>Again: the NRA is a religion and does not represent the desires of the majority of its adherents.

I agree - they dont really represent our interests very well. They are far too moderate and willing to compromise.
We need to eradiacate all gun laws of any kind form the books, and restore the 2A to its original intention, and the NRA
just isnt pushing hard enough. This is why we have additional groups such as GOA and the VCDL, because the NRA
is too goddamn liberal.

I feel like a survivalist stating this, but I think it is good to teach kids some skills that are not dependent on electricity, if only how not to be completely helpless during a power outage or a disaster:

One example is basic usage and care of a generator. It is surprising how few people don't get that there is a difference between a Harbor Freight special (which is an ET800 clone of a Yamaha model made in the early 19702), versus a Honda, Yamaha, or other quality generator with an inverter (or at the minimum active voltage regulation) that puts out clean power.

Another example, something simple as planting a garden or raising chickens. Skills that may not be needed all the time, but if something does happen, are worth having.

Not really, no. The "We're called racists if we say anything against Obama"/"Obama's a Kenyan Muslin usurper!" nonsense has been going on now for a long time. The AC's criticism is absolutely on the money. And ironically, you're attacking the AC for bringing up what you consider to be a strawman when you the "We're called racists just because we disagree with Obama" thing is a ridiculous characterization of what Democrats and liberals have actually criticized.

If you really want to do something about it, you need to counter-attack your allies when they try to pull either BS. Tell those who insist that Democrats are not highlighting actual racism when they complain about it to knock it off. And tell those who continue to push the Kenyan Muslim Usurper bullshit to leave, and stop self-identifying with Republicans. If you continue to call yourself a Republican, but also continue to allow such views to be associated with Republicans, you don't have a leg to stand on when you claim it's a "fringe".

OMFG. You frigging yankees can't even RTFA.

"OMG! ZOMG! gov't taking our freedoms!!! this must stop now!!!!!"

Let me help those of you who are not yet blind with rage, by quoting the RTFA:

It's not targeted on breweries specifically. It is targeted at diary farms. It is about accountability what the cows are fed with. Breweries inserted themselves into the market and, as suppliers, are subject to regulations.

It's much simpler, actually.

1. Samsung released Gear, based on Android. Major complain: miserable battery life.

2. Samsung released Gear 2, based on Tizen to address the major complains, battery life among them.

3. Google warms up to wearables while at the same time upset about Samsung diverging (and not only on werables). They approach Samsung and pressure them to go back to the official Android way of doing things. Thus, potentially, next Gear might be based on the Android again.

Haven't worked for Samsung myself. From what I heard, your experience reflects most of the Samsung. But the Galaxy phones were so successful, that they treat them very differently. From the scarce accounts, as far as I can tell, the whole Galaxy development is vertically integrated to allow them quicker response to the competitive threats. (The problem, I heard, is that Samsung bosses, seeing Galaxy development being very successful, now throw all possible carp onto it, hoping that the business unit would also fix other broken products too.)

I do think it's exaggeration.

If you look at the Android, more innovations comes from the Android OEMs than from the Google. Tablet support, advanced camera features, multitasking, multi-window, fingerprint sensor, wearable, in-vehicle infortainment - all first were done by EOMs. Google? Fancy UI gimmicks and G+ integration everywhere.

It is really hard to imagine how one can compete with Android right now due to market inertia.

But then, if you look at the reasons why Samsung went for Tizen with the current generation of the Gear devices - dramatic improvement in battery life - one can easily see that there is a niche for other OSs too.

And if you look what path Tizen has chosen to tackle the Android domination - native support for Android apps - you can easily see that the whole premise of the RTFA is flawed. Samsung doesn't want to fragment the market: they want to make Tizen compatible with Android to avoid the fragmentation. Developers shouldn't care what OS runs their apps, as long as it provides all the APIs necessary.

I have a Palm VII. It was fiddly, but it worked and works now (although no wireless anymore) as a great password manager that is offline and will always remain offline.

The device I have that I say has the best design for being timeless is the Palm V. It is one of those things that even 15 years later, it still looks relatively modern (other than the lack of a color screen.) It held up with daily use for years until smartphones caused the device and its charging cradle to wind up on the shelf for good.

I would say that my old HP48SX calculator with a card for additional functions still works and is useful. Engineering calculations are engineering calculations, and the tactile feel of the buttons is a lot more accurate than trying to use an emulator on a smartphone.

Just the small engineering touches showed outstanding build quality. For example, the card had an edge connector, but there was a sliding metal flap that kept the connector on a card shielded until it was inserted into the calculator.

I remember an early 1990s computer case for a generic 386 (back when we had hundreds of beige box makers.) It had multiple cam locks (Medeco or Ace, forgot which), as well as a keyswitch. It wasn't made out of tinfoil sheet metal as today's cases, the thickness had to be at least 1/8 of an inch. That case was used and reused by a friend of mine because it just worked without issue, and why waste something that well made.

I wouldn't mind going back to the days of repair rather than replace. Better off to pay twice as much for something and be able to maintain/expand/upgrade it than have it break or go obsolete and contribute to more landfill clutter.

If you honestly believe this, it makes me suspect everything else you said.

Well, tough, because it's true. Railroads were suffering from ever increasing property taxes, and the only way they could deal with them was by getting rid of as much property as possible, undermining their network effects. And like I said, it's in part one of the reasons, not the whole reason.

Interestingly most of the reasons you give are not real reasons - the Interstate system being a partial exception (though if that had been it I think the railroads would have survived), but the major ones are:

- Aforementioned tax burdens where taxes were in proportion to area and people served, not income.
- Stifling Federal bureaucracy, making it impossible to reorganize services as population shifts occurred and making cutting routes actually preferable to reorganizations.
- Aforementioned Federal bureaucracy preventing railroads from setting competitive prices. They were forced to sell many services at a loss, even when there was no reason to believe customers weren't perfectly prepared to pay proper commercial rates.
- Zoning reforms that made car ownership mandatory for anyone living in any area developed since the 1940s, plus the (deliberate, in my view) mal-administration of urban centers.

Add union intransigence to the mix, and the occasional mismanagement (Penn Central - if only they'd have let Al Perlman do his job), New Haven, etc) and it was a recipe for disaster.

People talk about bug free code. It is a matter of won't, not a matter of can't.

Sometimes, there are products out there which can be considered "finished". Done as in no extra features needed, and there are no bugs to be found. Simple utilities like /usr/bin/yes come to mind. More complex utilities can be honed to a reasonable degree of functionality (busybox comes to mind.)

The problem isn't the fact that secure or bug free software can't be made. It is that the procedures and processes to do this require resources, and most of the computer industry runs on the "it builds, ship it!" motto [1]. Unfortunately, with how the industry works, if a firm does do the policy of "we will ship it when we are ready", a competitor releasing an early beta of a similar utility will win the race/contracts. So, it is a race to the bottom.

[1]: The exception to this rule being malware, which is probably the most bug-free code written anywhere these days. It is lean, robust, does what it is purposed to do, and is constantly updated without a fuss.

I think the point is neither of these are attacks on the open source community. They're arguably attacks - albeit mere criticisms of - on "GNOME/Linux", but that's not the same thing.

A company contributing bodies and work to a community is helping it, not harming it. It's up to us to decide if we want Mir and Unity. We're not harmed by their existence. And FWIW, anyone arguing that Mir is terrible because it undermines Wayland isn't thinking this through, both because there's a much greater case for saying Wayland is damaging to the future of GNU/Linux, and because Mir has changed the politics whereby Wayland was once an obscure thing nobody was taking any notice of, but Mir basically turned the entire argument from "Should we replace X11 with Wayland?" (Hell no) to "OK, should we use Mir or Wayland [abandonment of X11 is implied to be a settled issue.]"

I thought we'd moved on past the putting words in people's mouths BS.

1. The paranoia in the original post that I was refering to was the notion that the Canadian press had concocted a headline with the intention of providing a world wide news story that would make everyone think that Heartbleed isn't a story. I don't know where the fuck you get any other interpretation from.

2. I haven't apologized for censorship anywhere, neither in the comment you quote, nor anywhere else. The fact you think that Eich was targeted for his views rather than for being an ass about them doesn't make it true, it just makes you another idiot who puts their fingers in their ears and cries "la la la" when anyone tries to explain the truth to them.

Actually refusing to listen to what someone has to say is one thing. Inventing an entire story about what you wish they said and believed isn't just arrogant, it's a sign of a serious mental problem. Get help.

I don't see tape being killed off until magnetic density in HDDs hits major diminishing returns. Even though there is only one tape drive maker these days (Quantum with the LTO line), they can keep advancing tape because the media has a lot more area than a HDD platter (or a stack of platters.) An average LTO-6 tape is 846 meters long, and that is a lot of space, even with factoring in the physical contact that the media has to go through.

It would be nice to see a consumer grade tape drive that can run from USB 3 or 3.1, especially if WORM cartridges were available, with media about 1TB native in capacity. Couple this with some decent backup software, and it would come in handy to mitigate data loss. Tape's advantage is that it is inexpensive, easily stored (drop a cartridge, and if there is no physical damage, it will still work), and can be set read-only in hardware.

I've wondered if a HDD maker could make archival grade hard disks, with media that can last 25 years or so. This might require multiple sets of read/write heads (similar to a drive that had two sets and could access different data sets at the same time independantly.) Couple that with a form factor that is easily grippable/manipulable by a robot, and that would replace both VTLs and real tape libraries.