Mauro's rationale for the change was valid even if the research behind it was lacking re: the backward compatibility issues it may create.

Upside though is that cars start without a battery as well :)

Kevin Systrom is just reiterating what the original ToS said but with evasive and redirected language. "We do not have plans..." Yeah, you don't have plans yet, you asshole.

The patent system is to supposed to protect ideas but what it does instead is protect monopolies and stifles creative destruction.

Actually, poorer women tend to have higher birth rates. Education and access to contraception are two of the most relevant factors in a lower birth rate, and these are woefully lacking for most poor American women. I found this Census Bureau paper with some data from 2006 showing that women in lower income brackets have much higher birth rates.

Was designed in Israel.

They have some of the brightest software engineers/hackers in the world. They also have secret military forces that have popped up in other countries to selectively kill people they consider enemies to their state. Put two and two together...

Does Google really think Apple would reject Google Maps, with all the negative publicity it would cause for Apple?

If the disaster is big enough then there will likely be a police officers or paramedics on every block anyway, which is what you'd want the phones to be used for anyway. We don't need emergency payphones for non-critical use, including people calling home to tell their relatives that they're ok.

The real trick is that the gov can track video receiving equipment (by the frequencies they use to decode the video)

What is this some Michael Bay "the signal that hacked your network" shit? How could they detect a passive receiver?

The experts at the NHC can't reliably forecast a given hurricane's strength 3 days in advance, even for the killer systems that undergo rapid intensification, a process which requires massive amounts of energy in a small and narrow zone of the atmosphere (read: should be easy to forecast from their spot atmospheric measurements but is not), yet armchair scientists can somehow surmise that a specific storm did what it did based on the sparse influences of a 100 year global warming weather pattern. It's beyond laughable.

Along with higher resolution.

So long, it's been fun. Hope Google and Facebook aren't too far behind you.

Strikes and unions just don't make sense for unskilled labor. And just because it's electronics doesn't make it skilled - if you're doing something that could be replaced with a robotic arm, it's not "skilled", skilled refers to mental skills, not physical.

Actually, unions make far more sense for unskilled laborers. As an engineer, I don't need a union to bargain for my wages. My bargaining power lies in the fact that my skills are in short supply. Companies must pay me competitive market wages because it would take them years to train someone to replace me. Contrast that with an unskilled laborer. They have no bargaining power by themselves because, by definition, they can easily be replaced by anybody else the company hires. Only by joining with all the other unskilled workers do they gain any sort of bargaining power. A single unskilled worker threatening to quit has no real effect on a factory, but the entire group of laborers can effectively shut down the factory in the short-term.

Unions can be pretty fucked up in practice, but in theory they represent the only way unskilled laborers can gain any sort of bargaining power.