob and Tom and etc., we're not just connected through our freedom of association choices, we're also connected by our shared context and history.

See above; I can't just erase our shared context from my memory, if I decide Bob is a Nazi after the fact. One of the problems with Facebook is one of things which make it useful: the extended shared social network, where I not only see what you write in a conversation, but because Bob knows you, and you know me, I get to see Bob being an ass because of his association with you. Am I just supposed to "de-friend" everyone? How do I know that I'm seeing Bob because of you, and not Tom? Maybe I'm seeing him because of both you *and* Tom?

Twitter's links are "strong" because if you "follow" them, you see every little thing they post. Facebook's links are "weak", because if you "follow" someone, you don't necessarily see every little thing they post.

The reason that offline social networks work is because you have transient freedom of association. You have less of that with Facebook, and drastically less of that with Twitter. That's why Twitter is basically a troll-sewer, and Facebook is less of one.

Another reason for the "troll-sewer" effect is that there is no longer term consequence, if you can delete your posts after the fact. By allowing the rewrite of history (discussed earlier), you remove the need for the social lubricants of politeness, civility, and (possibly pretend) rationality, which are required in real-world interactions. Because of that you end up with large amounts of vitriol over things which would have blown over, or which people would have just avoided commenting on in the first place, in order to try to keep the peace with someone they disagreed with over some issue they brought up.

If anything eventually dooms social networking, it's going to be the "Twitter effect", where people's mood swings are driven harmonic oscillators; at least Facebook is a damped, driven harmonic oscillator, and as a worst case scenario, by reducing what you see of your friends posts, or of reactive posts that tend to blow up into large threads, they have the ability to damp it further by pushing in the control rods.

A social network of the type that the OP suggested combines the worst effects of Twitter, with the worst effects of removing accountability. IT would be a highly chaotic and unstable system. This is perhaps what the OP wanted in the first place, but it's not a place most of us would choose to participate in, or participate in creating so that he could feel good about having one.

It mutates as it reproduces. It's like the rolling codes on your car alarm or garage door opener: vaccination against the previous code won't prevent you getting infected with the new one. This same effect is why you can have the cold or flu more than once in your life.

Actually, it's not.

Glaxo Smith Klein has said that even if they relax the bio safety level 2 requirements for filling the vaccine vials, after a certain (short) point, they will be converting their production of other vaccines from such diseases as rotavirus, measles, mumps, and rubella.

At that point, we are talking about trading American lives to benefit Liberian lives.

Note that the NewLink vaccine donated by Canada has demonstrated Ebola-like symptoms in many of the people who've been inoculated in Phase I trials, so it's entirely possible Canada Health has been giving those people either the virus or a weakened strain of the virus, and is actually infecting people. Apart from that, they also have the fill rate problem that GSK was complaining about, which would short-sheet supplies of other vaccines.

How exactly is coming in through the airports with ebola, where you have a nice vector to spread the virus both nationally and internationally, superior to people sneaking into the country with ebola?

No, you had alternate indoctrination.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v...

"The great leader Chairman Mao teaches us; promote physical fitness exercises, and improve people's physical condition. We must always be ready to protect our country."

Note that I first heard this in a U.S. social studies/world history class when I was 14 years old, following normalization of relations with China. And yes, we did the exercises.

Patriotism is not necessarily a bad thing, but to try to claim that it's a U.S. phenomenon because of "The Pledge of Allegiance" is any more indoctrinating than radio broadcasts of physical fitness exercises as part of military readiness is disingenuous.

P.S.: They were off the radio in China for a while, but they are back on the air. This is a daily occurrence in China to this day; The Pledge of Allegiance is no longer practiced in most U.S. schools, although, except in 4 states where it's outlawed, it's generally at the discretion of the school board and/or individual teacher. Most avoid the controversy.

My understanding from someone familiar with the case is that they were in the U.S. on L1-B visas that had been legally applied for; it's common practice for companies like IBM to pay their existing wage plus a per diem when they send someone to India to train people there, or to otherwise resolve issues in the foreign country.

From what I've been told, this is a misunderstanding on the part of EFI with regard to equivalence between the labor laws that apply in the other direction, and the labor laws that apply in the U.S. not being equivalent. It's why the fine was so low, and it's why only the California minimum wage was enforced in the payout to the workers, and why additional charges were not leveled at EFI by the USCIS.

It's pretty common for many organizations to do this (without the prevailing wage screwup) to avoid having to swear third party contractors or temporary employees to secrecy, without a relatively big carrot/stick to get them to keep their secrets. At least one of the photographs of the aluminum laser cut single piece MacBook case was a result of bringing in outside contractors to put down new carpet squares in the lab in question.

A lot of U.S. people tend to dislike this type of thing because it means that they don't get the temporary job that they can then leverage to get cell phone pictures to sell Engadget and really cash in on the situation, since a temporary position paying prevailing wages for a short term gig isn't going to come anywhere close to matching a $50,000 payday from a tech blog. They also don't believe that the foreign workers deserve to have the jobs they do in their native country, when it could be done for much higher cost in the U.S. by a less qualified American.

I think a lot of the SVC people laid off were people working on Microsoft Products for Apple. Mountain View, at the facility South of the I-101/I-85 interchange, near Moffett Field, were there to do work on Mac OS X products. I you look at the Microsoft job postings, you'll see that almost everyone in APEX is a continuing engineer, and that there are a small number of Objective-C and iOS openings that all appear to be concentrated on front-ending Office 365 on Mac OS X and iPhone, iPod, and iPad, rather than native applications.

I expect this is the non-announcement that Office 2014 for Apple products is going to be nothing more than a front-end wrapper for their subscription products. This somewhat makes sense, given that Apple has been pressuring them on productivity apps on their platforms, and that "good enough" is the enemy of "expensive". If you couple this with Mac OS X *never* having been a tier 1 platform for Office products (where's VB 5, VB.Net, Acces, etc. for Mac OS X?), it was never intended that Apple desktop systems be able to compete with Windows desktop systems in terms of being able to do the same vertical market development using ports from Windows vertical market development. It was an avoidance of cannibalizing the Windows market in that area.

Obviously, I could be wrong, but when working at Apple, I visited the Office developers there several times to deal with OS and kernel related issues; the only place they seem to be willing to hire Objective-C people seems to be Redmond or Bellevue, and it appears to be for things like Skype development, not office; the APEX jobs appear to be remaining in Mountain View at present, and greatly scaled back.

I believe the actual concern is that with a long enough snippet, people lose interest, and instead of driving traffic to the web site, you actually detract from the traffic that gets sent to the site.

This was a concern for U.S. newspapers as well, a few years back, but given that most of their content is syndicated off the AP newswire, or by United Press International, or by Reuters, or some other wire service, there's very little left of value in a paper that's failing to do journalism, and therefore isn't creating content that a clone of everyone else's content.

The actual number you are looking for is 85%.

Straight out of Donald Knuth volume 3: Sorting and Searching; at 85% fill, a perfect hash starts degrading in performance.

The basis of the Berkeley Fast File System warn level was an 85% fill on the disk, which the filesystem effectively hashed data allocations onto. As people started getting larger and larger disks, they began to be concerned about "wasted space" in the free reserve, and moved the warnings down to 10%, then 8%, and so on.

This is what the OP is suggesting (again) for very large disks, but without something like an LFS and a background defragger, fundamentally, most FS implementations performance still starts to drop of a 85%+ fill. Background defraggers/"cleaner daemons" have their own performance issues (e.g. like Garbage Collectors, they tend to run at the worst possible times, as in when you are putting performance pressure on the system already).

But as Ken Thompson said: "The steady state of disks is full".