Uh, dude... I have family members that buy bottles of new age memory water that have been impressed with good memories and are supposed to help you along on your path to enlightenment. They've also bought polished black rocks that "retune the negative energy of cellphones into good energy that can heal any illness" which if cellphones aren't around they'll fall back on the energy of underground streams.

Actual snake oil was so much more straightforward.

People form groups. Bullshit is spread around. When someone hears the same bullshit from two places, they tend to go "oh my god, that must be true!".

Never underestimate the power of stupidity and ignorance. The general population of the world is nowhere near rational.

Well, even the hunters that hunt for fun and discard or abandon the meat (which I find pretty crappy, personally) are essentially performing a population control function. Unless they're doing it on one of those high fence stocked places.

Animal population control is probably the most useful societal function of hunting these days. Those kind of hunters are still being used by the parks and wildlife departments out there as part of population control, even if they're oblivious to the whole thing. Oh, and they're still paying into funds that pay for the parks.

MOST game animals if they weren't hunted would quickly become serious hazards... to crops, cars, and public health. Many states are killing deer every year by the thousands to try to prevent the spread of lyme disease.. not enough hunters.

Humans have removed these animals natural predators... so somebody's got to fill that void.

Hunters provide a service to society, and pay for our parks in the process. It most definitely has a place and a purpose.

I'm fairly sure most predators LOVE chasing down prey. Cats will torture a poor wounded mouse catching, releasing, catching, releasing... they quite clearly are having fun. It's entirely natural... if it was really boring or say physically painful you'd avoid doing it and the animal that enjoyed it would certainly do better than you and outcompete you.

Virtually all hunting (in developed countries) is "for fun" these days.

Sure, I can see how that's distasteful to some... but hunters still fill valuable roles. Humans have removed almost all natural predators... so a lot of these animals if not hunted would end up culled by wildlife management officials.

What's better... involving the public in the process, where they learn to respect the wild and care for it (and paying for the privilege)... or having all that done out of sight and mind by the government?

I'm not a big fan of big game farms, which is occasionally like shooting caged animals... but mainstream hunting is very responsible and useful to society.

There are states where game wardens and other wildlife management types have to cull deer herds, etc by the THOUSANDS to avoid overpopulation. This is to prevent many things, not least of which would be people dying in car accidents hitting or attempting to avoid deer. Sometimes they collect the deer and distribute them to homeless shelters, etc... usually not. That's a tragic waste, IMHO.

At it's most practical... hunters fill a void left in the natural world when humans removed most of the predators (wolves, etc). Without hunting, you'd have obscenely large mass killings by wildlife officials to control explosive animal populations. Feral hogs are a BIG problem, and it unfortunately has gotten to a point where people actually have to go out and kill them by the hundreds... which I also find somewhat tragic. Wasn't there a drone story about people hunting hogs just a bit ago? Hogs just aren't thought of as good eating, so not enough hunters target them.

So... animals are going to die regardless. Wildlife officials generally try to balance permitting to the animal populations... so hunters do what the wildlife people otherwise would have to. Fees from hunting is a major component of funding for the parks department, too. So... lose hunting and you'd probably lose a lot more parks than we already have. (Then new farmers or developers would then eradicate or displace the animals)

Sure, there are drunken idiots that shoot at shadows and highway signs... but there's MANY more very responsible hunters out there who respect wildlife and the wild places they live in. The vast majority of hunters I know try to minimize suffering and work to maintain healthy animal populations.

Hunting makes you very aware of the outdoors and a much better steward of it than the unthinkingly blurting out "hurting animals is wrong", never contributing anything towards wildlife management, and then going to McDs to chow down on food from animals that are confined to areas barely large enough for them to stand in for a good part of their lives. That's better?

It's very distinctly obvious to anyone who spends time in both the country and the city that the vast majority of the people screaming about overly broad animals rights don't actually spend any time with wild animals at all. Their main conceptual interactions with wild animals are from their own pets or Disney cartoons, which are all heavily anthropomorphising. So, it's not all that surprising that they end up thinking that way. It's all a lie, though. Man is a predator, and it's entirely natural to be what you are. You can try to "rise above" our animal roots... that would make for an interesting conversation... but really what I see is much more "out of sight out of mind" BS. The casual person saying "hunting is wrong" consumes animal products that involve much more animal suffering than meat by way of hunting does.

I certainly plan to introduce my son to hunting when he's old enough... I just hope by the time that happens he hasn't been brainwashed into thinking it's wrong. I'm hard at work brainwashing him to think otherwise ;)

I flew RC helicopters a little bit.. just about ANY hard landing was enough to send a rotor into the tail boom (aptly named) and destroy the rotors and probably a couple linkages.

Really? Last time I went bird hunting (around twenty years ago) steel shot was mandatory.

Lead's been mostly banned for a long time now.

... and EVERYONE knows that every bit of data that is recorded anywhere is automatically in the hands of the gov'ment.

Really?

This site has a pretty good number of IT people on it (just a guess). Nobody's noticed lots of little black boxes plugged into our networks... or strange database connections... or unscheduled data dumps/transfers... no intrusion detection issues... etc?

I might give some non-bullshit level probability to the possibility of our phone calls and internet and -maybe- credit card transactions all being monitored... but every retail store and web site? With all those entirely different data models and transaction implementations? Even just the major ones would be a HUGE HUGE HUGE operation. .. or are we all in on it?

OH MY GOD. The network admins must be involved! Oh crap oh crap... Who's my admin? Oh yeah, ME! I MUST BE SPYING ON MYSELF FOR THE GOV'MENT!

That is REALLY amusing.

The rest of the reasoning in your post would mean that Baptists, Methodists, Pentecostals, etc all refer to different Gods. There's something "incompatible" between them all.

In fact, I'm quite sure that WITHIN THE SAME RELIGION there's parts of a given Bible/etc that are different and incompatible. So, The God of the old testament is apparently not the same god as in the new... so by your own definition you're probably polytheistic worshipping about 20 different Gods.

So, while outsiders see these three major religions as derivative and worshipping basically derivatives of the same God... your rationale is basically THE direct cause of religious conflict and the absolute worst parts of religion's impact upon the world.

I wouldn't be so proud of that.

This.

We are working on a single board Linux system based on a Freescale ARM chip as part of an industrial control system. It's got a bit more than the Pi, but it's -way- more expensive. Luckily for us the value isn't as much in the SBC but the system it's a part of.

Just the assembly of the board costs TWICE AS MUCH AS THE COMPONENTS at the 25-50 unit level from a high quality but relatively very cheap US assembler.

Once we move out of beta into hundreds of units, the cost of outsourced assembly may come down to parity with the component costs.

Last I checked, pay in the game industry was very low for the talent required. Given that so many want to do it, I can't imagine that's changed much.

Recommending the game industry to someone who isn't seeking it out in the first place is just wrong. It's simply not worth it unless you REALLY REALLY want to be there.

Fairness != giving people their desires. Fairness is trying to avoid having the burden of paying for government be extremely high for some, and almost non-existent for others. The burden should not be EQUAL, but it should be a bit less disproportionate than it is.

Citizen B's standard of living WENT UP when he worked harder. Maybe not as far as he'd like, but it's not a tragedy. The tragedy is that the woman who makes 10 because she had to drop out of high school to work when her father died has to work two jobs just to make sure HER kids get a better chance (who she only gets to see when she's putting them to bed). SHE works a fuck of a lot harder than Citizen B, and her "desires" are no less worthy. Citizen B looks at her paying no income taxes and spits on her as a "goddamn freeloader". Interesting point: the time she works to pay for sales, gas, and other taxes could have been spent actually getting to spend some time with her kids.

I can't resist:

Citizen C earns 10000, and pays 4000 on his four houses. He pays 2000 in taxes, but he used to pay 2500. He's fuming mad others are talking about putting him back at 2500, since that'd be going backwards and by golly his whole life everything always got better with time. Backwards just seems so unnatural! Damn thieving government! (His father, who also made 10000, paid 8000 in taxes at the same point in his life)

I use XP for virtual machines. I have MSDN, and I use XP as the OS for each Windows-based development environment I set up.

I tried using Win7 for exactly one VM, and it's three times larger than it needs to be. It wastes RAM, and subjectively feels slower. I'm sure there's some way to reduce Win7's footprint to not be THAT obnoxiously oversized... but why bother?

(The host OS is Linux-based)

Well, the limiting factor is quite certainly backwards compatibility.

The architecture itself very possibly cannot compete with ARM on low power... no matter what the "best chip designers and process" can bring to the table.

I think it's getting to be time to finally retire x86. It'll be hell to bring a new architecture to market... but what's the alternative? Microsoft is dying. Apple is starting to make their own chips.

They probably do have the best people and starting fresh they could very likely do amazing things.

I really hate timezones. Still, you're right that the alternative is probably worse.

I suppose the alternative is to move everybody to a hollow sphere with an artificial sun in the middle.