Sorry, that's not allowed, presumably because Apple doesn't want iOS to serve as a drone controller. (Imagine the liability issues.)

Someone hasn't heard of Parrot, who make some of the best consumer drones there are, which are all controlled by iOS devices running apps that are available on the App Store.

Actually, this is only sort of true. On a percentage-of-annual-income basis, it's correct. But in terms of dollars and cents paid in taxes annually, it is incorrect.

The fact that Ballmer is involved in this is the only reason it's on Slashdot...let's face it. This situation relates to capital investment, and it happens several times a day with regard to transactions of varying sizes. We could argue about whether or not it's about the taxpayer that gets stuck with this or that, or whether capital will flee if we tax the rich more, but one thing is true: Ballmer is no more to fault for leveraging available, documented, and legal tax write-offs than we are when we all claim a write-off for our mortgages, business expenses, or even just the standard deduction (if we don't even itemize).

None of us seek to maximize the amount of taxes we pay. But we demonize the ultra-wealthy, by name, when they do the same thing as us but on a larger scale. Don't fault them, fault the system...and then change it.

One more thing: flash-bang devices often ignite fabrics and papers, if they happen to land on them. The amount of heat they put out is quite intense, if brief, and the reason why tactical teams frequently wear either natural (cotton) or ablative (nomex) fibers on the outside. Imagine if a raid starts with the blankets of a crib catching fire while the baby's inside, and the parents can't do a thing about it because they've been put face-down on the floor, hands zip-tied behind them, hysterical while they have a cop kneeling on the middle of their back.

The problem is in finding developers to support the project in the first place...which includes companies being willing to let some of their employees do some of it on company time. The website is NOT the big roadblock here, by a long shot. So forking it accomplishes absolutely nothing, and moving the repository to SourceForge, while not a terrible solution to the "no more website" issue, really doesn't address the true problem.

Yeah, I was thinking pretty much the same thing. He's calling the current government "stone age" and yet wants to go back to the days when Hungary was run by the SOCIALISTS as progress? As a way of LOWERING taxes? Pretty funny, actually...

Two things. One, the cloned FTDI subcomponents are in and of themselves essentially indefensible. The notion of "unclean hands" absolutely applies here. Two, that notion further applies to the manufacturer who included the cloned subcomponent in their product. To use a car metaphor, if a car is supposed to use a Bosch-made airbag sensor that has been well-tested and proven to be reliable, but the manufacturer instead knowingly uses counterfeit sensors, they open themselves up to enormous risk in any situation where the reliability of those counterfeit sensors has been called into question. They cannot rely upon any of the due diligence that Bosch has done, nor can they point to Bosch as being at fault. Furthermore, even if they point to the counterfeit manufacturer as being at fault, they themselves end up taking on some of that blame as well, for knowingly having included their product in their car.

It hurts the company that included the fake chip in their components, knowing full well that they were doing so, however.

Two things are true here: 1, the consumer is absolutely not going to say, "Hey! FTDI broke my (device name here)!" and 2, the consumer is going to say "Hey! Device made by (company name here) just stopped working...it's a piece of shit!" So I kind of get why they're doing this, even though I don't like the fact that the end consumers are getting screwed in the process.

Actually, I'm not entirely sure this is correct. There are other factors that would act as choke points. Portable devices, for example, and their batteries; you'll go out of your mind if you treat your smartphone as though power was infinitely cheap. Transmission/distribution infrastructure is another MAJOR issue...even if you wanted to ramp everything up to 465KV lines everywhere, there's only one company on earth that makes the transformers, the power cables can't handle it, and within the existing rights-of-way for transmission lines that much power would introduce problems with foliage (the safe zone around a line increases with the power it carries), and we'd likely see a repeat of the 2005 blackout on a regular basis. And that's just what I can list off the top of my head.

But even aside from all that...so what? Your point is like saying that cars that get good gas mileage are a bad thing, or that Moore's law sucks because it just means we can do more with our computers now.

Actually, the problem is bandwidth. Remember how it turns out that most big ISPs are throttling Netflix traffic, and trying to get Netflix to pay them extra to pass their content? Yeah, well, Netflix has had to cave a bit. Comcast is getting paid by Netflix now, and thus the more bandwidth needed, the higher the cost.

But there are other challenges as well. Content providers charge more for media in multiple formats than they do for media in just one format. Pushing the data, even within Netflix, does require more drive space and internal bandwidth and capacity (or, in Netflix's case, a higher bill from Amazon since they are hosted in AWS). They need to build their systems out (i.e., pay for more cloud) to manage the bifurcation between content types as well.

And in other news, you get what you pay for. Extra features, upgraded content, etc. have never been free. They come at a premium. Everything else is just an explanation as to why that might be.

Yes, you do have a point with regard to the complexities of internet security. BUT...these are not ordinary people. These are celebrities. Celebrities, especially on the level of famous actresses, engage the assistance of executive protection companies and PR firms. Both of these are quite familiar with the incredibly complex concept of "don't store nude pics of your body online somewhere," and are quite able to help sort things out for them.

This isn't a new kind of hack, it's not a new kind of problem, and the solution isn't a new kind of solution. Even so and even then, these people had access to others who could help them with it.

are not being watched or monitored and are not showing any symptoms of the illness

How the fuck can the latter be stated with any kind of confidence in the same sentence as the former?

There are three problems with that:

1, the PUC is a local...VERY local...authority, at most reaching to the borders of a state. There are hundreds of them in the US alone. Unless you want things like wireless standards adoption to be fragmented across that large a scattering, you don't want this.

2, there's a nation-wide PUC equivalent that deals specifically in the things you just spoke about. And it's called the FCC. Which proves that the basic hopes and dreams you have are unrealistic, based on their past and current performance as a regulating entity.

3, what you're talking about has nothing to do with most of what TFA was getting at in the first place. Connectivity is not the core of it all.

If he'd said the same thing with only that one substitution...that fascism = all other authoritarian forms of government? Sure, I'd have responded in much the same way. Though, it actually would have been less ridiculous, since historically fascism hasn't been the doctrinally-sworn enemy of all other forms of government to the same degree that communism is. In other words, there would have been less stark examples of how fascism is not interchangeable with other authoritarian forms of government than there are with communism.

I wonder in turn...if he'd called the guy a fascist and I'd replied much the same way, would you have posted as an AC?

The same as the difference between communism and fascism. (Mussolini and Franco, both facist leaders, fought the Communists tooth and nail in their day.)

The same as the difference between communism and the Taliban. (The Taliban emerged from the fighters that overthrew the Communist regime in Afghanistan.)

The same as the difference between communism and monarchies. (It bears mentioning that one country...Russia...had its monarchies ended by Communism in a bloody civil war.)

The same as the difference between communism and National Socialism (Nazis..who hated communism pretty hard, by the way, and killed 25 million of them).

Saying that someone is the same as a communist because they are authoritarian is as far off the mark as saying two companies are the same because they are direct competitors in the same market. Communism is a subset of authoritarian government forms, not the same set, and it's not at all compatible or even friendly with most of the other forms of government that share its authoritarian characteristic. I know it feels good to throw words around that make someone sound bad, but really...if you want to be a truly active and useful participant in a democracy, you have to pull your head out of your ass and deal in terms of fucking reality.

Oh don't worry about the employees, they'll be fine. With Mark Hurd at the helm, they'll be...*laughing*...*doubling over laughing*

Oh, I'm sorry...I couldn't QUITE make it through the rest of that sentence without laughing my BALLS off!