hold down these three buttons and cycle power

Those kind of features are normally customer request, unfortunately. Nothing can be done.

the terribly bad design we typically see in embedded

Most people just don't have the raw mental horsepower to write low-level or OS-level code and have it work GOOD.

It takes god-like powers, a will of steel, a precient intuition, a mind like a steel trap for details, a dashing appearance, the ability to leap over tall buildings in a single bound, and be very well endowed to be able to pull it off. It isn't something you can throw at a kid fresh out of college and zero experience for cheap without running into problems because it takes a few years of practice to evolve into a diety with phenominal cosmic powers.

I'm pretty sure a rich white guy posted this.

You realise that the ancient Greeks knew the Earth is round, right?

Aww, he's trying to argue. Look at him use his words! Such a good boy.

Your pie in the face comparison is invalid. It suggests disaster has already struck. The only disaster that has ever struck flies in the face of what you and other scientific midgets who can't read a simple spreadsheet detailing results of core samples...the next ice age. It is coming. Bring on more carbon.

Millions of people repeating the experiments of others to put a bullet point in the education section on a CV may or may not mean anything. How many lives have been improved by this experiment? Where is the utility? Just follow the money, and you'll find it...

What meme? That was entirely spontaneous, honestly, grammatical errors and all. I'm sure you realize though that once you start treating things as indisputable facts you have left the realm of science.

Gravity, no matter how many times you drop your beer bottle, no matter how many times you have watched the same consistent yet mysterious universal force bring it shattering end, is just a theory. I don't care if every expert and every crawling worm on this planet believes the same exact thing in the same exact way, it could still be wrong. Is the earth still flat?

Climate science is not physics. It is in its infancy and I believe it deserves a healthy dose of skepticism, *especially* when people get creepily religious about it. If predicting the future were as simple as putting 1 mcg of Freon-12 in a a sealed test tube of 500 mL 50% O3 and declaring that 25-50 years from now that is what happens to the entire planet, then I would expect the most powerful cluster of supercomputers on the planet to be able to predict if is going to rain next weekend better than the farmer's almanac.

There is zero demonstrable practical output or progress in terms of human progress or human suffering to show for all the work and money that has gone into this field over the last 30 years, and anyone who puts any stock in it is no better informed than the creationist who believes that the world is 6,000 years old, because all of the world's leading bible scientists sat on their hemorrhoids and confirmed the same values while trying to infer the entire history and trajectory of the universe using a single pre-scientific-method cultural document transcribed from one culture's oral tradition, that described some details of some other culture's cultural events.

Even so, 20 years ago, I had one computer, one monitor, and one TV, and each of those was expected to last 4 to infinity years. Today? 3 TVs, 4 laptops, two desktops, a tablet, a netbook, and 6 monitors, and I'm periodically replacing it all about every 2-4 years. The expanded market just increases your upgrade load. Everyone I know has a desktop, a laptop, and a tablet (even if the desktop is only used once a year for taxes). I only see more and more variety of these things at the electronics store. I'm pretty certain the bitching you hear about a shrinking desktop market has everything to do with more companies competing and lowering costs, than number of units actually sold. I'm still buying desktop computers at a rate of once every two years, and I have been since at least 2004.

I can think of some more skeptical reasons.

Or the Ozone layer is perfectly fine now, and repairing itself, albeit slowly, and said scientists currently have their hand out and need to come up with an excuse to fill it.

Or, the "Ozone Hole" was a natural occurrence all along, and had nothing to do with CFCs, because CFCs are so flipping heavy whoever construed all of it isn't on the ocean floor is a dunce...etc

This question is a little US-centric. Let me try to iteravely improve on this...

From your perspective, how is the globalization of commerce and specifically programming affecting you and those you know? Are the new high level scripting tools available to programmers since C++ became popular pushing the profession towards a more "commoditized" state, where people are easily replaceable and where the related skills and specialization eventually offer no better benefits and compensation than other less skilled professions?

They smell like Magic Smoke, of course!

Just like Red Hat Linux 6.1 bitcoin is incompatible with magic smokeless CPUs.

Proof of the above. Why do you think macs draw the art crowd? Hint: People who aren't genetically predisposed to math and reading comprehension don't compare enough to see the obvious price and technical specification deficiencies. That and the Windows interface is more verbose. :D

**Ducks**

I don't see how Chrome is gaining share on mobile...constant freeze, lag, and crash on all phones I use it on. The default Android browser and Firefox are the same. Opera is the only thing that is remotely reasonable, even if it is a bit slow at times it is head and shoulders above anything else.

Does anyone actually buy into that? What a crock.
The removal of the Carbon Tax was entirely politically motivated.

Politically motivated only because poor people were being wrung dry by the utility rate hikes caused by the carbon tax, and they rebelled. But that was the entire reason for politicization of climate change. It's all about money.

You can't get any significant money for your government programs from taxing the rich, so you need to tax the poor. But if you're progressive, you can't exactly overtly raise taxes on the poor...so...carbon credits. Brilliant!

Only Australian Labour completely screwed the pooch and people were seeing their bills double or triple...that isn't going to sneak by unnoticed. It'll probably be 20 years before they see a majority again.

Talk to me agitation when you've read the IPCC report. I won't debate with John Regurgibots.

In other words, fuck out you lying ignoramus

On this topic many socialists seem to grow drag knuckles and turn into the hard left version of the Drudge Report comment box...all hemorrhoids and no logic. Friendy reminder, in science there are no facts, just theories paired up with hard data. Everything is open to interpretation. For example, I would conjecture that global warming as it exists in the policical world is a means to a political end (hardly surprising?). Raising taxes is politically inconvenient, and in order to generate significant revenue you need to raise taxes on the overwheling majority of your tax base, the poor. This is especially inconvenient for the left, who tend to run on a platform championing social programs and increased quality of life for the poor. So, in order to do that, you need to present a problem and get Joe Sixpack worried about it, and then solve the problem through an increased revenue sceme (e.g. carbon tax, carbon credits) that act as a regressive tax, keeping wealthy donors happy and keeping the majority of the burden on the poor through increased utility bills.

You'll notice that Wikipedia article only discusses the Lump of Labor Fallacy in terms of Europe.

In the United States, things are a little different than the eurozone. You don't just get handed citizenship, you have to wait for years. Around 1/3rd of our immigrants are illegal, unskilled, and uneducated bumpkins with no meaningful English proficiency. Those folks have no chance of obtaining a loan, business license, or necessary permits, ever. And when you're not a citizen, you're paid in dirt and peanuts...and then the vast majority of legal immigrants will have no substantial capital by the time they gain citizenship, and any they do would go to immigration lawyers.

While some immigrants are absolutely job creators (I work for a company started by a naturalized citizen), the ratio of workers to job creators just isn't what you'd expect it to be.

Historically, it used to be the immigrants that created more jobs, but that was before the 1965 Immigration Act which increased abolished country of origin specific quotas. Most influx was restricted to 1st world western and northern european immigrants, who brought abundant capital, skill, and entrepreneurial spirit into the country. After the act, most of the immigration came from capital-poor and family-oriented (as opposed to entrepreneurial-oriented) folks from Asia, Africa, and south of the border.

The effect was quite immediate. Median wages adjusted for inflation started dropping in 1968 and have been trending downward ever since.

If we wan't to go back to a 1968-style economy and income distribution we're going to have to repeal the 1965 Immigration Act, and that's all there is to it.

Must be nice to have a government that allows a tight labor market to keep benefits high and dependency low. Our politicians adore dependency and buyers market here in the US...we've had more immigrants+graduates than jobs created for the last 7 years, making it tougher and tougher to negotiate benefits like that.

You CAN get vacation like that in plenty of companies in the US, but it is based on years of service. 5 weeks isn't terribly uncommon but you'd have to stay at the same company for a decade.

So you have to be pretty much done growing your salary if you want your 5 weeks. Almost nobody gets raises based on the market value of the experience earned at the company. Just inflationary raises if any. Even that is based on government reports of inflation, which are underreported to keep benefit costs down.