You're missing the fact that we provided comprehensive insurance for fifteen years. 15 years. It was only when Obama said the insurance has to cover crap like aromatherapy that it became too expensive to afford, so now our (former) employees have no coverage. Good job, libs.

RTFA. The point of the thing is that the young generation knows how to RUN software, but who is going to design quantum CPUs in 2030, or invent the next revolution like the Internet? You don't learn to build new technologies by practicing being an MS cubicle drone running Exchange.

Hell, with the prodicts you mentioned you're not even ALLOWED to try to figure out how they work. That's called reverse engineering and it's against the license. The whole point of the Pi is to first learn how things work, then use that knowledge to build entirely new and better things.

About half of Google's profit goes to income taxes, 62% to taxes in general. Last year, Google Inc. paid about $2,600,000,000 in income taxes on their profit. Then when those same profits went to the owners (stockholders), the stockholders paid another $1,500,000 in taxes on that same money. So about half the profit goes to income taxes. It doesn't stop there, of course. A stockholder who had a $1,000 share of the profit gets $500 after income taxes and they then use that money to buy gas, for example. If they buy gas, they pay another 12% gas tax, so they only get 88 cents worth of gas for every $2 originally earned. Maybe they paid their mortgage with the money. Property tax is about 27% of the mortgage payment on a house, so for every $100 in earnings, they can pay $37 of mortgage. The other $63 goes to taxes. I guess you think a total tax rate of 63% is too low. Here's the deal. I've invested time and money to open businesses and hire people for the last twenty years. To open a business, I have to invest (risk) money for an office, equipment, salaries for the first three-six months, marketing, etc. I risked that money hiring people to develop something in hopes of making a profit. Do you think I'm going to put my life savings at risk in hopes of getting 37% of the profit, if there is any, while paying 63% to Washington bureaucrats? How about when it's almost guaranteed I can't make a profit because Obama says we have to get the insurance that covers aromatherapy and crap, at a cost of $800 / month per employee? Hell no. I'm in the process of shutting down my businesses. That's what the current 63% total tax rate gets you - businesses shut down, people out of work. See also "California".

Xmbc is lime Windows Media Cenyer Edition + Roku + a few other things. Comparing it to a command line player is just silly. That's like comparing a $2 million luxury RV to a bicycle.

mplayer is great. I use mplayer DAILY. It's in no way similar to XMBC though.

You like Microsoft. Cool, that's your prerogative. Lying to yourself can cost you, though.
I've been doing security full time for sixteen years. You'll find my name on CVEs where I've found flaws to instantly take out wikipedia and other top tier sites. That pretty much puts me at opposite end from "retard" when it comes to network security. When DHS and I tell you Microsoft products are full of giant security holes, we know what we're talking about. Pretending otherwise and getting the least bit sloppy while running IE will get you owned

. Example - Java exploit in Chrome on Linux could crash a browser tab. The same exploit in IE lets me install a rootkit because IE is integrated with the system shell.

It's a joke, not a math test.

No matter what protocol you choose, the right color palette can make it MUCH faster. most business applications look fine with 256 colors. modern desktops typically use millions of colors. 256 colors is SO much more responsive than 16 million.

I see these devices as a bridge from programming to electronics. Pretty soon, pronaly within an hour or so, you'll want to connect SOMETHING to the MCU and that's where the electronics begins. For someone coming from a programming background, the MCU seriously boosts the coolness factor while learning about how to build electronic circuits controlled by the chip.

I've been programming professionally for fifteen years - in C, Perl, PHP, Javascript, VB6, Actionscript, and other languages. Being a programmer, I was glad I didn't have to learn both embedded systems and assembler at the same time. For a guy like me, at a point where I've done just a little bit of kernel ptogramming for example, Arduino was really nice. "mov 0x40 0xD0" isn't what most programmers are familiar with.

OP said they've actually used Java after having used an actual programming language, so doesn't that pretty much guarantee OP HATES Java? I sure liked it right up until I tried to use it. ;)

I've used the Picaxe, which I really liked, bate pics, the Basic Stamp and the Arduino. I'd suggest the Arduino for most people. Largely because of the community around it.

However, if you're on a budget like me, I'd only buy one Arduino board. Any "permanent" projects get the Arduino board replaced by a bare chip with the Arduino bootloader, which sells for about $5. That $5 chip + 5volts is an Arduino, minus the unused headers, LEDs etc.

I hadn't heard that idea before. I wish I could mod you up. The innovator gets paid for their investment, and the patent ends up public domain. That's similar to a bounty for open source software, except with your idea the first X licensees pay, not just the first one.

I'm sure a couple tweaks to the idea would be needed. One tweak is that probably the price would go down with each purchase, so someone who wants to be the first to market would pay more than the last. That would almost be required since it becomes free after the last license is purchased. Noone would buy the last license unless it was really cheap. Instead they would just wait for it to be free.

the phone subsidy is there to sell pricey contracts. If your don't want the subsidy, look at the network's no-contract affiliate.

The bad guys only had to compromise one machine, then the trojan spreads. Say for example my co-worker Jeff has him home machine infected. He uses ssh to connect from home to his office. The bad guys now haveaccess to infect his office machine. Jeff is a sysadmin at the office, so from his office desktop he logs into various servers. That spreads the infection to the servers. I then use scp (ssh file copy) to pull some files on to a server from my work desktop. Now my desktop is infected. Later, I ssh from work to my home office. Now my home office is infected.

For this reason, we have a rule. Always ssh FROM the more trusted machine TO the less trusted one, never the other way around. For scp and rsync, that means always PUSH files to a client's machine or any server on the public internet, never PULL to a less trusted machine from a more trusted one.

The trojaned ssh isn't the one installed from the repo, it's installed later by the bad guy, so it doesn't matter how you installed . Again, the trojaned ssh isn't the one you installed. The ONLY difference between source vs. binary packages in this case is that people who installed binaries could be alerted that the hash of the existing file doesn't match the correct binary. So binary installs are SAFER as far as this trojan.

How does the bad guy get the trojan on your system, if not from the repo, you ask? He gets access when someone else who is infected logs into your machine - your sysadmin, your hosting company, a vendor, etc.