Every purchase you make on a credit card the merchant pays a portion to the credit card company, generally 1-3%. The interest on balances is actually a small portion of the major cards' profits.

HP being a good example. Their hardware is generally solid, but every piece of software they're associated with is crap. This includes drivers, most firmware, and pure software (QTP is overpriced and broken, their diameter api crashes as often as it works). I suspect that the process for building good hardware is so different from the process for good software that companies have trouble doing both.

DMCA takedowns apply to sites that host user-created content. It does not apply to content that a site creates itself.

In every software company I've worked at the codebase is roughly 5% critical, complex code that makes the company money, 95% boilerplate utility, ui, boring code that everyone tries to find ways to reduce. For that 5% it's important it be GPL-free since there's no way in hell the company will release it, and GPL violations can be expensive. Anything it links against in the other 95% must also be GPL-free. The rest of it can contain whatever free code reduces work for developers. Fixing a bug in boost may help my competitors, sure, but maintaining a fork just so I can jealously guard a little change in a third party library is a shocking amount of work long-term. The money rests in giving back and getting someone else to maintain as much code as you can, other than your core competence.

Not true, young males are higher risk even when learning, for flying or driving. That's why insurance is cheaper once you're over 25 regardless of experience, and for females under 25.

This is about rural Iowa. The main cost for maintenance is probably getting a person to the area where a problem is. They cherry-picked the date to be in the middle of a recession when they could pay peanuts for someone to drive 3 hours to the middle of nowhere to replace a repeater, versus now when they have to pay 9 peanuts.

I would agree, probably some ethernet or ip handling code. Something that has to exist on every device that connects to a network and is run on every single packet. The CRC check on the ethernet frame is a likely candidate. Every router, switch, and networked device is going to run an identical check on every packet before it can even verify that the frame is well-formed. Maximum frame size is around 9kB, and the standard is 1500 bytes. That's a lot of runs on a 10 gb lan.

This guy talks like this is some new idea, but there are excellent libraries that already provide this stuff. A quick look at the list tells me that boost and openssl cover most of the functionality, and unlike chromium they are made to be libraries, so you can be pretty confident they work under all conditions and the developers won't screw around with the api between versions.

https://ohio.overseasvotefoundation.org/vote/home.htm Click on 'voter help' and select 'can my American children, born abroad, vote'

The US is about the only country that taxes citizens regardless of where they live and work. Which leads to a fun situation where the kids of US citizens born abroad are considered natural US citizens and expected to file taxes, but may not be eligible to vote depending on which state their parents were from. Taxation without representation.

If they're looking at the sold-to-stores number then it is still deceptive. A store will have some stock of each smartphone they sell. For apple that's 3 models max. For android it may be 3 models per manufacturer. If they're looking at sell-through to users then it's a valid comparison.

If McAfee announced that they would continue supplying virus definitions to their antivirus running on XP would that make the front page of slashdot? Because that's all MS announced here. I very much doubt it takes them much extra effort to port virus definitions to a previous version of MSE.

There is nowhere in the world that people live where you heat your house 12 months a year. Even for the cold months the best your bulb can do is determined by how electricity is generated in your part of the world. Burning natural gas in a modern furnace to heat a house is in the mid-90% efficiency range. Burning that same gas to generate electricity is about 60% efficient. If your electricity is mostly renewable then wasting energy on the scale of a lightbulb makes no difference. If you use coal and natural gas then electric heating of any sort is sadly inefficient given the alternatives.

The question is are girls avoiding it because they're not interested, or are there some subtle (or not) level of sexism inherent in the industry? It used to be that orchestras were nearly 100% male, and all kinds of excuses were put forth as to how males were better musicians, more dedicated, etc. Then they started doing auditions with the player behind a screen, and suddenly the male-female ratio jumped to right around 50-50. Are you sure girls are avoiding CS because they aren't interested?

This is pretty much exactly how autopilot works in aviation. The pilot sets the autopilot, and it flies so long as it can understand and react to the conditions it can sense. If it detects bad input, or a condition it isn't programmed to handle, it hands control back to the pilot. Generally planes don't fall out of the sky just because the pilot has control again when he didn't expect it.