If it's a big shop with tons of review it won't prevent this particular product from being a lemon. I recently had that happen to me on eBay, 99.5% approval rating and >100k feedback score but product was real bad. They delisted it after I complained. At any rate, I wish Amazon would split it into "Product reviews" and "Vendor reviews", because a lot of the feedback is about bad customer service that's entirely irrelevant if you buy from a different seller.

It's the same attitude you may have noticed that come from people who defend libertarianism but when confronted with the flaws of Somalia will claim that those were, nor are, not under real libertarianism, but something else (anarchy, in the case of Somalia).

The truth is, people game any system. They want that cushy job, that fat pay check, the easy life. Any form of organization whether it's corporate, government, non-profit or otherwise end up serving at least three distinct interests. The one they're supposed to serve, sure. The actual people working in that system, they all want theirs. And finally the system itself, the government wants to expand the government's powers.

Incentives are flawed. Checks and balances are flawed. But perfect is the enemy of good, because the alternative to not keeping those forces at bay is exploitation. Inevitably, when there's no power structures they create themselves, anything from gangs to warlords to conglomerates to oligarchies. The idea of an egalitarian society where everyone is equal and power doesn't concentrate is like a world with gravity where matter won't clump together.

There's a reason why Churchill said "Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time." I think the same can be said of capitalism, there's hardly any problem finding faults with it. The problem is finding a better system that works in the real world with real people and not some idealized form for an idealized people. Ideology is always clean and academic, the actual implementation is always messy.

You're saying that /. posted an inflammatory and inaccurate headline & summary? THAT HAS NEVER HAPPENED BEFORE.

Then its using pre-calculated patterns of the shared memory usage (presumably allocation order, sizes allocated, NOT the actual memory contents etc) to guess what the user is doing in the other app. Then, when it detects a pattern that corresponds with "I'm about to log in" it pre-empts the app with its own phishing login screen skinned to look like the original. The user is -expecting- a login screen to popup, and one that looks right does... so they enter their credentials.

Really? Android allows one app to take control of the screen and become foreground without explicit user interaction? There's the security flaw right there. The shared memory stuff is noise by comparison.

The problem is, as is usually ignored by most /. geeks, interface. I already use my smartphone in a bracket on the car - and despite the tablet having larger touch surface, the problem is essentially the same - I want an interface with *big ass buttons* and voice control and preferably physical dials the the like - because I don't want to muck around with even a single more tap than needed.

Sure, I could replace my Prius console with a far more functional tablet, but unless it's designed to be used by a highly distracted user (i.e., Driver), it's neither safe nor fun to do so.

Regarding mounts - this has been absolutely awesome - and even works with my iPad mini:
http://www.mountek.com/press/2...

I took it on my europe trip - worked on every car I was in, and it's super-light, portable, and I stuck the metal plate to the *inside* of my case so not only is it not marring my phone, it's not even visible.

There are other brands that target the same space apparently, too: https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

I'll have to remember that little quip the next time someone's complaining about "women-hostile conditions in the $X industry."

How on earth does this make him a "scumbag" and why do you want his career to fail, exactly?

Ever heard of something called integrity? This man has none. He crafted a huge lie and operated under false pretenses. Who cares why he did it? He did it. Nothing he says or does can be trusted now. People who spread lies and misinformation like this JUSTIFY censorship.

Nobody is saying that immigrants are going to ruin our economy. H1B workers are not immigrants. They're foreign workers. They hold no right to become citizens or permanent residents. They're just pure imported labor. There's a big difference.

Ugh. I'm so sick of all this nationalist bullshit. Why are we so afraid of the global economy? People should be free to move between different countries and seek employment at will. Ultimately, it's better for the world if we break down these artificial barriers.

Because when it comes to jobs, we don't even have a national economy. We have a local one. By the time you get into your 30s, most people have zero interest in packing up everything and moving to another state to get a job, much less another country. That barrier isn't artificial. It's ingrained in human nature.

When it becomes too easy for people to move to another place and take jobs, the inherent result is age discrimination. People who are younger and more mobile come in and take jobs that were needed by people who are less mobile, when the mobile people could just as easily have taken or created jobs closer to home.

It would be different if the world's wages were somewhat balanced, because then the number of young people leaving the U.S. for jobs would be balanced by the number of people entering. However, this is not the case. The U.S. pays higher wages to compensate for a higher cost of living. Therefore, those young people moving into the U.S. and taking jobs from older folks constitute a real burden. And at least in our lifetimes, there will never be balanced wages worldwide. There will always be some new third-world country to exploit for cheap labor. And workers in those countries will always benefit from coming to the U.S., where wages are higher. So tearing down those artificial barriers to labor entering the U.S. will always cause serious harm to workers in the U.S.

Worse, tearing down those barriers does nothing to improve the world on the average, at least for the foreseeable future. Because there will always be cheap labor pools to exploit, raising the standard of living in one country will only continue up until the point where they start demanding more money. At that point, they'll just bring the educational standards of another country up to the point where they can start exploiting it, and leave folks in the first country homeless and starving. The only true way to raise the quality of life around the world is to ensure that no one anywhere is willing to work for less than a living wage. This is, of course, hard to do.

If you want to see a demonstration of why a lack of barriers is a bad thing, you need only look at the Silicon Valley with respect to the United States as a whole. There are no barriers to moving to California from other states with lower cost of living and lower average salaries, so lots of young people move here to make more money. The result is that age discrimination is rampant, the cost of living has skyrocketed, and there aren't enough jobs to keep people from losing their homes. And now you're talking about making the problem worse by making the entire world flood to the Silicon Valley.

As far as I'm concerned, if a company wants to hire workers outside the U.S., they should create a division in another country and hire those employees locally. This has several benefits over H1Bs. First, it is less likely to result in a reduction in jobs in the U.S., because separate business units tend to work on separate projects, and have separate staffing needs. Second, it does not drive up the cost of living in the U.S. by artificially inflating demand for housing. Third, it puts a lot more money into the economies of those other countries, because those workers are spending money in businesses near their homes, rather than here. That makes it much more effective at driving up the standard of living in those other countries than bringing workers here would.

Why don't companies do this? Because they don't want to drive up living standards in other countries. They just want cheap labor from those countries. If they drive up living standards in those other countries, then workers from those countries would eventually start demanding higher salaries, and they'd have to go and find another country to exploit before too long.

In short, government's whole reason for existing is to protect the powerless from the powerful. Employers are relatively powerful compared with their employees, so government actions that limit the ways in which those companies can abuse employees are generally a good thing, whether that means protecting U.S. workers from losing their jobs to foreign workers or protecting foreign workers from the often abusive working conditions that they encounter as foreign workers working in the United States by forcing those companies to start divisions in other countries and hire the workers locally instead.

The incentive to find the boundaries of what kills your clientele and what just makes them gnash their teeth but return is becoming a science of profitable intolerance.

Bribed legislatures have trashed consumer protection laws or made them ignore updating them. It's almost like large organizations have voting rights. But nobody cards them at the polls if the campaign contributions are fat enough.

When your head has been blown apart by multiple 9mm hits or you're rendered brain-dead by a thorough beating, you won't hear any "wooosh" anymore.

Everyone dies, Anon.

Try your armchair revolution tactics before a phalanx of well-armed cops, see what happens.

What happens is that the cops must choose between doing nothing or attacking unarmed people. Former means their weapons do them no good, the latter means they expose their evil for all to see, thus deligitimizing their authority. It's an extremely efficient tactic that turns the very armed might of your opponents against themselves, but of course it requires you to be ready to die - or spend the rest of your life in jail - for your cause.

You do realize that this has been demonstrated multiple times in the past century alone?

But I strongly doubt you would dare.

Nobody knows until the moment of truth comes. But I think it's more likely you're afraid they just might dare, thus exposing your worldview as a delusion held due to fear.

Might makes right: if someone with more power than you says you can't do something, then you cannot do it. There are no noble and high principles that can stand up to reality. It sucks, but that's the way it is. Get over it.

Which is why Pirate Bay has been shut down, just like Ghandhi's resistance was quickly and efficiently suppressed by the British Empire. Not to mention the hard-line communists who stopped the dissolution of Soviet Union through military power, and the US stamping out drug use through its War on Drugs.

Perhaps you should take a look at reality, and consider how well your own principles stand up to it? Then again, posting as AC strongly implies you already know you're spouting bullshit.

Work is still work even if the result isn't property, if somebody wants software to do X which doesn't exist they have to either pay someone to write it or write it themselves. My current job would still exist if copyright disappeared tomorrow. As would any other system built for internal use or one particular client, all the consulting services around making it work and so on. Or that are centered around controlled services like an MMORPG. Yes, COTS software as we know it would basically implode but I'm guessing that in its absence we'd see Kickstarter or "hostage" funding, basically it's already written but we want a sum to give it away, probably with a lot of smaller and more incremental improvements. After all, the world won't stop needing software and it won't write itself.

That's the way other markets work, the electrician is paid for the work not the kilowatts, the plumber as well not by the cubic meter. Being able to shamelessly copy each other has its benefits too, it might curb innovation but it also lets everyone use the best, most popular and easy to use solutions rather than worrying about patent lawsuits and seeking out inferior alternatives to work around them. Actually being the first to sell something tends to give you a pretty good edge even if you have cloners who'll copy your magic, particularly if you're thinking hardware/software combinations. It would be different, but I think we'd be okay. In the vacuum left companies would probably be more willing to spend money on tweaking OSS tools to their uses too.