Doesn't it already work the other way? A seller is offering a product at a stated price. A buyer states that they will pay that price for the product. The sales contract is in effect when the seller ships the product (implicitly accepting the deal), and charges the buyer. If the buyer realizes before the product ships that they'd like to back out of the transaction, they can do so.

At least, that's the theory. In practice, a seller may not be completely honest about whether the product has already shipped or not. And in theory, a seller would check that their price was as it was intended, but in practice, they might not for every transaction.

Browsing the web often involves a fair amount of typing on the web, which isn't comfortable on a tablet. And that I'll often be chatting with one or more friends at the same time, possibly watching a video in another window, etc. If I've got a PC available, it's always going to be my machine of choice, over a tablet. Now, if I'm reading the news before bed or something, a tablet's just fine. But not for much more than the most casual of uses.

I found some information that implies that the Android version will be 4.4, and I think you can sideload Flash on Android devices, even though it's not supported by Adobe any more. (In fact, I just tried it, and it'll run on my Android 5.0 phone just fine)

For desktop Linux, I don't think that Adobe has ever released an ARM port of the plugin, so you'd be out-of-luck if you wanted to run a "real" OS, rather than a mobile one. Well, unless Gnash has gotten good enough to be usable for your purposes. It's been a number of years since I tried it, and it didn't impress me then.

Racism is a belief. Facts can't hold beliefs, although they can be used to support someone's belief. Unreasonable conclusions and unreasonable interpretations of facts can be racist. Facts cannot, and logic cannot.

Say that a bullet-proof study came out saying that blond-haired people are, on average, far less intelligent than brown-haired people (assuming some specific, concrete definition of and way of measuring "intelligence" were to be discovered). In and of itself, that would be a fact. If you add the opinion that "more intelligent is better than less intelligent", then you might come up with the prejudiced opinion that "brown-haired people are better than blond-haired people". That doesn't make the fact itself "colorist". It's only the combination of fact and preconceived opinion that makes the thought colorist.

TFS states that it's a Cortex-A5. That family of chips implements the ARMv7 instruction set. Cortex-A5 looks like it's a little less powerful per-MHz than a Cortex-A8, but the higher clock and core count should mean that it's much more powerful than the Beagleboard XM. I don't get the focus on Ubuntu, though. There's no real benefit to running that instead of Debian.

Well, they could provide a marketing benefit via word-of-mouth, of course. But what software do you know that's really bug-free? And anyhow, you can't say that a user like that isn't *more* of a freeloader than someone who at least gives some kind of positive feedback to the developer (well, you can, but I'd disagree with you).

The "freeriders" in the summary don't include those that "test it, and give feedback, find bugs, suggest improvements". If someone's doing that, then they're a helpful part of the development process. The text in the summary that describes freeriders/freeloaders is:

Obviously, that can't be talking about people that submit bug reports and suggestions.

I'm in southern California, and I have a similar experience. I work 40 hours, and it's enough to finish everything that's required of me. In the 6 years I've been employed here, there've been maybe a dozen times that I've had to go over a 45 hour week. When I hear some of the work stories that people talk about, all I can do is thank my lucky stars that I don't live somewhere like SV, because I wouldn't have lasted long with those kinds of workdays.

There are lots of interesting and/or frustrating problems to work on at home too. If TV's all you can come up with, then you aren't even trying. My work is within a fairly constrained field. I have a lot of ideas for things that I don't have the opportunity to do at work, and when one becomes sufficiently interesting, I find time to write it at home instead.

I go to work to do the things that my employer wants done. I go home and do the things that I want to do. It works out nicely.

I noticed a similar tendency in my own behavior. There are two things that I've done about it. First, around an hour before bedtime, all the electronics go off. Pull out a book of whatever you like to read for recreation. Force yourself to start reading, but don't force yourself to keep reading, because then it will feel like a chore. The deal is that you can read as long as you'd like, but when you put the book down, the light needs to go off too. Second, almost everyone has some kind of creative endeavor that they can pursue on their computer. In my case, there are a small number of programming projects that I've started. Writing software requires long periods of concentration, and if you're working on something interesting, then you'll have more incentive to stick to the project.

If you're unhappy with your level of concentration, then find something you enjoy concentrating on. Then when you're obligated to do something tedious, you at least have the attention span to properly apply yourself to the task.

Good to know, thank you.

A new study reports
molecular evidence

Because fuck using URL shorteners when they're unnecessary. It's better to know at least the domain that a link will take you to.

DRM is a source of bugs. Removing it can have significant benefits beyond piracy. When games usually came on CD/DVD, it was my standard practice to download a No-CD crack after I bought the game, so that I could be lazy, and avoid digging through the CD pile to switch games.

The equivalent today is perhaps playing a game without an available internet connection. I'm not in that situation often, but a few times a year, I am. Then again, that usually means I'll just switch to the cellphone instead.

No, the device worked as well as it did before, but with some improvements (a shell to log into wirelessly, compiler, normal contents of binutils, alternate appstores, customized UIs, etc).

Closed hardware is certainly shittier than open hardware, but exaggerating the point is counterproductive.

It's not sold as a computer, but it can be made into one. I turned my iPod Touch into a little remote-accessible Unix system with some compilers and such. I'd be surprised if you couldn't do the same with the current crop of hardware.