Posts by Tom 13

@wowfood

No, Bing!

...

or! perhaps! Yahoo!

Re: then HP (or their insurers)

Not necessarily HP's insurers, but some insurance company somewhere. Although yes, the company usually purchase insurance against this sort of thing for their members in the US. It's only prudent is a lawsuit happy country. The possible exception is if they can prove willful/gross negligence on the part of the defendants.

Re: A restriction which is largely artificial

Yes, it is largely artificial. But it is legally binding. Which is of course the bitch when you game the legal system.

Re: I'm tired of this typical MSFT marketing crap.

If you don't know the root cause of the exploit, it might not be sufficient to be using a different browser so long as IE8 is installed. This is the huge technical mistake MS made in their legal anti-trust fuster cluck all those years ago: the IE components are still part of the OS and therefore accessible to other apps even if you aren't actively using them. I'm assuming the other versions aren't vulnerable because they've replaced the vulnerable files as opposed to some other improvement (like sandboxing) in the browser itself.

Re: And

I'd like to and am inclined to agree, but I do have a caveat.

SF readers are a bit of an outlier. They know what they like to read and they know they need to pay the people who produce it so they can get more of it. I think they are also inclined to put peer pressure on any friends who might try to leech from the creative commons. I expected similar results for Anime.

I'd like to believe the same will be true if other publishers adopt the same stance. But we'll need the data to confirm it.

Re: Cancer kills, find a cure for it,

I have no data to support my hypothesis, but I long ago decided that there is no cure for cancer because there is no cause, or definable set of causes for it. I think cancer is just an error in the cell reproductive process. The body has mechanism to either repair or remove most of them, but even running at 16 nines of reliability, every so often something is going to slip through.

The best you can do is reduce exposure to things we know that can increase the likelihood that the repair/removal mechanism is needed. So technically any increase in exposure to radioactivity is increases those chances. The rub is in figuring out which increases it is reasonable to avoid. For example, I think the reason we see increased lung cancers associated with cigarettes and asbestos (particularly short length fiber varieties) is that they cut lung material which requires repair and the repair itself is subject to that 1 in a trillion chance of failure. Increase the opportunities enough and you will get a failure. Exposure to either increases that damage exponentially, which is why we been able to statistically tie them to cancer. Genetics of course modifies that because some folks will have better repair/removal mechanisms. Which is why George Burns could live to such a ripe old age smoking cigars without getting cancer while the Marlboro Man didn't.

Re: Free speech ground

If you're a rational person as opposed to a knee-jerk statist, it's pretty easy. Let's try this one on for size (deleting as is appropriate for your world view):

All warmists/denialists be forced to put a disclaimer on their research that their research might be biased.

Yeah, until you are on an ultra firm legal basis (like loosing a court case) it's dangerous to require certain kinds of speech on products sold.

@Peter 45

Yep, even back in the 1770s they called them 'coffin nails' for a reason.

Re: Frack much?

No he doesn't. He's seen the movie Gasland and he knows its true. It says so on the internets.

Re: as a scientist

The first draft as you describe =/= the first draft from WG1 of IPCC

Their first draft is akin to your published paper.

And frankly even as you described it, if I were looking for nefarious inputs into YOUR process, I'd want the whole thing. If there are mistakes and irrelevancies in it and the process by which they are removed is documented in your updates (Dr. Smith pointed to a faulty assumption for ..., Dr Samms corrected my math in ...) you will remain in good standing. But if I find a branch of your hypothesis is suddenly dropped at the same time you received funding from someone with a contrary opinion with no evidence pointing to a valid change in the research path... Yeah, I'll want you to lose not only the grant but that good standing too.

Re: I'm still curious to know

I know at least one person who bought a Win7 system and got Win8 in addition because they were selling it for a mere $25 more. He installed and uses 7 and frankly would have preferred XP if not for the fact that support was being discontinued.

Re: new experimental UI that does away with the screen

Hey, if they can do it and it works, that my be worth half the price of my monitor in OS costs!

Re: To be fair to Vista

No, the underpowered machines were just the excuse. I built a system with a Quadcore, 8G of RAM, a Raptor drive, and a kick ass video card for gaming. It still sucked. Mostly because the drivers weren't there for 32-bit let alone 64-bit, and without the drivers, nobody (including the high end game companies that should have been eating it up) was writing software specifically for it.

At one point the Vista drive failed and I rebuilt the system on Win 7. Still using it today and I think my original build was about 6 years back.

Re: Xara Xtreme

Maybe someone in the MS Development office should post this quote from your post on the wall:

"The best software in the world is the software you know best."

It galls the *nix users that for the moment that's still Windows, but if MS remembers that quote and leverages it instead of aping whatever the current trending fad is, they remain a power player for as long as they want. Forget it like they did with Win 8, and one of these day it WILL be the *softies who are galled that the *nixes are the software people know best.

Re: Instead of

If MS were really talking to their key clients, this wouldn't be something they have to keep learning. Businesses invest billions of dollars, pounds, euro and shekels every year for training. Why should they have to retrain every three/six years because MS has released a new OS?

Re: Impressive findings

It's a male Frisco thing. Sort of like they'll tell you how much they respect and value women until you get them drunk and they tell you what they really think. Unless of course you're a woman in which case you might be surprised when they act on what they really think.

Re: money laundering/tax evasion

and once you move into those categories you move into different legal territory than we are accustomed to thinking about: instead of being presumed innocent you must prove your innocence, at least for tax purposes.

@Ben Tasker

It's got nothing to do with changing one form of cash into another. Check my post above. The issue is whether or not it can be used as legal tender to settle debts for goods or services. So even if a business never changes bitcoin into US dollars, so long as they are within the boundaries of the US, or part of a company incorporated (under any of the varied methods of doing so with as widely varied names) is operating within the US, that business is subject to US regulation as specifically allowed by the Constitution.

Actually that's one of the few points which is well covered in the Constitution

Section. 10.

No State shall enter into any Treaty, Alliance, or Confederation; grant Letters of Marque and Reprisal; coin Money; emit Bills of Credit; make any Thing but gold and silver Coin a Tender in Payment of Debts; pass any Bill of Attainder, ex post facto Law, or Law impairing the Obligation of Contracts, or grant any Title of Nobility.

Section. 8.

The Congress shall have Power To lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts and Excises, to pay the Debts and provide for the common Defence and general Welfare of the United States; but all Duties, Imposts and Excises shall be uniform throughout the United States;

To borrow Money on the credit of the United States;

To regulate Commerce with foreign Nations, and among the several States, and with the Indian Tribes;

To establish an uniform Rule of Naturalization, and uniform Laws on the subject of Bankruptcies throughout the United States;

To coin Money, regulate the Value thereof, and of foreign Coin, and fix the Standard of Weights and Measures;

To provide for the Punishment of counterfeiting the Securities and current Coin of the United States;

So in this very, very rare instance, they are quite within it boundaries. Now that might stop at our borders, but given how much international trade passes through our borders, it is not without consequence. Also, we can enter into treaty agreements with other countries which surely have similar abilities to regulate coinage within their boundaries.

Re: Motorola were obliged to offer SEP patents under FRAND terms

No, the EC and you are claiming they weren't FRAND, JSJ clearly stated Motorola staked "their opening position and expect negotiations not litigtion." This is standard business practice and is exactly what I would have done in Motorola's position. Motorola clearly want a cross licensing agreement for the ridiculous rounded corners patent Apple own. This is what always happens in complex cross licensing deals.

I once worked for a small company you've never heard of that developed a software based program for some HP scientific apparatus. They hit a road block extracting data from the unit and had to enter into an agreement with HP to get the data formatting information. Once they entered into the agreement, HP wanted to cross license the software back to themselves as well as have some additional capabilities which would be reserved to HP. The company I was working for got better code and and steady customer out of the deal. Most importantly it was beneficial to BOTH companies. So long as you don't immediately to the Lawyers these sorts of things can be worked out.

Re: Are they "Cooking the books"?

Much as I despise Clinton and love Reagan, I think they were removed under Reagan. They kept beating him up about the unemployment numbers even though jobs were growing as was the GDP. He correctly argued that people who aren't looking for work in a full employment economy shouldn't count as unemployed. Unfortunately the unintended consequences of that decision include that discouraged workers in a contracting economy also make the number look better than it is.

Re: Oh Lewis!

except it isn't an anti-terror law. This idiocy was around long before 9/11, mostly at schools, which are pretty much under the control of Progressives.