the powers that be aren't going to let us go to war. It's bad for business. Take that one terrorist attack ages ago in India that was traced back to Pakistan. The Indian people called for blood, the corps said no (since real war cuts into their profits) and everyone backed down.

Oh, for sure you're going to see a lot of human misery for the sake of the super rich being super rich. But large scale wars that wipe out the pleebs aren't going to happen again.

Many companies have paid ridiculous amounts of money for code that doesn't work, particularly custom and semi-custom code. The NHS in the UK scrapped a >10 billion GBP - that's 16 billion USD - national healthcare system. Vertical integrators that have a stranglehold on certain professions are often full of horrible, horrible code. Insane amounts of spaghetti code have been made by cheap outsourcing companies to go into "commercial software". Closed source has its gems. Open source has its gems. But as a broad generalization it's the pot calling the kettle black, both have a huge spread. Often it's just good vs better or bad vs less mediocre and the question to pay or not depends on whether a $50k+ worker could be 1% more effective - that's $500 - with that tool or not.

Personally I find there's a difference of layers, closed source software doesn't sell unless it looks good on the surface with user interface and hand-holding documentation, comes with buzzword compliance, feature checklists and fancy demos of the capabilities. Open source is more grab it, put it through its paces and see if it works for you. Doesn't have to be so pretty to look at, but be a solid workhorse with detailed technical documentation but often a high learning curve. It's usually more about manpower though than anything else, often you realize there's five open source developers trying to compete with a hundred closed source developers and it's not so much a better of the quality of the coders but simply about being outgunned.

The same applies to some open source projects. If you're willing to throw the resources at a project; whether that be your own patches and improvements, or financial resources, you're likely to get what you want out of project.

I've seen some of this so-called "superior" closed source code, and some of it is insanely awful, poorly documented cruft.

Really? I don't recall one or two major acts of terrorism a year since 2000. In fact I only recall one (7/7), and maybe you could count the bungled attempt to bomb an airport but those guys were laughably dumb. So what are the other 20 odd major acts of terrorism that I somehow slept through?

Not to mention the perpetrator-victim relationship, in the UK and most of Europe a knife is enough. Depending on where you are in the US if you tried to rob anyone with a knife chances are you'd get the wallet while you're up close then get held or shot at gunpoint as you're trying to get away. If you have to assume your victim might have a gun (legally or illegally) the only "safe" way to rob them is to control them at gunpoint from start to finish. As I understand it guns are not that terribly hard to acquire here in Europe but they are usually overkill to commit the crime and they rarely let you get out of a situation you couldn't escape with a knife. Unless you intend to kill but most murders around here happens in close relations with victims in "stabbing distance", not gang violence on the street. And of course to an armed robbery you send armed police...

Do some Google searches. People noticed that the video output on Lightning connectors is lower resolution than 1080p and horribly compressed. MicroUSB on the other hand supports MHL, which gives you 1080p60 uncompressed video and uncompressed digital audio.

He's a crank. Sure, it might be possible that some things are not all as they seem but he's on a roll that everything is some sort of conspiracy or false flag operation. Nothing is as simple as crazy religious fundamentalists shooting up an easy low-security target for huge publicity and terror factor.

I'm sure uucp is still around. My earliest "Internet" feed was new and mail and news feeds over UUCap. Bring back bang paths and modems!

Isn't this a feature pretty much taken for granted? My $80 Hauwei Ascend II has bluetooth for pete's sake... It's a $10 dollar chip (maybe $2.50 at the bulk Sony buys)... I get that margin's are slim but come on...

Since pretty much all residental connections I know of block outgoing port 25 I don't think most of the world has "internet access" the way you define internet access. Good luck in your quest to redefine it.

All off Microchip's current PIC32 line is MIPS based, and their reps always push them aggressively when I talk to them. Their theory seems to be that they wanted a 32 bit microcontroller but didn't want to get into direct competition with ARM vendors.

The NSA are fools if they think that the Russian and Chinese and French and Israeli intelligence agencies are not at least as good as they are. If the NSA has found a weakness in something it's fairly safe to assume that at least one other agency has, and then maybe shared it with their partners in the same way that the NSA shares stuff with the British.

When they put weaknesses and backdoors in they are taking a calculated risk. Someone will find it, it's just a question of how long and how much benefit they can get from it compared to the harm that having others know about it will cause.

The Euro is a credible alternative. Despite all the raving headlines there is zero chance that it will be dissolved. The Euro zone is doing well, with most countries out of recession and the others being supported through it. People ask how countries with such different economies can share a currency, but forget that there is actually a pretty big difference between say California and Alabama, for example. Yeah, there are problems, but they are resolving them.

Euros are a safe long term investment. If somehow the Euro ever did fail the entire world would be fucked anyway, including the US Dollar.

If the US defaults on anyone it will be screwed because no-one will want to lend it money at good rates any more. Doesn't matter if the US claims China or whoever wasn't playing fair so it's okay, investors will just see that for the lame excuse to dump on anyone those choose that it is. Kind of like how the US can declare anyone they like an "enemy combatant" and ignore their rights, they would just declare anyone they didn't want to pay a cheater and default.

Something like that already happened in the UK. When Iceland's banks failed we froze their assets using anti-terror legislation on the grounds that it might hurt our economy. Now everyone considers the UK a less safe place to hold assets because if things get bad the government might declare you a terrorist and freeze them. If they can use anti-terror laws against Iceland they can use them against anyone.

Massive government cuts are what drag economies down. Japan tried it in the 90s, Britain is trying it right now. You get 10 years of a sunken economy bumping along the bottom before it can even get back to where it was before the crash, while everyone else recovered a long time ago.

Obama did the right thing by stimulating the economy. You get out of recession first, and then when times are good again pay down the deficit. Cutting during the recession is suicide. A recession is caused by people not spending money and business drying up, so what do you think will happen if one of the biggest and most reliable spenders (the government) makes huge cuts?