They are not going to get very far weeding out fake likes when their system is set up to bribe people for likes.

What facebook needs to do is add a dislike button like youtube has.

If I want to comment on my local government's facebook page to complain about something why the fuck do I have to LIKE them first.

Secondly facebook should crack down on companies asking for likes to enter competitions or get discount coupons at their shop.

You say accelerating yet the FA is about microsoft doing the opposite.

Had microsft open sourced something useful then maybe people might care like open sourcing skype or ntfs or windows or office or outlook or uefi signing, the kinect etc. Instead they open source rubbish which is only good to leverage their own products and is nothing good for for porting to other platforms for interoperability.

I appreciate your idea, but I don't think it's that good a fit for the Segway.

People that can't walk a mile most likely needs their own assistance tech - a walker, a wheelchair - on the bus or train as well. And people that don't have time to walk a mile or two won't be helped by a thing that barely moves above walking speed. A bicycle rental spot (or free city bikes) would be more helpful and less costly.

"Not tonight dear, I don't have a headache"?

Firefox works just fine. Better than Chrome for me, actually; it uses less memory and less CPU, and when I stopped allowing Flash I rarely or never see any crashes either.

If you feed it a -m command line switch, one of my applications informs you that Martian Mode is not yet implemented.

Lame, huh?

...laura

Fair enough. That probably wasn't a good example by me.

Incidentally in the case of the kindle book, amazon refunded the buyers their money so they did at least try to help the victims.

I guess what I was trying to do was to give an example of a different situation where an innocent party is wronged by losing something that they thought they had purchased legitimately. Same as your point 1. The buyer hasn't committed a crime but they still lose what they have purchased. Maybe a better example would have been counterfeit keys. The rights owner doesn't have to recognize them.

To point 2, in the case of the kindle book, amazon refunded the buyers, so they had the option of rebuying the books elsewhere and hopefully sending the revenue correctly this time to the rightful owner.

Agreed. Copyright infringement isn't theft. I should have made a better example.

Not sure why you are asking me this... ?

I'm just explaining to the AC and the readers here why his 1984 ebook got removed. Right or wrong what amazon did, its different from what steam does when it removes a game from sale.

Thanks. A lot of these sound like "don't cares" in the instruction decoding logic. Reminds me of an undergrad course in logic design with lots of Karnaugh maps and stuff.

...laura

I wouldn't have minded seeing an example of one of those illegal opcodes and how what it did was useful.

Brooks called such things "curios". Side-effects of invalid operations that people had started to use, and that had to be considered part of the specification.

My policy (seconded by my boss) is that I do not document such things. If a hack is documented people start to use it, then we have to support and maintain it.

...laura

That book youre are talking about was sold by somebody on Amazon who never had the rights to it to you in the first place so you never had a legit license to have that book. Thats why Amazon could remove from existing buyers. The same way as if you bought stolen goods from a second hand store, the police can remove it.

Games that have been take off steam have never been removed from a users library when the license was fine when it was sold.

microsofts brand name is shot and they know it. Compare the different console boxes. The ps4 and wii u have the company name displayed quite promiantly on them while the xbox one does. Nor did the xbox 360 or the original xbox.

Even on the zune device boxes microsoft was ashamed to put display their company name prominently on it.

And on phones they used the Nokia name to push their windows phones.

Fact is, outside of pc software and hardware, microsoft knows their brand name deters customers.

I solder SMT components by hand as well. Don't even need a microscope; just head-mounted magnifier glasses is plenty. Make sure you have good light and plenty of flux and you're good to go.

But the problem is the board. Sure, if you have a finished design already, and you intend to actually use it in the future, then sending off for a finished PCB is good. But if it's just a hobby, and you're prototyping or just playing around to better understand a particular circuit, then spending a good chunk of money and weeks of time for a board is simply not feasible. You really want to set something up, try it, then tear it down and try the next idea.

With that said, I don't know that this is the answer either. Hand-drawn does not sound precise enough to handle SMT, and a whole separate device just making prototype boards sounds like too much money and space for a hobbyist. Perhaps the answer is desktop mills that become cheap and precise enough that you can use them to cut out boards from copper blanks along with other building tasks. At least that would not be a single-purpose gadget.