Not in the traditional sense where you gather everyone involved, hear them out, make a decision and then the matter is settled. In science things are settled when nobody sees a reason to argue anymore, the prevailing theory adequately explains everything in its scope. After all it's mostly mathematical formulas which happen to match the real world, if my contact lenses curve light the way optics say they should what's there to argue? In that sense, I find the resistance to evolution incredible because all it really says is that there'll be more of those who reproduce more and less of those who reproduce less. Sounds to me like a "well, duh" statement, particularly when you look at what we have done with domestication. If you shape the environment, you shape the animals and nature's been doing it much longer than us.

I don't even think they're even playing the same game, most assholes are just playing power games gathering sycophants, bullying those they can bully and sucking up to their superiors. Actual skill is mostly irrelevant and in fact superior skills and abilities might be threatening to them. The "good" assholes are usually trying to train their minions, like you can't cuddle a dog that just has chewed up your shoes unless you like having your shoes chewed up. You have to convey that it has been a bad dog and that you're angry with it. And the anger is more proportional to the level of expectations you have.

The good kind of assholes often chew out rather senior people - not to be confused with yelling at everybody - when they're doing things you know they can do better. They know what a release window is, they know how an RC patch should look like, they know not to break the user ABI, they know what kind of QA they should do themselves before sending review or pull requests. Good assholes often chew out people not because they're ignorant or incompetent but because they're being lazy, reckless or sneaky. It's not "it could have been done better" it's "you could have done better and you know it" but you tried pulling a fast one.

A little bluntness brings out a lot of the counterproductive characters, like the drama queens who don't take critisicm, those that will go in the trenches and you can change their design over their cold, dead hands, the dodgers who'll try to shift any blame away from themselves, who'll start throw ad hominems and so on. What goes around comes around though, if someone calls you out on your own turds you'd better be ready to handle it gracefully. That's something the bad kind of assholes never do, it's one set of rules for them and one for everyone else.

No, it's an excellent technical write up for those in the know about 3D lighting but I'm still at a loss for anything to actually discuss about it. I think even the old guard are 99.9% out of their depth trying to discuss whether any of the techniques used were appropriate or optimal. It's not even remotely trying to make it accessible to the general nerd as it's throwing references, acronyms and low level implementation details at you at a blazing pace with little to no explanation. The only summary I got away with was "smart man, if I ever need anyone to do something like that you're the kind of guy I'd hire" which I suppose might be the point, but it's not my little phd-class niche of expertize so I'm not going to argue with him. So what exactly would you like to discuss?

Just because it's ridiculously hard to prove doesn't mean that it's false. For example, most physists believe gravity needs a force carrier which they've called a "graviton", the same way light (electromagnetic radiation) consists of photons. That theory is 80 years old and still totally unproven but as long as nobody has a good competing theory we still kind of assume that's how it works. Not that we're not trying to look for gravitational waves and other clues, but most of it is so far off the scale of what we can experimentally detect that it'll probably still be unproven in a thousand years.

Actually the cost of the inventory itself is not the biggest issue, unless it's likely to expire without being sold. In prime locations - and any place you'd want to have a retail store of tiny little parts is a prime location - space is at a huge premium, easily >$1000/m^2 per month. You could of course try for a big warehouse outside downtown, but people don't drive all the way out there to find on the third isle in the fourth shelf down the $2 transistor they were looking for. Or at least you're not making any money that way.

If it's not circulating, get it off the shelves which is why book stores carry the top sellers, video stores the blockbusters and so on. Bargain bins, fire sales or just taking it off the shelves because you need to make room for new sellers drags down the average profit a lot. If you're Amazon and it's stowed away deep in some warehouse you're not in that much of a hurry. Also you didn't have to stock up your stores so there'd be wares on the shelf to buy either. But in a retail store it's sell, restock, sell some more. If it's not circulating and circulating fast, you're going to lose money.

Nobody argues that 9/11 was a victimless crime, but I don't feel that I'm in any way contributing to that crime by watching the footage. I don't think even the jihadists who were celebrating it were doing anything illegal, even though I'm sure the victims and their families strongly disapproved of people cheering for the death of their beloved ones. And the idea that there is a demand for this kind of terror and destruction in the first place. Watching it was victimless. Killing 3000 people obviously wasn't. It only happened once though, no matter how many times they show it in replay. Should these people sue CNN because they're being "revictimzed" every time the footage is shown? Just admit it, the logic is unique and doesn't apply anywhere else.

* white label tablets. Presumably built and sold in China, elsewhere.

White label tablets are sold in China, but also everywhere else. Rebranded as Aldi / Staples / Wal-Mart or what have you.

We need to recognize that premium android might as well be a different OS than white label android. The apps will be different, the languages will be different, the monetization will be different, the fragmentation will be different.

What are you talking about? I have a white-box Chinese Android tablet. It came with Android 4.2, gmail, Play store, google maps, etc. All of the no-name (Aldi Branded / Walmart / etc) tablets I've seen are the same.

For all intensive purposes premium android is as removed from white label android as it is from kindle.

Totally incorrect. The cheaper manufacturers actually provide a better android experience as they're using 'pure' android rather than putting shitty touch-wiz / sense style overlays & attempting to sign you up for a million stupid Samsung / etc services.

Oh - and you say "for all intents and purposes". Think about it. Intensive purposes makes no sense in the context this phrase is typically used in.

Don't underestimate the power of someone making sparks in this powder keg, for example some of the 40% non-Russians in Crimea. When you've got soldiers from two different countries standing toe to toe a few armed hardliners could set off a firefight that makes both sides think the others are attacking. For that matter, one of them might want to stage such an "incident" as an excuse to either take over or throw them out, except it spirals out of control and once they start shooting back, well then nobody's going to care much how it started. World War I had one assassination to spark the whole war, even if it's not directly a shooting escalation imagine an incident, an ultimatum to leave, refusal, boom. P.S. You can hardly call it a civil war when it's Russia invading Ukraine, that is war plain and simple.

But they also make down payments later when the money is of less real value. To get the real cost of a loan you should use size*(interest-inflation), which means the real per year cost of loans around here is around 1.5% despite being 3.5% nominal. Personally I think of it more as a running expense, for every $100k more expensive house I want to live in it'll cost me about 1.5% real interest = $1500/year. You're also counting it wrong, imagine you took out a 20 year loan instead and put the extra money in a savings account instead. It's only the interest rate difference that'd be the extra cost of loaning another ten years, the rest is you comparing apples to oranges - someone who makes enough money to pay it down in 10 years and someone who doesn't.

If you estimate days, not weeks for a shot at $10k you're complaining? Don't worry keep doing your $100k+/year day job. My guess is that there won't be anyone trying to do this in secret anyway, if I was serious about it I'd probably announce it on the mailing list and if there was anyone else thinking the same thing probably one of us would back off or we'd join forces. The worst that could happen is probably that one project starts and then stalls, but they're so far along nobody else dares to start. My guess is that the prize is significantly less than the commercial cost of writing the code anyway, like a bonus for people who are already somewhat interested in writing the code for free but the prize check is an extra carrot in the end.

No, client funds are not company funds. If you run a parking lot and a car gets stolen from the lot you're not liable for replacing the car. You might get that liabilty if your valet wrecked the car, but not in general. Same with deposit boxes, storage lockers, mail packages and so on if you want to get your money back in case of theft you need insurance. Which is what FDIC is for bank accounts. No insurance, then you might not even have a claim against MtGox. First you'd have to take them to court and win to make them liable for damages. And even if you do, well there won't be any money to collect there anyway.

Retroshare's problem is that it sucks donkey balls. I tried setting it up with a friend swapping PGP keys - that part wasn't so hard, but setting up a private share my friend he couldn't download at 1/10th the speed I can through HTTPS/SFTP/FTPS/any other secure file transfer mechanism. I don't know what they're doing wrong but it just seemed utterly amateurish so I uninstalled it and hasn't given it a second look since.

Chips have tolerances which means there's a spread on how fast they'll run. Binning is not overclocking, if Intel finds a i7-4770K that can run 100MHz above the rated speed they won't sell it now. They'll put it in storage and wait until they have enough of them then launch a new model i7-4790K (coming to you in Q2). People analogy, if you select the best people to go into elite forces and the rest in the regular army you've binned, but not overclocked. That'd be more like putting them on drugs to amplify their combat ability at the long time cost of their health.

On the other hand, think of all the fucked up shit people live through - people who could have killed themselves, but don't - and ask yourself if you're absolutely certain she'd want to die. I had a close relative with Alzheimer, in the end she didn't even recognize her own children. She was of course confused and scared, but I don't know - she never seemed to be in the kind of pain and misery you'd need to be suicidal, I think she lost that level of introspection and more or less drifted off into her own world. I think it was worse watching her mentally fall apart for us on the outside, at least in the end.

If you just make it broad and vague enough practically everything will have some adverse effect on something. Or if not with certainty then with for some of the people some of the time and the increased risk meaning an increased risk. Or it's not by itself harmful but is somehow a gateway or stepping stone to something which might have adverse effects.

For example, take alcohol and let's forget all the health effects. Alcohol drinking is probably the leading cause of public urination which is clearly some form of adverse effect. It's also known that it lowers the inhibitions to violence in some people, so in the wrong situation it can clearly lead to adverse consequences. And obviously drinking is a prerequisite to drunk driving, which we all agree is bad so it's a gateway to adverse consequences. If you start putting enough bullshit like that together you can make almost anything seem bad. And I just wanted a beer.

If you preemtively need to take everyone's freedom away to avoid the risk that they'll someone infringe on someone else's freedom you're throwing the baby out with the bathwater. If I want to get drunk, I should be able to get drunk. If I'm becoming drunk and disorderly, drunk and violent or drunk and driving then you can stop me. And even assuming I've got an addiction and is borderline alcoholic, what good does being a borderline alcoholic and a criminal help me? No, I disagree with you it's my life and my right to fuck it up. If I want to go to McD and supersize it every day until I'm 500 pounds and die from obesity that should be my choice.

As for covering the costs of public healthcare, well I'd rather pay it rather than have the health nazi police trying to measure how healthy I'm living and metering out an appropriate tax/insurance premium. A truly "fair" distribution of costs would also involve a truly invasive surveillance society where I couldn't enjoy the pleasure of drinking my own beer in my own house without somebody recording it and adjusting my risk profile. But hey, I'm willing to put that to a vote if you are...