I seriously doubt that. I only have global sales number, not US specific, but there are many online retailers that are larger. Newegg had around $2.7 billion in revenue in 2013. The same year Amazon had $68 billion, Apple had $18 billion, Staples and Walmart both had around $10 billion in online sales. Sears (a company that every talks about as dieing) and QVC (yes the website for that crappy home marketing TV station) both had nearly $5 billion in revenue. Even among consumer electronics CDW and Best Buy had more online sales at over $3 billion each. And again, while these are global numbers, most of those companies are US based, with strong US sales.

Newegg is one of hundreds of online retailers of simular size. While it is a great company, it's adoption of bitcoin is by no means an indication that something has gone mainstream.

Source: http://www.wsj.com/news/intera...

Yes, H.265 support is out there and Netflix et al are using it. The question is how long they'll keep using it now that HEVC Advance has announced they're taking 0.5% of Netflix's revenue.

Coding is likely to be obsolete in a few years - replaced by deep learning systems as those systems increase in capability, and so the last thing we should do is steer kids away from math and toward coding.

One of my computer science profs said that, pretty much word for word, when I suggested I wasn't interested in grad school. Except at the time "CASE" was the big buzzword.

From the rate of progress I've seen with these "make coding obsolete" initiatives, I expect I'll be well retired before that happens. And, even if they get something working, there's still going to be a job market for coders in gluing all these deep learning systems together.

It is a bug in OpenSSH misusing PAM. They argue that these sorts of bugs wouldn't be as easy to make if PAM was less complicated, which is certainly true, but it is still a bug in OpenSSH.

And it doesn't work for the borrowers either. If people make their cars available for use when they don't need them, then that will mean that most cars will only be available for use during times of low demand, and will be occupied during time of high demand. With that availability, shared cars will barely dent the existing taxi and public transportation systems.

I have seen a ton of articles lately pushing the idea that once automated cars are reality that no one will need/want to own cars. I'm sorry, but taxis have been around since before the car was invented and they still only fill a minor role in our transportation needs. There are reasons for this, and automated cars don't address any of those issues.

Oh, wait, you didn't need to pass a test for that.

I'm just trying to think how that would have been possible. I think back then there was a medical exception you could plead for. I didn't. I passed the 20 WPM test fair and square and got K6BP as a vanity call, long before there was any way to get that call without passing a 20 WPM test.

Unfortunately, ARRL did fight to keep those code speeds in place, and to keep code requirements, for the last several decades that I know of and probably continuously since 1936. Of course there was all of the regulation around incentive licensing, where code speeds were given a primary role. Just a few years ago, they sent Rod Stafford to the final IARU meeting on the code issue with one mission: preventing an international vote for removal of S25.5 . They lost.

I am not blaming this on ARRL staff and officers. Many of them have privately told me of their support, including some directors and their First VP, now SK. It's the membership that has been the problem.

I am having a lot of trouble believing the government agency and NGO thing, as well. I talked with some corporate emergency managers as part of my opposition to the encryption proceeding (we won that too, by the way, and I dragged an unwilling ARRL, who had said they would not comment, into the fight). Big hospitals, etc.

What I got from the corporate folks was that their management was resistant to using Radio Amateurs regardless of what the law was. Not that they were chomping at the bit waiting to be able to carry HIPAA-protected emergency information via encrypted Amateur radio. Indeed, if you read the encryption proceeding, public agencies and corporations hardly commented at all. That point was made very clearly in FCC's statement - the agencies that were theorized by Amateurs to want encryption didn't show any interest in the proceeding.

So, I am having trouble believing that the federal agency and NGO thing is real because of that.

In her particular case, yes. That's why I said:

one might get a bit suspicious if this consistently happens to people in an under-represent demographic within the company.

The Technican Element 3 test wasn't more difficult than the Novice Element 1 and 2 together, so Technican became the lowest license class when they stopped having to take Element 1.

The change to 13 WPM was in 1936, and was specifically to reduce the number of Amateur applicants. It was 10 WPM before that. ARRL asked for 12.5 WPM in their filing, FCC rounded the number because they felt it would be difficult to set 12.5 on the Instructograph and other equipment available for code practice at the time.

It was meant to keep otherwise-worthy hams out of the hobby. And then we let that requirement keep going for 60 years.

The Indianapolis cop episode was back in 2009. It wasn't the first time we've had intruders, and won't be the last, and if you have to reach back that long for an example, the situation can't be that bad. It had nothing to do with code rules or NGOs getting their operators licenses.

A satphone is less expensive than a trained HF operator. Iridium costs $30 per month and $0.89 per minute to call another Iridium phone. That's the over-the-counter rate. Government agencies get a better rate than that. And the phone costs $1100, again that's retail not the government rate, less than an HF rig with antenna and tower will cost any public agency to install.

You think it's a big deal to lobby against paid operators because there will be objections? How difficult do you think it was to reform the code regulations? Don't you think there were lots of opposing comments?

And you don't care about young people getting into Amateur Radio. That's non-survival thinking.

Fortunately, when the real hams go to get something done, folks like you aren't hard to fight, because you don't really do much other than whine and send in the occassional FCC comment. Do you know I even spoke in Iceland when I was lobbying against the code rules? Their IARU vote had the same power as that of the U.S., and half of the hams in the country came to see me. That's how you make real change.

But the US population isn't their hiring pool, people qualified to do the job are their hiring pool.

We're specifically talking about people interviewing at Google, not the general US population. These are people who are, by definition, in their hiring pool.

I can entirely understand that the demographics of Google employees won't match that of the more general population. But if the demographics going into the interview process consistently and noticeably fail to match the demographics actually being hired, then it looks like there might be a problem. Which exact problem, I don't know. Poor pre-interview screening? There's many other potential reasons than rampant age discrimination, but I think there's also enough merit to the complaint for someone to start digging.

Yep, there are a lot of flashing lights and beeps sending code in the computer world. I still hear phones using "... -- ..." to indicate an incoming SMS.

OpenSSL has first-to-market advantage, and anyone who hasn't evaluated the quality differences will choose the simpler license. Plus there are other alternatives, like Amazon's new SSL-in-5000-lines which is also gift-licensed.

The time for OpenSSL to dual-license was when it was the only available alternative to entirely proprietary implementations. That might indeed have funded a quality improvement.

I don't know a thing about the quality of GnuTLS or the Amazon thing. I've seen enough of the insides of OpenSSL to know it's not pretty, but am not a crypto guy and this don't work on it.

Maintaining FIPS compliance did not make anything easier. It's essentially a prohibition on bug repair, as you have to recertify afterward. But the people who wanted FIPS were the only ones who were actually paying for someone to work on OpenSSL.

I don't think any of the other Free Software projects ever tried to be FIPS certified.

If you are one of the infringed parties, I'd be happy to talk with you about what your options are. bruce at perens dot com or +1 510-4PERENS (I'm not there today, but it will take a message). I am not a lawyer but I work with the good ones and can bring them into the conversation if necessary.

As a community we've managed to almost completely ignore that because of their use of dual-licensing, MySQL made 1.1 Billion dollars after 9 years in business, and that for a database that was written by one person, and the code base remained available under the GPL.

IMO, 1.1 Billion dollars is pretty damn impressive. Especially if you get paid that to make Free Software. Heck, sign me up!

Oracle was a bad actor, and Monty is now leading further development of that same code base under the GPL. But it did not have to be that way.