, but future growth and earnings potential

But most of that future growth and earnings potential is going to come from some other company on the market. If you make a smartphone, you are taking money from other smartphone companies, as well as to some degree companies that make computers. Once you get successful enough, you may also be in a position to reduce margins to the companies who provide components for your smartphone, so you're taking their money too.

A little bit of money comes from "new" sources, the larger you are the more that may be available, but generally your profit comes at someone elses loss. Part of why Wall St. tolerates only a small amount of competition and we always end up with 2 or 3 real competitors.

I will not risk the safety and security of my systems by allowing them to display potentially (frequently) harmful ads.

Let's tally the bad things some ads, do:

- Play audio without permission
- Play video without permission
- Provide intentionally misleading guidance about what a click will do (i.e. "DOWNLOAD HERE!")
- Pop-ups
- Pop-overs
- Obscure material
- Render improperly/force remaining web page to render improperly
- Look really, really ugly
- Frequently provides a strong incentive for copy-cat content, 0 content websites, click-bait, plagiarized content websites to exist, and to be profitable

Let's then look at the upside:
- Provide income stream to site owner

I've got an obvious solution:
- Learn from Wall St. Journal. Paywall your content, groom it to ensure it is top quality and worth payment. Have a secure order form that is not compromised and willing to spill your CC details to everyone, ask for no more personal information than is strictly required to authorize a purchase.

Of course most of us aren't going to deal with the paywall, but if you are a site owner, and you want guaranteed revenue from your site, then that is your only option. Otherwise the arms race will continue. As far as I'm concerned the internet was far more useful before people tried to monetize it. There was 90% less content, to be sure, but the content that exists came from people who had something useful to say.

I was referring to Windows 7 of course, until Microsoft chooses to release something that can fairly be described as an upgrade.

I found 30Hz to be annoying just sitting in a GUI, I never have tried to game with 4k on any system, I doubt I will do so soon.

Why can't the government print more pesos, inflating it anyway? The only difference is electronic funds may be easier to trace, but this is a loser in that they still have to pay to imprison you for being an enemy of the state. Easier just to "steal" via inflation, and knock you down to size and redistribute the extra pesos based on whatever their algorithm is (usually fraud).

If your government turns against you, you are fucked, period. Your only real hope is that you had some investments they can't reach, and you can get yourself out of the country before they close the borders.

The trick is DUAL. You can do dual monitors in linux, been there, done that. You can do 4k in linux, I'm doing that right now. But dual 4k means you have a video card with two display port interfaces, those are not easy to come by. Doing 4k on HDMI is certainly possible, but under any OS you will be limited to 30Hz refresh, which means mouse lag. Windows handles it poorly, you will see noticeable lag. OS X and Linux are pretty good about it, but still..it's annoying.

Once we get video cards with the newest HDMI implementation and/or video cards with more DP, then this might be worth looking at. Nobody has yet produced more pixels than I can find a use for, but I speculate that point could exist in my lifetime.

Unless you make that one thing an awful lot, to the exclusion of other things you could make, but will never make. Coffee makers tend to be the defining implementation of that philosophy.

Hence I don't understand the purpose of this article at all, it's a self solving problem. If you can boil your life down in to a handful of meals, then one trick pony implementations make a lot of sense. If you cannot, then it's a waste of money and you'd be foolish to consider it. If you have boiled your life to a few meals, the reasoning used in the article will not make much sense to you, and just sounds like some random noise with no substance behind it except to condemn products you find useful. If you are someone who enjoys cooking, and/or has high standards for the meals you eat then you would never use such devices.

This isn't new, you can, and many people do, go out and buy a pile of frozen meals for the week, and that's all the effort involved. Others, who want better tasting food, spend a lot of time making it themselves and do a better job of it. To each his own, time is the only true currency any of us manage, each spends it differently based on preference.

Given that she got an A on her examination on "Sharing & Caring", she got on a watch list due to her communist tendencies. Then she clearly attempted a workers overthrow. You can't really blame the government there.

I have never seen Agile implemented successfully in a large corporation that had an "old-fashioned, stodgy" system in place that people "liked" (i.e. didn't want to change, however defunct). I define success as producing superior results. Serious developers don't care about the process and don't want it in their way, the only people who care are people that serious developers don't care about. The "by the book" types will do as told, because they don't want to put anything on the line. So basically you're changing a process the A players don't need, and the other people won't engage in. I'm all for wasting money that would otherwise be returned to wall street, but I'd definitely not use it this way.

. To tar all religious organizations and their member churches as being alike in wanting your goods is no different than considering all non-religious people as being the same because a few horde what they have.

The people in question in my comment aren't using the money for anything but themselves. It is purely used to sustain the church and presumably pay off the $2M costs for the building which is nicer than the corporate hut I'm sitting in right now. Because they are family, I have insight into what is really going on, and I know exactly how charitable these people are. In their terms, they are simply sinners, in my terms they're just self-serving hypocrites who have lost touch with the value of their institution to the society that protects it. But this is anecdotal, not everyone is as bad as the noise in my ear. By the same token, a few churches that do behave properly does not necessarily validate the institution they are based on.

Yes, Jesus may approve of charity but not all followers of Jesus are charitable. Even Jesus had to recognize this, repeatedly, to his own followers, while he was still alive.

And while I reject the notion of God as being more useful than not to society until such time as He comes down from on High and removes all doubt about his policies, one reason I reject many christian religions is summed up by your comment: "If you're going to be an atheist and reject God, it really doesn't matter if you adhere to the Christian rule set or not. Christian works won't get you to heaven. Living "right" won't get you to heaven."

If I were going to be a religiophobe, which I am not, I would argue this comment entirely removes all value of religion from society, and instead puts it in the status of a cult. I would actively seek to abolish such institutions as being utterly devoid of merit and an active drain on their environment. I would remove all tax protections, I would force them to pay taxes both income and property, and do my best to render their income stream imposible. I would argue a God who demands fealty above action, blind faith above reasoned discourse, is not a God we should follow, even if he exists, even if he is omnipotent. This to me is the definition of the anti-God, a force of nature we may die in vain trying to fight, but which we should fight with all due passion. As far as I am concerned you have described Satan himself.

I do not believe in such beings though, and instead believe that your religion was founded in an attempt to help us get along well, and has been co-opted by politics and "size of my church" in a more profound way than you pointed out. I think if we pick and choose what parts of religion are useful, and what are not (dogma) they do still have significant value, or at least we can debate the values and make a determination. Further, I think most adherents do listen to the useful bits and let them outweigh the dogma, much of the time. Removing the religious dogma from your statement, I will distill it to "There is no morality without religion", a statement I disagree with, and can provide support for, but which we will probably be unable to find common ground on. If you tried hard, however, I believe your greatest argument would simply be that a non-religious basis of morality is sound academically and has strong secular merit, but is not comprehensible to "the average joe", and further without fear of the Almighty and the realization that right and wrong are social constructs, we may see a rise in anti-social behavior. I have no response to that, it might be true, I hope it isn't, because we're going to hit this issue soon enough.

maybe the relig-a-phobes will calm down now.

Nope, as mom constantly tells me, this is because Christianity is under attack. If anything, this will focus those that remain and get them higher and mightier while they still have a majority. I have relatives who run churches, all I hear is how atheists (i.e. me) are ruining everything, driving away our core values.

Nevermind that while I am an atheist, as atheists go I tend to stay pretty close to the christian rule-set as far as morality goes, I tend to accept most of their reasons for most things as being least-bad options, certainly I'm willing to accept that the concept of morality exists which many of my "secular humanist" peers have utterly rejected. That's not the point! The point is you gotta have faith and pay for it! So churches are having to close. That's one point. A meta-point may be that the political capital behind religion is shrinking, and that one I cannot see a single downside to at all.

His message is confused, possibly on purpose. The straw-man is "people" who don't like "pixelated" images. In fact "people" appreciate well done art, which he relies upon to try to make his point in the article, we are repeatedly asked to compare images and agree with him! But, and here's the real gist:

- Pixel art arose primarily due to device limitations: how does one create great art with huge, blocky pixels and a limited color palette? A genre was born
- Badly done, hid def art, frequently is preferred over well done pixel-art at lower resolutions. True enough, often non-artists can't see the mistakes or merely are less offended.
- Devices are screwing up his pixel art in some cases, making it look terrible. Can you blame users, here? No. I don't fully understand what is happening on some devices, but certainly not all devices have the same sized pixels, not all devices have SQUARE pixels, and when scaling happens various algorithms of unspecified quality are applied to render the image. It is a mathematical truth that a higher resolution source will produce a better display image.
- Here's what he didn't say, but is heavily implied: High Definition pixel art takes far too much work. The "pixel tax".

So if you boil down his argument it ends up being HD pixel art is cost prohibitive, but HD artwork gives more bang/buck, so our best option is to deliver lower quality art instead. Which is rational, but not ideal. However it is ignoring the obvious:

- Figure out why some devices improperly display his art, fix if possible ($$$)
- Create better tools for delivering HD pixel art ($$$)

The last one seems strange I guess, but his entire point was that pixel art was an evolved style. Various techniques and methods were created to do it well. With significantly improved technology, many of those techniques are out of vogue or utterly useless. At the same time, modern tools & animations are lacking in fidelity, not all of which can be fairly blamed on lazy-artists: there is still a need for pixel-art (by some definition), but the sheer magnitude of pixels and the multitudinous array of colors available makes it a daunting task. Better tools and techniques are needed to produce higher resolution computer art.

Personally I prefer hand drawn art in this style over 3D models for many types of games, so I will miss it. But I can't help but agree that low-res is probably not the right solution.

As far as I can tell technophobia is on the rise.

As opposed to installing Windows, realizing it was broken by design, and there is fuck all you can do about it.

The moral of this story is:
1) The TSA and assorted related three letter agencies don't give a crap about due process or warrants anyways
2) If you're travelling through the USA (into, out of, or stoppover in), either don't bring any electronics at all, or only bring freshly wiped stuff with absolutely no personal data on them. Blob up your personal files into a passworded file somewhere on the 'net that you can download when you get where you're going, and don't carry the URL for it on your person.

3) Encrypt your hard drive, make sure to shut down before walking through security, and remember "I do not recollect" was good enough for Reagan.

I predict HuffPo will tell us how awesome that is, too.