And if you make your case and the boss disagrees would you accept the answer at face value? Or would you think the boss is a clueless PHB, playing favorites, falling for smooth talkers and credit stealers and so on that isn't giving you the wage you deserve? I'm guessing you'll see many disgruntled workers that think they're performing equal or better when they're not. I would like to see the anonymized payroll, with title to see the average/spread but I don't think knowing Steve, Alan, and Lucy make $5k more than me would be very beneficial for our working relationship.

Mesa has been about 5 years behind OpenGL, seems this follows the trend, not sure if that's a good or a bad thing. After all it's not falling behind but it really doesn't seem to be closing any gaps either. So 4.0 is DirectX11 generation hardware, CodeWeavers have said they hope to have DX11 support in WINE within a year. That would be nice, several games I play that are no-go in WINE and would be at least one obstacle in going back to Linux.

The requirement has been for the "Designed for Windows [Version]" program, if you want to ship with the sticker, be an OEM partner and get the best pricing it's compulsory but it's not an install requirement. That would be stupid of Microsoft, since most pre-2012 machines wouldn't be able to update. Also for Win8 OEMs are required to give you a way to turn it off, for Win10 they're merely permitted. I'm sure some of them will be encouraged by Microsoft to disable it completely, to see if that'll draw anti-trust lawsuits. So not yet, but I bet it's coming soon....

1. Pretense: Find or create some kind of probable cause for a warrant. Doesn't in any way have to be related to what you're really looking for or anything you think he's really doing, just plausible enough to get rubber stamped by a friendly judge.
2. Fishing: Search through third parties like cell phone records, bank records, email records, social media records etc. under NDA, since the person won't know he can't challenge them.
3. Parallel construction: Using the information gathered above, find some law they're actually breaking and "randomly" catch them in the act. Preferably one that'll let you go through the rest of their belongings.
4. Fine tooth comb: Most people break the law in many small ways, just hit them with all of them. And even ones that won't stick, just to get the total and the defense burden high.
5. Buy high, sell low: Have the prosecution offer you a "deal" where you can either take 10% of a ridiculous figure or try it in full court, knowing a few of the lesser charges will stick so the prosecution won't look like a total sham,

Only 62 of 381 in the Facebook case were ever charged with any crime. The remaining 300+ are still totally unaware the government has seen through everything they've done on Facebook, since it's all under NDA. You can't challenge or suppress a warrant until the government tries to use it against you in a criminal case. This reminds me of the NSA wiretaps, since they've officially never admitted to wiretapping anybody there's nobody with standing to sue. It's a nice end-run around the constitution, that's for sure.

Long before that people will have figured out that speaking one of the big global/regional languages is useful. I wouldn't go so far as that we'll all join up on one language, but say one of the top 6 - Mandarin, English, Spanish, Hindi, Russian, Arabic. And I'd likely strike Hindi from that list, since like Portuguese, Bengali, French, Malay, German and Japanese (7-12) it has no significant tendency to spread beyond its current native regions. That is, if they ever get around to learning a second language since many people still aren't literate in their first.

A good example is Europe, the trend is extremely strong that secondary speakers of languages like German and French are down while English is up. India also seems to align on English, not Hindi. Africa is already using English, French and Portuguese as common languages, except much shorter in development. Same with SE Asia, what's a group from Myanmar (Burmese), Thailand (Thai), Malaysia (Malay) and Vietnam (Vietnamese) going to speak in common? Chinese or English. Maybe it's not as clear in the US where 300+ million already speak your language natively, but ours has ~5 million. Yeah, we're going to learn a bigger language.

In this particular case the requirements seem to be very low, any doofus can win the lottery and it doesn't require any elaborate explanations. You bought a lottery ticket, you won, lucky you. The lottery makes the payout and case closed, if that's all done why wouldn't you just make a bank transfer? As long as you do everything openly with the IRS and pay your taxes I don't see why they'd even look twice. The bank isn't likely to tell anyone because of client confidentiality, the winner just says he gave half to charity and the fraudster could just make up any excuse about an inheritance or whatever. It's not like the bank account has to match the story they're telling people.

Sure, if you're not using any GPL-only libraries and not taking any third party contributions without copyright assignment. Many of the big libraries are community projects, there's no single entity to dual license them so it doesn't matter what license you offer on your part. And for copyright assignment you can't just find code you need, they have to actively sign it over and not many will help you make money. Chances are pretty big your project will be forked by some of those who refuse and their GPL-only project will become the dominant one. And once ownership is divided, a dual license isn't coming back.

This is actually a pretty creepy possibility already on fairly "generic" sites, it's one thing that people know you read a newspaper. With a subscription though they could list exactly what articles you bothered to read and which you didn't.

Because the point of open source is having code shared with you by other developers. You own the code, you don't need a license. It's everybody else who has an interest in what license you pick. Those who favor copyleft want more GPL code so it'll snowball while others want to use is in proprietary products. How useful open source is to you is directly proportional to how many developers are using a license aligned with your interests. Why do you think RMS spends all his time promoting the GPL? Why did Apple pick a BSD kernel? It's all about the license, it matters to them what you pick. That's why.

Troll much?

Last I checked toddlers can't drive a car, sunny highway conditions or not.

Actually, they've already learned to recognize hand signals that indicate where they're going.

If you look at any of the videos where they show the cars "vision" of the world it does a damn good job of tracking cars, trucks, pedestrians and cyclists, spotting them in plenty time. You're right they don't do subtler things like make eye contact or consider if the person is drunk, but they're probably good at spotting someone swerving in their lane which is the second best thing.

Fact is, I don't know WTF some people are trying to do. I just keep my distance and speed such that I don't end up in a collision with them. So will presumably the Google car, here's a loose cannon on deck that doesn't drive like the other 95% so just give it a wide berth. You really don't have to figure them out to drive safely, you just need to recognize the signs to spot them.

I wouldn't go that far, but there's OSHA safety and Secret Service safety. Most companies have policies that exist primarily to make it hard to make accidental, ignorant or reckless breaches of security. The level of security needed to effectively protect against a malicious insider planning to do mischief is so high that most places it's not worth it, it doesn't mean the low hanging security measures are worthless. Having a bullet proof vest isn't stupid even though someone could shoot you with a bazooka. As long as you're not making a steel reinforced door and leave the window open...

If you're a standard Ubuntu user you probably won't notice much, because it's the developers getting gray hairs from X. They work around all the shitty problems so it works for you, just like users felt IE6 worked fine.

The main issue is how rendering is done on modern applications/desktops:
1. The client draws everything into a bitmap using its own tools
2. The client passes it via X to the compositor, which puts it together
3. The compositor passes it via X to the hardware, which draws it

So X does not do a whole lot anymore, and what it does it does poorly. Lots of blocking calls, poor versioning (per client, not per bind), poor synchronization (tearing), hardware overlays don't mix well with regular compositing, support for multiple monitors and input devices with hotplugging, global hotkeys/media keys, conflicts like modal window and screensaver both wanting to be on top and so on.

So what is it X did, that Wayland doesn't do anymore:
1. Help you draw the application (use Qt/Gtk/vwWidgets/OpenGL instead)
2. Draw the application somewhere else, assuming it wasn't just passed as a complete bitmap. In that case remote X and Wayland over RDP will perform similarly.

And though it's not directly part of the protocol, you're likely to see a revisit of client vs server-side decorations since Weston - the reference implementation - only support CSD. Basically, who draws the borders, title and buttons of the window. Mobile applications make this more interesting since you often don't want to dedicate the screen space, but you still want to be able to move/minimize/close/kill frozen applications through hot corners and such. But primarily it's a technology migration.

The EPA does two things, both of which sound good but are extremely hard to put a dollar value on so saying it's financially sound sounds very categorical. The first is protecting the macro-environment from pollution like NOX (acid rain), CFCs (ozone layer depletion), DDT (cancer) and various other toxins. Potentially huge impacts, but also vastly complicated models riddled with uncertainty in both effects and consequence. Like for example CO2 emissions and AGW, could you put a dollar value per ton? I mean if you could with any certainty there wouldn't really be any controversy.

The other is protecting micro-environments, basically small and isolated habitats where rare and endangered species live. Neat, but also means they're rather insignificant to the ecosystem as a whole. Biodiversity might have some unquantifiable benefits for biologists, medicine and such, large animals occasionally brings tourists but in many cases I doubt you'll find any immediate financial effects of just paving it over and exterminating the species. The EPA is mainly founded on the basis that we can't undo it and that preservation has a purpose for preservation's sake, not that there's any clear economic benefit.

I think they're pretty much in the same boat, long term as assume both NASA and the EPA are for the benefit of the human race but in the short term, they sure do look like an expense.

So what are you trying to say here? He3 is only useful in a fusion reactor and we don't have a working design. People have been working on one ever since they invented the H-bomb and come up short, we have enough He3 here on earth to experiment/test with. Maybe we should see if we're able to do something useful with it before we spend billions trying to build a moon mining operation?

Probably because you have a rose-tinted view of how it would work. Here's how it really will work: Big companies have lawyers and systems to keep track and will do the legal minimum to avoid "orphan" status. The little guy won't keep it available for sale, file the correct paperwork or keep up with his payments, giving big corporations a free source of expired material.

The price of registration would likely be a flat fee, favoring large commercial successes made by big companies over small artists. If it was tied to profit made on the work you'd see Hollywood accounting and it's not about the pennies they earn on Steamboat Willie, it's about protecting the Mickey Mouse character. Copyright should simply be way shorter by default, then the few exceptions who are willing to pay for a few more years can apply for an extension.