Posts by Tom 13

The vote the tyrants out.

You do have a Constitutional Monarchy don't you?

It's the "collaborating to do down another competitor" that becomes the sticking point.

If you are getting together to protect something jointly developed (in this case allegedly patent-protected processes for handling compressed video) then you aren't engaging in an activity that violates anti-trust laws. This is useful for setting industry standards for manufacturing. What isn't allowed is getting together and saying "We'll if none of us price our goods at more than Y, we can drive company ZZ out of business. After they are gone, we take the price limit off."

You mean more so than the lot that are already willing to blow themselves

up to kill civies while still maintaining sufficient control that they don't self-immolate where they are standing?

Realistically I don't think that's possible. They are already on the knife's edge of preparedness.

On the other hand, denying them known safe sanctuary might just cause what ever small number of them can entertain a rational thought to engage in that activity more frequently. In short, the WWII principle: the religious centers are off limits only in so far as they are not actively engaged in hostilities - taking care of sick people is fine, but proving a fire platform or weapons storage make you a legitimate military target.

Actually I recall reading an article which showed the price increases

in wheat more closely followed the increase in the price of gas/petrol than its conversion to ethanol, and that the quantities of grain sold for food production didn't vary much.

But I suppose many people find it more satisfying to blame it on ethanol. Not that I myself think ethanol is a good fuel additive (it actually increases certain pollutant emissions, reduces the energy density of the fuel, and primarily seems to benefit ADM, not the farmers producing the corn). I just prefer to keep my facts straight.

Actually, before Google became the 80,000 ton gorilla of search engines

one of the favorites was Dogpile, which did exactly that. For all I know they are still around. Now what was different between Dogpile and Bing, is that Dogpile explicitly claimed they were indexing indexes, and their top results took you to say the Yahoo search for "IT nitwits" or Bing search for "IT nitwits."

So it's not the meta-indexing that is at issue for me, it's the indexing of someone else's work and passing it off as your own that is problematic. For the consumer the problem is this: What if Bing becomes the number 1 search engine because of MS's monopoly power, but its search results are all pilfered from Google, and that as a result of the pilfering Google goes bankrupt?

Sure.

Keep your personal life out of public forums and it won't affect your professional life. And yes, FaceBook is a public forum, no matter how much the marketers lie.

Because 5-0 has gone new school

whereas Magnum has class, just like the old school 5-0 did.

You haven't been paying attention to the problems in the US Housing market.

Being only 30% upside down on your house at the end of the next 5 years, even if you bought it today (assuming you could find someone damn fool enough to finance it), will be considered good. The foreclosures didn't stop because the market bottomed, they stopped because the damn fools didn't keep the paperwork straight and now nobody can figure out who actually has a right to foreclose on the houses. Once they figure that out the foreclosures will start again and the market will go down again. Especially in California, where the state government looks about like Greece these days.

Yep, same bunch of twits.

They also seem to believe the DCMA prevents pirating software and that outlawing guns deprives crooks the opportunity to shoot someone.

Put a sock in it

you over-sensitive weenie. You must be French and not American. Americans can take a punch like that and roll with their British cousins.

You sir are sadly mistaken.

The US government CAN and does CONSTITUTIONALLY posses the power to have the military enforce our laws and government edicts. Congress passes a resolution declaring we are at war or in a state of rebellion at which point the CinC can do pretty much any damn thing he pleases including suspending habeus corpus. At which points military units are deployed to the choke points with the redundancies and the company officials can stare at the wrong end of a gun while being told to pull the plugs. Or the military just pulls out the big wire snips. Or the c4 if they are interested in making a big show of it.

Most people don't realize that because its only happened twice in our history. The big one was the Civil War, and most people these days focus on the ending slavery part for that one, ignoring some of Lincoln's harsh measures. The other one was a little thing called The Whiskey Rebellion that was personally put down by our very first President.

Mind you, in that situation a mesh isn't going to hold up well either even though that was part of the original DARPA design. But one of the key elements of that original DARPA design is that it wasn't intended to convey the volume of information the current structure does, only tweet like commands sent to field commanders, and submarine and ship captains.

All of which makes it rather more in our interest to make sure we don't arrive in a situation where the government would have justification for taking those actions. And keeping an eye on them so they don't lower the bar enough to get away with a false claim.

The revolution you hope for

has already been strangled in its cradle by the Muslim Brotherhood, a Hamas-like group of thugs that predates Hamas.

Yes, Mubarak was a strongman, but he was the best chance for eventual liberalization in the region. He was promoted as a result of assassination and has survived 6 subsequent attempts. That sort of thing tends to color one's outlook, particularly when the reason your predecessor was assassinated was because he sought lasting peace.

The way this thing is shaping up, Robespierre is going to come out looking like a moderate. Look for the big mushroom clouds in the Middle East real soon.

Restraining orders are not punishments.

Punishments can only be rendered after trial. Restraining orders have been and will continue to be useful and effective tools of the law to protect citizens from criminal activity. The clearer example is the spouse who obtains a restraining order against a violent soon to be ex. But if the law is to be fair to all, that has to extend beyond that example. Another example would be the restraining issue ordered by the Illinois Supreme court that the Board of Elections could not proceed to print ballots without Rahm's name on them until the court had heard the case. Without the order, irreparable harm could have been done to Rahm's case before the verdict was rendered. (Personally I'm of the opinion that the final verdict was wrong, but even before hand I grant that the restraining order was legally in order and necessary).

You might be smoking something,

but the Federal Taxes don't change from State to State and all winnings are taxable as normal income. After that, state taxes are applicable as your state determines. This is simple stuff, not rocket science. Now, what I'm not sure about is whether or not gambling losses can be used to offset gambling gains. They certainly can't be used to offset normal income.Territories etc. might be different.

I think the battery usage numbers on the laptops prove out

the energy savings potential. Whether or not that translates as energy savings for a corporate server environment is of course another issue.

I think the earlier poster who listed his plans for his new array showed why disk usage is going down. For some things in the server environment, it is worth the premium for Flash drives. So those sales are going to Flash. For others it is high end SCSI or maybe SAS. And for low end work it is SATA. Where you have considerably more read than write activity, Flash makes tremendous sense, other places not so much. So enterprises are optimizing based on need. Total storage volume goes up, market share for HDD temporarily dips while the adjustment is made, then resumes a normal growth curve again. You also probably see more Flash growth than HDD growth because of portables. Might see more growth if corporate goes Flash on Desktop where 500G is probably overkill because data is stored on the LAN. But I think that's a tough sell because you're only talking about booting once a day.

I'm not with the rest of you Sareks.

I want them to test it, and for both purposes noted by Ef'd.

That was my reaction when they gave the teaser on the news last night.

When I heard that it was someone from the Mall Security team that assembled and posted the video I groaned.

That's an open and shut case of abuse even for someone like me who is tired of tossers gaming the courts. The Mall can try to negotiate the price, but they will pay up. And at least one person from the Mall Security Team is going to be on disciplinary notice (or worse) for the next 6 months.

He said "directors and other members of senior management."

You said "someone who has any skill and knowledge with using a computer." I believe the intersection of those two sets is exceedingly small, and all of them are well paid in private sector jobs.

Making it the installed default doesn't help either.

It doesn't offend me as much when people are intentionally stupid, but when they are given a helping hand in being stupid I get annoyed.