Every grocery store and quickie-mart I go to that does wire transfer has signs, brochures, etc. warning you about all the most common scams, of which this one is most certainly on the list. Those that persist in not yet getting the memo that using WU/MG to send money to anybody you don't actually know is insane are beyond help.

Hint: Why would somebody send you a huge check and expect you to forward the money on to their "agent"? Why would they just not pay the "agent" themseleves?

You can't fix stupid... while I feel sorry for those that fall for these schemes, I'm not sure what can be done to help them.

I could totally see the two networks running simultaneously. It's completely accurate that TCP/IP sucks for mass content delivery; it's gigantic waste of bandwidth. And for point-to-point interaction this protocol would be massively inefficient.

But why can the two protocols not run on top of the same Layer 2 infrastructure?

UAE's (Unrecoverable Application Errors) were the bane of Windows 3.1. When Windows 3.11 was released, MS proudly announced that UAE's were no more!

How did they pull off this programming miracle?

By renaming the error to "General Protection Fault".

And they vanquished THOSE in Windows 95 by calling it an "Illegal Operation"

After that, it was just [Program] Has an Error (using various wording, depending on version.

First, I refused to answer those questions not because I bow down to suspect authority. (Where did THAT come from?) I refused to answer them because they are stupid. Of course the answer is "no", but that answer establishes nothing, because the questions imply conclusions that themselves are up for debate. If this is the way you and your like-minded compatriots engage in debate, no wonder you can't get anybody to take you seriously.

And I keep seeing this claim that the ISO process is set up to "suppress opposition and dissent"... but the only specifics ever mentioned is that the process takes a while and has meetings outside North America. Is that the best you can come up with?

To answer some of your points:
- Most technical standards organizations are private. IEEE, ANSI, SAE, IEC, UL, IIHS, IETF, W3C, ASTM, etc., are all private. (Not to mention tech-specific ones like the ones over Compact Flash, USB, Infiniband, etc.) Arguing that the ISO is illegitimate merely because it isn't a government agency is not likely to be persuasive. (And as a side note, the ISO was set up at the behest of the UN and is tightly coupled with them... it's not a UN agency like the ITU, but it might as well be.)
- I'm not aware of any standards organization (professional societies like the SAE and IEEE included) where standards are put out to vote by "a representative slice of practitioners"; they are all voted on by those that chose to participate in the standards process.
- Arguing that it's controlled by a bunch of money-grubbing consultants and trainers AND that it's rammed through by attrition is a contradiction. Stretching out the process indefinitely is exactly opposite to the goal of making money off the standard, since nobody makes money off a standard that doesn't exist.
- It's not deliberate attrition just because it takes longer than you'd like.
- Yes, the burden is on the ISO to demonstrate relevance of its standards. But once they have successfully done so to an organization and that organization comes to you for your services, objecting with nothing more than you "shouldn't have to defend yourself" is not likely to get you hired.
- If such a significant number of professional testers object to the contents of the standard, why could they not scrape up the funds necessary to participate in the standard? Even with meetings held in distant locales, on a per-person basis, it doesn't come out to much. (And could you not find any software testers in India, Japan, etc. that are like-minded to save on travel expenses?) If you want to be taken seriously, you gotta put your money where your mouth is...
- Again, consensus doesn't mean "everyone agrees that they can live with the content", it means that a majority (or super-majority, depending on the rules) approve of the content. If a single "no" vote could prevent a standard from being approved, we'd never have any standards at all (imagine if the Ethernet standard could have been completely halted by IBM signing up for the IEEE committee and voting "no" so it could push Token Ring instead.) This is not a difficult concept to understand, nor does it rise to "suppressing dissent".
- Like it or not, refusing to participate in the standards process does not bode well for arguing that there's "significant" objections to the standard, since those objectors could not be bothered to show up when it came to deciding on the content. (An online petition? Seriously? That's supposed to persuade anybody?)

It's perfectly normal for plumbing in a commercial or industrial setting to be run underneath the ceiling. Burying stuff under a concrete floor is expensive to install, weakens the floor, and is difficult to maintain. A raised floor has limited load-bearing capacity and is also expensive vs. a suspended ceiling (if you care about aesthetics at all... you don't really need one of those either.)

You see plumbing buried in the floor of slab houses because it's cheap to install when the slab is being poured. This is infeasible in a commercial building which is expected to require changes during the building's life.

Really, an N2 line is no more dangerous than the hot water and/or steam lines running overhead in pretty much every commercial building. And in a facility that uses fuel, such as natural gas, those lines are going to run overhead too.

*And I don't see how the ability*...
*ever*
*not reached (or failed to be reached)*

Firstly, I'm not going to answer stupid leading questions. What is this, some kind of sound-bite-driven political debate?

If you don't like the way the standard is going, you form an organization of like-minded individuals and join the working group. Spread amongst a group of people, the costs are not that extreme, nor the commitment that dire.

And I don't the ability of education providers and consultants being able to advertise "We teach/use the XYZ Standard" as being some sort of nefarious plot. If you are looking for advice on something, being able to have a decent idea what you are going to learn about without extensive interrogation and negotiation can be quite useful for both parties.

The signing of an online petition is guaranteed to be utterly and completely ineffective... the costs of actual participation are so low, it's not entirely unjustified to ignore an online petition as anything other than an isolated group. There's a process to get heard on the issue, and internet petitions, and combative communications with those involved are not it.

I read that petition: "Because the people that signed this petition who couldn't be arsed to participate in the process disagree with the standard, consensus is not possible." How was THAT every going to go anywhere? "Consensus" is not reached (or not reached) by waiting until any schmoe with an axe is satisfied; consensus is reached when the committee votes on a standard and approves one. And yes, sometimes consensus cannot be reached, and the standard simply dies... that's a perfectly valid outcome too.

It seems as if their chief complaint is that they were not asked to provide input, and the personal communications with members of the committee didn't go anywhere. That's not how the standards process works (I'm speaking from the IEEE perspective, anyway; don't know how ISO works)... your organization (at least from the IEEE end, this is open to pretty much anybody that can muster up the nominal dues) signs up to be on the standards committee, you pay a nominal fee to be included in the working group, and Pow! Your organization is now a full voting member for the standard.

If you don't sign up for the working group, then it should be no surprise that your input is considered entirely optional and/or ignored entirely.

In the first article, the author describes a management course where a group was supposed to form a consensus. He complains that he disagreed with everyone else, wouldn't change his mind (because of his self-proclaimed "high-standards"), and was therefore excluded from the final output from the group, which then was reported to be a consensus. He disagreed that there was a consensus at all, since he didn't agree with it. That's not how "consensus" works; it does not mean that everybody will be satisfied with the outcome, or even want to be associated with it. He goes on to complain that the ISO process requires "consensus", but since he, and like-minded individuals, disagree with the standard, it should not be cleared as a standard.

Again, not how consensus works. In a consensus process, the majority approve of whatever the final output is, and the objections of the dissenters are noted and made available as part of the standards record. You can look on the website of pretty much any standards organization and access drafts, comments, meeting minutes, presentations, the whole works. This full record can help potential adopters of the standard decide if they want to utilize it or not.

Okay... you are an uneducated person who's never had any experience with modern medicine before (Liberia has 250 doctors (and heavens knows if their training is any good) to serve the entire country of 4M people; the US has 834,000 doctors to serve about 100x the people.), your family member is ill, and a bunch of people in really scary outfits right out of a Hollywood movie just grabbed your sick family member and loaded him/her in a truck to a quarantine facility. You are naturally suspicious because lots of people have died in your village before, and the authorities (who have a well-earned reputation for being a bunch of useless kleptocrats) have never given a flying *bleep!* before. But you certainly do have plenty of experience with the thugs hauling your family members off in trucks, never to be seen again.

Deciding you want your family member back home is not an unreasonable thing to want to do, in the face of whatever sinister purposes you think the central government might have in mind.

That said, I'm sure more than enough of them, like many rioters and protestors everywhere, were there for the looting. Because nothing says "Fight The Man" like taking a bunch of swag.

If you think small-time developers are upset now, I can only imagine how furious they would be if Apple started doing "pay for play". BillyBobIndy would have even less of a chance to make it.

Really, Apple wouldn't make that much money from it, and the reputational costs would be too great. I could see a "sponsored" category being set up, but nothing beyond that.

Other than the fact that fabricating that many 'bots is painful and expensive, what makes this different from The Game of Life (albeit with an algorithm that takes more than a couple of lines.) I just don't see how this is any different from running a simulation of robots forming "any 2-D shape"... what was learned by actually building them?

When Wal-Mart decides to sell a new brand of dish soap, it isn't their job to ensure the product is a smashing success. All Wal-Mart cares about is that when you need dish soap, Wal-Mart is where you buy it; it doesn't really matter to them which one you buy. If DishSoapCo is depending on Wal-Mart to convince consumers to buy their soap, they will be sorely disappointed. (Of course, with no marketing plan, Wal-Mart is unlikely to carry the product to begin with, but that's because they have limited shelf space; the App store has no such limitation.)

In the same vein, as long as you keep buying devices and apps from Apple, they don't really care which ones you buy. Developers that are relying on nothing more than the App Store storefront to do their marketing for them are probably not going to succeed, and they have nobody to blame but themselves.

"Good Faith" helps reduce your damages in a patent claim, but mere use of patented software (much less distribution) leaves you open to patent claims, independent of copyright claims.

And yes, this is a problem with software patents. Both the distributor and end users are vulnerable to claims.

Android is indeed tied up in all sorts of patents, and every phone vendor has to pay up licensing fees, including to Microsoft. (As of a couple years ago, MS made about 10x their Windows Phone revenue just from Android lic fees.)

I saw a notice on my company's intranet last week advertising this program. As a pilot, it was offering free "visits" (PCP visits are free under the regular program.) Tuesday morning, I needed to leave on a business trip just after lunch, and I had my colon acting up (nothing disgusting, just inconvenient.) Several years ago, the same thing happened and an Rx for Hyocyamine fixed the issue. I didn't have time to see even a Doc-in-a-box, much less my PCP.

In a few minutes, I registered for the program, picked one of the four physicians currently online, and after about a five minute wait, she popped onto the screen. She went through a quick history, had me prod various parts of my abdomen to make sure it wasn't some serious organ problem causing my colon issue, and sent the Rx to the K-Mart across the street. She reminded me that she was no substitute for regular physical exams, and that if the problem continued I should see my regular doctor. I cannot imagine a doc-in-a-box visit for the issue would have been very different.

In short, this is exactly the sort of issue telemedicne works for. It saved me the hassle and time of a doctor's visit, it worked for my employer since I didn't have to cancel my business trip, and it worked for my primary doctor, who didn't have to work me in at the last-second.

Really, I think it's best for the sort of issues that you'd handle yourself if the drugs you need to treat it were OTC, but for whatever reason, are not. It ain't going to make a whole lot of sense for most problems.

Having access to a live patient that's not in sub-Saharan Africa is kind of handy.