Well yes, that's the problem. There is absolutely no reason why the total value of the economy should have any particular relationship with the total value of all of the gold in existence, which leads to all kinds of fun when the economy expands and you have to somehow convice everyone that gold is now worth more not because it's actually more useful for anything (it isn't) but because we need it to be worth more in order to have enough currency in circulation to support the actual value of the parts of the economy that are genuinely worth more.

With a completely seperate rendering engine with different quirks, too, at least in the case of the Mac version.

From what I can tell, the patch was intended to change the behavior userspace sees from the driver, so it wasn't immediately clear whether this was an intentional change or not. More importantly, it also wasn't clear whether other drivers which Mauro was also responsible for maintaining also behaved in the same way. Mauro provides some context here - basically there are a whole bunch of different webcam drivers which each implement the V4L2 API slightly differently, which means that often applications only work properly with certain webcams. The patch was part of an attempt to clean this up. Linus seems to think that any change to userspace APIs that might break existing applications is wrong and fixing up compatibility is no excuse, so it looks like webcams will remain a mess on Linux for a while...

No. The actual analogy would be if Bill said. "Errrm, hang on, the existing beads which are in equally important structural areas are just as dodgy, should we fix those too" and his boss yelled at him to shut up and stop trying to make excuses, they haven't failed yet so they're fine. Then a few weeks later the whole thing falls down and kills someone because one of the older welds fails.

His argument is that it's a bug with pulseaudio because there are already quite a lot of existing drivers that behave in exactly the same way, and PulseAudio broke here it's already going to be broken with all of them. Subtle difference.

That's not quite right. The standard option for RPi these days is Raspbian, which is actually a clone of Debian developed and maintained by Raspberry Pi users. So you don't have the support of al the actual Debian infrastructure like their package archives, download mirrors, etc. Meanwhile the MK802 can run either Ubuntu or Debian (or various other OSes). You need a custom kernel just like on the Pi but nearly everything else is standard Debian/Ubuntu. (Ubuntu can't actually run on the Pi at all because the ARM processor's too old.)

That's a relatively old problem, though. Certainly housebuilders have been building homes on flood plains here in the UK for at least a decade, probably longer. I saw a really hilarious incident a while ago when they insisted that their new homes weren't at risk of flooding and the building site flooded spectacularly part-way through building them - and the company kept on insisting there was no problem!

Intel actually had to write an ARM emulator for their Android stuff because ARM has a very definitive software advantage over x86 there. Sure, there's lots of x86 desktop applications, but how many of them are usable on a tablet? On a phone? For that matter, how many of them can be used without adding the substantial cost and system resource usage of a full Windows install?

Not anymore, apparently. They removed that feature. Now the only way to send someone you don't know a message, even just one explaining how you know them, is to pay Facebook money.

Have you heard of something called network effects? At this point you basically have to be on Facebook if you want to be at all social because everyone else uses it. It doesn't matter how much they fuck users over or how awful their services is, within reason, because what're you going to do - move to another service that none of your friends use?

Also, in many cases people will not be able to send someone a friend request at no charge. I just visited Facebook and they pestered me to update my privacy options with a really obnoxious pop-up. The privacy options they're encouraging me to lock down are the people who can send me friend requests (from anyone to only friends of friends) and who can send me messages without paying them money (from friends and others I may know to only friends). They're not trying to get me to change anything that might reduce their ability to profit from this, such as who can look me up on Facebook, just the options that would force more people to pay them money in order to contact me.

Of course, they can't actually explain where they met you and why they want to be friends anymore without paying Facebook money to allow you to message them. Facebook removed messages from friends requests.

From what I can tell, the CIA were practically bragging about how clever they were for disguising their operatives as health workers doing polio vaccinations to anyone in the media that would listen. The only way you could've missed it is if you were living in a cave somewhere when Osama was assassinated.

Atheros ath9k and ath5k mini-PCIe cards are not exactly exotic hardware...

This. For example, ASICs like the hypothetical Bitcoin mining ones are produced by chip fabs using a number of pieces of equipment produced by many different companies, and all of that equipment is required to make chips. There's no one organisation that has the tools, knowledge and resources to manufacture all the different bits of equipment required to set up a chip fab.