A shame that we fully expect this data to be used to track us personally (because, let's face it, it probably will). This kind of data would be a huge value to civil engineers and planners who design the roads and target maintenance, improvements, and new routes. It would cost in the tens of millions of dollars to collect just a fraction of this using traditional methods, and yet the data could be had for less than a 1/10 of that and be far, far more complete.

Corporations said they would always act in the best interest because they're held accountable by stockholders and consumers? Is he saying that unregulated corporations are doing things which may be harming the population in general because of a short-term profit motive? Say it isn't so!

You've never seen manufactured housing (aka mobile homes)? That do that all the time, and delivery it right to your site ready to be hooked into the power grid and water/sewer.

Don't like mobile homes? Try a modular home. Built in a factory with all the bits complete but in shipable-size pieces, assembled on site.

Still too much? there are a dozen different panelization technologies that will send you prefabricated parts you just screw or connect together.

None apart from Unity itself as far as I am aware of, but the claim I responded to was "However, the Apple trackpads are limited to two fingered use on non-Apple operating systems through the use of crippled drivers".

Wrong. At least on my 2009 MB Pro 3- and 4-finger touch has been working out of the box on Ubuntu for many years.

To answer the question from TFS, I can only echo what others already wrote. When I purchased this laptop, the MB Pro had by far the nicest product design for my needs, and the PC laptops I found in the same price range did not come close: Full-body aluminium instead of plastic, smooth outer shell instead of little knobs and slits everywhere (important, e.g., when having to remove the laptop from the bag at airport security check), low-key LEDs instead of a blinking christmas tree telling me useless stuff like my wifi working (I know, no need to blink for every packet!!!) but require the use of tape when you want to watch a movie.

Lots of people pay outrageous prices for stuff. People with lots of disposable income. If you were pulling in solid 7 figures (or higher), the cost of Google glass would be insignificant, less than the cost of a lunch out to someone with an average salary. Buying a private jet vs flying international first class seems like not that much of an upgrade, considering you get to the same place either way, and you get a comfortable ride regardless, but jet ownership and usage is increasing, even through you'll probably never buy one.

That's just it. Nearly 200,000 people die every. single. day. Doctors have patients die all the time because some things can't be fixed, or can't be fixed within the constraints of "regular" medicine. One of those constraints is money. I didn't see where he took her to a clinic and offered the best surgeon in the world $10,000,000 to attempt the surgery. (And, remember, all medical procedures are just probabilities of repair not guarantees.) Because he probably would have gotten a different answer.

And, yes, it's intensely frustrating. In fact, I'm often glad that I'm not a doctor. I've run into cases where someone's home will cost more to fix than the home is worth. Often, for those people, it costs more than their life savings. It's the death sentence for the structure, and a pretty dire condition for the owner. Imaging that your only shelter is falling apart around you, and may collapse, but not only don't you have the money to fix it but if you found the money and did fix it, it would still be worth less than the money you spent.

As for the misdiagnosis, doctors are still humans and they still make mistakes.

Every fiat currency in the world is backed by the guns and ammo the country can bring to bear in the event of war, because might implies stability.

Fiat currencies are backed by nothing more tangable that that which underlies bitcoin. It's all a matter of confidence. The biggest problem with bitcoin is psychological. Humans, on the whole, have been duped into believing that inflation is good, and that more money means more value (ignore the fallacy there, most people will never understand it). Bitcoin is a (nominally) fixed supply, which means that it's value related to other fixed supply goods, in a perfect market, will never change. To someone who has used fiat currency all their lives, that's a bad thing.

In fact, as bit coin value goes up relative to fiat currencies, the payments in bitcoins (how much you "make" on a transaction) goes DOWN, which is the worst thing you can show any average Joe. The flip side doesn't help - if the value of bitcoin goes down, then the public sees it as a commodity which has lost value and is therefore a bad investment.

IMHO bitcoin can't win.

Oh, they do. Mine has a little section with breadboards and wire and arduinos and shields. And they're about 2x-3x what Amazon will deliver to me for free in 2 days (yes, I have prime), and 3x-10x what the parts go for on the open/global market. So, yes, I'll spend $20 on that SD shield if I absolutely need it today, but if I don't I can guarantee I'm going to order it for $10 at Amazon or for $4 the next time I order from DX.

Being local means something, and I prefer to buy locally, but not when I get raped at the checkout. I understand the 1000% markup on a pack of 5 resistors or a single LED I need that might cost $2 - there's a minimum cost to package, stock, and sell something. But the bigger stuff really needs to be more in line with what other vendors are selling it for on line. That means better/more efficient distribution and smarter inventorying, and clearly they're not interested. Lowes seems to be able to stock copper parts at $0.15-0.40 a piece, and you can buy a whole range of bolts, screws, and nuts for as little as $0.05 a piece. If they offered me a hammer for $40 that I can buy online for $15-20, I can pretty much guarantee they wouldn't be making many in-store sales, which is why they sell a hammer for $17-22, because for $2 extra I'll happily get it right now, but for $20 extra I can buy two on line and always have a spare.

There should be a law against doing this that applies to anyone not in law enforcement. Or government. Or corporations. Those are the minds which will be affected, and they won't stop until something is made illegal.

Those people are just collateral damage in the war to maximum revenue. They say you can't make an omelet without breaking some eggs, and you can't make yacht-buying CxO salaries without breaking a few laws. So a few people get bad wifi. They should just be richer so they can buy better service.

With the resurgence in the maker movement, RS might have been in the right position to take advantage of it, but instead had tacked towards a mobile phone mall storefront with some overpriced toys, horrifically overpriced, low end consumer electronics, and batteries.

Sadly, there's probably not enough volume in the maker niche to keep all of the stores afloat at competitive pricing (i.e., not $35 for an Uno board that can be had from Amazon for $18 and from foreign shippers at $12), but it would be awfully cool to have racks of parts and components in at least one store in every town.

To add to the "bad example" text of a sibling post, it's also Buzz Aldrin. Famous, good looking, tall, white, and well spoken - those are all unwritten and unspoken mitigating factors in American law. It would have been the same for any high profile CEO or member of nearly any state or federal legislature.

FWIW, a punch is actually a battery charge. Assault is the threat of bodily harm (and that may also be used as a mitigating factor if you are accused of battery following an assault).

Mainframes are like really big industrial cars where everything is hugely expensive. They're stupid expensive, but far cheaper than trying to do massive amounts of work with thousands of pickup trucks.

It's like the transporter they use to move the space shuttle with rockets and all ready to go:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C...

It goes 1MPH, which sounds pretty wuss-tastic in car terms, until you consider how much capacity it has at that speed. It would be basically impossible to accomplish the same thing with any number of VW Beetles without spending years taking apart and reassembling everything each time you wanted to attempt a launch.

That's where mainframes make sense - problems which are really massive, but need to run on one computer. Any problem that can be broken down into smaller chunks can be solved much more efficiently with a network of smaller computers.

As the smaller computers continue to get more and more capable and the technology to break down problems and high speed interconnects become more common, the jobs that run better on a mainframe get more rare and networks of servers become more common.

Mainframes do have one cool thing going for them that is not respected on smaller machines - portability. There's code that's been in use for several decades on mainframes running in a stack of emulators. Each new mainframe gets an emulator to make it possible to act just like an an old mainframe. This means the customer needs to run their code on the emulator instead of having to tweak the code to work on the new mainframe. For jobs that justify mainframe costs, downtime is very expensive, so minimizing additional conversion efforts is huge. Also, it's entirely possible that the last person who knew how some mission critical code worked may have died 40+ years ago and business people aren't big proponents of hiring someone to figure out and rewrite legacy stuff.