But that isn't how it works.

The whole FOSS thing is a trade. On the one hand, the coder "donates" his/her/its time doing things that are funAnd when you multiply the time spent by maybe some thousands of users, all trying to work out the same problems - compared to the time taken to write, compile and toss-over-the-wall some of this stuff, "free" software is probably some of the worst deals on the planet.

And as for that old crock: You get what you pay for or "Hey, it's free: what do you expect?", most of this stuff is far from "free", it has a large negative value, as it takes many hours or days of your time just to get up to zero: the point at which you can start to do something useful with it.

The simplest course of action would be for the major search engines, i.e. Google (there are some others, I'm told) to simply cut those spanish newspapers out of it's web-crawlers and search functions. If there are no links to the newspapers in question, there can be no tax to pay.

If that means that the online versions of these publications simply cease to exist? Well, that's not the search engines' problem. Would the E.U. then have to instigate a new internet law, to force these sites to be crawled and to force the search engines to do the opposite of forgetting about E.U. citizens and actively "remember" about them.

I have the impression that the newspapers that were pressing for this law don't realise that, despite what they may think, they really are not in a position of power, apropos the internet.

Let's review:
"Pay authors" ... "Provide journal free ... "

Don't worry, it won't. I'd reckon on one edition.

Of course, what this whole field of study needs is a rich uncle (or sugar daddy) to provide funding for specific, basic, pieces of research. You'd think that for all the money they've made from social media, some of the FB/Twitter/others founders or major beneficiaries could put their hands in their pocket.

Or maybe they are the *last* people who want to make this subject rigourous and scientific?

To replicate an experiment, you take the description of the conditions, tasks, environment, fixed independent and dependent variables, analytical method and results provided by the original experimenter in the (peer-reviewed) paper they published.
If you can show the same results, with the same statistical significance, then it's reasonable to assume that the experiment shows a valid scientific phenomenon.

If you can't then one of the two experiments got it wrong and more work is needed.

The basic problem with social experiments, that are based on the judgement, feelings, or anything else that the studied group merely says it would / would-not do, thinks, feels, or otherwise emotes is completely subjective. Asking people how sad, happy, angry something makes them feel and rating that feeling - or the difference from previous values - has no scientific merit, as none of the terms used have any hard, scientific, definition and none of the participants have had their feelings "calibrated".

It's little different from a scientist (a proper one) measuring electric voltage by sticking their tongue across two electrodes, or measuring distance by eyeballing it. The level of accuracy and standardisation the social "sciences" have at present puts them on a par with chemical research: phlogiston, fixed air (CO2) in the 17th century.

As for being able to determine which variables are being measured - or even what all the variables are in their experiments, the social scientists have yet to discover their subject's version of fire.

One of the techniques the government has for allowing the discussion of sensitive issues, without starting a witch hunt is called The Chatham House Rule

Meeting held under this rule do not allow the the disclosure of who said what. The "what" can be reported, but no-one is permitted to say who said it. That permits people to express views, or ask "what if" questions (and get considered, informed answers) without having to always play to the (media) audience and make guarded, ambiguous and watered-down statements.

Since the government recognises the value of these sorts of meetings (as well as the established protocol of "off the record" briefings, which cannot be quoted) it's ludicrous that they would think that removing anonymity would be a good idea. This can only be one of those "silly season" media reports, usually made up by journalists who are bored as politicians are away during the summer months.

Yup. Smaller, better, cheaper. This is exactly what the RPi people should have been developing for the past 2 years.

The world has moved on since the BBB was the game in town.

Now there are much better boards (though maybe not all with the BBB's size) that, unlike the BBB support audio in & out, have more RAM, dual-core processor and more flexible power options.

Some of the new generation boards also make the BBB look quite expensive - both for what you get and in absolute terms.

Well if you hardly ever reboot, then of course you won't have problems. (Just so long as you don't wear out the flash used for /tmp and /var/log

The whole point, as raised in the observation about crappy SD-card + power regulation is that when the board experiences power failures, then it is likely to corrupt its filesystem. Since your board doesn't suffer from outages, it's no surprise you don't have these issues.

A household that can't afford $100 for a used PC isn't likely to be one that's paying for an internet connection.

Give them a computer and it's like giving a starving man a tin of beans - but no tin opener.

The computer is only the tool. The resource that stop children being underprivileged (in an extremely narrow, and not very practical sense) is internet access.

MicroSD required mechanical connectors to the device and is a great deal more expensive that flash - in a very price-sensitive market. Given that an IoT thing could find its way into any environment, the last thing you want is for its operation to be dependent on the correct operation of nasty, cheap (and they *would* have to be cheap for comparable production costs) connectors and uSD cards of variable quality - that are outside your control.

Far better to have everything firmly and permanently attached to the board. Why solder in a connector whan it's just as easy (and takes the same amount of board space) to solder in flash instead. That way you don't get the blame when an idiot user "recycles" an old uSD card and blabs all over the internet how crap and unreliable your product is, as their card keeps corrupting.

RPi got it completely wrong in this respect. You don't hear of corrupted software & kernels on all the cards that use flash. If it's more "difficult" for noobs to use, then that's no bad thing either as it discourages those who are lacking in the clue department. This is not meant to be a plaything for children.

There are other people out there making similar devices.

One I have heard of is Olimex who reckon their product (still in design, with an RT5350F) will be 10 USD in 1,000 off quantities. Over time and with better integration of future devices we can safely assume that will halve.

Well it proves there is one footballer with a brain.

If you've ever seen them being interviewed on TV - either before or after a match, even that singular result will be a surprise.

And then the next guy writes their own set of checks, which work slightly differently and check different things and in a different order. So both of you have spent time writing essentially, the same thing. - And maybe even spent even longer testing it and occasionally documenting it too. OK, maybe that last one''s a stretch. Nobody bothers to document "simple" programs, since we all know the code IS the documentation and any good programmer can work out what is going on (are they still teaching that garbage?)

And then when there's a change to the data formats, or a migration to a new environment, instead of swapping out one library of standard code - every single soddin' "simple" program has to be checked, re-tested and debugged.

So no. People who are still doing this sort of thing, even though the industry has been suffering from their intellectual laziness for decades, shouldn't be allowed to develop commercial code.

I think the reason is, that people who pay for software have been bitten by "simple" programs too often.

With a simple program: one where you open a file, do some stuff and produce an output - that always supposes that everything works as it's expected to. It assumes the input file has the expected name, that it contains the expected data and that the format is what you expect. It also assumes that the data will fall nicely within the bounds of "sensible" values, and that the output can be written as the coder expects.

However, real-world data is never as neat as we plan for (especially when there is a deadline). There can be missing values, changed formats, some data is floating point or fixed and DATES. Can the "simple" code deal with DD-MM-YY and DD-MM-YYYY or even some people who randomly swap that day / month / year field order, or use names for months - or slip leap years into the fields.

Basically, with the "simple" libraries that most of us use, there is a fundamental lack of robustness. Our code works with data we expect, but coughs a brick with something unusual - or from a changed specification.

And then there's the security angle. There's always a security angle

These are the factors that have made "coding" a complex business. Simply because the simple coding models we use to knock out a couple of hundred lines of code with, have shown themselves up to be wrong, limited an unreliable.

That'll be a first!