Posts by Tom 13 7544 publicly visible posts • joined 10 Jun 2009
Generally concur, but having once been involved in a Trademark dispute and being aware of several others, I'll give them a pass on this one. The lawyers told them they had to, so they did. Few people in a board room have the gonads/are foolish enough (choose your preferred option) to challenge a lawyer on these pronouncements. Now the courts have rightly said, no.
No, it emphasizes them. If you didn't start asking them several years ago you are late to the party. Maybe this is the horse and buggy shops going out of business now that the horseless carriages are here. Maybe it's Amazon becoming the Standard Oil of present day. The difference is important.
I'd also note there was a time when Borders was the #1 bookstore company in America if for no other reason than they were the first with the big block, browse, and lounge format. It was the first time I saw a copy of Black's Commentaries on the Law for sale in a retail outlet.
Can only speak to the US, but over here schools including universities and 501(c)3s get MS software at what is essentially cost plus what a grocer would regard as a normal markup instead of the typical IP monopoly rate businesses are charged. I imagine it would be similar elsewhere.
In the US you aren't an adult until you are 21.
They didn't say "kid" which is the usual phraseology when trying to pull at the heart strings, e.g. The Trayvon Martin/George Zimmerman case.
So all in all I'd say the Vultures were using precisionist grade terminology here.
And the Tumbs up is for them, not you.
This took more than one blatant fool. So let's go ahead and count them:
1. The Canadian woman who called it in as a real threat.
2. The deputies who showed up to investigate.
3. The sheriff who decided to take it to the DA instead of cutting the kid lose after the scare of running him into the police station in handcuffs.
4. The DA who decided to prosecute instead of cutting the kid lose.
5. The judge who set bail so high only Bill Gates or George Soros could afford a bond company to pay it.
6. All the idiots who elected idiots the idiots in items 2 to 4 who are elected officials or the idiots who appointed the non-elected officials in items 2 to 4.
We'll leave out the idiots on this thread who think the fools in items 1 to 6 are doing a good job.
When the hoplophobe stop electing morons to appoint even bigger morons as judges.
Given the postings I've seen on the pages of El Reg, it's gonna be a while.
I'd also note this San Antonio which isn't far from Austin. It's where libs congregate in Texas.
Yo, brainless! Of course the police are supposed to do something. They're supposed to log the call, go to the parents house, asses the situation, and apply some common sense. With contextual evidence that the kid wasn't serious they give him a good stern warning about not doing it again and go back to the station to log the report. Throwing him in jail with a $500,000 bond on the basis of nothing more than a single FB post is beyond the pale.
Oh and all those victim suits would get tossed as soon as the were filed. The police departments have no legal responsibility to protect you from harm.
Oh, this article is leaving out the juicy bits. The kid has to be confined to solitary for his own protection. When they pull him out and put him back in the general population he gets beaten to a pulp. And bail has been set at a number even the bail bonds companies can't afford.
So, if it is all stuff that been running around in the conspiracy mill, how do you know what he's saying is real and not stuff he made up to garner attention?
I mean, do you REALLY think The Queen is sending "selfies" to the pool boy? I'm not questioning that we'd scoop them up in a New York second if she were, I'm asking if you really think she'd do that. She's not my queen and I don't think she would.
Yeah I noticed that too. I'd like to think it's the sort of remark that would set off alarms in a normal Brit's thinking. But apparently most of them are too caught up in hating on the US at the moment to see the bright flashing lights or hear the blaring sirens warning them something isn't right.
I've heard a similar tale in a different context. His claim was the reason the allies didn't "find" chemical weapons in Iraq is that the weapons Sadam was using were sent by the US military. So they couldn't publicly recover the crates as they'd have US serial codes.
These are the kinds of conspiracy theories you need to walk away from. Too many ghosts, shadows, and false fronts for somebody unconnected to sort out with logic alone.
Yeah, and that's when you should start doing a serious reality check.
By his own admission he was only at the NSA for 30 days. Do you seriously think anyone could get these kinds of details on such a wide variety of data in only 30 days?
Intelligence data is compartmentalized. My roomie has a clearance and works as a civilian for the military. Not the really secret black ops stuff, just the stuff you wouldn't want the enemy to know about how you make equipment. Pain points for him are bad enough. Very rarely he deals with highly classified systems. If you get high enough into them, you get a phone number you can call. If some one answers "Hello" and gives the correct countersign you ask your question. You don't ask who answered. You don't wait for a response to your question. You just ask. More likely you'll get a recording device and you leave a message. Maybe they'll get back to you before the deadline for whatever you are working on expires. Do you really think the hard core black ops stuff we expect the NSA to perform in defense of our country is LESS compartmentalized than the process for building armarments?
I'm not sure the long term investors are gone gone. I suspect they are still there. They certainly are swamped by the trading algorithms of the short term feeders. I also suspect that to the extent they are in the markets, they are more likely invested in companies like IBM than Dell.
So I arrive at basically the same conclusion as you and others about the prospects for Dell the company: highest probability of its future existence is with Dell the man. Whether this is the most profitable route for current shareholders is a different question, but at best the odds of getting more money with Karl are 50/50 and only on the initial buyout. If you miss the initial buyout the risk of getting a hell of a lot less than Dell the man is offering are 80/20. If you're a current shareholder the question then becomes: Are you better connected than Ichan?
Have to agree about both the quality of the hardware and the piss poor Sprint support.
The EVO 4G was the first cell phone I ever bought for myself. The hardware and interface were great. It had the first logical and responsive touchpad I've ever used. BB and iPhone - on at least one character in the password the phone picks a character to the left, right, or above the character I think I'm pressing. I actually got it to play FB games at the time and was disappointed with the FB app. But since I didn't fully do my research I didn't hold it against the phone. What I was counting on was it having sufficient signal so I could use the phone as a hot spot for my laptop on my daily train commute. That's where it all fell apart. IF I could get a signal it was 3G at best, never 4G. And I live in the metropolitan DC area which is theoretically flooded with 4G towers. I broke the contract before the term ended and the problems were all on the Sprint end, not with HTC.
I've subsequently replaced it with a pay as you go, cheap ass clam shell non-smart phone.
No, it's deeper than that. I suspect most of the posters haven't quite crystalized the nagging suspicion into a thought. In fact, this one only came to me today as I was reading through the posts:
The so called "boffins" who peddle this sort of story to the press are like the IT sales guy we technicians have come to loathe. They oversell their possible breakthroughs and under-deliver on actual product. They subconsciously recognized the pattern even if they haven't expressed it. And at route the cause is the same. The sales guy is looking to pad his take home pay. The boffin is looking to fund his next round of research which also writes the checks for his take home pay. Now, there are probably lots of boffins out there who aren't doing that, but we don't hear about them because they are engaged in actual boffinry.
I didn't read that as cynical, I read it as a criticism of the author being lazy and not including a reference for comparison.
Cynicism comes with age. Mostly because when you get to be an old fart like me, you've heard at least one of these "breakthrough" stories each month over the last 30 years and none of them have come to fruition.
There has always been a clear and substantial profit to be made in improving battery manufacturing.
Way back in the dark ages of computing (circa TRS Model 80-III) my high school chemistry teacher had just arrived from a gig in the industry. Between the weight, toxicity, and relatively poor performance of any battery, any company that could make a major breakthrough was going to make about half as much as Bill Gates (which given they actually manufacture stuff means they'd be shifting twice as much gear as he did). So they've always had really good people working on really intractable problems.
Crap advice.
Like Highlander, there is only one trilogy and you watch them in released order.
Episode III was as much crap as Episode I. There is no building pathos that causes Skywalker to become Vader. It happens only because the plot requires it. Lucas simply isn't the person to write the kind of script that episode III required. He does okay and sometimes well with heroic stories, but episode III is a Miltonesque fall story. The only movie in the second released arch that was marginally passable was II. Even it would probably have been done better as a made for TV single episode event. If you think about the overall story arch episode II needs to do a LOT of groundwork for episode III, and that will detract from the heroism of it as an episode. If you like, episode II needs to be the Gawain vs Lancelot episode of the movie (drawing on the Excalibur interpretation of the Arthurian legend).
In fairness, I'd search it too before posting the quote. Not because I don't know where it's from, but because memory sometimes plays tricks on us. And I wouldn't want to be doing a "Play it again Sam"* on a well known Star Wars quote.
*Correct quote is probably:
"You played it for her, you can play it for me," and "If she can stand it, I can! Play it!"
although it might be:
"Play it once, Sam, for old times' sake." After he feigns ignorance, she responds, "Play it, Sam. Play 'As Time Goes By'."
source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casablanca_%28film%29#Quotations
We KNOW its out job to police the globe because every stinking time you guys get upset, you come wailing to Daddy about it. Personally I'd like to let the lot of you stew in your own juices since you never want to do the smallest thing to prevent it before it reaches catastrophic levels, but we're stuck in the stew too.
except of course for the ones who can't because they don't have the means to do so.
To the extent the trade negotiations discuss spying, it will be kabuki theater to reassure everyone. They can't actually dig too deep, because they can't publicly disclose that for the first time in his life, what The Big 0 has been saying publicly is true: everybody spies on each other, even if the public proclamation is that gentleman don't read each others mail.
I'm not.
The green case rests on the claim that by mining (including oil and gas well) carbon from out of the mantle we increase the carbon content in the troposphere which drives AWG. While you get secondary effects from cutting down too many trees it's the fossil fuels that drive it. So if you want to re-balance the carbon content you have to bury it back in the ground. Hence some of the proposals we've seen to inject the CO2 into the mantle in a sort of reverse, non-fracking drilling process (mind you, we still don't have the supply of unicorn farts to power this drilling operation, but I'll leave that aside for the moment and assume we do).
On the secondary front, trees may absorb carbon on net over lengthy periods of time, but they also produce CO2 as part of the respiration process. There seems to be a bit of debate about whether young or old trees capture more carbon for AGW braking processes. In any event it may be more of a wash than is generally admitted during the growing cycle. There is however no debate that once said tree is dead, it decays and pumps any temporarily captured carbon back into the troposphere.
The warmist camp isn't eating its own dog food now. I doubt they'd be greatly concerned about the change because they'd make sure the law had sufficient loopholes so they could continue to live in their houses that consume more fossil fuels than 20 normal families, drive their oversized even for an SUV vehicles that consume more gas than the 73 Plymouth Fury sedan I learned to drive in, and fly their private jets to wherever the latest AWG confab is even when it is right next to a commercial airport. Meanwhile they'll expect us rubes to drive electric cars charged by windmills and solar panels they've required us to install on our domiciles.
Actually you do.
The fundamental assumption he is making is that the markets act as a truly massive aggregate: millions of people instead of hundreds or possibly even only dozens of scientists. The smaller sample size for scientists means that unless they are pre-disposed and empirically less biased than the three orders of magnitude larger sample size, the larger sample is more likely to eliminate random bias. Either system is equally subject to systemic bias, which is both rather more hard to spot and rather harder to eliminate even though it is the holy grail of scientific experiments.
Where he might have a weak spot in his argument is in assuming the market actually has larger numbers of people independently evaluating the risks. With the advent of mutual funds and various expert lead retirement plans, I've begun to question this assumption. It was true when individuals were directly buying stocks, or at most belonged to an investors club where each member did research and presented his conclusions to the rest of the group before the group decided how to invest their money. Today too much has change to simply accept that belief.
Also, I believe most of the paints etc. they use to protect the hull from the corrosive effects of the sea also have the effect of being insulators instead of conductors. Not enough to matter for typical running conditions, but when you are trying to dump massive amounts of heat not the sort of thing you want between you and the big dump.
You forget our Navy, except in time of actual combat, is now run by Greenpeace.
They can't even engage in live fire training if there's a chance a dolphin or seal will die. And don't even ask about what the civy test teams are going to have to do with sequestration now in effect. They're only allowed to work four 8 hour shifts per week even if they're the only guy available to run the data station during that 12 hour period.
Of course not.
There are few barriers to entry in the hammer market, so the ones with proper wooden or black handles are always plentiful and the fools who make yucky orange handled hammers quickly go out of business without anyone ever much noticing they were in it in the first place.
The same is not true of the desktop market.
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