You understand that the release of the latest iPhone generations produced the highest rate switchers away from Android and over to the iPhone, right?

I don't mind the debate - I've had an iPhone since the 3GS but was and am seriously looking at switching away for various reasons. The debate should be based on fact though, and the facts are that Apple doesn't have a dearth of people moving off other platforms and over to its own.

Don't be silly, Apple doesn't have piles of cash in Cupertino. They move the money to other countries where they can avoid US taxation.

Just send him to Libertarian Island with Peter Thiel, and then they can all be killed by pirates once they're outside of US jurisdiction.

Union representation.

The Debian package for libudev1 is built from the systemd source code. Says it right on the page: "Download Source Package systemd".

Good plan. Then when those guys all get together to go out drinking again on Comcast's dollar, they will have a funny story to talk about.

Comcast has over 100 lobbyists whose careers revolve around preventing that. They will scale up that spending as needed. And the FCC is practically a case study in how to execute regulatory capture.

There's an additional service fee if you want an invisible handjob.

And have a trivial exploit as a result too. It's a good thing that people who write bad Python and Java code are using those languages.

It's all operating system cached writes, they're not even getting to the disk's write cache.

Python's file flush() function does not flush data to disk. You have to call os.fsync(f.fileno()) for that.

Same problem with the Java code. flush doesn't make sure data is on disk. You have to use sync or force or something.

This is an excellent way to introduce the smart scientist/moron coder archetype to people though, so it's not completely useless.

SSDs and disk speed have nothing to do with this. None of these writes are hitting disk. All they've shown is that when you cache a write to disk, the operating system might add data to it more efficiently than the slow Python and Java string code can expand a string.

There's minimal evidence that healthy eating alone lowers your long-term body weight. That's part of the point really. Any diet change, be it fad dieting or more sustainable health eating choices, they are all capable of short-term weight loss. Keeping that weight off on the long-term is is a so much harder problem, it's barely related to what works for losing a large amount of weight in the first place.

If you read studies about people who lose and keep weight off, like Long-term weight loss maintenance, the common factors that always show up are both very low calorie counts and constant feedback. Basically, chart your weight all the time, and cut your calories if it ever goes up. That is brutally difficult to sustain for years at a time. If you follow any sort of hunger-driven diet, with healthy foods or not, you will probably go back to whatever weight your body likes over time. That's how hunger works.

The Central Valley of California is sitting on rich topsoil over 100 feet deep. Before the modern water projects, it mostly grew winter wheat, because there's enough moisture in winter (the rainy season in California) for that in most years. The Central Valley is technically a Mediterranean climate, not a desert (though the southern part of the Valley is technically semi-desert). But the water projects made it profitable and possible to grow crops year-round rather than just in the winter, mining that 100 feet of topsoil for food. Telling people they can't mine a resource like that doesn't go down well with Americans, who tend to be an ornery sort.

An example is almonds. Almonds now use close to 10% of water used in California. One almond takes approximately 1.1 gallons of water to create it.

So: Why, in the midst of drought, are California farmers planting *more* almonds? The answer, paradoxically, is because water has become more expensive. The water projects are not delivering water to California farmers, so California farmers have a choice between a) not growing crops (and thereby losing their farm, since no crops means they can't pay the mortgages they took out on their farm equipment and/or farmland to expand in earlier more optimistic times), or b) drilling wells. Drilling wells that in some cases are a thousand feet or more deep. The water from these wells is ridiculously expensive for two reasons: 1) the simple cost of drilling, and 2) the large amount of electricity needed to haul that water (at 8 pounds per gallon) up that 1,000+ feet of pipe to the surface.

In fact, the water from these wells is so expensive that if the farmers used it to grow a low-water-use crop like wheat they'd lose money. Most low-water-use crops like wheat or corn have a relatively low price on the commodities market, a price that will not pay for the cost of the well and the electricity to pump water out of the well. So, paradoxically, expensive water has caused farmers to instead grow almonds -- one of the only crops that sell for a higher price than the cost of the water needed to grow them, yet also one of the most water-thirsty crops on the planet.

And now you know the side of the story you don't get from the Libertarian free market think tanks and their notion that expensive water would cause water usage by farmers to decline. What matters to farmers is *not* the absolute cost of the water. What matters to the farmers is the *marginal* cost of the water -- the difference between what it costs to obtain the water, and what income they get from using the water. When water was cheap but in limited supply, farmers grew crops that were water-thrifty because the price of those commodities was enough to pay for the water. Now that water is expensive but they can pump as much as they wish from the ground (until the aquifer runs dry, anyhow!), the California farmer's slogan becomes "drill, baybee, drill!" and the almond trees go in.

That grass-roots FLOSS development only happened after the GPL does not mean it was necessary to create it, nor even caused directly by it. Giving away free software to promote consulting and support revenue can be a profit center independently of other motives. I can easily imagine an alternate 2015 where there was no Stallman, so instead consulting companies shared boring infrastructure code to split its development costs.