> tech companies are especially hard

Wiring harnesses from some entity in China I only have email contact with. Steel sheet metal fab across the country that likely needs months to get my order in. Surprise tariffs on my embedded boards due to Trump's trade war on China. Failures on some of these boards that leave the HDMI displaying, but frozen, and even a serial connection stops responding, so I have no way to diagnose it and suddenly a bunch of support incidents where the box needs to be shipped back.

The tech piece of this is by far the easiest bit of the operation. I guess what I'm asking is, "hard, compared to what?"

Good Old Games, and some new (like Witcher) and never any DRM

If we can also kill PIPA, we should then try to fix the copyright term. Drug companies are somehow able to make a profit with a 20 year patent. Getting a successful drug to market can take 10 years and up to a billion dollars. Why should a song be copyrighted for 120 years from date of creation?

Dude, calm down. I know where your stapler is, I'll get it to you.

Is this a precedent? Does it mean that now anyone who does not want to be on a jury can pay $250, write an essay, and go home early? Many people lose more than $250 in pay while serving, so this may be a cheaper alternative. When I had to serve, I wasn't even picked, but I lost five days of work and had to pay for parking - $250 would have been a cheaper alternative.

A bit off-topic - can anyone suggest good, legal online stores for buying old games? Steam has a few, and Gog offers a lot of quality games up for sale - are there any others?

I did a lookup for "offduty police and BP" and fond this link: http://www.cityofpascagoula.com/news/continued-prep-for-oil-spill-1540/
supporting quote:

Tuesday, May 18: The City Council passes a resolution authorizing off duty police officers to wear their uniforms and use side arms when employed by BP or their sub-contractors for security purposes within the city limits of Pascagoula. The presence of these officers at the staging areas has facilitated movement of equipment and personnel while keeping disturbances at a minimum.

It worked. 7 out of every 8 German casualties occurred on the eastern front.

A couple of points:

1. These next-generation devices lack storage, and it is far cheaper to put a drive on your local network than it is to rent space online, in which case you pay monthly fees not only for the storage but for the bandwidth to access it. A desktop in the basement is a good solution for this requirement.
2. The cost of a terminal which can be used to access virtual OSes over a network usually costs about the same as a desktop. If you can have the desktop for the same price, why not keep it?
3. When a product becomes a commodity, people don't stop buying it - in fact, quite the opposite. Just because Apple can't charge $2000 for a computer anymore doesn't mean low-margin suppliers won't continue to sell them.

Exactly right - meetings never end, interruptions never stop, and drive-by management becomes an even easier habit to fall into. It may be tiresome, but there are real benefits to getting the right people into a room, and focusing on the problem at hand. Where chat rooms and follow-on technologies really shine is enabling these meetings over great distances.

But the fact that there are no charges being pressed enrages me.

Are you a parent? There's absolutely NOTHING they could do to the guy that would be worse than losing a child. I wouldn't be surprised if he winds up comitting suicide intentionally, with the same gun. I can't imagine how much this guy's hurting right now.

I'd also betting his marriage is over. Yes, charges of child endangerment could be filed, but no punishment is going to change anything; no punishment that state can inflict will come close to what he's done to himself.

I am a parent, and my eyes tear up thinking about a child dying, mine or one I've never met - they are all tragedies. However, in this case the *stepfather* left a gun around that killed a child that wasn't his. He may or may not be suffering, and it should be investigated.

The Internet is not a thing like the 'winter olympics' or recording industry. The Internet is a series of tubes which allow the transfer of information

ftfy

This kind of criticism has been popping up repeatedly regarding Android. Most of these reports are speculative and seem to be ignoring the facts, which are that:

1) There are hardly any vendor specific Android SDKs, everybody gets their SDK from Google. Apparently this is not causing any problems with respect to compatibility between the included emulator and device compatibility. If this was an issue, people would be downloading vendor specific APIs to work around the problem. As it is, they are not. It's a non issue. It just works.
2) Most speculative pieces like the hardly original one cited here on compatibility come without any concrete examples whatsoever: which popular Android applications are actually problematic? Where are the hordes of disgruntled users? What's the actual technical analysis of the underlying causes? Where are the device specific applications?
3) Barring documented differences, the Android platform is actually backwards compatible. So if you want to target Android 1.6-2.1, don't use any features introduced after 1.6 or make the use of those features optional.
4) So far the first available Android device, i.e. the G1, has been updated to the latest Android version. Not right away of course, but the fact is that most Android devices in the market are 1.6 or newer either because they shipped like that or because they have been upgraded at some point.
5) The predominant application development platform on the Android phone is Java. What you think you might know about compatibility and native platforms simply does not apply to a proper Java platform covered in unit tests like Android. By and large backwards compatibility is a complete non issue. See 2. If you have evidence suggesting otherwise, share it. If it's not backwards compatible, your unit tests fail and you fix the problem. It's that simple.
6) Most other vendors address this issue by not licensing their platforms to others (e.g. RIM) and shipping only a handful of devices (Apple) or regularly breaking compatibility (MS). Given the competition, Google is actually doing pretty decent shipping a platform that runs on dozens of devices from dozens of vendors. Windows mobile is the closest thing in terms of breadth and we all love windows mobile for its excellent compatibility track record right? (NOT :-) ). The failure of other vendors to address this issue is what has been driving Android growth in the past year.
7) Of course there are bad devices out there and vendors with bad software update policies. SE shipping a 1.6 device at this point in time is illustrative of their poor strategy. Their inability to get this device out of the door is testimony to their incompetence. Their declining market share is well deserved. Don't blame Google for that though.
8) The practice of forking code, which is what some vendors do, is bad for compatibility and time to market. This is true for any piece of software. If you are going to get an Android device, make sure it is running Android 2.x and that the vendor in question has a track record of supporting their devices in the field with updates. Extensive vendor or operator specific customizations mean significant delays between getting updates on your device and increased dependence on a probably not so competent development team.

What do you mean small subset, you can compile and install KDE and x.org on Cygwin. Pointless I agree, but most common place unix commandline stuff compiles and works on cygwin. I used to depend on cygwin to make life a bit more tolerable when I was still depending on windows laptops for development. There's something called puttycyg which is a fork of putty with some cygwin stuff compiled in that really improves the terminal experience (bash in a dos window kind of sucks).

I never noticed any performance issues. But then I don't do much performance critical work on the commandline. A few simple greps, ls and wc commands and the odd bash script to automate some stuff.