Washable? If printing eventually becomes sufficiently ubiquitous and refined, all you need care about is "recyclable." Toss the day's clothes in the bin. Pick what you want to wear tomorrow from a catalog, and let it print overnight. The fibers from today's garment will get recovered and added to the feedstock for the printer. The recycled fibers can be washed agressively without concern for the state of the garment they used to be. Eventually fibers wear out and you need some more feedstock.

And don't forget that your dealer would love to be able to download and print replacements and install them for you. No warehousing stock on hand. No shipping. No dealing with the manufacturer to source it. Just having the part for every model, for every year, "in stock" within a few minutes, guaranteed would be a huge win even if you didn't bother having a nice printer at home and installing the part yourself.

You can also make accounts using the names of real students for the friend requesting, or completely random ones. Some people won't friend the "Mascott" account, but may approve a request from somebody they think they know. A lot of people won't even notice being friends with two "Steve Smiths," but you could change the name on the account after getting friended pretty quietly to avoid being accidentally contacted as the actual person.

Figure out the human effort involved and work on that. "What the market will bear" means "How much can I rip a guy off without going to jail".

Except that charging more for semiconductors probably wouldn't land anybody in jail. So, your premise is very confusing. If somebody wanted to start a factory for NAND and charge more that what anybody else does, then they are perfectly entitled. It's not a very good business model, and they probably won't make any money because very few people would want to buy the product. But, they could do it if they wanted. You seem to have some very strange beliefs about how the economy works, which are pretty consistently contrary to how the economy actually works.

Just like your previous claim that "It's made by a machine, so it costs less." In the end, you are only ever paying for human labor or location. That's it. Whether naked people make a product bare handed, use simple stone tools, or high end fab equipment is all irrelevant. The chips cost a lot of money because somebody has to build the fab equipment, somebody has to operate it, and you need somewhere to put it all. They sell for a high price because there is a market of people who see that the product is more valuable to them than having that many dollars in their pocket.

You are absolutely right. The whole summary doesn't make any sense at all... first of all, the Macs run 32-bit applications just fine. Second, if you can emulate a 64-bit ARM, you can emulate a 32-bit ARM. Third, phone apps would suck on a laptop or desktop.

The logic of the article may still make some small amount of sense. Imagine a photo editor on iOS. Now imagine that there is an easy way to use your iOS apps on OS-XI. The only problem is that if your Mac Pro has 64 GB of RAM, and your iPhone is 32 bit, you may not get much benefit running that app on the bigger fancier system. OTOH, if the iPhone is 64 bit, then a future developer might make sure that the app has some extra bells and whistles in it that aren't very practical on a phone, but are really only useful when you run that app on a larger system.

It's not just a technical issue that the article seems to be trying to talk about. It's a broader ecosystem / psychology / platform possibility.

I was worried that Flash might stay expensive for a while, but now that an analyst is predicting it I know it won't actually happen. So, expect a massive crashing in prices pretty much immediately.

The proposals I have seem for extreme term limits seem good at a glance, but none of them address the fact that it would in practice hand massive power to lobbyists. When everybody in the legislature is brand new, they can't be an expert on every issue that comes up. Thus when some nice guy who contributed to the campaign says, "Oh hey, I know all about water rights in the west," or flood insurance, or whatever it is, he's the one teaching the Congress however he wants about whatever he wants. You need some career bureaucrats to manage something as large as running the government, otherwise somebody will do it for you. We need really fundamental, far reaching reforms about how the US government does business to go along with term limits. It has to be done in concert with lobbying reform, campaign finance, and streamlining of federal responsibilities.

This is categorically false. Individual output of programmers vary by an order of magnitude (10x source [construx.com]). Literally one guy can be worth ten others. And this is why the "do you really need rockstars" is always a yes. Even if you are not trying to solve hard problems you can either hire 10x guys @ 50k a year or one guy at 150k a year. You make the choice.

  "Do you really need rockstars?" is absolutely not always a yes. But, there are indeed cases where that's true. I recently left a day job, and I have some obscure specialities, so I have basically declared myself a rockstar. My old job was interested in knowing if I would be available to do freelance work. I said yes, but gave them a day rate that was probably much higher than they were expecting. So far, they haven't needed me, which is just fine. Eventually, they may well wind up needing me because they know I would be able to do in two weeks some things that it would take them months to get a generic "Okay" programmer up to speed enough to even start figuring out. The trick is to always take it on a case by case basis. Sometimes you have no need for a rockstar. Do your project with a great team of competent developers who are great to work with, and deliver a great product. Every once in a while, you want to do a project that you can't do alone because there is some obscure specialty that some insane jackass knows inside and out. 9 time out of ten, rockstar isn't as valuable to you as the day rate. But, every once in a while, yeah, something comes up where the cost of dealing with a lunatic is well worth it. Same as with any other developer, or any other job, you make a cost benefit analysis about the particular situation. There isn't a useful "always."

For one thing, on classic Mac OS, this sort of functionality was generally done with extensions which required rebooting the machine to take advantage of. You couldn't just drop an extension into the Macintosh HD:System:Extensions folder and start using the functionality without interruption. Support for IBP frame ("Long GOP") style codecs with out of order frame references was also extremely difficult to shoehorn into the design of the early QuickTime API. For a very long time, there wasn't anywhere you could put a file that would add robust support to it. And, if you can't conceive of any other way to do it, try to add a codec to VLC or FFMPEG. Yeah, "Put a codec in a directory" is really obvious when somebody says it out loud, but actually making it work really well was extremely rare when BeOS was doing it.

Or even try to add a codec to a Windows box today without an installer, for a Windows native application. Where do DirectShow filters go? Or was it a Video For Windows thing? Or... And then you have to make registry changes because just having a codec in a directory isn't enough to make it fully work. A codec like Cineform also wants to register a control panel applet to control decode behavior. They've had plenty of time to refine it and make it work easily as you describe being blazingly obvious...

More importantly. The source code of a library isn't necessarily any use for understanding best practices for using a library. Reading libavcodec would be gloriously unhelpful for adding video support to an application.

The amendment vote was 205-217. That's not losing by too much.

Well thank goodness it didn't pass. According to the NSA with their excellent monitoring of current events, they report that they have just discovered 205 terrorists that need to be watched closely and exposed! Who knew we were in such danger...

Well, I'm sure that'll be tomorrow's headline, anyway.

Nah, all the piracy just means *AA can't afford to hire good trolls anymore.

Not every project needs an upper limit, but some certainly do. A friend of mine did the 3Doodler kickstarter and it also wound up unexpectedly successful. (Blew through the original goal in the first few hours, and wound up making a few million dollars at the end of the 30 day campaign.) When they sold out of the planned first batch, there was a bit of a scramble to estimate how quickly a second batch could be made, how big it should be, etc. But, they didn't change the design of the product, so they were basically scalable by pushing delivery deadlines for successive batches out. Of course, the risk is if you have underestimated a per unit cost that would have become obvious after the first batch, you are still locked in to deliver subsequent batches at whatever price you got for them. If you sold the first batch, and then did a re-analysis of how best to do the second batch, it's possible that things could be done better.

When you pitch in for something like a Kickstarter project, making a guess of how well the people will handle the scaling is just a part of what you have to estimate. If there isn't a history of successful delivery of similar projects, you have to deal with the likelihood that your investment won't pan out. If there is a history of it, you still have to deal with the possibility. That's what happens when you spend money on something that doesn't exist.

That said, the game devs should absolutely stick to making an initial delivery before worrying about stretch goals. I have never seen a significant game project come in ahead of schedule or under budget. Ever. I've been starting some indie game dev stuff on my own time recently, and just getting a crappy game out the door really is a shocking amount of work. Getting a good game out the door is an almost inconceivable amount of work, and getting exactly the game of your dreams out the door is simply impossible. Considering that the original planned budget of the game was such a small percentage of the ultimate take, they could have just done the original game as a "practice run" to give something to the players and then used whatever was left as the budget for the bigger fancier sequel.

The age cutoff is arbitrary. But when we do not treat it as inviolate, then we do us all a disservice. In practical terms, minors have no rights, and thus should have less responsibility. That is, they should never be tried as an adult, under any circumstances. It is always their parents' responsibility if their upbringing comes out wrong.

In the inner city, tons of young kids get adult sentences for being involved in the drug trade. So, it is already far from an inviolate already. There is a disproportionate portion of young people convicted as adults who are racial minorities, so that's another big issue with the legal system at present. But, it's silly to say that not being mature enough to automatically be trusted to sign your own contracts inherently means that you should be excused for rape.

IMO, the way it should work is that everything is recorded, and made publicly available after, say, 7 days. In that time, and officer can request that something specific be witheld from the public record. the process would basically be the same as a warrant, where the officer would go to a judge, who would review the footage and would sign off on the redaction. If the footage came up in a court case, it would be possible to petition to get it unsealed. This would cover all sorts of situations. A bust of a child pornographer might involve several minutes of child porn, for example, and you probably wouldn't want to publish that, given the point of bothering to arrest the child porn publisher. Likewise, you might want to protect a source or informant, which could be pretty broadly defined to include 'potential sources,' which would cover shopkeepers who don't want to be specifically on record as being friendly with the cops, but who the cops want to interact with and establish a relationship that may be useful to exploit in the future.

Besides, once there is a year of footage being recorded every day, it may not matter much if you get recorded talking to the cops. Your enemies will have to invest a massive labor force to find footage of you making off color jokes by watching all of it. (Unless the government successfully makes some awesome public facing database for finding this stuff, but in reality they would just hand half a billion dollars to a vendor, wait five years, and then declare failure on a project like that which a startup could have working reasonably well in a few weeks...)