That depends on what the money is used for.

If I walk up to someone on the street and give them a thousand dollars out of my pocket, there is the presumption that this would help them. Even putting aside obvious extreme cases like gamblers and drug addicts, that thousand dollars can very easily be burned up on things that will actually do little to remove people from poverty.

If my thousand dollars was used to help pay for a car, they can drive to work, that's better but they still have a depreciating asset that they have to maintain. If it was used to buy Christmas presents, then you have some happy kids, but you've bought something that does nothing for you in the long run.

Now what if you do something smart like invest it? Then you're likely to see some real value from it. In about thirty years. If and only if an emergency does not force you to withdraw it. In the meantime, you're still poor and you have to resist the urge to use that money for anything but as an investment or a payment that helps you on a continuing and increasing basis.

You don't want to give people money and expect that to end poverty. You want to remove incidences of bad decision-making and you have to buffer them from bad luck. Money can be a buffer, but if you continue to make bad decisions with the money you have, you're going to keep being poor.

There are anecdotes of people who make millions, either being rock stars, sports stars, or lottery ticket winners, and they lose it all. How do they end up that way? They would have been (temporarily) rich one-percenters just as surely as Bill Gates or the Koch Brothers are. The catch is that they have terrible decision making skills when it comes to money. They may spend it lavishly. They get bad advice and fail to learn how to invest. They may simply have weak personalities and are taken advantage of. They don't understand what you do with money, and then they lose it.

Although those are anecdotes, the same thing happens to tens of millions of people everyday in smaller, but more crucial situations. Poverty isn't always about helpless people being taken advantage of. It's more about the fact that it is more important to know how not to be poor than it is to actually have money thrown at you.

The point is that the solution to Poverty is *not* money. The solution to Poverty is *doing the right things* with money.

How does this work with checked luggage? Presumably your stuff won't be pulled from baggage if you aren't expected to get off in Chicago, but instead in LA.

Obviously, if you only have carry on luggage, that works fine.

I've always felt that using 64 whole bits has been a waste of good address space. I'm glad HURD agrees. I'm actually contributing a patch to get them back down to 16-bit mode with the holy grail of finally returning to 8-bit. I have always felt that if you're running on a microkernel you should run with a micro address space too.

I think they announced that back in 1977 as part of the celebrations for the 20th anniversary of the start of the HURD project.

Persecution fantasy mostly. Still, there are examples of places that men, in general, don't get a fair shake based on gender. I won't bother listing them all because you've probably heard the Father's Right's schtick before. The reality is that while this is a case of blatant sexism, the reality is that men do also have issues with sexism too.

That said, I have heard some feminists state that they believe that gender bias hurts both men and women. I can get behind that, but I don't think we should trundle that out every time that an instance of a woman clearly being discriminated against comes up. What we have here is a case of clear irrational bias. It should be dealt with on that level as a clear case of bias and not have it minimized with counter examples of how bad men have it.

Similarly, if there are examples of men having biases play out against them, then we should discuss those examples as well, without trying to minimize them by pointing out how bad women have it. Irrational bias should be spoken out against because it is wrong, not made into a tool for one-upping the other sex.

Well, you could eradicate systematic gender bias and you will still get people who act that way. There are people out there who act like assholes for no explicable reason, and sometimes, you're not even sure that they know why they act like an asshole.

We're probably always going to have gender bias and racism at the anecdotal level. If you're expecting to totally eradicate it, you're going to be disappointed.

Right now, there are white males who are being referred to negatively in a racial and gender biased way. However, for the most part, no fucks are given. The reason for that is that we don't perceive that as being a problem for us. The world we should be going for is a world when you can make stupid comments like that about anyone, and they are in a good enough position to laugh it off. If the almighty white members of the all-powerful Patriarchy can't avoid being referred to in that way, then I just don't think that its realistic to assume that anyone will ever succeed in not having some irrational bias directed at them.

Of course, I am speaking of the reason for patents to be authorized, at least under the US Constitution, not the actual functioning of patents, which definitely has a debatable effect on the ability of an inventor to profit reasonably from their invention.

Personally, I'd be fine with them doing away patents at this point. A scenario that punishes an implementer to the benefit of someone who buys a regulatory fiction like a patent, is counter productive.

Well, we know that conventional physics doesn't cover everything, obviously. I'm pretty skeptical of this myself, but I'm reserving my opinion.

Virtual particles are definitely not a fringe understanding of the quantum mechanical realm, but they've always been representative of something... well... virtual. They would be generally expected to cancel out at macro scales. The only example I've heard of where they don't is Hawking radiation, and that's only because of the very specific consequences of anything that goes across an event horizon.

While the probability of any one discovery being a real quantum leap (so to speak) is very, very small, we know that our incomplete understanding of the quantum realm also means that finding new physics is almost certain, given enough time. So I'm interested in this, although not overly excited yet. I'm thinking someone had a bad network cable or something. :)

You can get at the owners in certain circumstances, and it is likely that rolling over at settlement probably was the line where further fighting would have started exposing the owners to actual liability either from the fines or investor lawsuits and such.

They don't want to operate Grooveshark. They just want to make sure that no service operates where they don't get paid. They're being paid by Spotify and the other services. It's Spotify and their ilk's problem to operate a streaming service. The *industry* doesn't care, since a lack of streaming just means they can go back to making sales on CDs.

The patent system is actually there to let other people copy your design, but adds a grace period where you can be paid back for your effort in working on an idea, usually through making sure you are first to implement that idea. It is merely supposed to be a provision to encourage you to share an idea which you might otherwise hide while you sought to benefit from it. It is not supposed to "protect" your "property".

It is quite possible for a company to preserve its trade secrets without a patent. Patents are primarily supposed to help the People, not the "owners". The patent period is a bribe so that the information is more effectively spread and not hidden.

If a patent is turned from a vehicle which is supposed to encourage the spread of ideas into simply a government sponsored industry, which counter intuitively tries to make it harder to spread ideas, it goes against the original reason for patents.

Copyright has a similar premise, and is going the same way. Mickey Mouse or a Metallica album is supposed to be protected only long enough to make it worthwhile for the artist to profit from its creation. That isn't supposed to be a guarantee that they get to drive a Bentley at the end of it or that you'll be able to have an industry based on the limitation of ideas.

What is actually happening is that the copyright and patents are being used to make it worthwhile not for the artist to make their music or the inventor to profit from their invention, it's being used to make it possible for publishing companies and patent-holding organizations to profit from the works of those artists. That's why copyrights are getting extended all the time.

Ease in which music or ideas can be copied should be a hint that these are not a solid basis for an industry. And the extremes to which these industries go to in order to halt the natural spread of performances and ideas only proves that point.

As someone who works in software, I think we have actually solved this issue very simply. Open source software makes money and provides a living to people who work with it every day. The ease in which that software can be copied has only made it more popular and the people who have created it even more in demand.

You can add more fault tolerance to your power by adding this, but honestly, you're effectively creating a second, more expensive infrastructure to make up for the existing infrastructure that isn't working.

That's fine if you have the money and the need to do so. That's why people have diesel backup generators.

Still, if your normal grid is that messed up, that's not a problem with centralized generation, that's a problem were you have idiots managing your system. There's no scenario where you won't have a more efficient system through economies of scale by centralizing generation.

You may be forced to have solar and battery backup because of poorly managed utilities or perhaps because of location, but that doesn't mean that kind of arrangement is the overall solution to the issue. It's a band-aid that perhaps you can afford and are willing to pay, but that doesn't mean you aren't overpaying for it.

Except it isn't. Having a distribution network is not cheap, but still cheaper than having to maintain and service units at every location.

You can subsidize individual generation that that so that the cost is hidden to individuals as part of a tax bill or a utility bill, but it is still more expensive even so.

Well, someone needs to get us to the point it is affordable and even then, I have my doubts.

A home installation of solar power is not a necessity. A home itself is a necessity, and thus you must pay for it. However, distributed solar generation is inefficient, and the homeowner is forced to make a capital investment to get something that they can otherwise get more efficiently from the grid.

The insulation that people do to their houses is probably a much better plan anyhow. You don't need to worry about the grid or panels or batteries at all, you just waste less power in maintaining your internal environment.

Solar power is a good idea, but like most forms of generation, is most efficient when generated centrally. We're really only adding complexity to the system with individual generation.

Right. There's no issue with them putting their best foot forward if this is something you can get with the basic product.

However, if you have to enable these features AND you have to pay for them, that's a different product. The danger is that the reviewers rate their "basic" product as a top-rated AV product. Then people flock to get this basic product over the basic offerings of other AV companies who did not rate as well, but might well have a better "basic" product.

It's basically bait and switch, and probably fraudulent. It seems like every crime in China can get you executed or sent to a camp, so the fact that so many Chinese companies work this way makes me think that China itself has a very different view of what makes up a fraudulent practice.