that only exist to give housewives/househusbands something to do with their time

Definitely not - they're there to get people to make decisions that they otherwise wouldn't make, usually bad ones.

People love to get something for nothing. "$1 off a "premium" bag of wavy potato chips! Hell yeah!" No matter that the generic wavy potato chips are still fifty cents less and taste the same - it's a DEAL!

Kohls is famous for marking up their goods by 300% and then having a 30% off sale. The lines are out the door for "the savings". JC Penney tried to do away with that scheme and nearly went bankrupt. They went back to it this year and are returning to profitability.

If you don't have a concrete estimate of value for what you're purchasing, you can get wildly abused by the marketeers. That value will be subjective, but you better darn well know what it is if you don't want to get taken. I buy clothes at Kohls, but unless I'm desperate I limit myself to the 70% off clearance rack. That's where I find my valuation meets their prices. YMMV.

Except they're only doing this to their USB VID/PID - which IS THEIRS.

No. They're doing it to property that other people own. Just because that property advertises a fraudulent USB ID does not transfer ownership of that property to FTDI. They are intentionally breaking other peoples' property and even crowing about it.

FTDI is taking an end-justifies-the means stance, and implementing a vigilante approach. It's drinking the imaginary property Kool-Aid that gets people drunk on ideas like this, and they seem to lose all judgment.

"If I want to deprive you of your watch, I shall certainly have to fight for it; if I want to buy your watch, I shall have to pay you for it; and if I want a gift, I shall have to plead for it; and, according to the means I employ, the watch is stolen property, my own property, or a donation. Thus we see three different results from three different means. Will you still say that means do not matter?" - MK Gandhi

That makes no sense.

Look at it from a macro-economic perspective: The reason we're moving to automation is because it increases efficiency, allowing us to produce more goods with fewer resources. That will increase average standard of living.

There are a couple of ways it could go wrong, of course. One is that the increased efficiency and therefore increased wealth could end up concentrated in the hands a small percentage of super-wealthy people. We've actually seen a lot of this over the last few decades, but we've seen it previously during other technology-driven economic restructurings as well, and what always happens is that competition eventually drives the margins of the super successful down and in the end the wealth ends up getting spread more broadly.

That points to the other way it could go wrong: The common man only gets his share of the increased wealth by doing something to earn it. Even though increased efficiency means there's more to go around, barring some sort of large scale government-driven redistribution, you still have to work for your share of it... which means you have to be able to do something that others who have wealth consider of sufficient value to pay you. So the other way it could go wrong is that there may simply be nothing available for such people to do.

That last is also a risk we've seen bandied about in past economic shifts, especially the shift from agricultural to industrial labor. What has happened in the past is that we've created new kinds of jobs doing previously unheard-of or even previously-frivolous things. I don't see any reason that this time should be different. I expect the transition to be painful -- and the faster it happens the more painful it will be -- but I don't think there's any end to what people want. People with resources will always want things that people without resources can supply. I don't claim to have any idea what those things will be.

It's also possible that I'm wrong, and that we'll have to take a socialistic approach to distributing the fruits of automation-driven productivity increases. I don't think so, and I think we should be careful not to move that direction too quickly, because it has huge negative impacts on productivity and we're going to need all of the productivity increases we can get, but it is possible.

The fact is that it's going to happen regardless of where minimum wages are set, or even if there are legally-mandated minimum wages (as opposed to the market-determined real minimum wages). Anyone who thinks most unskilled jobs aren't going away is crazy. The question is at what rate this change will occur, and it seems quite clear that high minimum wages will make more automation economical sooner, pushing the rate of change.

We're edging towards a major economic restructuring driven by widespread automation. We've had automation-driven restructurings in the past, and dealt with them, and this too will be handled. But when you're talking about widespread elimination of old jobs and creation of new jobs, speed kills. Retraining, and even just adjusting to the new reality, take time, and in the meantime millions upon millions of displaced workers are a huge drain on the economy, not to mention miserable.

I think it's pretty clear that high minimum wages are a forcing function for this transition, and I don't think it's something we really want to force. Ideally, it would be better to slow it down, at least in terms of the human cost, though the most obvious mechanisms for slowing it (labor subsidies) may also dangerously distort the economy.

Ebola is not highly communicable. It's more communicable than, say, HIV, but it's still pretty low on the communicability scale, and even lower if you're asymptomatic.

Unless you are part of a protest group (organised or not) with more than about 25K members, you probably won't. The Party knows that people blowing off steam are not a threat, but are easy to turn into people who are a threat.

I don't disagree with this, but I wonder why you think that this means it has more liberty. Unless you happen to be one of the ones that controls most of the capital, of course.

What's wrong with our system is that corporate shills call anyone who suggests any restraint on corporate behavior a "socialist", and enough people are scared that only bloodless corporate tools can get elected.

We vote like a bunch of pussies, and we get the government we deserve.

That's because you use ridiculously vaguye language like "easy to transmit". You need to specify the conditions under which the potential transmission takes place. What peoiple don't realize is just how primitive conditions are in Africa, and what a difference it makes. These are countries where medical providers re-use latex gloves, sometimes even hypodermic needles. Granted, this guy was part a medical mission that probably had all the protective equipment, but you have to keep in mind that the primitive conditions that preceded them meant that there have been some TEN THOUSAND cases in the region.

It's immensely labor intensive to take care of an Ebola patient, especially with the precautions required by close contact., but the overwhelming numbers introduces yet another deadly risk factor: fatigue.

So yes, I suppose you could say the medical personnel who contracted Ebola are stupid because they made a mistake under pressure. But what about the rest of us? This epidemic should never have got big enough to pose a global concern. It was our choice to cut the CDC's emergency preparedness budget to a billion dollars below the FY 2002 mark.

I was with you right up to the point where you demonstrated that you are okay with making rape jokes.

My wife's daily driver is a MacBook Pro. All the stuff she needs for home is readily available on OSX as easily as on Windows, e.g., Quicken; work is a non-issue because the products she supports are on iOS. Even if the vendors sometimes treat their OSX ports as second-class citizens, it's rare that any basic feature we care about is missing. It's just the latest bling that's usually not ported right away.

OTOH, I wouldn't be able to use a Mac for my job, because my employer requires us to use things including custom in-house apps, that are only available on Windows. Likewise some of the apps our kids use for school. The stuff I do at home beyond web surfing and such, I do on Linux.

Viva ecumenism!

Or, you can install the free (for noncommercial use) VMware Player, and in about an hour of googling and not-too-difficult hacking, plus the time to legally download the installation media, you can try out OSX on your existing Windows or Linux machine.

It won't let you know what a low-end Mac Mini feels like as a daily driver, and it's not what I'd recommend for an HTPC, but if you wanted to try cobbling together a small app to see what it's like to develop on OSX compared to Windows or Linux, it's about as low a barrier to entry there is.

At 120 hours a week you don't have much time to spend any of that windfall, and by the time you do have time to go shopping you're spending it in India.

There's not even enough time left to sleep, eat and shower - one ought be skeptical of the claims.

There's a rapid diagnostic test that is developed and can be at West African airport departure gates in less than three months if the FDA gets out of the way. I know, it's only nutters like the NPR health sciences correspondent going on about this - was Dr. Paul also saying crazy things like the government is making the situation worse? Instead, they should totally go ahead and implement a travel ban so people sneak into the country with ebola instead of coming through the airports.

Meanwhile nobody in the US is infected with ebola and cattle are still far more dangerous, right? Wait - fear, fear, fear! Give us power and ... fear! Talk about cult leaders.