Posts by Tom 13 7544 publicly visible posts • joined 10 Jun 2009
Oh you get service for that kind of cash.
Top of the line concierge service wherever you are.
If you don't know what an appropriate gift for a business meeting is, they'll let you know even if it is meeting an ambassador.
Need an emergency trip to Japan or Russia? No problem, they'll book the flights and the hotel, just tell them what your specific destination and departure locations and times are.
I don't see that continuing to iterate the process without addressing the underlying issue advances the cause of justice. Both the claim of defamation and the claim of bad service with fear of retaliation must be viewed as possible but suspect. Until the courts have probable cause one way or the other, the posters should remain anonymous. And a third party seems necessary to determining probable cause.
I don't have an issue with Hadeed having the customer list to prove they aren't his customers. That seems to me to be allowable as a probable cause argument to move it to court for a full test. Where I have a problem is with that being sufficient for him to get the names of the anon posters.
I think it isn't fairly resolvable without both parties submitting their initial claims to an impartial third party. And I think it is critical because the third party establishes a baseline before claims start shifting. If Hadeed doesn't produce a complete list, or there are ways that people who are his customers don't get on the list, that should go to his credibility. Likewise if the anon posters weren't his customers I have nothing against stringing them up on the nearest tree. But there's a lot of room for mistakes and misunderstandings in making those determinations, and I think it should proceed with more due diligence than is present in the court decision.
Because it is. Deal with it.
The court does not a priori know either Yelp or the posters. The outline for the procedure should proceed from: I have two people who are making opposing claims. One says he has anonymously been defamed. The other says it really happened and they feel intimidated by by the person who claims defamation. The court must protect the second party until such time as there is reasonable cause for the assertion of defamation. The first party simply asserting it is insufficient. Reasonable cause should be something roughly the equivalent of a search warrant. Given the particulars of the case Hadeed should be producing a complete list of his customers that is turned over to an impartial third party. Yelp should be turning over the names of the posters in question. The third party compares the lists, if a given poster is not on the list of customers the poster should have the option of producing a receipt for said services. Hadeed should have the option to refute receipt. If the poster can't produce a receipt or Hadeed can prove the receipt is questionable, then Hadeed's lawyers get the names and he can proceed with a defamation suit.
I was following this a bit on another news site yesterday. Yelp's claim is that they have a threshold for the number of reviews you need to submit before your review will always display. Something or other about with a sufficient number of reviews over an appropriate period of time you become a reliable reviewer. I've never used the site and make no assertions as to the veracity of the claim.
Here's my take on the lawsuit and the ruling: It's frelled.
It is possible Hadeed has indeed been defamed. It is also possible Hadeed is using the courts to intimidate real customers who were upset with the quality of the service. Simply revealing the names of the posters to Hadeed and his lawyers doesn't take into account the second risk. What is needed is an impartial 3rd party to asses Hadeed's claim that they were not his customers without revealing their names to him or his lawyers. If the posters are indeed not on his customer list then the names should be revealed to him and his lawyers. The impartial third party should be either the judge or some appointed by him.
I wouldn't say taking that income. I've never bought/built a PC for as little as I paid for a tablet.
What tablets and smart phones are doing is cannibalizing the casual user market that use to buy laptop/netbooks. All they really want is to browse the web and check email. Tablets do that fine. They never need a full fledged laptop, it was just the only thing available to them. If the economy were good, they'd be buying the tablet and spending the saved cash on other luxury goods. With the economy in tatters they're spending it on necessities.
I'm not much of an MMOer myself, and the last other game I devoted any real time to was Civ 3, but whenever I browse the gaming forums it looks to me like the PC gamers don't think the console players ever caught up.
On the Linux front, I actually know someone who worked on the Mass Effect series. According to him they were initially excited about developing a game (pre-Mass Effect) on Linux. Then they looked at the available tool sets and declared it hopeless. Maybe things have improved significantly since then.
If a friend of mine has my email address and has Google+, I don't mind them being able to import their Gmail info into Google+ to email me. But if they don't have that information in their Gmail account I don't want them locating me by some gawd awful search.
Yeah, yeah. Right up until Uncle Waldo dies because his packets for the remote relay for his open heart surgery got stuck behind Johnny Dooshwad downloading his 2PB of pr0n. QoS will always be needed, it's just a matter of setting the parameters rationally.
It's always tough when your workforce (possibly through no fault of their own) has exceeded the capacity of the market to support it, but that's exactly when the difficult changes have to be made. I hope things are improving for you whether you are a survivor or one of the guys who needed to land on his feet.
Neither IT nor the users should be in command. It should always be a partnership in which the needs of the business are worked out based on the available technology from the IT department given the level of funding the business is willing to provide.
Unfortunately, we all live in a Walgreen's world.
Rank hath its privileges, and some of our users are really, really rank.
So in terms of the question, it depends on which users you are talking about. Some have too much control, some have too little, and some have the right amount.
But in the end there's actually not much the IT staff per se can do about it because all of those decisions are actually made elsewhere in the organization. IT just gets to be the whipping boy because they deal directly with the users.
Probably not, but they are certainly a very large component of the market by dollar/pound/Euro volume. A high end tablet probably costs about the same as a low end tv, and people figure if they've going to drop that kind of money they may as well get something decent, especially since it should last them a good 10-15 years or more.
Yes, the market is misunderstood, but not for the reasons you state. It's a variation on the computer industry Y2K bubble, and I don't understand why so many so-called professional analysts always miss it. Consumer electronics purchases over the last few years have been artificially inflated because pretty much everybody had to replace their tvs with the switch from NTSC/PAL/etc to HD. So it should be expected that sales volume should return to or dip below (because people replaced non-failing sets early) the trend line without the burst of forced replacement purchasing. And no, I don't think the industry could force another paradigm shift to start a replacement binge so soon after the last one.
I doubt people want to buy these expensive new devices without the supporting content and infrastructure.
That pretty much sums it up. We've got a decent package from FIOS that runs us just shy of $300/month for phone, tv, and internet. But at that there isn't enough space on the DVR to justify timeshifting HD programs on the few we do get. So most of the stuff we watch is still 4:3 instead of 6:9. Yes, Verizon offers the HD channels, but at a serious premium over what we're already paying. That translates as absolutely no incentive to switch to 4K or any of the other new gizmos.
Wow, talk about rewriting history.
The shuttle and the ISS were both the brain kids of people like you back in the 70s. They were sold as the work horses that were going to be used to establish a permanent and somewhat populous presence in space. What we got instead is a constant drain of money that generates just enough positive PR to keep the program on life support. The most important product of the ISS is all the "international goodwill" it generates for politicians.
Voci might be a bit off on focusing on the cost, but he is right about the ISS being at the heart of what keeps us from going out and doing real exploration. It's more the mindset behind the ISS than the budget per se. If you want public funding, you have to put men and women out, and show them being excited about what they are doing. That's what wins hearts and minds, not that sterile satellite probe crap. When you have the hearts and minds, the money follows.
Shoddy thinking my boy.
The ISS has nothing at the moment that would be useful toward such a mission. That means you're going to build the entire apparatus here on Earth, lift it to the station, and bolt it onto something that is already 15 years old in the only environment worse for mechanical structures than the sea. And that's before you start assembling the launch vehicles. Far better to build the new structure free-floating from the ISS.
Tell you what, you keep improving those efficiencies and let me know when they match the 98% of the modern gas furnace. Then we'll talk about the desirability of you the amount of real estate your green system is going to require to power the townhouse I live in.
There's not a lot that is concisely targeted and written. Short answer: Lobbyists, just not the ones you usually think of.
The broadband market here is a mess because you have to get permits from the local governments to build out your services (run cabling, put in cell towers, etc.). In most places the rules are complex, arcane, and expensive* so they had a single incumbent providing service. In the old days it was because the locals put together the cable company and after many hard years of scraping by finally had a usable service. Then came the buyouts which eventually mostly became Comcast. Meanwhile Ma Bell was a government sponsored monopoly since day 1 and was only broken up as a result of the Sprint case (wireless I think, although it may have been about long distance rates which used to subsidize monthly service). The fallout is that we have oligopoly competition with high barriers to entry. And any time a start up makes a run in a given location, the competitive response can't be differentiated from the undercutting response so eventually the new guy either goes under or get bought out.
*Even Dish, which theoretically has fewer issues on this front ran into problems with local governments passing zoning laws about where the receiver dish could be placed and how big it could be. To some extent reasonable, but the limits were excessive.
Here in the US the various governments typically contribute to a pool of money that is made available to private companies to offset the cost of public transportation.
Remember, we're mostly a self-owned car society, our public transportation pretty much bites. If you don't get sick from the diesel fumes cycling back into the bus you may be sitting next to the guy who couldn't find space at the shelter last night. Light rail may be a bit better, frequently not. Metro in DC is clean, but you can't eat or drink while riding, and you have to be really careful about keeping track of you smart phone and tablet. I happen to have lucked into a fairly decent bit of public transit from my house. I use to drive but between the $75/month monthly parking permit, the $65/month government contribution and the saved gas and wear and tear on my car I figured I was nuts not to take it. Plus it reduced the chances I'd be in a car accident that would jack my insurance rates. These days the government contribution is up to $100/month (which matches my ticket price) and I have no idea what parking is up to. Mind you, there's no way in hell that $100 a month pays for the cost of the people working on the train let alone the purchase and maintenance on the passenger cars and engines.
So yes, the occupiers in Frisco are really doing this out of envy, greed, and spite.
In this case the intent of the law is more important than it's letter, and it's letter ought to be updated to reflect it's intent rather than penalize companies who are doing the city's job.
The reason you aren't allowed to stop private vehicles at public bus stops is that most private vehicles are cars, and you'd have too many of them stopping and preventing the public buses from doing their job. That clearly isn't the case with the tech company buses.
Parking spaces are never zero maintenance. You have to build them and repair them. Some are cheaper than others (along side the road versus 12 level concrete garages). But to the point of your post, since they are paid for from tax dollars, the additional use charge does seem a bit much.
More interestingly, it was originally businesses that wanted parking meters for spaces. Without the parking meters, cars would come, park and stay put the whole day. With the meters, the business could see a steady turnover in the cars that were parked. They believed this created more customers for their stores. Not sure if that bore out in practice, but it is what why they wanted them. In some places you could even get tokens from the stores for free. It certainly has become corrupted since then, with politicians seeing only one more revenue source to shake down.
I concur completely about the rest of your post.
So what you're saying is that the employees of Google and the rest of the companies providing this service have already paid for the bus stops via their tax dollars and shouldn't be able to use them for their designed service. No sale. Just like you'll get a No sale from me on Frisco moron "working hard" on making it a nice city. They've borrowed money they can't repay just like the rest of Cali. If they were a private business we could at least get them thrown in jail for committing perjury and fraud.
There is an easy solution: stop voting for the idiots who cause the real problems in the first place. Housing prices only skyrocket in places were construction companies can't build adequate new housing because of local regulations. Given the money stealing tendencies of the politicians and those who support those same politicians, I expect at the root of the problem are a bunch or convoluted rent-control laws.
Oh the issue is pretty clear: Cali is filled with too many libturds (like the author of the article) who can't tell the difference between their money and other people's money.
Those people riding the public buses aren't paying anywhere near the cost of running the buses. At no cost to the city, the high tech companies are providing a similar service to their employees. And since they are private, they can keep them neat and clean and take disciplinary action against unruly passengers. If the high tech companies did away with their routes the city would lose even more money if they had to buy buses and staff them to make up for the increased passenger load. And that's assuming they DID pick up the extra work load.
I wish it were otherwise. Granted it might make things a bit more complicated on this side of the pond, but were mostly in the mess we are because everyone depends on the US to police the world and hating us when we do it.
Unfortunately, I don't think you'll ever get it back. The progressive/socialist/communist segment has so overtaken you I don't see a way back. Sadly, we're not far behind you. And I rather expect that this brief respite from the ravages of absolute tyrannies will return. From 1215 AD to 20xx just seems too short a run for liberty.
I've been hearing that same line since Intel put out the 386. Like my fusion powered air car, it's still in the future.
The technical reasons for this seem to change every few years, but the fact remains that Intel is always the big name in computers and servers. I'd like to see it change, but that doesn't mean it will. And hope is not a plan.
Sort of. The problem there is that Intel has such depth of cash, facilities, and technical knowledge that they can ALWAYS undercut on cost.
I was one of the people rooting for AMD when they went head to head with Intel on x86 CPUs. In the time I've worked with tech (and I cut my teeth on a TRS-80 model III), AMD are the only company that has ever really caught Intel with their pants down. At the time I had gone to a conference where their VP of Tech pooh-poohed the fast AMD chips because they wouldn't be able to dump the heat. He was correct up to a point, but AMD just put bigger coolers on the chips. Intel didn't really have anything ready to go, but within a year we were back to a horse race. Ever since then Intel has had at least two functional chip designs still with their developers so that if they need to, they can pull one fresh out of the oven. It'll cause some wiggles in their planned cash flow, but it won't seriously disrupt their market position and they will remain profitable.
No, that was not the only change.
Up until 9/11 the primary difference between a terrorist and a mafia hit job was the terrorist wanted the news cameras around so he could make a political statement. The number of dead was always low usually in the single digits although sometimes in the teens. Injured for bombing incidents would be a magnitude or order larger. On 9/11 both numbers jumped two orders of magnitude. They moved from "horrendous crime that we abhor but tolerate" to "all out act of war."
Yes, like Yamamoto it also woke the sleeping dragon.
We have heroin, cocaine, Benadryl, Xanax, beer, and champagne but their calling it accidental?
Strikes me as more like walking into a hacker convention with completely unpatched Windows XP laptop that turned on and using the unsecured wireless the venue has helpfully provided.
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