I wish you were right but I get people trying convince me of these things in person and then complain I don't take them seriously.

My least favorite is an otherwise functional guy who believes that Obama is a gay Muslim secretly married to a transvestite (Michelle) who plans to take his role as "The Beast" and under the direction of the Antichrist, declare martial law before the end of his term and round up all non Muslims and put them in Internment camps already being prepared by FEMA.

I don't understand how he manages to get dressed without drooling all over himself let alone hold down a job.

We can only hope that Uber's notoriously...risk tolerant...approach to just ignoring regulations that they don't like will result in a lot of spam that is actually 'spam' for the purposes of the CAN-SPAM Act of 2003 being sent out.

That particular law is more or less a dead letter, given how easy covert or extraterritorial spamming is(and, of course, it's assorted gaping loopholes); but there are theoretical penalties that could stack up fast if you actually fuck up.

In this case, if grabbing people's contact lists doesn't count as 'email address harvesting' in the context of the prohibition on sending to harvested addresses, I'm not sure what would.

Honestly, it's downright impressive. Uber has managed to get markedly sleazier since they did their "Oh, 'god view' and threatening to stalk reporters who piss us off was naughty; we promise to be good..." charm offensive bullshit.

The same is true of university exams. My undergraduate exams, for example, mostly required that you answer two of three questions per exam. To get a first (for people outside the UK: the highest classification), you needed to get 70%. Most questions were around 40% knowledge and 60% application of the knowledge. If you could predict the topics that the examiner would pick, then that meant that you could immediately discard a third of the material. To get the top grade, you needed to get 100% in one question and 40% in another. This meant that you could understand a third of the material really well and understand another third well enough to get the repetition marks, but not the understanding ones and still get the top grade. This meant that you could study 50% of the material and still do very well in the exams, as long as you picked the correct 50%. And some of the lecturers were very predictable when setting exams...

What jobs do you imagine existing in 10-20 years that don't require some understanding of programming? I thought my stepfather, as head greenskeeper at a golf course might have had one before he retired, but it turns out that the irrigation system that he had to use came with a domain-specific programming language for controlling it. A lot of farm equipment is moving in the same direction. Office jobs generally require either wasting a lot of time, or learning a bit of scripting (hint: the employees who opt for the first choice are not going to be the ones that keep their jobs for long). Jobs that don't require any programming are the ones that are easy to automate.

But, of course, we don't need to teach our children to write. After all, they can always hire a scribe if they need to and there really aren't enough jobs for scribes to justify teaching it to everyone.

Why would I be stuck with the connector? For one thing, you can easily install adaptors - even if you'd rolled out USB A or B sockets, they'd still be supported everywhere and you can buy adaptors very cheaply. The main problem with a USB A socket (which is really the only one of the previous ones that you'd consider for charging) is the low power - it can only provide about 10W, even if you have some adaptor. USB C can provide 100W, and 100W seems like enough for a DC supply for quite a while.

But if I'd rolled out USB A sockets in 1995, I don't think I'd object strongly to replacing the faceplates on the sockets with USB C ones in the next five years, if the wires in the wall could supply the required power.

No one you know has a MacBook Air? Most of the next generation of mobiles are going to have USB C (Apple and Google are among the bigger backers), so expect to see a lot of them appearing.

If you connect one of these to the existing AC main, then you're just moving the well wart into the socket. You still have one AC to DC converter for each device, and that particular device can only provide 2.1A at 5V, which is well below what USB-C supports (no charging a MacBook Air from it, for example).

Given that the store doing the advertising presumably stocks the banned goods, and it's a lot harder to hide physical merchandise in a hurry; I'd assume that the plan depends on the costs of being discovered being less than the value of the advertising, with the cute little trick being there to make it newsworthy, not to fool the cops(even if there were somehow zero machine vision errors or plainclothes cops in Russia; it can't be that uncommon for off-duty cops to wear street clothes; or for the families of police to talk to them).

There is probably a small but nonzero risk that, thanks to the buzz, some humorless enforcer will throw the book at them; but barring that the plan would appear to depend on the actual penalties for 'banned' goods being pretty toothless.

As long as you had a reasonable expectation of winning, yes it does. I have one. They decide beforehand if they're going to cover this case or not (if it's a bullshit case where you don't have a snowballs chance in hell, they don't have to), and after that it doesn't depend on winning or losing anymore.

They don't pay me, so I fail to see the difference.

Actually, there isn't one. Spammers pay their ISP, too. Advertisers pay the people who own the cinema, or the radio station or the billboard. So the means of delivery gets paid for in both cases.

Sorry, no difference at all.

The Open Group claims the copyright on the POSIX specifications. If APIs can be copyrighted and this copyright includes all implementations, then it would be problematic for all open source *NIX systems. Of course, they might decide to provide a license that's valid for everyone except Oracle (though writing such a license in a way that's GPL compatible would be very hard, so glibc might be in trouble).

The thing that killed DC in the war of the currents was that step up and step down transformers for AC are easy and cheap to build, but doing the same thing for DC caused a lot more loss (one of the simplest ways of doing it was to convert to AC, do the voltage change, and then convert back to DC). For long hauls on the grid, you want a much higher voltage than in houses. Now, however, it's relatively cheap (both in terms of convertors and in terms of loss) to produce DC-DC converters. USB-C supports 5V (up to 2A), 12V (1.5-5A) and 20V (3-5A). It's fairly easy to imagine 48V between rooms and then a converter in the sockets able to provide USB voltages. You wouldn't want to run a heater or a vacuum cleaner from it, but it would be nice for a lot of consumer electronics.

We're not talking grid back-haul though, we're talking a few tens of metres maximum within a house. I've wondered for a while if it would be more efficient to have moderately high voltage DC room-to-room and then low-voltage DC in rooms. Given the number of things in my house that would prefer a DC supply and so end up with (cheap and inefficient) AC to DC convertors per plug (and especially if you use LED lighting), it seems like it ought to be a win. And now seems like a good time to do it, as USB-C is a consumer connector that can provide up to 100W via something that's designed to be very cheap to produce in the lower power variations.

This article seems(somewhat bizarrely) to be written from the perspective of Google, Inc. but purporting to be talking about "android" and its prospects.

There is certainly a place for analysis of "So, did this 'android' stuff pay off for Google? Was it roughly break-even? A strategic failure?"; but that's quite different than "How is Android doing? What are its prospects?". Conflating the two, though, is confused at best and outright nonsense at worst(especially when examining the 'running Android, possibly even developing it in some way; but not running "Android+Google Play Services"' slice of the market'.

So, is Apple the one actually making money on smartphones? Hell yeah. Has Android been tepid in terms of actually making Google any money? At best; it may well be directly losing money and only appearing to pull its weight as a strategic play. Are the margins for most Android handset manufacturers pretty unexciting compared to Apple? Also hell yeah. However(much like the PC OEMs), that may not actually affect Android: None of the Android OEMs gets the option of joining Apple in making iPhones(except the ones that happen to also have divisions that manufacture components for Apple, like Samsung). Apple has zero interest in letting them do that. So, they can either ship Android handsets with Google, ship AOSP+their own or somebody else's stuff; ship Windows Phone, attempt to build their own OS entirely, or leave the market. Shipping Android handsets with Google isn't a terribly high-margin strategy; but it is so far unclear whether any of the other options are any higher margin.

It is very likely that Google isn't getting nearly as much of what they want from Android as they would like; and Android OEMs certainly aren't earning terribly exciting margins on their devices; but that's their problem. It only becomes Android's problem if Google decides to pull the plug, or if OEMs abandon it in favor of WP or one of the assorted linux-with-stuff-on-top-but-not-android options. So far, WP has gotten fairly good reviews; but struggled for marketshare, and the not-Android Linux derivatives are all writhing around near the noise floor. This isn't obviously a good thing, Android is a pile of mediocrity in quite a few respects, even if some of Google's applications and services for it are pretty good; but it is still the case: Since nobody gets to be an iOS vendor except Apple, and Nokia is MS' special buddy, with other OEMs allowed but sharing a very small pond; 'Android' is a fight over some pretty unexciting margins; but unless a company simply wishes to stop manufacturing smartphones and tablets, it's a fight they'll probably remain in for some time to come.

Sure, I'd love the second coming of WebOS to sweep away the unbelievers and deliver us; but that doesn't appear to be in the cards.

Top 10% probably. Take a look at a global rich list calculator. You can live very comfortably in a western country with 9% of the world's population being richer than you. If you're in some parts of central or eastern Europe, or a few parts of south-east Asia then you may be near the bottom of the top 20% and still living very comfortably. The '1%' that people talk about in the USA are well in the top 0.1% globally, but 'the 1%' makes a better soundbite than 'the 0.1%'.