I wonder if those Scandinavian countries with high GINI scores have a defacto policy of importing more poor people from neighboring countries like the United States does? No, they all have very tight immigration controls and immediately deport illegal and undocumented aliens. Wanting to reduce the number of poor people and seeking to ease the process of entry for poor migrants are mutually exclusive goals.

The United States already has legal mechanisms in place for them to do this . . . they are free to get in line and apply like everyone else.

That i7-4770R and 4K-capable onboard Intel Iris Pro 5200 is hard to beat in this form factor (if you can handle the hurricane fan noise). They were available around $400 at Black Friday. This new NUC is a nice small form factor, but kinda pricey for the performance.

Sure content creators need to be rewarded for their work -- but not until the end of time. Certainly not for decades and decades after they're dead. And no fucking way singing "Happy Birthday" in a restaurant should count as a public performance and result in sending a check to Warner / Chappell music (but it does). And while we're at it, fuck the perversion that copyright law has become, and fuck Big Media's teams of lawyers who'd rather exploit talent, rootkit PCs, cripple their own content with DRM, and turn people into felons and sue them into the poor house than fix their obsolete distribution models. Your tired argument is the same one that has been parroted by the RIAA and MPAA shills since the Net has existed. Yeah, let's throw the "fuckers" under the bus and give Big Media Corps the right to do whatever the fuck they want, forever!

Because generally speaking, neither of these groups produce any value per-capita compared to the middle class. The middle class does, but they're generally working too hard to notice when they get fucked by politicians on both sides until it's too late.

While that may be true (perhaps I should've used a Bundy Ranch-esque illustration to fire people up instead), quit dancing around semantically. Left-leaning new sites absolutely refuse to take a stance against Islamic terrorism because it doesn't fit in their worldview and it makes their readership highly uncomfortable, yet they have zero problems pointing out every conceivable flaw imaginable (again, perceived or otherwise) with Christian groups they've been programmed to ridicule and hate. Period. I mean, the President just did it again this morning at the National Prayer Breakfast. There, is that clear enough for you?

...that if a right-leaning group committed "atrocities" anywhere (perceived or otherwise), MSNBC, Salon, Mother Jones and their ilk would have it on front page infinite loop 24 x7. Our society needs to quit playing partisan games and starting calling out evil, regardless of who the perpetrators are.

As someone that owns a high end imaging studio that shoot "big stuff" every day for a living, we would love it if someone came along and built a sensor using a full 4x5 capture area. It hasn't happened since Better Light and their digital scan backs (and we still use and love our Super 8K-HS), which is now 15 year old technology. The current state of the art is the Phase One 80 megapixel digital back, and Phase One has cornered a very large percentage of the medium format digital market at this point. Both the DSLR and medium format guys are going to start to run up against physical limitations inherent to the sizes of their capture areas, including sensitivity (evidenced by this new Canon's relatively low ISO ratings), and, most importantly, the details of what the optics can resolve. If you want to capture more actual *image information* and not just pixels, you need to scale things up. My guess is that that 50 MP Canon will just make it that much more obvious how soft most lenses are at the corners.

To build what you describe, someone would have to pay for the R & D to design and fab a chip that large. That's no trivial effort. Only a few foundries in the world right now are even capable of producing it. I believe Phase One is using Sony silicon in their latest iterations; previously, they had used DALSA for awhile. Yield per wafer is obviously way lower too with a monster sensor -- maybe two at the most? These guys look at the potential market and have to cost-justify it that way, and the market is just too damn small, unfortunately. If the selling price is six figures (and I don't see how it couldn't be, given that a new Phase One IQ280 is $50K), how many potential buyers are really out there? I just don't see it happening unless someone like the Federal government steps in and commissions their own cameras, like it did with Hasselblad back in the 60s for the space program. With the NSA and Homeland Security's "needs," you never know.

...but we already know that Comcast and Verizon are the Antichrist in corporate form. I am concerned about the details of the implementation but this *should* be a very positive thing for those who actually use the Internet instead of just acting as its tolltakers.

The problem is, and one of the main reasons that Uber and other rideshare companies exist at all, is that gov't took things a step beyond simple regulation, at least in the US: they implemented full-bore artificial scarcity via the ridiculous, corrupt medallion system. These medallions act as both a completely unnecessary limit on competition as well as on the total number of available cabs. They are a lose-lose for the consumer and all the folks complaining about Uber et al have never been able to come up with a good reason for keeping the medallion system, which is one of the main reasons why taxi service sucks so bad in the US. We can certainly have regulation without the gov't limiting the number of vendors in the market -- that's the way it's done in, you know, just about every other industry out there. Why should the cab companies and taxi unions be any different?

Well, considering the armed insurrection at Ferguson, and the raft of armed "activists" ready to confront law enforcement while using peaceful protesters as human shields while burning the property of completely innocent people to the ground, it would be extremely bizarre if they weren't running training exercises. One could say that they would be negligent if they weren't...

All medallions do is create taxi cartels, barriers to entry for others wishing to participate in the market, a complete lack of competition, and insane profits for the medallion owners (not the drivers). It is a system that just begs for abuse and it's disgusting that this type of situation is not only condoned, but advocated by our municipal governments. It is only because of the ride share apps that these dinosaurs are finally being wiped out by their own well-deserved asteroid. http://www.washingtonpost.com/...

So, what's to stop an insurance company from working with the ride share companies to offer up commercial coverage to anyone driving using the company's ride share app? Some smart insurer is going to go down this path and make a lot of money. Certainly, with almost a million drivers, someone like Uber would have the clout to negotiate the lowest commercial rates on the planet. That would be absolutely no different than what taxi unions have been doing for decades, just at a larger scale. The only difference in this case, apparently, is that it's OK when a union working under a gov't sanctioned artificial scarcity (medallions) does it, and absolutely horrific and unfair when an evil corp like Uber does it.

Purely anecdotal . . . search the Net and you'll find many more stories attesting to the exact opposite. And good for her . . . that's her choice. My choice (and the choice of many others) is to never take a taxi again. The insane growth of the ride share industry, however, is proof positive that people are readily embracing any alternative to the gov't-sanctioned artificial scarcity known as medallion-based traditional taxi services.