If 22% of TV purchasers defaulted, leaving Wells Fargo to pay the bill, you bet your ass Wells Fargo would stop paying for TVs.

If that were what the article said, it'd imply that Wells Fargo should stop issuing lines of credit in excess of what people can repay. Whether the money was spent on Dogecoin or Home Shopping Network kitch, it's spent. The limit is there precisely so that the consumer doesn't spend more than he can repay (even if it is a long way down the road to paying it off).

Instead, what the study referenced in the article actually said was that 22% of those who purchased cryptocurrency on credit are still carrying a balance. Only 11% of those people carrying a balance said they wouldn't even sell their stake in crypto to pay the balance, which is greater (by 50%) than the average rate of default, but that's only considering this self-selected group of people willing to take extraordinary financial risk (and, we can presume, are not a typical cross-section of cardholders).

So, roughly the same number of people are being irresponsible with money as usual, but because they're being irresponsible in a new and different way, it's time to sound the alarm!

Lenders have said they’re worried they’d be left on the hook if a borrower lost money on a digital currency bet and couldn’t repay.

As opposed to plastic crap from big-box stores, ever-shifting expensive fashions, electronics designed to be obsolete by next CES, and all the other pointless crap we're bombarded with in advertising. When you can't pay the credit card bill, you can just flog all that stuff for beaucoup bucks on Craigslist or eBay.

Ever had the nagging suspicion that your car's manufacturer was charging outrageous prices for parts simply because it could? Software might be to blame.

Damn those silly algorithms and expressions organizing themselves in a way to make extra money for a completely uninvolved party who happened to deploy them. The nerve of them!

The practice may be automated now, but it's been going on for literally decades. Even as far back as the 1980s and 1970s, you could swap parts between Corvettes and other cars. The part numbers would be different, but the equipment itself would be functionally identical. Funny how the part for the Corvette always cost several times as much; I'm sure it's purely because there were fewer Corvettes on the road (than, say, Citations or Skylarks), so the manufacturing costs were higher, right? Riiiiiiight

The price of a thing is always cost plus, where "plus" is defined by what the market will endure. If you can keep the cost hidden (see also: US healthcare) or obscure the availability of a thing (nearly-identical parts with different labels, with only one label approved for your application), the market will endure a hell of a shafting until the house of cards comes down.

Moore's Law is an economic one, not a strictly a technological one. Although, keeping it going depends on semiconductor processes getting finer.

The costs per nanoacre more-or-less follow a predictable curve relative to how bleeding-edge a process is required to fabricate a chip. If you need a really old process, availability will be low, so demand will push the costs up. If you're using the latest, availability is low and yields will initially be low, so the costs are way up. Everything in-between is pretty cheap because demand tends to go towards newer stuff, and the fabrication plant for those middle-aged processes has already started depreciating-out.

If you're trying to be an industry leader, you're targeting the newest processes, so you have the highest expenses. As a result, you want to keep your chip small because costs scale with semiconductor area (N chips per wafer, X dollars per wafer, etc.).

However, there's a lower bound on that. If you've got a chip with over a thousand pins, like a high-end microprocessor, the chip has to be physically large enough to have that many bumps to wire out to pins. Also, there's the case of heat dissipation to consider. A teeny-tiny part that draws a lot of current may shatter or desolder itself if there's not enough surface area to mate with the thermal solution.

So, you want to be small, but there's a lower bound to that. That implies wasted space on the die, which you're going to pay for, anyway. What to do with it?

Add a core! Make the pipelines deeper! More cache! Add some multimedia accelerators. Add an FPGA! Add some other dedicated-function unit! Then present it as a bullet-point for selling more of your part versus your competitor.

Ergo, Moore's Law.

s/Apple will do/Google will do/

Geez they are really doing their absolute best to piss off and alienate their core fanbase.

They learned from Apple that it's a totally safe an profitable thing to do if you have a "golden parachute" in another market.

• Apple did it to the educational customers in the 1980s and early 1990s.
• Apple did it to the publishing/print customers in the 1990s and early 2000s.
• Apple did it to the audio/video content creators in the late 2000 and early 2010s.
• Apple did it to the nerds shortly thereafter.

Now, with their not trying to sell to nerds and professionals (apart from iOS developer systems), Apple's more profitable than ever. They learned how to milk a market for what it's worth so that you can get into a market where the money's better, the effort less, and the users still desperate. When the old market is sick of you, you don't need them anymore.

Apple will do just fine until they lose touch with what consumers feel is shiny and exciting; then they'll be as relevant as Westinghouse and Sears.

Fear not, fellow nerd. There will be plenty of other companies who will make shiny things for us for the limited time before our usefulness wears out.

This smells very "motte and bailey" to me, if being played in reverse.

1. Vanishingly few people will be okay with adults grooming adolescents for sex on Facebook, so I would presume that overwhelming answer will be that this sort of behavior should be disallowed on the platform.
2. Facebook implements additional controls on behavior in other areas, as well, like they always do.
3. When there's public backlash, they'll fire back with "the users asked for it," citing this poll and tying whatever additional restrictions they make into "protecting the children."

Remember in 2012 when Facebook put out a huge policy change but would allow the users to veto it if 30% of the accounts voted against it? Of course it was fair because people aren't allowed to have multiple accounts; therefore, "no one" has one. Sure it included people who abandoned the platform and many others who had died, but it was only 30%, right? Getting the equivalent of the whole population of the US to care about something enough to log in during a week-long window and find the "vote" button is no big deal, yeah?

It's their platform to do as they please, and that's fine. I just wish they wouldn't be so duplicitous about it. Do your thing, Facebook, but don't act like your users asked for it.

True. It's like the difference among home economics (computer skills), shop class (programming), and geometry/precalculus (computer science).

Misguided as the College Board's proposal is, there's a little bit of wisdom in teaching some of these things to everyone, but maybe not in the context of computing.

The biggest win from CS is not the potential paycheck of being a programmer, but in things that other math/science courses should already teach students, but apparently don't: problem-solving by decomposition. That skill alone (and maybe the encompassing skill of algorithmic thinking) will get a typical person a lot further in life than knowing some soon-to-be-antiquated programming language (Pascal, anyone?).

I've been writing code for over 30 years, and I went through a phase when I believed that literally everyone should learn code. I later realized that part of that came from dealing with people who couldn't do anything unless it was broken into explicit steps, and the rest of it came from wanting to share my joy of programming with others. The unfortunate (or perhaps fortunate for us professionals) is that most people hate programming. Associating the valuable life skills of critical/algorithmic thinking with something that most people hate would be a disaster.

Absolutely everyone should take home economics, though. The basic life skills of planning a personal budget and keeping oneself fed and clothed are far more important than learning a programming language or even basic computer skills.

Once again I've had big updates like that on my machines. At home I run Windows Pro and at work Windows Education and neither have ever done this.

I'm not disputing this. I'm saying that it does happen, just not as overtly as Steve described. I run Windows Pro at home and on my laptop and have seen it happen to older software I'd installed.

It can both not-happen to you, and happen to other people who have different software installed.

Steve may have been simplifying for brevity's sake, but that is exactly what the experience feels like when the update happens overnight while no one is there to stare at the PC.

When Windows 10 does an upgrade to a later version, it effectively does a clean OS install and re-installs applications. This is what's going on behind that creepy "These updates are for your protection / Your computer will be just fine / All your data is exactly where you left it" screen. If it hits a known conflict (Microsoft keeps a database of these), an application won't be reinstalled. It wasn't the intent, but it sure looks like Microsoft decided to uninstall another company's product just to be a dick and show you who really owns your PC.

You can tell when you got one of those big updates because all the stupid in-built advertising gets reactivated and Candy Crush Saga III: Wrath of the Tyrannical Twizzlers or WTFever shows up prominently on the Start menu.

Subjective, arbitrary, and opaque. Even if all you do is post about old games and computer hardware, you're not immune.

YouTube are acting as though they're so big and attractive that the talent can't leave. That sort of thinking is only true for a limited time.

People are going to be really hacked off when they find out the rest of the industry has been testing their fumes on great apes worldwide!

Oh yeah, I'd forgotten about that. Texas has dumb things about "data processing" versus "programming," where 20% of one is exempt and the other is (AFAIK) non-taxable unless it was part of the task of generating a report (web sites are included in this definition of "report," so front-end programming is always taxable), so writing a program for a client and getting them to run it for you can actually save them some tax if you're playing to the letter of the law.

And then there's nonsense about whether or not a thing is taxable based on why you did it. If you're an architect and produce a drawing in AutoCAD as part of the production of a design for a client, that's non-taxable. If you're an architect and produce a drawing in AutoCAD because your client handed you a sketch (or a drawing in some other program's format), the labor involved in creating the AutoCAD document is taxable. There are analogues in bookkeeping, where doing tax-prep things as part of bookkeeping are nontaxable, but doing tax-prep things in order to produce payroll (and, AFAIK, only payroll) tax documents is taxable.

Coordinating this BS on a national level would either require some sort of uniformity of the sales tax systems first (yay!) or would be too onerous for small firms to handle. Maybe for strictly retail/resale a small company could do it, but consulting or any sort of value-add would be nearly impossible across state lines.

It's worse than that.

Texas, for instance, has state, county, and local sales taxes (usually just the city). The state rate is constant (with exceptions for differing types of goods, some of which are totally exempt and some of which have a portion of the price exempt). The county and local tax rates are usually—but not required by statute to be—constant within those counties and localities, but cities sometimes stretch across county lines, and then there are addresses with a city associated (because of the nearest post office) but that are actually outside the boundaries of the local taxing jurisdiction. Very little of this can be determined by ZIP code because those are allocated to the servicing Post Office rather than political subdivisions.

The other states with sales taxes probably aren't much saner.

No, if taxes must be collected based on destination, this is going to be another rent-seeking cottage-industry that exists entirely because some government goons disconnected from reality decided that something that was easy-to-write-down couldn't possibly be a complete pain in the ass to comply with. Square or PayPal or whatever will collect the taxes plus some compliance overhead fee and distribute it on your behalf. Compliance would be a completely unreasonable burden for small businesses to undertake themselves.

The app comprises multiple Electron processes, a player server process (for being remotely controlled), and the MPD player process, while managing to present a semblance of a whole.

Thankfully, no one had to endure the savage ordeal of writing in a low-level language to assemble this pile of media-playing middleware. Phew!