I believe X.org versus Wayland would be another pair bridging the old and new Linux world.

The very fact that you would equate the battle over a display server with the battle over the granddaddy of all running processes puts you so far into the "new Linux" camp that you can't even see the border. I don't mean that insultingly, just a statement of fact.

CLI FTW.

The premise behind Coin is attractive: consolidate credit cards onto a single card-sized gadget

First, calling this thing "credit card sized" amounts to nothing short of a lie - More like a PCMCIA-card sized, or about four credit cards thick. It wouldn't fit in my current wallet, which doesn't even like holding the older embossed-number style cards because of the extra thickness.

Second, my credit/debit/gift cards already come on credit card-sized devices. And they don't need batteries.

Third, how many cards do people have that they need this? One credit card, one ATM card, and on the rare occasion I get a gift card for something, I use it ASAP to avoid some crazy terms of service eating the balance away. As the only possible audience I see for this, the sort of crazy coupon ladies who have two dozen store-specific cards just so they can play games with juggling discounts and no-payments-for-x-months - And even in that case, Coin only holds eight cards total, making it still useless.

And finally, NFC has made the entire concept pointless. Coin has built dedicated hardware to do something that every smartphone (except the iPhone, because fuck you that's why) on the planet can do much, much better.

So someone explain to me what I've missed here... What killer use have I failed to consider for the Coin?

Why do you actually care how much time your washing machine uses?

Because although you can do other things while it runs, you really can't just take off and go about your day (Ever had an unbalanced washer shake itself loose of the drain hookup? Not a pretty sight). So if you have four or five loads to do on a typical Saturday, at one hour per load it means getting out of the house by noon to enjoy the day; at 2.5 hours per load, it effectively kills your entire day.

"USB mass storage".

I know, mind-blowing, eh? Instead of supporting fifteen different incompatible protocols to get people's phones to talk to your massively sub-par onboard electronics, you just treat everything like a dumb ol' external HDD, and they all just work like magic. Who'da thunk it?

Oh, I just graduated top of my class from Calcutta University.

Fair or not, quality of education correlates highly with median income. Poor areas have poor education systems, plain and simple.

Particularly in any tech-related field, good luck in the modern world after graduating at the top of your class with all that experience you have working on 486 PCs, 20khz scopes, and textbooks that still refer to transistors as an exciting new technology.

Now I want to work for $0.40 an hour and live in a shanty because a college education is about coming home to dirt floors and non-insulated tin roofs!


What you "want" has no relevance here.

I've worked in tech (SE) for 15+ years now, and I don't know of a single colleague that would agree with the sentiment expressed in that quote.

Ditto, this!

He clearly means "I have talked with CTOs" and doesn't grasp that that title just means yet-another-stuffed-shirt, not any sort of actual engineer.

Because, while I have no doubt that good engineers exist outside the US - They don't need to come here to work as indentured servants. Thus we have exactly the wrong sort of selection bias in who applies for H1Bs in the first place.


"Tech Looks To Obama To Save Them From 'Just Sort of OK' US Workers"? No. Real tech (as opposed to "pointy-haired cat herders") wants Obama to clamp down on importing "Just Sort of OK" foreign workers to displace equally qualified American workers. Simple as that.

Funny thing about banning something like this - It creates an audience that didn't previously exist.

I had zero interest in this whole situation, but now that some repressive backwater dipshits have banned it? Into the collection it goes!

'Course, I live in the US, not the UK, and we consider that sort of footage "Primetime TV", but the principle still stands. You ban it, I will find a copy.

/ No, that doesn't apply to CP, Mr. Hansen, move along ya old perv.

That people who use spaces for indentation are just WRONG. :)

Don't make me come over there and physically remove your "tab" key, heathen!

so without reading the article, the answer is going to be no, there's no evidence

...Except for that pesky 4+ sigma deviation between the expected and measured value of g for a muon (and a brief mention of a new Fermilab experiment to push that to 7 sigma). Other than that, nope, no evidence at all.

Nothing to see here (if you have no soul whatsoever), move along (and let the real scientists do their thing so you can have your hoverboards and replicators 50 years from now). ;)


I do have a question for the serious participants in this discussion, however... Since the Muon counts as 40,000 (200^2) times more sensitive to unexpected effects than the electron, why not work with the Tau instead, which should have a whopping 1.2e7 times more sensitivity?

They probably rigged their SUVs to actually manufacture CCl4 and immediately release it into the atmosphere just because.

Oh c'mon now, no one (over the age of 2) would behave that petulantly, right?

Realistically, what are your chances of actually keeping pace with the thing or out-running it without losing control of your own vehicle?

Pretty damned good, actually - Unless talking about an intentionally homicidal driver in an unencumbered tractor, even the wimpiest piece of crap passenger car on the road can blow the doors off a loaded semi.

Now, against that trailer-less tractor, good luck. 400-600HP with no load and tires the size of your entire car means you can kiss your Fortwo, aka that shiny metal smear on the pavement, goodbye.

constant use of feminine pronouns

Good catch, but I wouldn't really call one slip "constant".


You are wearing a tower of twelve fedoras.

Damnit, why do people keep insisting on calling a trilby a fedora?

Basically Fark has one particular mod, of a gender I don't need to mention, who gets upset every time she greenlights another trashy Jezebel link and the Fark regulars (rightly) rip it to shreds. Admittedly, some posters cross the lines of good taste in doing so, but most just point out that Jezebel itself does more to advance misogyny than any forum trolls could ever do.

The official announcement thread for the new policy pretty much says it all. Fark regulars openly mocked this new policy, much like anti-beta posts here... All while shown prominent links to Foobies (along with plenty of other not exactly "wymyn friendly" advertisements) in the sidebar. This policy will last a whole week, unless Drew goes nuclear and literally bans half the userbase. But hey, we need another MetaFilter since Google has starved off the original, right?

For those seriously debating the "need" for websites to take actions like this, look at Slashdot as a role-model. Put bluntly, sites that feel the need to censor their comments simply have inadequate moderation systems. As much as Slashdot's doesn't always work to bring the best to the top, it does do an amazing job of pushing the complete garbage to the bottom. Browse at -1, and Slashdot looks much like Gorgor-era Fark; browse at 2+, and threads look like a coherent discussion of the issues broached in TFA.

So you would rather have to have paid out-of-pocket the three times in the past 15 years for whatever happened?

In that 15 years, I paid somewhere on the order of $14-15k for insurance that paid me back less than $4k total. Worst investment ever. Hell, until I replaced my previous car recently, I paid more per year than the total KBB value of my car.


Now, do you have/want to pay all that money, or have the insurance company pay that money?

I would, grudgingly, put medical insurance in a different category than car insurance. Not to say I approve of mandatory medical insurance, and I still loathe the the insurance companies (if for a different reason, for having created an artificially hyperinflated market thanks to most people having a complete mental disconnect between the idea of treatment actually costing $400k vs paying $3000 or so out-of-pocket). I will accept, though, that we all eventually die and our last few years cost a small fortune in healthcare. We do not, however, all eventually get into car accidents with damages adding up to dozens of times the price of my car.

Or as you so aptly put it, "it would take you 400 years to recoup what the insurance company will be paying out" - The flip side of which means that such an accident happens at most once every ten driving lifetimes, and realistically far less than that (since that would assume 100% of all premiums paid went solely to that rare huge medical bill). Big scary numbers look big and scary, but that doesn't make it any more rational to live as though it will happen to me.

As for the potential liability issues, consider me a biiiig fan of "no fault" states - For that matter, the real topic at hand (driverless cars) will likely eventually force every state to go no-fault, since the question of who bears responsibility for an accident becomes effectively a battle between auto manufacturers, not passengers.


I do not like driving in states which don't require insurance

No worries! Your insurance company already charges you for "uninsured motorist" coverage, even though such things shouldn't theoretically exist in states that mandate insurance. How thoughtful of them to make sure you can rest easy!

There in principle cannot be a car insurance market if cars don't crash anymore.

In the past 15 years, I have invoked my car insurance three times, and haven't had a single accident in that time.

Insurance covers more than just liability - It covers a small rock falling from a dump-truck and breaking your windshield; it covers your car getting stolen; some policies even act as a sort of extended warranty, covering repair or replacement costs in the event of a breakdown.

And, even with a hypothetically "perfect" driver, some accidents will still happen - Front tire blowout at 75MPH in dense traffic, deer running from the woods into the road 10ft in front of you, construction debris falling from an overpass, etc. Driverless cars will probably handle these events better than live humans do, but such events will still happen.

All of that said, I would love for you to have it 100% correct, because I fucking loathe insurance companies, and deeply resent the government forcing me to pay them in order to drive. I just don't realistically see it happening.