The modern engineer basically exists because standardized people were needed for us in industry. Engineers don't decide the technical details of their implementation; they don't decide what to implement. Hence they're mental laborers.

What kind of an experience did you have to make you say this?

Which third party? I haven't seen one that catered to intelligent people and didn't have some pretty wild ideas on how to do things.

There's nothing rewarding about giving a large chunk of cash to somebody when a loan was available for 2% or less... It's extremely easy to invest that same cash into something that pays more than that interest.

It's the exact same premise as your house loan which you say is for tax purposes. The loan interest is so affordable that the benefits you get from having the loan are higher than the payments you make in interest.

The house loan and its benefits are complicated, but it's still the same basic math -- can I make more money by keeping some cash with me and getting a loan, or not?

And for those shows that you really want to watch as they come out, there's Amazon and Google, selling them at $2 an episode, or, usually, $15 a season.

$15 for a season is pretty reasonable, considering the alternative (paying cable much much more).

high STATISTICAL probability that they MIGHT be

Errr.. what, now? "Might be" is already an indication of probability, although a very vague one. It doesn't make sense to say that something has a "90% of maybe" chance of being right.

In other words, what you wanted to say is that the test can show that there is a high probability of being virus free, but it can't prove it.

but ARM has 8 (32-bit) general purpose registers, and a few specialized ones, some of which are only available in certain operating modes

That's not correct.

http://infocenter.arm.com/help/index.jsp?topic=/com.arm.doc.dai0245a/index.html

2. Register set

The ARM register set consists of 37 general-purpose registers, 16 of which are usable at any one time. The subset which is usable is determined by the current operation mode.

People act like we can actually compete with a country that doesn't have to deal with the EPA, OSHA and Social Security or the FLRA.

The whole point is that a country that doesn't have those things will have unhappier populace with a lower standard of living, and therefore less time and inclination to innovate and go the extra mile to make something of their own work.

That's why we can't compete in mindless assembly and raw materials, but we're still doing pretty damn good in everything else.

Also note that it's already illegal in Canada to wear a disguise while committing a crime (Section 351), so this is a clarification of the criminal code, not a change.

That doesn't sound right. Of course it's illegal to wear a mask while committing a crime, since it's illegal to commit a crime wearing anything at all (or nothing at all, for that matter).

My understanding is that this increases the punishment of wearing a mask while committing a crime, but it doesn't make it any more illegal than it already is.

even though Gardasil doesn't do anything useful

Citation needed.

I have one saying quite the opposite, actually.

Why not? 12 month is a lot of freakin' time... Maybe GM had a very shitty plan on what to do with the bailout, and then 10 months later they came up with a much better plan.

I would argue that one should be able to change their mind, *especially* on major policies. They have the biggest impact, so make damn sure that you're doing the right thing.

but I believe most people would gladly trade that here in exchange for national healthcare

Hard to believe, but based on the surveys going on right now, it seems like at least half of Americans would *not* like national healthcare.

especially since both men have a history of flip-flopping

How about saying they "changed their mind", or "made a different decision" instead of "flip-flopping"? Why is it bad that somebody in a position of authority changes their mind in light of new information? Don't you want them to do that? Or do you think that if someone thought that something is bad 4 years ago, they should do everything they can to end it today, even if they now believe it's a bad decision?

You have to learn and adapt as you go along to be successful. We should be looking for that in leaders, instead of calling them "flip-floppers".

I'm little sad they have no real engineering/development in Austin, but they seem to like keeping all of their people working on the same product in the same offices. Spreading an engineering force globally can cause communication issues, so they seem to avoid it.

You don't seem to be searching right... The team working on ARM-based ASICs going into iPads and iPhones is in Austin. Here's an example posting.

Because you don't get to be the size of Pfizer by giving up all your profits. You need to re-invest into growth, and you need to be able to reward people working or investing into the company in order to get them to keep doing it.

If you're already rich, like Paul Newman, and don't need more money, then you can set up a little company to make salad dressings and donate the profits. But, unless you're ridiculously rich, you'll never have the money to build a state-of-the-art research facility to develop new drugs.

Saying 'my new integrated GPU is now half as fast as the slowest discrete card!' is not a great marketing win. If you want to play games well you need something better and if you don't care about games you don't care how fast the integrated graphics are.

AMD has never been saying that. When Llano came out, it was on par with mid-range discrete cards. You could clearly play quite a few modern games on it: http://www.anandtech.com/show/4444/amd-llano-notebook-review-a-series-fusion-apu-a8-3500m/11