> what possible reason can there still be to do it by hand any more?

My baby daughter will probably always have a smartphone / calculator with her when she grows up. She'll have a tool that can so arithmetic for her. Yet, I plan to teach her arithmetic with jelly beans, hands on, doing it manually, so that she UNDERSTANDS what multiplication is all about. Once she really understands it, she'll know when and how to use it. She can then use the calculator as a shortcut, but use it effectively.

I do the same with my employees. First, they learn the process manually so they understand it. Then, they use the automated tools. Whwn the automated tool doesn't work or needs an extra argument because of a special case, the employee can handle it because they understand what the tool is trying to do. One of our most recent hires improved the main automation tool considerably, something he couldn't have done without first truly understanding what it does by having gone through the process manually.

I'm a giant nerd who can't throw a ball, can't dance, can't sing, and that's given me time to develop some skills that give me a reputation as a bit of a programming and sysadmin savant. Someone calls up with a problem and they start by saying "it's really strange, a lot of people ", I interrupt "hold on one second. Yep, the time must be set wrong on one of your web servers. You're using a cluster, right?" Aghast, they say yep, two weeks ago they switched from a single server to a true cluster. A large part of the "magic" is simply understanding the stack from top to bottom. Not USING assembly or C, but being CAPABLE of doing so, so I can imagine what the PHP calls are doing, what the code would look in C. Then I can picture what the system calls must be, and what that means to the drive heads. I'm darn sure not expert in C, in .Net, or most anything else, but I've done just enough low level stuff to picture what curl must be doing in memory as it fetches a web page.

Names matter but pretending that a country has 100% of it's electrical power needs met by base load nuclear power stations can be excused by "OK, if you want to get all technical"?

It appears that we have very different value systems.

So the Obama admin kowtows to pundits? Ok.

You got me - some systems are completely fucked up. There should be a trail of showing who has access to sensitive information or IMHO the system providing the information is completely broken.
However both Snowden and Manning did demonstrate that such a thing was the least of the problems with some rogue agencies. The same sort of idiocy that had part of the CIA running guns to Castro and another part trying to stop people running guns to Castro still applies so many years later.

No the "Godwin" was over government identification numbers in tattoos but it appears to be less obvious than I thought.
However going back to the back tattoo - if we wanted to be rich we'd be tattooing teenagers. From what I see at the beach there's a lot of young female hairdressers or just about any job description have that have that "stamp".

Personally I think you lost the moral high ground on name calling when you called me dense for challenging one of your lies.
How about we just agree to disagree - you appear to think that despite knowing very little about this topic it's important enough to mislead people on it and I don't. How about that?

I said:

  That's only one element of whether or not it's protectable under copyright, but it's the claim someone made and I responded to.

Knowing that it is in fact something of value, we then have to ask what other attributes are required for something to be protectable.

Your reply:

Reading comprehension problem? I explicitly stated, not once but twice, that the fact that it's valuable not settle the question of whether it's protectable. It fully answers, and only answers, the assertion made above that it's worthless and "_nothing_".

That isn't true. They actually love regulation, see for example the laws they fancy that keep dealerships between auto companies and their customers. When they do want regulation, good or bad, it's usually reactive instead of theoretical. That is IMO a better way to go about it. If we always regulated based on theory, we'd never have video games today because of how much the democrats still to this day believe that they cause violence.

> I drive relay boards
> We have three here already, and I'm probably about to add a fourth.

If you need to drive a lot of relays, you might consider a serial-to-parallel chip feeding a ULN2803 octal darlington array. That's about $2.50 of electronics per eight relays. With connectors and such, call it $0.50-$1 per relay. You can connect up to 256 addressable serial-to-parallel chips to a single IO on one Pi (or a PC, through a $2 level shifter). So for the price of another Pi, you can add 35-70 more relay outputs to your existing Pi.

As I mentioned, there is a large overlap between the applications people use Pis and Arduino for. That was one example I have recent personal experience with. If you want a computer with a few GB of RAM, there are several thousand options to choose from. We don't need one more 2-4GB computer.

If Obama was really so serious about it, then why does he wait until he can't do anything about it to even SAY anything? Let alone do nothing the whole time, except appoint a former telecom lobbyist to the FCC?

If the exec has too many passwords at work to remember easily, of course they will write them down.
Solutions to that include SSO, IDM, etc.

Yes, I was referring to the components that Google has implemented. Sorry, I should have been more precise.

Here at work, people have built essentially the same project (USB control of relays) with three different platforms, an Arduino, an rPi, and an old Pentium with MBs of RAM. All three did the job.

The Pi processor runs 44 times as fast as the Arduino, meaning it was 44 times as fast as needed for the purpose it was used for. The Pi has 512 MB of RAM, the Arduino accomplished the same task and has 2 Kb of RAM. The Pi has up to 16 GB of flash storage, the Arduino 32 KB.

So they ALREADY did "up the specs" to about 50 times as powerful as needed for these types of tasks. The Arduino used for the project cost $5-$10, the Pi $35.

Suppose the Pi had 2 GB of RAM and cost $150, would you suggest that they "up the specs" to 4 GB and $250? If that's what you want, you can get it here:
http://www.walmart.com/ip/Dell...
The Pi isn't a desktop computer. It's designed for particular types of tasks, and those tasks don't need gigs of ram. In fact, looking at the Pi-related web sites and the Arduino related web sites, the applications are often very similar, which indicates that the Pi is way over-speced for the many of the applications it is used for.

When I started my web hosting business we offered servers that ran Linux, just like the Pi does. The standard dedicated server had 256 MB of RAM, the upgraded option had 512 MB - just like the Pi. Web sites served hundreds of GBs of traffic every month off those 512 MB servers. Why does the Pi need more?

Headlines are supposed to be brief, not redundant. This headline could be chopped in half without losing anything, the second half is just redundant. Just say "President Obama Backs Regulation", or since this is a nerd site, "President Obama Backs Regulation of *".

It doesn't matter what it is, Obama wants it under government control.