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I don't know whether i would call that a toilet. They're literally doing their business in the street.

No. What she said was she wanted "normal". Have you noticed how the poor people on tv have money for nice clothes and apartments. Basically she didn't want to feel poor. She didn't want her kids to grow thinking they were poor.

This article although older, offers better information and insight into his life:- http://www.forbes.com/sites/katiasavchuk/2015/03/02/the-face...

There also seems to be a contradiction between the 2 articles. The one from BBC says his mother died on the day he was born whereas the forbes article says she died when he was 4.

I don't know. That's why we need to shine more light on this industry. Who knows? This might be a viable target for something cooperative scheme like microfinance (which has the advantage of low interest rates, high recovery rates, mutual benefit and general social upliftment).

The power of compound interest works both ways. For the rich, It can mean a spiral upwards, as they can exploit the difference in interest rates of different investments to make profit. For the poor, it often means a spiral downwards into greater debt, more frequent defaults and ever higher interest rates.

So for corporate America, It's basically open season on the misinformed and undereducated poor? This sounds a lot like predatory lending - There is a good chance, the retailer is counting on these people to default so that they can sell the couch at 1000$ retail to the next gullible person who walks in.

EDIT: I am not saying this should be illegal. Clearly, Buddy's is offering a useful service to people who are turned away by other establishments. But there needs to be some regulation. You shouldn't be able to charge $4500 for a 1500$ couch.

This sort of thing should be regulated. There is a line between healthy capitalism and crass exploitation of the poor by the rich. The poor and unaware need to be protected.

I find it interesting that your main complaint is that the red cross lets bureaucracy and red tape get in the way of actually helping people on the ground, while the article seems to complain about the lack of accountability and transparency from red cross (which would require some bureaucracy and red tape). Maybe the Red Cross has trouble reconciling these seemingly conflicting goals (in addition to their alleged lack of competence)?

What really scares me are the ABS and traction control systems that are now becoming mainstream on motorcycles. These systems have accelerometers and gyros, which take in to account, information like lean angle of the bike when calculating the braking force. It certainly is a feat of engineering.

Little about being a biker, programmer, and an aspiring tree-shade mechanic, reassures me about the safety of these systems. Internals of a bike are much more exposed to abuse, bikers are known to take a spanner to their machines, the motorcycle repair workshops are a much more informal industry (at least here in India). What happens to a bike that is not subject to regular maintenance? On the other hand, I have always marvelled at how mechanical systems like motorcycles are usually built with some sort of graceful failure in mind - In a lot of cases a motorcycle will warn you about a faulty component before it fails catastrophically. I assume the people who designed these systems, would have kept that in mind while designing these systems (although stuff like Toyota's unintended acceleration does not inspire confidence).

And what happens in the event of a catastrophic failure:- a car locking up at speed is still dangerous, but there is room for error. If the front tires of your motorcycle locks up at speed, the odds of you walking away from the incident are not high.

Don't get me wrong, these systems DO SAVE more LIVES than they could possibly take away in the long run, But I am still disconcerted by the whole thing.

EDIT: typos

>>that the three companies has benefited from subsidies.

More to the point, America has benefited tremendously from subsidizing these companies. Elon Musk was a South African born Canadian (before he took American citizenship). He could have probably based these companies in any country of his choosing. Now America has at least 2 more private companies that are breaking new ground in their respective fields, and adding to America's GDP (and befitting the world in the process). Even if govt. funding played only a small part in the success of these companies, I would say this makes a strong argument for govt. subsidies.

Note: I have edited my original comment after you replied (but before i saw it).

My point is that Russia is forced to face actual consequences for its actions, whereas the Americans, and the rest have been given a free pass for doing basically the same thing.

You mean like what the US, UK and Australia did to Iraq. What punitive action did these countries face for their actions?

Yes, really the whole thing makes perfect sense when viewed from an "Old Order" vs "New Order" perspective.

>Thousands of people have died building soccer stadiums and people are saying that is wrong.

Over 1100 people have died in a span of a few weeks from the heat wave currently happening in India. This sort of thing happens. Obviously, the Qataris could be doing a lot more to reduce deaths and improve condition of workers, but this is not exactly news, nor is it due to slavery.

I still think that a lot of the hate haslittle to do with slavery and more to do with the fact that :-

1. Football fans from England/Europe/America pissed off that they couldn't host the world cup and are annoyed that the Qataris were able to buy their way into the world cup. This group has been running an effective smear campaign ever since the selection happened.

2. Undercurrent racism from football fans and non-fans (Why is this article even in Hacker News? Are there that many football, sorry soccer fans here?)

Funny, that everyone seems to miss the fact that the current indictments actually relate to corruption w.r.t. the previous tournaments and world cups hosted in USA, South America and South Africa. Nobody in /r/soccer seems to care about that.

Of course, don't let the facts get in the way of all the Qatar/Russia bashing.

Oh, stop your bleeding hearts. Speaking as an Indian who has lived in the Gulf (and has family who has worked in these construction sites you speak of), I find it immensely ironic that a bunch of former colonial white-majority countries (the biggest benificiaries of slavery) are lecturing Qataris on slavery and human rights.

Yes, the labour laws there suck and are in much need of reform, but the levels of criticism this has reached crosses into downright racism.

Since we are on the topic of slavery. What about the millions of undocumented workers in the US, who work below minimum wage, have no rights, and no protections afforded by the law- They are effectively slaves working under the threat of deportation. The idea that US government cannot do anything to stem the flow of illegal immigration is ridiculous. We are talking about a country with military/police capabilities larger than the remaining top 5 countries combined. The fact of the matter is the US economy benefits from having a low-cost, migrant population with no rights, just like Qatar, and the government isn't in a hurry to fix it.

I would rather a World Cup be hosted somewhere in middle-east,Asia or Africa instead of yet another country in Europe or the Americas . India would make a great host if it could afford it. But we can't, and neither can many Asian/African countries. If the Qataris can and are willing to do it, give them a chance.

Edit: It's also amusing to find everyone on this thread and the internet up in arms against Qatar/Russia for all the bribery and corruption, when the indictments so far actually relate to corruption going back 24 years for matches in the US, South America (according to BBC) and the previous World cup in South Africa. I don't remember anyone complaining about corruption back then.

What jumped at me was the fact that list seems significantly inaccurate/unrepresentative. For example, Delhi which has a population of 11 million according to its wikipedia article is missing entirely from the list (It would be between 10 and 14 rank as it stands now). The article is controversial due to conflicts in the definition of the boundaries of a city, but by any definition, Delhi should definitely be up there.

Are the brands you are referring to, by any chance Xiaomi and Huawei?

Here in India at least, these Chinese brands along with Lenovo have pretty much become household names in respect to mobile phones.

And they do make good, solid, innovative products at half the cost of their Korean counterparts. From an Indian perspective, It is no surprise that Samsung is bleeding to these (at least in the low and mid segments).

What is truly amazing to me is the pace with which the reputation of these mobile companies were built. It took years and even decades for the Koreans (Samsung and LG in electronics, and Hyundai in cars) to be taken in the same respect as the Japanese. The trust and reputation of the chinese brands (in the mobile space at least) were built almost overnight (and sooner in cases like OnePlus). There is certainly a Tom Sawyer effect in play with use of marketing tactics such as invite-only and flash sales.

To give a counter-opinion in favour of Samsung, I am using a Galaxy Tab S 8.4, and I find useful some of their custom ROM features like Power Saving mode (which restricts background data and runs in black-and-white mode), the split screen mode (very useful when say comparing excerpts from 2 book, or say running a calculator and another app.

Yes, they do try to bundle a few additional third-party apps like Flipboard, Evernote, and Dropbox. I wouldn't call these bloatware as these are high quality apps that most people would actually like and find useful, but I am mildly annoyed at the imposition. They also have a few of their own google-like apps and services like S Voice, S Planner and S Finder. These are basically attempts by Samsung to pull a Google (which frankly, they don't have the chops for). On the whole, i would say these additions are only mildly annoying since performance hasn't been much impacted, probably because of the hardware(but this may change with time and updates).

What are the applications of WebGL?

If you are doing a game or a 3d application on browsers- WebGL would be the way to go obviously. But apart from that, where could it be used? Could websites and web applications benefit from using WebGL? If so, in what way? Would it improve or worsen battery performance?

ps: Sorry for all the noob questions but i am genuinely curious about the implications of WebGL.

I think the anti-piracy angle is what attracts the game industry. Sony probably envisions a future where GTA XXV is released exclusively as a streaming service. Such a DRM-system would be practically uncrackable (unless you hacked the server or the server code was leaked). Customers would have no say in the matter. This is the main reason why the industry promotes consoles so much. Red dead redemption was never released to PC even though i am sure a lot of PC gamers would want it.

>In the NY Metro area, it’s Con Edison

That is a rather unfortunate (or rather appropriate) name for a company named after Edison.

Could you link to a source for this. The relevant wikipedia article makes the same claim but is tagged [citation needed]. The LA times article linked by the parent says "(Costa Rica is presumably sheltered by the U.S., but only under the loose ties of the Organization of American States)" which is kind of vague and mysterious. All the countries of the Americas are in that organisation so that leaves the question of what would happen in a conflict between neighbours.

Wow. That is truly amazing. What is almost as shocking to me is that I have never heard of this before. I have heard that Costa rica was a model for its healthcare sytem but i never heard that it didn't have a military.

This story should be told more often and Costa rica should be a model for the world in this regard.

What is worse is that all Internet banking and debit card transactions online(in India at least) depends on SMS for OTP as mandated by RBI guidelines. I have had OTP messages arrive 6 hours late while trying (and failing) to initiate banking transactions (which have a timeout period of 1 - 2 minutes).

>>The age of the fossil fuel personal car is entering its last decade.

I wouldn't be so confident. Right now, Tesla addresses a small portion of the expensive sports sedans segment in a few lucky parts of the world. Even then, Tesla cannot make enough cars to fulfill demand. The grid as it is, cannot handle a sudden and drastic increase in demand for electricity and the additional infrastructure needed will be neither cheap nor easily obtained.

I do think the internal combustion engine (w.r.t. to cars) will be relegated to history, but I won't think the transformation will be quick or easy.

Same case currently in India, where petrol is heavily taxed and diesel is subsidized (Ostensibly as a farmers subsidy to run irrigation pumps but also because diesel prices are strongly tied to price of essential commodities). Price per litre is about 1 usd for petrol and 80 cents for diesel. This might change in the future as the current govt. seeks to end diesel subsidies.

Also, It should be noted that the Total Cost of Ownership benefits is not clear cut. Diesel generally has higher Miles per gallon rating, and is cheaper in some countries like India. But diesel engines are more expensive to make, maintain (bills for routine service are higher) and do require a expensive rebuild after a few hundred thousand kilometers (Newer diesel engines have got much better in this regard).

On a side note, it is quite hard to find hard data on the true TCO of cars that can help consumers make a decision.

The life-cycle of the parasite is also illustrated in a great oatmeal comic :

http://theoatmeal.com/comics/captain_higgins

This, exactly.

Stallman is taking a stand here. We might think that he is a dangerous extremist for his actions and stances (Not using proprietary software, mobile phones, javascript-enabled websites). But what he is actually doing is sacrificing his life to make his points (which are for the most part completely valid). I would guess, even he knows that most of his ideals are impractical in today's world, but he is walking the walk and planting the flag firmly, saying this is "How thing should be".

The difference between a crackpot and a visionary is that what the visionary says make more sense as time passes. IMO, Stallman's track record is infallible in this regard.

I am talking about the Luxury market.

At that price range you are competing with luxury watches, which will still retain their value 10, 20, 50 years from now.

But with this smartwatch you're investing 10,000 usd in something that will be outperformed and obsoleted by a 350 usd watch in 2, maybe 3 years and reach end-of-Life soon afterwards. Are there people who are still willing to pay for such a device. Sure(Think the Vertu crowd). Are they a big enough market to be worth the trouble. I am not so sure.

So the whole world (my office, friends, family, clients, colleagues) should change to suit my laptop?

For a disruptive product to be successful it should not be behind its time (where others are already there) it should not be too far ahead of its time (The technology might not be ready, the people might not be ready to understand the product, etc), It has to be just ahead of its time. I am sorry but I maintain that Apple has overshot with this product. This is not like removing DVD support or even removing flash support, because a lot of the world is still wired. Except for those who are fortunate to live in their own Apple bubble, many of the people who buy this will have to frequently face the frustration of owning such a device with practically no reward (apart from shaving of a few inches and grams off their laptop).