Tether is only backed by ~8% cash, but there are reports that the ~50% 'commercial paper' is in fact Bitcoin. So if there's a rush to pull from Tether, would it break the buck, or would it actually put Bitcoin into a further dive? — FWIW, Tether are still under investigation by the NY Attorney General. I'm sure that will be quite revealing when it comes to a head.

> only 9%-10% of people over 65 are hospitalized with the flu every year.

The issue here is that for those under 65, both the mortality rate and the hospitalisation rate is much much lower for flu — particularly because many cases of flu in the under 65s simply never get recorded, because for that age range simple/common flu is no big deal.

With the flu, it is accepted that any quoted mortality rate will always be an over estimate — because there are a *lot* of cases of the flu which are never reported, because its symptoms are often simply are not severe enough.

Exactly this. My mother has ended up with Amazon Prime twice fairly recently, amongst other similar things. Some companies are deliberately making use of what I would call Dark Patterns in their UI/UX, for this explicit purpose.

(Although I've no idea if HP are using the same tactics, it would not surprise me at all)

Does it really come as any surprise whatsoever (to Slashdotters at least) that 'royalty free' does not mean copyright free, nor infringement free — and that other/big companies might know and care about this stuff more than the average person ...?

Here's the thing: the term 'royalty free' has a distinctly different legal meaning to the term 'copyright free'.

Copyright, fair use, intellectual property ownership and licensing, etc, are all complicated legal areas. No real surprise that there are both intentional scams and naive misunderstandings in this field.

RIP Roblimo. Thanks for the early /. memories.

Granted, an exploited SD card can't pretend to be other USB devices (like BadUSB), but the exploit is similar to BadUSB in as much as it means the card's firmware can be re-written and malware can basically MITM your data / the device it's inserted into — so, theoretically at least, the card could be made to further exploit any vulnerabilities in the device it is talking to...

FYI... Sean "xobs" Cross and Andrew "bunnie" Huang disclosed low-level vulnerabilities in SD cards (as far as I can tell: on par with- and related to- the more recent BadUSB-type hacks) at a 30C3, back in December 2013.

For further details, see:-
http://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/?p=3554

Unemployment is a benefit of a technologically advanced society (paraphrasing Robert Anton Wilson, I believe) -- the sooner we all get our heads around that, the better.

Humans have always made tools to make tasks easier (or automate them entirely).

The article completely neglects the fact that OS X is a fully certified Unix, and, whilst OS X might not be overly popular in the server market, it certainly has a very large percentage of the desktop market. So yeah, perhaps the old-school companies that provide Unix OSes for servers may be in their 'last days', but Apple's OS X has brought Unix to the masses via the desktop, so Unix certainly isn't going to die any day soon.

...after recent comments from Valve re. developing on Linux (easy to port to, better performance than DirectX, ability to work with / feedback commits to driver devs, etc) — plus Gabe Newell recently calling Windows 8 a catastrophe — I would not be at all surprised if we saw a Valve-branded Linux-based games console in the near future.

But maybe that's just wishful thinking on my part?

What I mean is: unless app development is low investment, low risk and quick turnaround -- with the business intelligence to back that up (daily- or at least weekly- sales stats), coupled with prompt payments -- it's just a no-go for small/indy developers and/or small projects/apps. Word about the state of Microsoft re. third-party app developers is already getting around, so my guess is they'll just have to take it on the chin, as Metro/Win7phone apps will be slow coming because of this.

But hey, what's new? ;)

It's all well and good Microsoft copying Apple's business model here, but until they copy Apple with regards to paying their third-party devs, iOS developers will always be happier than Windows7/mobile/WindowsStore devs.

- Here's how it works with Apple: you get to view daily stats for your sales, and you get paid for that month's sales at the end of the month. Boom!
- Here's how it works currently with Microsoft: you have no idea about sales until months and months have elapsed, and then they tell you you'll get paid some months even later than that.

...so tell me Microsoft, is this enough incentive to retain any of the 'developers developers developers' that you may attract, so that they will go on to develop more than a single product?

Meh.

Microsoft are at an all time low at the moment. They're a lumbering hippo in the IT world, surviving solely through their clout and might. Lots of other companies 'get it' and are far more agile. It'll be Zunes all the way down if they're not careful.

I like C, and have used it a lot on and off over the years (and probably will still have to again, at some point) - but recently I've been totally loving programming in Google's Go language: it's just fricking awesome, for so many reasons! :)

I think Go is destined for Good-Things(tm) in the future

agreed: slowly but surely a.i. is getting there :)