I'll say I've found the IRS way easier to deal with then some of the other Creditors I've had. If my wages had kept pace with inflation and I got socialized medicine for my taxes instead of broken down buildings built by corrupt contractors in Iraq I wouldn't even have anything to complain about...

This party sadly came true.

And every individual citizen allowed to make their own private laws.

You can barely find stuff from 5 years ago on the web. Some stuff yes, but most of it vanishes or becomes very difficult to locate using modern search tools which are oriented towards serving up ads and hits for what's popular and current.

I can read a magazine on the toilet, I refuse to take a laptop in there (I don't even own my own, it's a work laptop and it stays at the office). I can't read anything on a smartphone period, the text is too tiny and the interface is awful, smartphones are badly designed nuisances. Similarly, I can read a book or magazine in bed, but not the smartphone and not my desktop computer and I will never own a tablet. I can read the paper or a magazine on a train or plane, but electronic substitutes fail badly there for me (and the books never run out of batteries).

The maximum limit on an an arbitrary heat-conversion system is that doesn't break accepted theory is the Carnot-cycle heat engine, where eff 1 - T_cold / T_hot (as measured from absolute 0). But it's a rare real-world engine that gets anywhere near the Carnot efficiency limit - a car engine might run at 1100K for an ideal efficiency of around 73%, but the reality in most cars is closer to 25%. Being solid-state a thermoelectric device could potentially operate at very near the ideal (no mechanical losses), roughly tripling the efficiency. Assuming 90% efficient electric wheel motors the total system efficiency could be nearly as high.

I think it's 30 years of declining wages. Half of all Americans live paycheck to paycheck. We're too busy trying to keep ourselves afloat to worry about anyone else, which is probably the whole point.... Keeps us at each other's throats :(.

Hmm, I don't think I have a profile page myself. I wanted to post something in forums once but couldn't without a profile, but I didn't want to create one so I let it slide.

I noticed things like "Half Life 2: Lost Coast" is very high on the owned by unplayed list. But I think people got that for free as part of HL2 at some point? I know I've got some HL2 add on that I've never touched (too disappointed that it wasn't a full game with an actual ending, so I'm not continuing that franchise). I think I have one or two other things that are in that category.

Also left 4 dead 2 was given away for free not too long ago, though it has a much smaller percentage of "not played". I suspect people grabbed it when it was free without even knowing much about it, tried it a little bit, then stopped because it wasn't their favorite style of game.

Oddly enough that is exactly the position portrayed in the article - on a mattress. Without spilling your wine. Which is also on the mattress.

I also think that with a low level language that more developers are aware of potential problems than developers using high level languages. In some sense I think this is also due to the types of programs being developed. C/C++ today is common used for embedded systems, operating systems, runtime libraries, compilers, security facilities, and so forth. So systems programmers versus application programmers versus apps programmers. The system programmers are forced to take a close look at the code and must be mindful of how the code affects the system. I think that if you had such a comparison done back in the 80s that the numbers would be different because many more application programmers were using C/C++.

Ie, interview for a systems programmer: do you know about priority inversion, do you understand how the hardware works, do you know the proper byte order to use, what does the stack look like, etc.
Interview for the modern applications programmer: have you memorized the framework and library facilities.

Good luck with that. Human energy production is directly a miniscule factor in global warming - it's the CO2 byproducts that's the problem. In the 90+ years it takes for a unit of CO2 to be removed from the atmosphere it will capture roughly 1,000,000x as much solar thermal energy as was produced by the burning of fuel that created it. If we generated 1000x as much heat directly, but without producing the CO2, then global warming would be a non-issue.

> People have to be able to provide updates... and feel appreciated by doing so. BSD licenses allow companies to "appropriate" code,
Very true
>and then sue the original author for copyright violations...
Say what!?!?! Source code typically must be published before being appropriated, making it trivial to prove who had the prior claim.

Of course that doesn't stop a lawsuit from being *filed*, but then nothing stops me from filing a lawsuit against you for stealing my pink unicorn either.

Patent violation are of course another thing entirely - but even there the "publish early, publish often" nature of open source will very likely work very strongly in their favor if they are the original inventors.

Fair points. But if the recording had been made in a place where the participants had a reasonable expectation of privacy, as in not making a spectacle of themselves in a public area, then the "wiretapping" laws would likely have been applicable. As a rule "wiretapping" laws tend to be a bit of a misnomer, with actual wiretapping being only one of the specific situations where they come into play.