Yeah there was a company here in Seattle that I heard about that was a wedding venue. Apparently their building was scheduled for demolition but the company was at best 'hopeful' that they would have a new space by then but in truth mostly just fraudulent. They accepted $1,000 deposits on rentals well past the scheduled demolition date. Then with a few months to go they started emailing people telling them that there had been a fire and that the space wouldn't be available for their wedding in a couple weeks. A newspaper looked into it and there had been no reported fires so even that was total BS. Understandably everyone who was robbed by these business owners gave very bad yelp reviews but since the company had been around for years it was only a few dozen people who were ripped off vs the hundreds who did legitimately like the space. As a result last I checked its yelp review was like 3.5 stars with a mix of 5 and 1 star reviews.

There really should be a weighting system to trend up and down based on the last couple months.

I've been a TSLA stock holder long enough to be extremely happy with my stock purchase. And you're right anyone who is just buying it for short term I think is terribly misguided. When I bought it, I bought it both for ideological statement of supporting a technology I want to see change the market and also because this is was one of those rare opportunities to buy a stock like Microsoft or Ford when their future was still uncertain.

That being said I can see why people would be worried about TSLA. I'm going to hold it until they go bankrupt but there is a pretty sizable risk that the entire automotive industry isn't going to just be disrupted by going electric, it's going to be disrupted by driver-less technology. I have no idea how Tesla is going to respond to that challenge. Apple has a market cap of $750Billion. They had a 4th QUARTER profit of $18Billion. TSLA has a market cap of $25B. Apple could buy a controlling share of Tesla with their profit from just a single quarter. Or they could take $18B from one quarter and start a car company. Microsoft has $92 Billion in cash.

Ford's market cap is $63B. If Microsoft or Apple were so inclined they could buy Ford and have a worldwide manufacturing infrastructure to build self-driving cars. There is actually a pretty long list of companies who if they really put their mind to it could enter the market at nearly a moment's notice. Then again supposedly someone could barge into the smartphone market at any moment but it doesn't seem to happen.

Also at least with .NET it's pretty easy to use cryptography without really understanding how it works. It's a property in the socketconnection. Just tell it to use socket protection level X and .NET will do all of the negotiation for you.

I have far more faith that the .NET team is up-to-date and employing some of the best cryptography experts in the field than to have someone working on an application, network or server to try and implement TLS themselves. As Heartbleed demonstrated, even with the entire security world looking at your code it's still pretty easy to screw up encryption. Trying to roll your own encryption is just a false sense of security since you've probably done it wrong.

Microsoft mostly contributes to making Linux run smoothly on Azure and Hyper-V.

Between 2006 and 2008 Oracle contributed 3% of all Linux code.

Actually apparently Google isn't much of a contributor and still keeps all of their changes in-house.

Yes but you sell a product. That's exactly my point. You aren't selling support. If you were giving away your product but making people subscribe to phone support then the 1,500 customers who don't use it will drop their subscription since they will see that they aren't getting anything out of it.

It's like health insurance. If you don't mandate health insurance but allow people to buy insurance for pre-existing conditions the only people who would have health insurance would be the sick and prices would go up.

Support contracts work really well for businesses since a single IT support contract can solve the problem for say 1000 employees so $80,000 a year might make sense when it works out to $80/user per year. If you called every other day you get your choice of developers from the support company. Having a driver issue, call and get directed to someone who wrote the driver layer. Having issue with an employee's file system, get directed to someone who is an expert on the file subsystem. At $80,000 a year you're looking at less than the price of a full time support professional and you get experts in specific domains since they're being shared between numerous support contracts. Everybody wins.

The business model breaks down for when each problem only affects one person. Where a day's worth of support might fix a problem on 1,000 systems at a corporation and be worth $1,000 in support time without question that same problem solved for one home user being worth $1,000 is just not going to happen.

Relevant quote:

The Coal Miner was paid to mine coal (by RedHat)
The Hydro-Electric generated electricity because it was built by IBM for the US government.
The water was gathered by Intel to sell more computer chips.
The farmer planted the wheat in a public field because it was cheaper to help plant seeds and pick what he needed than it was to buy flour from a commercial farm and was compensated in reduced price flour.
The baker baked the bread for a restaurant and then gave away the extra for free since in computer world infinite bread is as easy to bake as 1 loaf.
Finally the waiter expects a goddamn tip because they deserve to be compensated for their efforts somehow.

Your analogy breaks down because the majority of Linux development is done by people being paid to develop linux. Those developers expect to be paid. The people who pay them reap compensation for their investment in Linux in various fashions (support contracts, hardware sales etc.) So no it's not outrageous that a consumer product company would use a sales model that works for their business: selling things to people in order to also be compensated.

Linux is not a big volunteer effort, it's mostly a corporate collaboration to cut costs and boost sales.

If you rely on a RedHat style support model you'll never see consumer products flourish. Do you know any individual or family who pays for software support subscriptions? No. Out of sight-out-of-mind. The only people who pay for support contracts are CTOs who want to cover their asses. Customer support contracts would be so hideously expensive that no company could afford to offer them. Imagine if your grandpa had a support contract with RedHat. "I seem to have lost my word processor. Where is it?" Each call would probably cost you at least $12. If they called once a month it would be $100 a year in support costs. That's way more than "The Cost of Windows" and people would just buy windows (even though they don't get customer service with Windows).

Apple bundles the cost of technical support into their hardware prices and by trying to sell you shit. "Thanks for coming into the Apple store, are you sure you want us to fix your computer and not just buy a new fancy ipad?"

"Hacker Ethos" isn't what I would describe the average computer user as looking for. This move should be heralded as a great move for Linux. If you want Linux to move outside of gray-beards and corporate IT data centers don't scandalize business plans that are effective outside of those small markets.

I was wondering about that when I watched the last launch's fuel tank. How exactly *does* the Falcon engine re-ignite in zero g with what appears to be a gravity fed fuel source?

If you paid for all of the open source software that they checked out then it would apparently be worth the price of Windows or OSX: $199. So asking for 1 keystroke seems pretty fair. If 99.9% of the workers are happy to work for free and .1% feel like their time is worth 1 keystroke per user then you're looking at a perfectly reasonable transaction.

Also I would point out that perhaps a "vast majority" of the linux ecosystem is where it is today thanks to paid contributors aka Red Hat, Sun, MySQL AB, Intel, Oracle, Ubuntu, Google and yes even Microsoft. All of these large organizations didn't contribute out of the kindness of their hearts, they did it for the most part to make money. Even smaller contributors to open source projects are often working for a commercial entity and trying to improve some critical piece of their company's software. The developers were paid to improve the software to save the company money vs a commercial project or developing it entirely in house by themselves. The hobbyist working alone without being paid for their time probably is the minority contributor to the Linux code base. All of those developers found a way to get paid. But none of those funding sources work at the end of the line distro level targeting consumers. Consumers don't pay for support contracts. Consumers don't hire developers to improve their software or fix bugs. Consumers are used to just paying for something and getting it. So it makes sense that the back-end side of things will be mostly funded by support contracts and in-house development teams. Meanwhile the guys whose customers are consumers need to use a different funding model. And like I said, only charging every user a single keystroke is not a very large price to pay. Especially when compared to a RedHat support contract.

Oh I always love this argument:

"Well someone else could do it themselves."

You're right they could. But will they? No. I'm so sick and tired of the hypothetical person who works for free. You know what a determined person could also do? They could make me a pizza and then drive over to my apartment and hand it to me. They could even do it for free!

If you don't like this OS don't use it! If you don't like their attitude, don't use it! It's like people who whine about much a game costs--but then pirate it. Because not-playing it isn't an option to them. If you don't think the work that they've done is worth anything, if you don't think the work they've done is even worth the hard hard effort of typing "$0" then don't download it, go use Gentoo. If their work though is so much better than the all of the hypothetical determined user then clearly they're offering something that the person downloading values.

And yes, they use open source free software--but I bet 99.9% of the freeloading downloaders aren't contributing to the kernel or packages that they use. And that .1% who are contributors to the libraries that this OS uses can happily type in "0" free of guilt. Probably the user base of an OS like this consists almost entirely of people who want a free or cheap OS. Asking for a donation that defaults to $10 seems perfectly fine. And if you don't find it fine, then don't cry about it, just go use one of a 1,000 other distros that are more ideologically pure. Or how about you become the hypothetical "Determined user" yourself and do the work for free for all of us.

Parallel construction could be considered though 'Fruit of the Poisonous Tree' http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F...

If they only found him by ?illegal NSA wiretapping? the laptop would inadmissible. My understanding is that most parallel construction (supposedly) isn't for the sake of using illegally obtained evidence but simply to protect the method or person by which the evidence was obtained. Which also could be the case here. Maybe they actually got him using a sophisticated and warranted attack that they don't want people know they're capable of (e.g. how they took down SilkRoad 2 and 3 and 4.)

Then again IANAL so who knows, maybe all of my law and order reruns are of no use in this instance. :D

And WinRT is essentially identical to XAML/WPF there are a few changes but nothing that notable.

WPF was introduced in 2006, so unless the GP thinks that changing UI paradigms once every 20 years is too painful then I have very little sympathy. Apple has been on a similar schedule with Carbon -> Cocoa -> Cocoa Touch.

It's also hard to take someone seriously when on the Linux front the probably top two options are: GTK which is infamous for its poor backwards compatibility between releases. Or Qt which is notorious for 2 steps forward and 1 step back on every release. "Hey we fixed fonts, but now columns are broken."

It's good in people who can self teach but I know a family where the first kid really pushed himself to keep up with his peers academically and did a lot of self instruction. His brothers didn't have the same academically driven peers and the parent teaching didn't force the issue so long story short in highschool 3 of the four needed reading intervention since they were way behind on literacy.

I say the same thing about College vs. self teaching. While it is important to learn how to learn, some people do really just need a lot of structure. So if someone does home school it's important that the parent provides it if your kids need it and aren't providing it for themselves.

Did you mean that as an insult to liberals? Because our educational system that ensures people are properly trained to find work and not live off of charity seems like the most obvious of programs which aren't zero-sum.

You're right Liberals do champion tons of programs:
- Education to keep people out of jail and off of welfare.
- Loans to help people afford education.
- Energy Efficiency programs to ensure that cars cost slightly more but save their buyers tens of thousands.
- Anti-Monopoly efforts to prevent price fixing.
- R&D investments in the sciences to boost our nation's attractiveness to the brightest minds on the planet.
- A transportation system that has been proven in numerous studies to provide substantially more economic stimulus than it costs to build.