"Involuntary manslaughter" is a pretty useless law. It has virtually no deterrent effect (either you're aware that what you're doing is dangerous and don't care, or you think it's perfectly safe) and it only serves to further punish people suffering extreme trauma and guilt complexes after seeing themselves cause someone else's death. Prevention is far, far better than cure.

This is only part of the job, though. Reputation only mitigates against negative outcomes that are common occurences (eg a trader selling defective goods, out-of-date foodstuffs etc) but does nothing to deal with low-occurence, high-cost accidents. A guy who does ten thousand driving jobs without incident will not have a single review commenting on his lack of insurance, so there's no protection to ensure that the guy whose driver actually has an accident is properly insured. Furthermore, as online reputation gets more and more important, it's going to bring us back to a situation where new players are looked at with distrust. (Kickstarter's various failures are already starting to have this effect.

Exactly. Too many people say that they're "trying to take our freedoms away". Many things which are common practice are against the law, and there's often a tacit acceptance of this in the form of "if you're too small and innoccuous to get caught, it's OK". Organise that illegal practice, though, and you're definitely big enough to get hit with enforcement.

Now to all those people who say that the tacit acceptance of these practices on the small scale implies that it's OK on the big scale, I want you to think about this: do you want aggressive enforcement against the little guys? Because if you want absolutely equal treatment of individuals and the big businesses, that's what you'll get. Not acceptance of everyone, but enforcement against everyone.

Talking of sickening, let's go back to the GP's example of lemonade. If I take a glass of home-made lemonade from a friend, I know that I'm taking something that has been made in a kitchen that's not commercial grade. There is a risk involved, and because he/she's a friend, I can assess that risk. When I buy a bottle of lemonade from a stranger on the internet, how do I assess that risk? From a few reviews on a website? All I know is that he/she hasn't poisoned anyone yet. I do not know whether the kitchen has sterile, stainless steel surfaces, or whether it has separate food-preparation and utensil-cleaning sinks (as mandated in most regulations for commercial kitchens. I don't know whether the bottles have been properly sterilised.

The regulations on food preparation areas don't just serve to protect me individually from taking a risk -- they stop a race to the bottom where everyone opts for the cheapest stuff, and companies that choose to manage risk find themselves priced out of the market.

Nonsense. Debris on the highway is major issue taken seriously by the police (particularly if the police in question are the Highway Patrol). And if someone responds to the police with "no hablo inglés" after fleeing an accident, guess what happens next? No, they're not waved on. They're hauled into a police station while immigration and/or homeland security check they're not illegals.

Indeed. And the purpose of charging more for commercial insurance is to make a profit on commercial insurance. Fix commercial and non-commercial rates to be the same and commercial insurance becomes loss-making, and the lost profits are taken from non-commercial insurees instead.

As another poster says, it's about sharing the risk.

Commercial drivers (typically) do more miles than domestic drivers, so they are likely to have a higher incidence of events resulting in claims. This is why commercial insurance is more expensive than domestic insurance. You could lobby the government to make it illegal for insurers to differentiate between commercial and non-commercial use, but what happens then? The risk gets spread across everybody -- that's what. Insurance premiums go up for non-commercial drivers and down for commercial drivers. Commercial entities benefit at the cost of Joe Public. Is that what you want?

You are overinterpreting quite harshly there. I did not say copyright infringement was the same as stealing -- you were implying that because a particular illegal practice makes things cheaper for the consumer, it is better. I gave an example of a different illegal practice that makes things cheaper for the consumer.

I could have instead used the example of child labour, or slave labour, or unsafe working practices. I could have mentioned industrial espionage. Each of those means that you or I get cheaper things, but it is still not a just practice.

You are the one needing remedy -- you were far too quick to assume that the only reason I disagree with you is because of ignorance. You should learn to accept that other people can be equally well-informed as you and still come to different conclusions.

Their target market is very much a "western thing" too.

The guy who lacks preoccupations about ripping off delivery trucks sells cheap gear down the pub.

...aaaaaaand now we get to the point: you don't believe in protecting the copyrights that created the industries that invented the cheap stuff in the first place. There will be no new stuff if the people who put the time and energy into making it don't have their rights respected.

And would be illegal under consumer protection laws in most civilised countries....

No on-board HDMI because they expect a lot of people to want to run it headless, but because the composite video is essentially a freebie (it doesn't require all the chippery of a VGA or HDMI port), it's cheaper to add it to the full production run than to have it as an optional extra. So why not include it? At times things will go wrong, and you may need to look inside -- so think of it as a diagnostics port, if you like.

... which aren't really the intended use cases, are they? It's just hard to demonstrate how to use something for various unspecified makery uses.

Actually, it has a massive plus in its favour against the Pi -- it's a chip you should be able to get hold of in relatively low quantities. The Pi is kind of handy for prototyping embedded devices, but as the Broadcom chip in it is only available in extreme bulk, you're not normally working with the chip your final product will use. Here, though, there's the realistic possibility of getting the same chip as the CHIP for your product, so it's a very attractive prospect as a prototyper. Including the battery circuits makes it extremely attractive, because that means the prototyper only has to worry about wiring up the GPIO to enable their specific use case -- it's damn near plug-and-play.

Same here. People talk about using it for prototyping embedded systems, but as the Broadcom chip on the Pi is only available in massive bulk, you end up with a prototype that doesn't accurately model the performance of the final product. The Allwinner A13, though, is almost a commodity part, and I'm not surprised they're giving Next Thing help here: if this gets established as the hobbyist prototyping platform, by next year it'll start appearing as the core chip in more and more new devices being launched via Kickstarter.