Oh no, it's not a stupid idea, it's the perfect plan to shaft the gullible out of the last money they can't afford. The next logical step will be the debtors' prisons, obviously run by private corporations like most of the prisons are. Free labor, right here in the U.S., hardly subject to any labor standards.

I agree, but I don't know what fantasyland do you currently live in where credit card companies are not trying to create economic activity. People wouldn't be able to buy the crap they can't afford if it wasn't for pocketable credit, a.k.a. credit cards. In other words: the credit card companies were creating economic activity almost since day one, by allowing the gullible to buy stuff they can't afford. This hashtag purchase option just further lowers the bar that is already too low. IMHO it'll only be used by the most clueless -- those who are easiest to exploit by the system anyway. The whole idea is basically just to further exploit the underprivileged, as those are the ones vastly most likely to buy stuff they can't afford. It's not even shafting the little people, it's shafting the poorest of the little people. It is monstrous, but it's not new.

Here, you have to explicitly tweet (or retweet) a particular hashtag, and you have to have your card preauthorized. I still think it's a bit risky of a proposition, but at least it's trivial not to opt-in. What will happen is that the "particular hashtag", or rather "costly hashtag" space will become polluted, and the negative outcomes of this feature will get so much public outcry that it'll get dropped quickly -- or so one hopes.

Alas, I had to double check the calendar, I thought it was April 1st already...

My experience with core i7 Optiplex machines running Windows 7 and CAD systems is excellent. Those systems really fly, even compared to, say, Core 2 Duo (my laptop). A Libreoffice install takes easily 5x less time than on good P4 systems we had before. I'd be very hesitant to proclaim that an i7 will not keep up with hardware from a decade ago...

And how much power does it take to make a complete new machine? Part of the price of a new system is the cost of power needed to make all the parts :)

The politics in the Catholic Church exist because people are still people, and there is a negative selection bias for the good, the charitable and the kind to get into positions of presumed power. The Church is basically in a continuous state of destroying itself from within.

Even without the sexual molestation issues the organization is still rotten. The conclave to elect the new pope will be interesting this time because there's no mourning period and thus no time for the usual political positioning power plays. Yeah, it's a good thing, but you'd have thought those people know better :(

They would know what tax to pay exactly the way me and you know. The stock would need to come with purchase records.

This doesn't mean that I think charities should pay such taxes, just that it's wouldn't be a technical problem at all.

But those charities don't pay any taxes on such stock sales, right? :)

He'd probably quadruple his money if he began short-selling construction stocks in Turkey right now :) They're setting themselves up for a big construction bust in a couple of years at most.

On Windows, it's quite easy, actually. The non-IE browser plugin and the ActiveX controls are separate installs. Without the latter, you don't have issues outside the browser. The browser plugin flash is invisible to anything but the browsers. I don't recall if recent IE uses the browser plugin or ActiveX variant, I recall that older ones needed the ActiveX version.

Look, I'm not advocating running the fucking filesystem or a network driver in the userspace. I advocate running leaf drivers there -- such as application-specific USB drivers and the console. The console "driver" doesn't provide services used by any other applications. It receives stuff from the kernel and does something with it, and there it ends. It's just like the audit deamon!

When you have exclusive device ownership by an application, with app-specific USB devices, etc., there's absolutely no point in having a device-specific kernel driver. None. Those devices generally are data sinks or sources, and you don't need anything in the kernel besides the regular USB host stack. All of the requests can be handled by the userspace without loss of performance. I know, I've done that, and it works great. FTDI's unix drivers are completely broken on OS X since they use libusb, and libusb doesn't know how to deal with sub-second timeouts on OS X because it uses the wrong APIs that only time out with a second granularity. Thus I've written my own userspace driver from scratch, and it performs beautifully. I can have a bog-standard userspace process get worken up every two milliseconds to process incoming bulk transfer, and to respond to it. It allows regular userspace to provide soft-realtime kind of performance -- I can easily get 3ms device-to-device latency, with userspace application in the middle. It's very useful for prototyping, where occasional glitches can be worked around or even ignored.

Same goes for Windows, where FTDI's stupid driver doesn't feel it necessary to inform you that the device got disconnected. Basically FTDI's driver is written mostly for the braindead blocking kind of use, and they have half-heartedly added an event source that signals arrival of data and change in control line status. I mean give me a fucking break, how stupid that is -- obviously in their minds no one cares if the device has gone away, or when a data transfer had finished, etc. Anyway, that driver code works on OS X using their USB api, Linux using their api, and Windows using UMDF. The performance on all of the platforms is exactly the same. So I specifically don't buy any bullshit arguments about userspace being slow. Yeah, if you need to go back and forth between kernel, userspace driver, kernel, and other applications -- like for networking, filesystems, block devices etc, then sure it's slow. If your application is the sole user of a device, there are few if any benefits to having a kernel driver -- at least if a lower-level kernel driver already handles the bus transaction queuing, as is the case in any modern device bus you can think of (ata/sata, usb, modern pci, etc.). If you want to stream data at a low overhead between the USB device and the userspace, the userspace driver merely needs to keep the device's request queue filled in the host stack, and keep the finished requests drained. That's all there's to it, and it works well, and I can easily keep the device saturated -- running at a rate limited by the device itself and the host usb stack. I can transfer about 33 megabytes/s when talking to FT232H chip connected to a fast CPU -- and that's without trying particularly hard. So, again, I don't buy bullshit arguments that don't stand to a simple experimental confirmation. Remember: the ultimate test is the experiment. Nothing else matters.

Never make it to userspace? What the heck? What prevents the kernel from starting the first process as soon as the scheduler is up? It's a happenstance, in a way, that linux starts all the drivers and only then launches init. There's no solid technical reason for it, other than inertia. Not anymore.

Well, wrong choice of words. Of course MPAA and RIAA well predate the current bullying efforts (by a century or so), but the industry supports their existence and those relatively newfangled efforts.

But the industry doesn't care about those peanut payments! The industry has specifically formed MPAA and RIAA to be, among others, their bully! It's all about scaring people, not about extracting payments that would form any sort of a sustainable revenue stream. It's coincidental that MPAA has chosen extorting money as their modus operandi. The money they extort wouldn't pay their rent, much less the salaries of all the lawyers that work for them. If you look at cash only, it's all a money sink -- a ruse by the lawyers to get paid for doing not only something that is not productive, but in fact something that is counterproductive to the industry! The industry was coaxed by laywers to think that somehow the FUD campaign has a net positive financial effect. Of course we all know this is a load of bullshit, but the industry is none the wiser. If you trace the various efforts, they all have lawyers at the helm - it is a long time campaign by the IP lawyers to set up themselves as well paid parasites on the industry.

The industry PAYS MPAA TO EXIST, and they are (in their self delusion) happy to do so. MPAA has nothing to do with a debt collection agency, and I have no idea why anyone would think they are there to collect payments to distribute back to anyone in the industry, much less the artists! Again, the money the MPAA extorts wouldn't even remotely begin to cover their costs. In industrial terms, it's peanuts -- of course it can be life-wrecking for the poor souls at the receiving end of the lawsuits. But just the fact that it's a lot of money to a proverbial grandma, doesn't mean it's of any consequence to MPAA or the industry proper. It's at the level of rounding errors in their financial reports. Seriously.