- his war policy
- his civil liberties policy
- Aren't policemen sworn to _protect_ the law??? Who cares if it's not easy to convince Mr. Corzine to wear a seatbelt? You're a cop: give him a ticket, _before_ the accident, not afterwards. Next, give yourself a ticket for driving 91 MPH in a 65 MPH zone without an emergency. Now, give yourself a ticket for reckless driving (running somebody off the road, and not being at a safe speed to be able to deal with sudden developments - like your attempt to run somebody off the road backfiring - especially considering the knowledge that your passenger wasn't securely belted, as required by law). You should probably go to jail for practically killing the governor (a very important man!). Next, get yourself suspended from the force for misleading the public (leading them to believe that the guy you ran off the road caused the accident). Finally, throw your badge in the garbage for flashing your emergency lights falsely; how did you graduate from police academy? ...or do they teach nothing but rubbish there, these days?
- The Suburban gets about 13 MPG at 60 MPH, according to the EPA. As your speed goes over 60 MPH (especially in an aerodynamically inefficient vehicle like the Suburban), the amount of energy required to travel at a speed is approximately proportional to the square of your speed, so traveling at 91 MPH costs about 31^2==961 times as much energy for any given time interval as traveling at 60 MPH. (Since you're traveling at a higher speed, of course, you cover more miles per time interval at 91 MPH than at 60 MPH; the net result still ends up losing you tons of energy (read: gasoline, a.k.a. taxpayers' hard-earned cash) per mile, though. I'll happily walk you through the Mathematics involved, if you want - just drop me a line.)
- The Suburban was designed to transport a small army. Transporting 2 people plus a driver in one seems like a very poor business decision, given the note above, plus the Suburban's price tag. Given the statistical fact that SUVs cause a disproportionate percentage of all accidents in New Jersey, plus the fact that the Suburban's footprint is nearly double the size of the Prius' footprint, combined with the knowledge that New Jersey has more traffic (measured either by square mile or per capita, and defined either as total registered vehicles or as vehicles actually counted in road surveys - New Jesrey always wins) than any other state, I'd say that picking the Suburban was a bad policy decision, and sets a very bad example for the people of the State of New Jersey.
- The New Jersey governor needs a class in scheduling. You can't schedule your day such that you need to average 70 MPH over a route consisting of speed limits between 5 MPH and 65 MPH, and expect to make it (without violating the law, which doesn't seem to be a problem for public officials in New Jersey, especially cops ... maybe that's the root of the problem?). Even if you are prepared to violate the law (since we've already established that you certainly can, in New Jersey), consider the possibility that maybe not all laws in New Jersey are senseless: maybe you can get yourself and/or somebody else (your driver, for example) hurt by creating an unsafe situation? Maybe you can cost your taxpayers a small fortune (replacing your ridiculously expensive Suburban, and paying the increase in your auto insurance as the result of an at fault accident - remember, this is New Jersey, the state with the highest auto insurance rates in the nation) by acting irresponsibly? Should you be running a state larger than Israel plus the PA combined? (I admit, the guy running the state of Israel is even more irresponsible, but at least New Jersey has a Constitution (and is governed by the Constitution of the United States, too), and doesn't have the amount of international pressure faced by the state of Israel. Where's your excuse?)
- The guy who ran the New Jersey governor off the road deserves a medal for stopping two irresponsible criminals who were endangering the public. Not giving him the medal is bad enough; talking about deciding not to file charges against him is utterly ridiculous. We're talking about a guy who did the job of the policeman, when the policeman himself didn't seem to care about his job. (Why are we paying his salary, anyway???) Who knows what innocent motorist would've been killed by these guys, otherwise? (If you get hit by a Suburban travelling 91 MPH, you're almost definitely dead, regardless of whether speed is judged a contributing factor by the "experts." Besides, if it's safe to travel 91 MPH in a large SUV without a seatbelt on New Jersey highways, why is the advertised speed limit set at 65? Is this some sort of ploy to build a 20MPH highway and make a killing on speeding tickets??? I played around with some statistical traffic models, and worked out that if we upgrade our highways to 90MPH, the rush hour parking lot will essentially disappear, since you'll never accumulate enough cars in the same place to slow traffic down. Where the heck did Corzine learn how to govern? Oh, I forgot: politics is an unregulated profession, voter beware ("caveat emptor," or whatever).)
- Who are these "experts" who decided that speed wasn't a contributing factor? If you're driving on the Garden State Parkway and some (apparently) drunk Suburban comes barreling down the road from behind you doing at least 26 MPH (assuming you're watching your speedometer and keeping it exactly at the 65 MPH speed limit) more than you, what's your natural reaction? (Whether or not it's the correct reaction for a professional driver is besides the point: if you're that (apparently) drunk Suburban driver, you can't bet the governor's life on the assumption that the poor guy in front of you is a professional driver, especially considering the statistical fact that he's probably not one. Remember, in New Jersey, we get our driver licenses after driving 5MPH around a parking lot for a few minutes with Mr. Inspector in the passenger seat. That's hardly a "professional driver" test.) You pull off the road, to get as far away from him as possible. Now, consider what would've happened if said Suburban had been going with the needle glued to 65 MPH (since a cop is a professional driver, and can therefore be expected to do that) instead: the accident never would've happened, and even if it had happened anyway by some fluke, at least Mr. Corzine would've had a 26 MPH head start at saving himself from injury. Let's also not forget that braking distance at 70 MPH is nearly _double_ braking distance at 60 MPH; braking distance at 91 MPH is in the stratosphere, giving you very little chance to avoid impact. Finally, it's important to note that even cops aren't exempt from reaction time considerations: impulses travel through your nervous system at approximately 6 feet per second, which means that simply sending the signal to hit the brakes takes approximately half a second for a typical driver, and since most of that time is due to a Biological limitation, all the skills in the world can only yield marginal improvements. At 91 MPH (5280*91 == 480,480 feet per hour, or a bit over 133 feet per second), you've gone about 66 feet between seeing something wrong and hitting the brake pedal. That's 66 fewer feet available to you to slow down a bit before hitting that rapidly approaching barrier. Maybe those "experts" are actually just PR experts? (After all, I don't recall the article mentioning what they were experts at, only that they were experts (at something). . .)
In all discussions about the Middle East by the U.S. mainstream media, there is an incessant bragging that Israel is the only "democracy" in the Middle East. In fulfilling its propaganda function, it is not surprising that this media will praise a country as "democratic" even though it has been occupying by force for several decades a whole country (Palestine) thereby denying millions of people their right of self-determination.
Let's start the fun:
- I haven't heard too much bragging about Israel being the only Democracy in the Middle East (even though it is, at least on paper). I'd like to know what mainstream media the guy's talking about, so I can support it. The New York Times, for example, seems to have little more than lies to say about Israel. (I'd link to some of their more "interesting" stories, but their links are unreliable, since (a) they don't support my Web browser, (b) they required payment at one point (and may again, in the future), and (c) they still require signup, which I think is ridiculous just to see their lies. You're better off keeping your data to yourself, rather than supporting them with free demographic information.) In fact, I haven't seen much praise of Israel anywhere (not even in Israeli media), which I find rather amusing, considering all the sacrifices that Israel makes in order to try making peace with (or should I say, giving pieces of itself to) a bunch of terrorists, in exchange for nothing so far (unless you call more frequent terrorist attacks something, of course ... in which case, anybody with half a brain would probably start taking back territory as quickly as possible in order to reduce the terrorist attack frequency back to pre-"piece"-process levels ... so in order to justify the continued parcelling of the land of the State of Israel out to the sworn enemies of the State of Israel (as well as the people of Israel) by its "Democratic" government, we'll have to consider increased frequency of terrorist attacks as if it were "nothing").
- The United States has been occupying by force half a continent for two hundred years, denying millions of people their right of self-determination. For that matter, all Muslim countries have been occupying whole countries for centuries, denying over a billion people their right of self-determination (not to mention their far more basic right of life - just count the deaths committed by Muslims over the centuries, and get your Statistician to work out the expected population today if they hadn't been denied their right of life by force). The irony here is that the Jews (whom the Muslims seem to equate with the Israelis) are occupying the land that their fathers held long before the first Muslim existed; logically, Muslims shouldn't be allowed to rule any country, since all territories had (non-Muslim) rulers long before the first Muslims roamed the planet, and so any country ruled by Islam is by implication having its would-be people (if their ancestors hadn't been murdered) denied their right of self-determination.
- Israel had no choice in occupying the parts of Palestine that weren't granted to it by the UN, since you'll recall that in 1967, the 7 Muslim nations that attacked Israel refused to accept a cease-fire proposal by Israel when Israel had regained its original borders. Any half-decent army commander knows that when an enemy fires at you from rearward positions, the only viable tactic is to advance. I guess the obvious lesson here is that if the Muslim countries surrounding Israel hadn't conspired to deny the people of Israel of their right of self-determination, Israel wouldn't have had an "excuse" to have reoccupied the land of its ancestors at the expense of the recent (i.e., too recent for the 2-year minimum required by the UN to be considered a refugee - so the UN had to ammend its residency requirement to half a year) Muslim settlers' right of self-determination. An alternative lesson is that if you're serious about attacking a country (and denying its people of their right to self-determination), you need to plan your tactics out better, and if you fail, at least accept the no-strings-attached cease-fire proposal that said country offers you before being forced to advance past its borders in self-defense.
- There's nothing about Democracy that prevents a country from occupying somebody else's territory. Democracy simply means rule of the people. Muslim citizens of the State of Israel can (and in fact do, often for Muslim parties) vote in Israeli elections. (All Muslims that came back to Israel in 1967 (when Golda Meir begged them to come back (promising them their homes, land, and a special gift - i.e., a subsidy to "rebuild" their lives) after they had fled at the beginning of the war, apparently fearing the extermination campaigns that they still remembered from their previous settlements in what are now Syria, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, and Egypt), and the overwhelming majority of Muslims that have settled in the State of Israel since then are legally recognized (with an Israeli state ID and passport, which BTW no longer even indicates your religion, in order to avoid any potential for possible discrimination) by the State of Israel as Israeli citizens (with the sole exception of a whole bunch who gave up their Israeli citizenship in favor of Arafat's PA citizenship back in the '90s - and even many of them have converted back to Israeli citizenship since then, realizing that it's far easier to live your life in peace when a Democracy denies you of your right of self-determination (giving each of you only a single vote), rather than to try living under a terrorist government, headed by a terrorist who speaks out of both sides of his mouth, just in different languages).) Try comparing this treatment of Muslims in Israel to the treatment of Jews in Muslim countries (most of whom are long dead, by now, including much of my own family). I don't know about you, but I'd prefer my right of life over my right of being able to outvote a bigger local population in order to enforce my right of self-determination. Clearly, even this "new and improved" version of Islam suffers from at least some of the same unsound logic as the original.
- I don't know when 1.5 million (including both Israeli Muslims and PA Muslims) turns into "millions," but let's not let ourselves be blinded by facts.
- Why does the ISO need to get involved in the question of whether future versions of Microsoft Office should honor a standard document format? If Microsoft wants its Office suite to honor a standard document format, it's free to honor ODF. It seems rather upside-down to tell the ISO to create a(nother) standard document format (just) to honor Microsoft Office 2007. The last time I checked, software is supposed to be created based on standards, not the other way around. If the ISO disagrees, I'd counter that the ISO is a misnomer. (It should've been called the ISSO: the International Software Standardization Organization, dedicated to the standardization of any software that has enough people pushing hard enough and cleverly enough.)
- Why would anybody expect Microsoft to honor an ISO standard? Simply looking through the MSOOXML format clearly shows blatant disregard by Microsoft for other ISO standards. I don't see any reason to expect Microsoft to start honoring ISO standards now. (Just like in World War II, Iraq, or Israel, appeasement simply doesn't work in practice, since the question of appeasement only comes up when dealing with somebody who has bad intentions, while appeasement as a strategy for problem resolution requires a fundamental assumption of the other side not being malevolent. Therefore, when appeasement works, it's a statistical anomaly.)
- The MSOOXML format is already an ECMA standard, so we've already succeeded in our "mission" of "wrestling" control of MSOOXML from MS. (To be more precise, Microsoft has already succeeded in its mission of "wrestling" ECMA into accepting MSOOXML as a standard, but the technical precision here is irrelevant.)
- I'd say the golden rule of standardization is (well, should be) the golden rule of conservation, a.k.a. the Three 'R's: Reduce, Reuse, Recycle. The ideal is for the total number of standards to be as low as possible. If that's not feasible in a particular case, then each standard should be reused as much as possible. If that's not feasible in a particular case, unreusable existing standards should be put through the recycler, and converted into better standards. (All other factors being equal, the quality of a standardization body can easily be judged as inversely proportional to the frequency of backwards-incompatible recycling.) Now, don't get me wrong: it's 100% okay for a standard to specify multiple acceptable alternatives. (For example, a standard for date/time representation can certainly specify a number of alternatives. It's up to the standard itself to ensure that interpretation of those alternatives is unambiguous.) My problem comes when a new standard markets itself as an alternative to an entire collection of standards (in this case, ODF), not by generalization of many similar standards into one general case (which would've reduced the number of standards and increased the reusability of the existing standards, by covering more possible cases), but rather by simply duplicating most of them as (non-reusable) parts of itself in a half-assed way, and ignoring the rest. Doing so doesn't reduce the number of standards (since all the standards that make up parts of ODF are still necessary for other purposes), it doesn't reuse existing standards, and the only standard that it recycles (ODF itself) it recycles _to_ trash, rather than _from_ trash. If the 6000+ pages-worth of MSOOXML were split into a whole bunch of standards, each of which recycled an existing standard (or created a new one, if appropriate), then we'd end up with a more flexible set of standards than what we have now, and I'd drop this objection. (To work with an example from above, I have no problems with recycling the ISO datetime spec into a new version that allows the MSOOXML datetime representation as an alternative. Conversions are rather straightforward (ignoring compatibility bugs in MSOOXML, of course) using a simple filter.)
It is interesting to note that as the political races keep rising in cost, there is a corresponding rise in the R&D budgets for covering the news surrounding those races. This 2008 election season cost a record-breaking $5.3 billion.In other words, if we nuke the political machine, then (in addition to all the other advantages) we get to save $5.3 billion that would otherwise have been wasted on simply reporting a single election. The sad thing is, if you offered the average American an extra $15 in the bank in exchange for no TV during the election season, he'd take his TV and slam the door in your face. People like to think they somehow matter. Eh, I'd take an extra 3.5 gallons of ice cream (especially the cookie dough stuff) with a buck left in my pocket over fancy schmancy election coverage, any day. The worthless hours-worth of empty promises don't even come close to making up for the lost ice cream. Oh, and as an added bonus, I can eat 3.5 gallons of ice cream in far less time than the time required to watch $5.3 billion-worth of election coverage, leaving me with additional work hours, which translate into even more (cookie dough) ice cream 8-)
- Whether or not your work is derived from somebody else's, you can still choose how you'd like to distribute your own work. If it's useless without the original work, then your distribution of it will be meaningless. The copyright holder of the original work might have a case against you for violating his license agreement with you, but the GPLv2 doesn't prevent you from reverse engineering anything, so taking advantage of knowledge you gained while looking through the original work is 100% within your rights. Moreover, a license is allowed to restrict its definition of "derivative work" for its own purposes, and the GPLv2 expressly choses to do just that. According to its definition, a separate piece of code that fits in a hole in the original software is clearly not considered by the GPLv2 to be derived.
- Assuming that integrating your changes into the main release is what magically causes the problem, you can release your changes as a patch, licensed under GPLv2 or later. The patch is a document that stands on its own, just like a service manual for a car is a document that stands on its own. All contributions to Linux can be regarded as patches, and therefore, each copyright holder can license his patch any way he wants, and the kernel maintainers (the guys who integrate the patch) don't have the legal authority to change your licensing terms, so allowing them to merge your patch into their kernel certainly doesn't subtract from your rights. (Obviously, if you choose to license your patch under some non-GPLv2-compatible license, it'll be rather hard to integrate it with the kernel.)
- The GPLv2 doesn't prevent you from licensing derivative works under a different license. It simply prevents you from licensing derivative works under a license that subtracts freedoms by comparison to the GPLv2. A "GPLv2 or later" license gives the recipient all his GPLv2 freedoms, plus an additional one: to accept the GPLv3 instead.
- The fact that a work is already licensed under GPLv2 doesn't prevent it from being licensed under GPLv3, or any other license, too. The work isn't a slave to the license; rather, the license is simply a set of terms under which a recipient is expressly allowed to use the work. In effect, a license is an agreement that's already been signed by the copyright holder, and if you agree to it as well, you have permission to use the work under those terms. Once you look at things from the right angle, it's obvious how dual/triple licensing works: the copyright holder is presenting you with a bunch of agreements that he's already signed; if you accept any one of them, you can use his work under the terms of whichever license you agreed to.
- For argument's sake, let's assume that everything I wrote above is flat-out wrong, and that we really do need everybody to agree all at once to transfer to GPLv3. In such a case, it's trivial to gather an affidavit from each copyright holder stating that he agrees to license his code under GPLv3 at any time without consulting him first. (In our case, we're assuming that finding all the copyright holders and getting them to agree to relicense their works under GPLv3 is trivial. In reality, it's far from trivial, but the original discussion I'm commenting about took that as a given; they were simply debating whether it was necessary to gather everybody in the same room at the same time.) Now, obviously, nobody's going to tell me that the copyright holders don't have the right to sign such an affidavit at any time (and if they do due to wording issues, a lawyer can easily reword the affidavit to specify the proper time instead of "any time"). Problem solved. Game over. There's no need to read this crap.
- U.S. patent application number 20080319910, published on Christmas Day, details Microsoft's vision of a situation where a "standard model" of PC is given away or heavily subsidized by someone in the supply chain. The end user then pays to use the computer, with charges based on both the length of usage time and the performance levels utilized, along with a "one-time charge."
- I found it funny that it wasn't published on April Fools Day. There's nothing novel about this patent. Just look at the cell phone industry, for example.
- Microsoft notes in the application that the end user could end up paying more for the computer, compared with the one-off cost entailed in the existing PC business model,
- Damn right, the user will end up paying more. Just compare the cost of owning a cell phone in the US with the cost of owning a cell phone in Israel (where the phone and service markets aren't artificially squished together, allowing consumers to find the best deal in each market).
- but argues the user would benefit by having a PC with an extended "useful life."
- Microsoft releases a "new" OS every few years, which creates a rather firm upper bound for the maximum "useful lifetime" of a PC. Intel and AMD, in turn, release a "new" CPU every couple of years, so for their business to survive without them buying into this "new" rental idea as well, the useful lifetime of a PC can't be much more than a couple of years. Gamers will still need to buy a new computer every year, anyway, because new games will demand new hardware, and "standard model" PCs will be even harder to upgrade than today's mass-produced PCs. The obvious question then surfaces: How does Microsoft plan to lengthen the useful lifetime of a PC? The obvious answer should be evident: Microsoft plans to leverage its monopoly to put pressure on hardware manufacturers, just the same way that Cingular (er, The "New" AT&T) and Verizon leverage their monopolies to put pressure on handset manufacturers. The results should also be similar: infrequent and subpar hardware upgrades branded as "new" devices, plenty of "Gotta have it" marketing (I'm staring at an HTC FUZE "with Video Share calling" ad right now on the right side of the article page: "get yours now at an AT&T store near you. HOWiFUZE.COM available exclusively at at&t" ... just in case you had any trouble figuring out what "Gotta have it" marketing meant ... no features, no specs, no compatibility info, nothing ... just "with Video Share calling" (What's that, anyway?), and "get yours now at an AT&T store near you" ... since you'll have trouble finding much else at an AT&T store near you ... think "standard model" PCs), less frequent software updates, and as a direct consequence, an artificially extended "useful life" for devices. Now, imagine Verizon and AT&T under common ownership, and you're looking at the future of the PC industry, under this patent. (Verizon+AT&T still wouldn't be a monopoly, of course, just like Microsoft isn't a monopoly. Microsoft has Apple and GNU/Linux to worry about, and Verizon+AT&T would still have Sprint and T-Mobile to worry about. (The FTC would never buy the latter in a million years, so why did our "justice" system buy the former? That was a self-answering ("autoresponsive?") question, if you noticed the quotes around "justice.") Perhaps not incidentally, the newest T-Mobile device now runs GNU/Linux, courtesy of our Do No Evil (TM) friends at Google ("Do no evil," my ass ... but whatever), and rumor has it that Sprint and Handspring (or maybe RIM?) are cooking up their own free software plans.)
- Integral to Microsoft's vision is a security module, embedded in the PC, that would effectively lock the PC to a certain supplier.
- Integral to my plans to take over the world is a security module, embedded in every person, that would effectively lock the person to a certain ruler.
- According to the application, the issue with the existing PC business model is that it "requires more or less a one chance at the consumer kind of mentality, where elasticity curves are based on the pressure to maximize profits on a one-time-sale, one-shot-at-the-consumer mentality."
- That's just Greek for "the issue with the current model is that we only get one chance to screw over a customer before he goes elsewhere."
- Microsoft's proposed model, on the other hand, could "allow a more granular approach to hardware and software sales," the application states, adding that the user "may be able to select a level of performance related to processor, memory, graphics power, etc [sic] that is driven not by a lifetime maximum requirement but rather by the need of the moment."
- That's just the "investor relations" version of "We want to lock up the setup screens in everybody's computer, so we can charge people who want to adjust clock rates."
- "When the need is browsing, a low level of performance may be used and, when network-based interactive gaming is the need of the moment, the highest available performance may be made available to the user," the document reads.
- I find it funny that anybody can _need_ network-based interactive gaming, but whatever. The "need" of the moment concept, BTW, is what drives the cellular industry's high ticket items, like minute overruns, ringtones, music and now video downloads, probably "Video Share calling" (whatever the heck it is), etc. I think if we sit and define our needs in a sensible manner, we won't create these goliaths who profit from our "needs of the moment."
- "Because the user only pays for the performance level of the moment, the user may see no reason to not acquire a device with a high degree of functionality, in terms of both hardware and software, and experiment with a usage level that suits different performance requirements."
- That's just an attempt to keep Intel and AMD quiet in the early stages by assuring them that this "new" market order will actually increase demand for their most expensive hardware.
- By way of example, the application posits a situation involving three "bundles" of applications and performance: office, gaming, and browsing.
- Segmenting the market is an important step, here. It's the classic "divide and conquer" trick. (Hey, maybe I should patent it. Nobody at the USPTO knows any history anyway so I'm sure I can make it look "new" enough for their tastes, and if I make sure to put enough gibberish in the application, it'll be expensive enough for my lawsuit victims to hire a lawyer to make heads or tails out of my patent so that they'll just settle in the interests of containing their costs. Hey, while I'm at it, I should probably patent a bunch of judicial abuse business processes that are in common use. I can probably make a bunch of money suing a ton of big (and small) companies. In fact, if I can patent the patent discovery process and/or every known technique for discovering prior art, then I can initiate new lawsuits when my victims try to gather evidence for defending themselves from my original suits.) At the beginning, computers will all be created more-or-less equal, but before long, the cheap computers won't be "compatible" with the gaming "bundles," and you'll have to upgrade your device (and sign a new license agreement and a new service contract, of course) if you want to play the latest games.
- "The office bundle may include word-processing and spreadsheet applications, medium graphics performance and two of three processor cores," the document reads. "The gaming bundle may include no productivity applications but may include 3D graphics support and three of three processor cores. The browsing bundle may include no productivity applications, medium graphics performance and high-speed network interface."
- It's evident that the person writing this patent application knows nothing about the real world. You don't need medium graphics performance for word processing and spreadsheets, and having the third core (of your AMD processor - Intel makes no triple-core CPUs right now, and certainly didn't when the application was filed ... Microsoft must've been mad at Intel for something at the time) is quite useful for spreadsheets with lots of computed cells. Gaming, on the other hand, taxes the 3D graphics far more than the three cores of your CPU, so "may include 3D graphics support" should be "will include 3D graphics support," and any half-brained gamer would happily toss one of the cores in exchange for a faster GPU. Medium graphics performance isn't necessary for browsing either, nor is a high-speed network interface. If anything, the high-speed network interface would only be useful for the gaming or office bundles, the gaming bundle for network games, and the office bundle for sending and receiving large documents (thanks to Bill's bloated Office formats).
- "Charging for the various bundles may be by bundle and by duration."
- ...and by location, as we shall see shortly ;-)
- "For example, the office bundle may be $1.00 [68 pence] per hour, the gaming bundle may be $1.25 per hour and the browsing bundle may be $0.80 per hour."
- In other words, a 5-person office has just added $40/day to its IT budget. In other words, that office can achieve a 2-month ROI by buying the computers outright instead. They'll have to vary the pricing by location, though, since an Indian data entry person will otherwise be spending more than his wages every hour at his computer. (I guess that's one way to curb outsourcing overseas. It's a move that's calculated to bring many converts to GNU/Linux, though, out of pure necessity.) A home user, on the other hand, might benefit if he can get a top-of-the-line gaming rig for nothing up-front and $1.25/hr. if he only plays games for an hour a month. I doubt this scheme will take off early with hardcore gamers, though, unless a concentrated marketing effort is made, with the goods to match, and some sort of sane pricing model.
- "The usage charges may be abstracted to 'units/hour' to make currency conversions simpler."
- ...or to make it possible for the starving children in Africa to afford an hour a year of game playing
- "Alternatively, a bundle may incur a one-time charge that is operable until changed or for a fixed-usage period," the document reads.
- "Until changed" won't fly for a home computer, since it'll cost way too much to switch back and forth between games and work. (You might be able to get around that by getting 3 home computers, one stays on gaming full-time, one on office full-time, and one on browsing full-time. Quick, patent that.) A fixed-usage period will most likely be the norm, at least in the early stages.
LOL ... see, the problem with a centralized proprietary service to manage your stolen laptop is that (a) as Snipe pointed out, you're stuck with whatever the service supports, and without whatever it doesn't, (b) as you yourself pointed out in your funny sig, you're stuck with whatever features the service decides to add by user request, and without whatever features the service doesn't feel like adding for whatever reason, (c) if the service goes out of business, so does your protection, and (d) if Microsoft injects SQL bugs into the servers powering the service, the thief might get away without having his new laptop locked down, and/or the service might shut down a non-stolen laptop in the middle of an important presentation, perhaps with some trademark blue screen of death or something, possibly as a result of bugginess in the closed-source application that the service required you to install with admin privileges on your laptop. I dunno, maybe Windows people have just gotten used to giving closed-source apps admin privileges and praying for the best; I'd be scared stiff to trust something without source even in my own user account, much less as root.
Hey, don't get me wrong, I can understand why you're promoting your own junk; you have a vested interest. (I promote my own junk for the same reason.) Just don't be surprised when some of the obvious flaws are pointed out. (Snipe is a lot more diplomatic than I am, simply pointing out why your service doesn't meet the basic requirements she pointed out in the first couple of sentences of her original blog post.)
Take care,BTW - As it turns out, my original comment got through, somehow. Whatever. . .
- Dave
Tropicana is 100% orange and pineapple. All natural orange juice with no sugar added and never made from concentrate. The naturally delicious, sweet taste of Tropicana comes from our unique blend of oranges, selected from the pick of the crop and squeezed at their height of goodness, plus a splash of pineapple. Our pure, natural blend of fresh-tasting juice wakes up your morning and your body so you can face the day with a healthy start and a positive attitude.Now, here's the ingredient list, from the other side of the same carton:
Tropicana 100% orange and pineapple.
Ingredients: 100% Pure orange juice, pineapple juice concentrate, peach puree concentrate and natural flavors.The first obvious lesson is, don't believe the hype. Not only is the "never from concentrate" extremely misleading there, but it's not even 100% orange and pineapple, since they threw in peach (peach puree concentrate), too. The second lesson is that orange juice is not a low calorie food, nor would it be easy to make it one, since most of the calories come from the natural sugars in the fruit involved (but then again, you're losing weight by playing ping pong, not cutting out your breakfast, anyway, right?). The third lesson is that after all this, the stuff should still be plenty good for you. Finally, the fourth lesson is that the stuff tastes great (at least to me), regardless :-)
Not a low calorie food.
The suspects fled in the van down Delafield Street and crashed into a security gate at the back of St. Peter's University Hospital, Caputo said. All four suspects then jumped from the van and shots were fired.and
Three suspects sustained gunshot wounds, though none was life-threatening, Caputo said. They were taken to Robert Wood Johnson University Hospital.I guess the obvious question is, why weren't they just taken straight to St. Peter's University Hospital for treatment?
I find it ridiculous that people blindly install software, and expect it to just work.Eh, I don't know what the big deal is, here. My wife and I have been using junk mail, store sales brochures, various pieces of printed paper, paper instant oatmeal bags, and various other paper, ever since we got the cats (a couple of months ago), with no special processing recipe. We just pass it through the shredder (the "Tough Guy" - about $30, from Staples), and dump it in the litter box (a large plastic tote with built-in covering flaps - about $10, from Lowe's). None of our three cats seem to have any problem with it. I read some interesting stuff about toilet training cats, though, and I'm thinking about giving it a whirl. Why use _any_ litter at all, if you don't have to? Enjoy, - Dave
Shower Drain: A year or two ago many visitors had a shower drain issue and a "gurgling toilet" issue. As the desk person so helpfully explained to me, there was a $1+ million dollar renovation on the bar...not quite sure what the two have to do with each other...but perhaps she meant that the bar no longer gets you as drunk as might be necessary to think the toilet is gurgling at you.), the shower drains were very slow, and nobody bothered to fix them. (When you take a shower, it starts feeling like a standing bath, after a while.) As my brother pointed out, the hotel tried to avoid the question by putting the best spin on things. (I'd probably conclude that the additional $1M in the bar would probably make you more drunk, so you might not notice it gurgling at you. Unfortunately for them, (a) I don't drink, and (b) I'm a perfectionist, so I noticed the shower drain falling behind the showerhead, even though they were using reduced flow showerheads. I suppose they kept the reduced flow showerheads quiet rather than trumpeting their "green" policy, for fear of people putting two and two together and calling them out on trying to cover up their subpar plumbing job on the drain.) While there were certainly some bright spots, overall, I wasn't terribly impressed with this Pesach program. The whole program stank of underhanded marketing tactics, and a general attitude of not really caring much about the guests. I guess honest businessmen have become an incredibly rare find, these days. I mean, if you're trying to save yourself money, tell me the truth straight out, so I can make an informed decision. If you must spin something, give me back a portion of your increased profits in the form of lower pricing, and trumpet that around as a partial lie. Please don't try to make yourself sound all caring and everything when the only thing you care about is your profit margins; it's just false advertising. If you really care about making our world a better place, forget about combating global warming, and focus on making the world a warmer place, one person at a time. The former will come naturally once we've achieved the latter.
- This abundance does not preclude affordable health insurance. For 6 dollars a day you can purchase pretty comprehensive coverage, no deductibles or screening for pre-existing conditions.
- I know a lot of people who'd like to know Ilana's sources on that. (In particular, they'd love it if she were actually right.)
- The average immoral dolt, however, prefers to spend the meager sum on a six-pack and allow others to be coerced into covering his care.
- By that logic, universal garbage collection shouldn't exist, either. (Why should I have to pay for disposal of your ten cans every week, when I don't fill ten cans in a year?) If you like that logic, Ilana and I are on your team. I also take the concept a lot further in my Presidential campaign.
- How so? The lavish health care expansion, notes the New York Times, would be paid for "by raising $544 billion over the next decade with a graduated income surtax on the wealthiest Americans: families with adjusted gross incomes exceeding $350,000 and individuals making more than $280,000."
- Who exactly are those earning half a million to a million depreciated dollars? Rare are the employees who garner such wages in the corporate world, outside of Wall Street.
- To be honest, I don't care who you are: if you're making half a million bucks a year after expenses, you're making more money than you can ever need. I don't fault you for making the money, but I certainly do fault the system for making such a big deal out of a whole bunch of high-tech paper. A system that encourages people to horde money is morally bankrupt.
- The rich entrepreneur - the middle-class, small business owner - that's who [sic] Obama is looking to filch without flinching.
- If the "70% middle class" American makes half a million a year, I guess I'm under the poverty line. Perhaps Obama should expand his Robin Hood games to benefit me too? (Can we add a yacht entitlement, maybe?) In fact, while we're at it, we might as well take a shortcut straight to the finish line, so we can avoid all the paperwork for the intermediate phases: let's just have everybody's entire salary withheld at source, and let the government provide everybody's ration of (government-picked) food, drugs, healthcare, leisure, etc. Wait, haven't we just brought the Iron Curtain across the Atlantic? Let me get this straight: we wasted trillions of dollars fighting the Cold War, just so we could pick the ball up after the USSR dropped it?
- The constitutionality of singling out a distinct segment of society - the productive - for punishment is never so much as raised.
- I haven't found too many Americans who got rich by production, anytime recently. Most seem to get rich by clever market manipulations (essentially, creating protected monopolies, and then leveraging them elsewhere). I don't doubt that they put plenty of effort into their market manipulation (ever read any of the Microsoft internal emails leaked during their anti-trust case?), but to call them "the productive segment" is a bit of a stretch, if you ask me. Most of the real productive segment of our society isn't even in our society: it's in China, Taiwan, Thailand, Mexico, etc. Our tariff system isn't designed to protect American production; rather, it's designed to have the government profit off foreign production, effectively putting another hidden tax on the American consumer. However, it's arguable that even a flat rate tax would constitute "punishment" for the rich, since it's not fair that a rich guy should have to pay more in taxes just because he makes more. The only problem is that if we were to structure a flat amount (a certain dollar amount; as opposed to flat rate, meaning a certain percentage of your profits/income/whatever) tax, affordable to the poor, our government wouldn't have nearly enough revenues to finance its sheer bulk. Therefore, the rich people (the people who profit most by having a big government protecting their "interests") can certainly pay a bit more for it. That's why I consider the IRS tax bracket system acceptable, as long as the rich profit most from the government. My Presidential campaign aims to make the government neutral in the "rich guy vs. poor guy" game, taking away its justification for taxing some people more than others.
- The only consideration that seems to counts [sic] is, "How many Americans want it?"
- I hate to break the news, but that's Democracy, by definition. If you've managed to do enough hateable things so that the American public hates you, Democracy is obviously going to work against you. (Those types of people are better off with a "Legacracy," so they can find the loopholes and exploit them, without having to worry about the consequences of their actions.) The alert businessman would point out the obvious at this point: if you want to be able to do hateable things without having Democracy working against you, you need to pay off (or buy, or create) mass media in order to brainwash the masses into taking your side.
- It so happens that attainder laws are unconstitutional (Article 1, Sections 9 and 10). Our high-minded messiah has no authority or right to punish this (innocent) group of people without the benefit of due process.
- Our friend Ilana has obviously failed to notice that Democracy isn't about the rule of law; rather it's about the rule of the people. A and B are contradictory at a fundamental level. In a Democracy, he who gets the people on his side wins. (In a Democracy, laws are just there to fool the people into thinking they're getting a fair deal.) As for Obama, he has the "authority" to do anything he can convince our (ostensibly Democratic) governmental system to go along with, by definition.
- And indeed, this immoral drive will miscarry. Penalizing the productive will cause them to go into hiding like a tortoise in its shell.
- Nah, in practice, "the productive" will simply find other ways of producing money for themselves. History proves me right.
Error in Selection Query
SELECT publish_time, id,priority, title,category, urlkey, MATCH (body)
AGAINST ("Microsoft, Nokia to detail "alliance" tomorrow") as rel FROM
news WHERE MATCH (body) AGAINST ("Microsoft, Nokia to detail "alliance"
tomorrow") > 0 AND publish_time > (unix_timestamp(now()) - 5184000) AND
status = 1 AND id != 67358 ORDER BY rel DESC LIMIT 7
You have an error in your SQL syntax; check the manual that corresponds
to your MySQL server version for the right syntax to use near
'alliance" tomorrow") as rel FROM news WHERE MATCH (body) AGAINST
("Microsoft, No' at line 1
Yeah, I've noticed the Express Checkout thing. I think the main reason they put those lanes in is to speed up the other lanes. (That's also why they don't really complain much when you go over the number of items allowed, as long as other customers don't get all annoyed: they know you're really just slowing yourself down.) Remember: most of a supermarket's revenues come from the guys with the shopping carts full of stuff, not from the guys with a couple of handheld items on their way to a movie.
However, I do find it interesting that after asking all those questions, the blogger just walks away without actually answering his central question. To add insult to injury, his CSV has way too little data to be able to run any type of meaningful statistical analysis.
Finally, I find it rather ridiculous that after all this time, no supermarket has bothered to put together an assembly line approach to checking out. If you want to speed things up, have people put their stuff on a conveyor belt, where a worker can scan the items and pass them on to another conveyor belt either to a guy who bags the stuff, or to a self-bagging area for each customer. After you're done having your stuff bagged, you then head over to one of the checkout lines, where you simply show your receipt, pay, and walk out. Sure, the best-case latency (time between going on the first line and walking out of the store) is marginally worse than the best-case latency in the current system, but the average case and particularly the worst case latencies are both orders of magnitude better, because of the better overall efficiency of the system. This reminds me of the old Token Ring vs. Ethernet race, where a 4Mbps Token Ring network would routinely outrun a 10Mbps Ethernet network as soon as the load went up. The Ethernet camp responded with 100Mbps Fast Ethernet, which is the rough equivalent of increasing the speed of the conveyor belt tenfold, hoping to avoid gridlock. IBM's 16Mbps flavor of Token Ring beat out 100Mbps Fast Ethernet on a regular basis until switches became common (solving the collision problem, once and for all ... at least for wired Ethernet ... 802.11[abgn] all have the same problem, since APs work like hubs, rather than switches ... curiously, WiMAX solves the problem almost exactly the same way that IBM solved it a couple of decades ago, by essentially passing a token around a ring). The point I'm getting at is that in the network race, throwing more hardware at the problem was a cost-effective solution, allowing Ethernet to beat Token Ring on cost. In the supermarket race, on the other hand, there's more than a marginal one-shot cost to keeping additional lanes open, turbocharging conveyor belts, putting cashiers on steroids, etc., and so the best solution is to get more out of the existing infrastructure rather than simply throwing more infrastructure at the problem, and the mechanics of that solution were shown by Mr. Ford, about a century ago, to be an assembly line. (In a modern CPU, we call it "pipelining," because apparently it offends computer people to call something an "assembly line." When somebody finally goes ahead and implements an assembly line for supermarkets, I'm sure he'll invent more terminology to make something old seem new, yet again, and he'll be applauded for his outstanding "innovation" to the supermarket checkout lane problem. Parenthetically, it's worth noting that Mr. Ford wasn't the first to think of an assembly line, either; we know that well into the BC period, there were already Mathematicians exploring the advantages of the assembly line approach to solving certain classes of problems, and I'm betting that the basic concepts were already put to good use by our ancestors even before organized written communication came to our species.)
Enjoy :-)Here's my take on this whole business: http://www.bigfatdave.com/to_www_or_not_to_www.html If you'd like to have some fun, try doing this: http://bigfatdave.com/ or this: http://bigfatdave.com/blog.php BTW - IO Error: in case you're wondering where all your visitors have gone, they're all seeing server not found errors, because you've got a DNS error. Peace, - Dave
- Damages for patent infringement awarded by a UK court must not be paid back even if the patent is later declared invalid by the European Patent Office (EPO), the Court of Appeal has ruled.
- The UK Court of Appeal ruled that it knows better than the EPO which patents are valid.
- Lord Justice Jacob said in his ruling that his decision was based on the need for certainty in business.
- Lord Injustice Jacob said that justice should be ignored in the interests of preserving incorrect court decisions. (It's easy to make a counter-argument, that Lord Injustice Jacob's decision violated defendant's preexisting certainty in business (that the defendant clearly demonstrated long before the trial, by violating what it considered (and the EPO later "proved" to be) an invalid patent).)
- "First and foremost, the defendant has had a full and fair opportunity of attacking the validity of the patent in his own proceedings."
- "First and foremost, the defendant showed me why the patent was invalid, but I decided he was wrong without consulting the experts. I consider that a 'full and fair' opportunity to attack the validity of the patent."
- "Next there is a very very strong public interest in the finality of litigation."
- "The public cares more about rushed decisions than about correct decisions. Remember, I'm Lord Injustice Jacob!"
- "Finally a party who had lost would have a strong motive for finding further or better reasons for attacking a patent and getting some third party to do so, thereby undermining the first decision."
- "Finally, a party that incorrectly loses a case in my court (because I'm not an EPO patent expert) would have a strong motive for seeking a correct answer from the EPO, to undermine my incorrect decision."
- "It is much better that he knows that the first litigation about validity is the time and place for him to get his best case together -"
- "It's much better for my relevancy meter if he knows that the court system is the time and place for him to say what he should be telling the EPO -"
- "that he knows he will have no second chance," he said.
- "that he knows we'll ignore the experts at the EPO," he meant. (Lord Injustice Jacob wants you to shell out big bucks for a state-of-the-art lawyer to keep him company in his lonely courtroom, rather than just talking some sense into the experts at the EPO, rendering both him and his suck-up lawyer unnecessary.)
- "Now a purist may say: it is a nonsense, and moreover an unjust nonsense, for a man to have to pay for doing what, with hindsight, we know to have been lawful. But I think there are good and pragmatic reasons why the purist approach makes bad business sense. You cannot unravel everything without creating uncertainty. And where a final decision has been made on a fair contest between the parties, that should stand as the final answer between them."
- I'm not quite sure how a "final" decision can be made on a "fair" contest between the parties, without waiting for a diagnosis from the expert witnesses at the EPO. His argument is analogous to a court ruling that a defendant is guilty of murder without waiting for the results of an autopsy ordered by the defendant, and then refusing to take the convicted murderer off death row when the autopsy results finally reveal that the court ruled incorrectly, because the court wants to artificially avoid uncertainty (even when the defendant was certain all along that he didn't murder the guy). "[U]nravel[ing] everything" is the only way of ensuring _certainty_ since otherwise it's anybody's guess what wacky decision Lord Injustice Jacob will come up with next (totally ignoring the relevant authorities, of course).
- "I am not sorry to reach that conclusion," he said. "It means that businessmen in this country know that they can use the rather speedy court system here to get a conclusion one way or the other."
- Would he be sorry if this were a murder trial instead?
- "[T]he effect of all this is that one does not have to wait to find out who has won until the slowest horse in the race gets there."
- Clearly, he considers the star witness "the slowest horse in the race." I guess his fundamental problem is that he sees this whole business as a "race," defining the finish line as being located wherever the fastest horse in the race decides to paint it, and if a slower horse ends up finding the real finish line a bit later, he argues that we should disqualify the winning horse, because the so-called fastest horse had already declared itself the winner. I'd argue that the "fastest" horse here jumped the gun and should therefore be disqualified for having started running not only before the gun went off, but even before the finish line was measured and marked. Disqualifying the real winner after the false start in favor of the wayward Speedy Gonzales (blaming the race organizers for taking their time to make sure the finish line is in exactly the right place - in order to avoid making precisely the same type of mistake that our favorite Injustice Jacob guy in fact made, by rushing headlong towards the first thing that looked like a checkered flag, without stopping to think for a second that he might have just been looking at a checkered cab sitting around in a museum, not even on the racetrack) only adds insult to injury.
1) Connect to Microsoft's server.
2) Grab some file.
3) Execute it.
4) Shred all traces of it.
5) Exit.
1) Connect to Microsoft's server.
2) Tell it what the user wants you to do.
3) Read the result from the server.
4) Feed (the user-visible portion of) the result to the user.
- the problem is fundamentally unsolveable in anything but a totalitarian regime, due to fundamental laws of Information Theory;
- the "problem" is not very problematic (with my simple amendment above - making it illegal for an EULA to apply after a copyright expires), since it's not a big deal to simply reverse-engineer whatever code _was_ provided at the conclusion of the copyright term, effectively forcing the software vendor to invalidate all 5-year-old copies of his work on a regular basis - and any auto-update functionality in the code would have to be carefully guarded (for example, downloaded as-needed), which in the final analysis would inconvenience the vendor and his users in the interests of preserving the vendor's "trade secrets," which I consider perfectly reasonable; and finally
- the "problem" is not a problem at all, since as #2 noted, I consider it perfectly legitimate for a vendor to carefully guard his trade secrets, if he cares about them enough to go through that trouble, and if his customers care enough about benefiting from his trade secrets so that they're willing to go along with it, they deserve what they get. Put another way, I don't see a problem with a user surrendering his freedom to inspect somebody else's work, in exchange for having that "somebody else" actually do the work for him (in the case of Web-based software; or in exchange for having that "somebody else" secretly tell his computer how to do it, in the case of download-and-run software). For the record, I strongly believe that making this trade-off is nearly always a very foolish thing to do in today's world, but I don't believe in a police state: if you're allowed to commit suicide, why shouldn't you be allowed to sign your life away to the devil? (Executive summary: I consider it a drug; do whatever you want.)
- There's a qualitative difference in that remodeling in ownership vs. remodeling in rental isn't comparing apples to apples, since there's no guarantee that the landlord will remodel his house the way you were hoping for (or at all, for that matter). When you own a house, you have the freedom to do things the way _you_ want, rather than the way the landlord wants. For example, when we had a mouse problem, we were able to solve it with a non-toxic method (cats - and when it turned out that one of the cats we had gotten was pregnant, keeping her and the four li'l ones was a viable option), while most landlords would have insisted on (a) no pets, and (b) using mousetraps or poison (both of which create health problems for the human inhabitants). Another obvious example is the rather unique method we came up with for solving the heating efficiency problems that virtually all old houses have. Yet another interesting option is co-generation, or getting a generator to supply your electricity and then siphoning the heat off to keep the house warm. Unorthodox solutions to common problems are a major turn-off for most landlords, and if you're looking for a unique type of landlord, you've just surrendered the "liquidity" advantage of renting. I consider the difference a qualitative one because owning promotes a better quality of life, and it's hard to put a price tag on that.
- Once you're not talking about $600K houses (and comparing them with lousy apartments - since renting a house will still leave you paying the utilities and most minor repairs, 90% of the time) but rather $100K houses, the equation changes quite a bit: in particular, buying becomes a heck of a lot cheaper than renting, all costs considered. You're also not tying up a huge percentage of your portfolio, so you don't lose investment diversity. Also, note that rental rates do go up over time (normally tied more closely to the overall rate of inflation than to the appreciation of real estate), and most rental contracts don't give any long-term protection against rate hikes, especially if the house you're renting turns out to be a very desireable one (especially after the landlord went and did the whole remodeling thing so well).
- If you don't plan to move every other year, you need to take into account that you're getting a "rebate" on part of each mortgage payment, and that the "rebate" amount keeps going up for every month you stay in your home. If you stay for the full life of the mortgage (as little as 15 years for conventional mortgages), you're looking at approximately 33% of your total mortgage payments coming back to you as "rebates." Put another way, you're only actually spending about 2/3 of your official mortgage payment; the rest is simply being transferred from your bank account to your home equity account.
WordPress > Error
Sorry, there was an error. JavaScript and Cookies are required in order
to post a comment.
Status: JavaScript is currently disabled.
Please be sure JavaScript and Cookies are enabled in your browser.
Then, please hit the back button on your browser, and try posting your
comment again. (You may need to reload the page)
- Name
- Dave
- http://www.bigfatdave.com/emailme.html
- Website [sic]
- http://www.bigfatdave.com/
- Comment
It solved part of my problem (running on Slackware-current), here. I'm still working on figuring out what else is wrong on my installation. (I'm trying to put together tagfiles for a minimal Apache+PHP+APC+MySQLClient system.) BTW - coyote: I don't check this page often (in fact, it's my first time here), so if you notice anything here that you think I might want to read, I'd appreciate a ping by email. (If there's a way for the system to automatically email me when somebody posts a further comment, feel free to ask it to do so. Also, just in case it's not obvious, anybody is more than welcome to email me, for any reason or no reason at all. My homepage explains how to email me [1].) [1] http://www.bigfatdave.com/emailme.html
WordPress > Error
Hmmm, your comment seems a bit spammy. We're not real big on spam
around here.
Please go back and try again.
In the event of a succesful ping, the server MUST return a response in
the following format:
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<response>
<error>0</error>
</response>
In the event of an unsuccessful ping, the server MUST return an HTTP
response in the following format:
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<response>
<error>1</error>
<message>The error message</message>
</response>
ROAD CLOSED
to everyone but YOU!
[picture of a Ferrari (F430?) with a driver behind the wheel]
[PRST FIRST CLASS/U.S. POSTAGE/PAID/TAMPA, FL/PERMIT NO 543]
WANTED!
Participants for exciting new Reality TV Series to Air this Fall
A handful of lucky drivers will get the chance to test their driving skills on 10 closed public roads in 10 States beginning
in May of 2010 and these events will be filmed for a Reality TV Series.
Participants will get to race their cars on some of the most scenic and exciting closed public roads. This is a
competition for individuals interested in showing, not telling, everyone what they are made of behind the wheel. If you
think you have the stuff and want to prove it on National TV, here is your chance.
Participation is limited to the first 100 drivers that are selected after a screening interview. To be considered go to
www.robinhoodrally.com and click on the Sign Me Up tab. You are required to make a deposit of $1,000 and then
complete a screening interview. If you are accepted then you must pay the remaining entry fee of $4,000 by February
12th. The entry fee covers a small portion of the costs associated with the Rally.
The First prize is a Ferrari F430,
approximate worth $250,000,
Second Prize is a Porsche Turbo,
and Third Prize is a Corvette Z51.
For Complete Details visit
www.robinhoodrally.com and make an
application, if you think you have the stuff.
DO IT NOW!
- Warranty
- Since we're no longer using the microwave for its "intended purpose," we're probably invalidating our warranty, here. You may want to wait for your warranty to expire before trying this ;-)
- Fry-Worthy Container
- A "microwave-safe" container is normally rated to handle at least about 212 degrees Fahrenheit (100 degrees Celsius, or about 373.15 Kelvins). Frying is regularly done near 400 degrees Fahrenheit (over 200 degrees Celsius, or over 475 Kelvins). The reason I bring the Kelvins into this is that Kelvins measure absolute temperature (while both Fahrenheit and Celsius measure relative temperatures), allowing us to get an idea for how much more energy is being pumped into our food: 475/375~=1.27. That's more than a quarter extra. Most "microwave-safe" gear isn't designed for this. Corelle bowls work fantastically well, and so do caseroles designed for high temperature oven use.
- Temperature Control
- The Achilles Heel of a microwave is that it has plenty of controls for time and power level, but nothing for temperature. This is also one of the sources for potential danger: you can boil (i.e., burn) off the oil without even noticing it quite easily, if you're not careful. The idea of putting a temperature sensor in the microwave is patented, so you can't do that. (If this bothers you, consider shrinking the government.) To the best of my knowledge, though, nobody's patented the idea of stopping the microwave on a regular basis, and zapping the food with an infrared or laser thermometer. (Quick, patent it, before somebody else does.) An infrared thermometer can be as cheap as $10 or so, while you can get a good laser thermometer from an auto parts store for as little as $30 or so. (They're both great investments for your kitchen, even if you don't insist on blowing up your microwave for fun.)
What makes a billion dollar company is really just half of #2: a monopoly in a big market. Look at the profit center (measured by profit margins, not by absolute profits) for any large company, and you'll find that it's in the places where the company has least competition. Now, induction allows us to see that expanding the "no competition" zone leads to greater profits in absolute terms. Expanding your profits to the point that you can create a billion dollar company is simply a matter of expanding the "no competition" zone enough. (Remember, the "no competition" zone is the market(s) where you're able to translate investment into profit most efficiently. If you want to grow big fast, you need efficiency.) Microsoft did it with operating systems, and then abused ("leveraged") its monopoly there to jump-start and then subsidize an office software monopoly, to steal a Web browser monopoly (although I don't think they were counting on Netscape rising from the ashes with a new name, and nipping away at IE's market share ever since), and to attempt half a zillion more monopolies, some more successful than others. Google did it with WWW search, leveraging its monopoly there to jump-start a monopoly for WWW search ad-space, which it used to attempt a general ad-space monopoly. What happened to IBM? It refused to protect its monopoly, because when the DoJ started investigating, IBM quickly changed its ways. Once you lose your monopoly, you're dead meat. IBM continues to survive today by turning to consulting and brand-recognition for revenues. Where will it be tomorrow? Viewed through these glasses, a billion dollar company is a company that doesn't aim to compete in an eco-system: it aims to _be_ the eco-system. Once it's done conquering one market, it uses that monopoly to expand out to nearby markets (the markets formerly known as "partner space"). With these glasses on straight, we're now also able to explain plenty of other billion dollar companies, even from yester-year. AT&T, for example, makes its money in wireless, which should not be surprising, since it monopolized the wireless market by extending its preexisting landline monopoly. (Feel free to repeat the last sentence with s/AT&T/Verizon/g: a cartel is operationally equivalent to a monopoly.) How about a company like GE? Did it get that big making refrigerators? No, it got that big by participating in the financial services and media cartels. For that matter, take a look at the other media companies: they've all grown through cooperative monopolization of the information flows in our country. Why aren't AT&T and Verizon replaced by some new startup? They've insulated their profit center from startups by convincing the government to sell them monopolies over electromagnetic waves for purposes of cellular communication on your property, my property, and everywhere else in the country, and already before that, they'd already gained a virtual monopoly on "rights of passage" for landlines, DSL lines, fiber optics, etc. (You think you own your own property? Think again.) Note that their only real competition comes from a company called Qwest, which was only able to compete by taking advantage of rail rights of way to lay its own networks. How about the media giants? Well, they've conned Washington into selling them equivalent rights for purposes of television and radio broadcasting, including the right to lay cables in neighborhoods everywhere. (Viewed from this angle, the DSL vs. Cable war is a clash of titans: telecoms vs. media companies.) Now, you might ask, where does such a company get its start? If markets everywhere are protected by incumbent monopolists, how does a new company get its butt in edgewise? You have to take advantage of a strategic blunder by all monopolists in nearby markets. Microsoft took advantage of a strategic blunder by IBM: rather than seeking to monopolize the desktop OS market, IBM made the mistake of ceding it to a "partner." Google took advantage of a strategic blunder by Yahoo!: rather than keeping search ads separated from search itself, Yahoo! chose to charge businesses $250 for listing in the search engine, and then started altering search result order based on additional payments by interested parties. To add insult to injury, they changed their search homepage from a search page to a portal, angering their userbase further. Microsoft took advantage of its break by building its own brand and retaining its own copyrights, while planning for the eventual monopolization of the desktop operating system market. Google took advantage of its break by being "the old Yahoo!" that everybody missed. Facebook tries to be "what MySpace should've been," and only time will tell if it's ultimately successful, or if it ends up losing by a strategic blunder and going the way of Friendster. In the same breath, it's imperative to note that a company, after getting its break, needs to work tirelessly to prevent another company from getting its own break in a nearby market. Microsoft has turned monopoly protection into a science, by carefully targetting (for buyout or elimination) any company in a nearby market that takes advantage of a strategic blunder by Microsoft, before it becomes too late to squish it. This systematic vigilance has allowed Microsoft to get away with a lot of blunders that would've killed nearly any other company in its shoes. Finally, the age-old question comes back: what happened to "from rags to riches?" Why is it so hard to find new goliaths? The answer is pretty simple: as more markets become monopolized by "better fit" companies (i.e., companies that are highly aggressive at grabbing market share, and strongly intent on avoiding its loss through strategic blunders), it becomes harder and harder to hit upon a strategic blunder by _all_ nearby monpolists, that _none_ of them decide to cover for by squishing the original bug as well as its fallout. Remember, today's giant empolys an entire department for the sole purpose of waking it up if a strategic blunder results in a forecast for strategic trouble. These departments are normally equipped with all the tactical weapons necessary to conduct large-scale battles against the offender, as well as a direct line upstairs to call in the big guns, if necessary.
This is the heroic, honorable stance of the American elite in the 21st century. What the Nazis did, we do, and for the same reason: to secure the forcible occupation of a land we conquered through an unprovoked war of aggression. It is indeed wonderful and amazing that such a state of affairs -- such an abyss of depravity -- is accepted so calmly by the great and good among us....and by tens of millions of our fellow citizens.I find the comparison here rather comic, in that my family wasn't killed because they resisted "the forcible occupation of a land [the Nazis] conquered through an unprovoked war of aggression." Rather, they were killed simply because they were an inferior race, so to make "living space" for the superior race, they had to be sacrificed (after being rounded up into work camps, in many cases forced to dig their own graves, tortured purely for "good, clean" fun, etc.). It is indeed wonderful and amazing that such an illogical comparison -- such an abyss of propaganda -- is accepted so calmly by the great and good among us, yada yada yada. Perhaps, a slightly better comparison for our "death squads" may be found by looking at the allied "death squads" who went around towards the end of that Nazi war trying to capture high-ranking SS officers. (If they'd been just "petty terrorists," I'm sure they would've been "murdered" too, rather than captured alive. Then again, we did end up "murdering" them later, anyway, with a big spectacle masquerading as a trial. Of course, all the evidence was fabricated, and the verdicts were purely "arbitrary." At least that's what the Iranian-supported Iraqui martyrs (you know, the peace-loving guys we're murdering for daring to oppose "[our] forcible occupation of [their] land") would have you believe.) An even better comparison may be obtained by simply understanding the "new" rules of war: anything goes. For example, hiding out in dense civilian populations may be "unacceptable" according to our rhetoric, but based on our actions (or inactions) it's easy to prove that such tactics are highly acceptable to us, after all. Dropping nuclear bombs on major cities (twice, with threats to drop even more) is also quite acceptable. Targeted attacks on enemy supply lines have always been considered acceptable. What's the big deal with targeted attacks on command-and-control centers (and the leaders that occupy them)? Let me guess: tomorrow, killing a soldier who's shooting at you will also be considered "execution without charges, without trial, without evidence," eh? To answer that Chris guy's question about GW:
By this logic, of course, the Nazis were fully justified in murdering leaders of the French resistance in World War II. The British would certainly have been justified in sneaking into George Washington's house and killing the insurgent leader in his bed. (And his wife too, no doubt, as an acceptable level of "collateral damage.")That is exactly correct. If you have an opportunity to kill an enemy general, you're a fool if you don't take advantage of the opportunity to gain a strategic advantage. Also, as long as we don't recognize your right to secession, your right to self determination remains unenforceable, and so it's always profitable for the stronger party to characterize a conflict as a revolt (or its politically correct synonym for the 21st century, an "insurrection" or "insurgence"), because obliterating an enemy carries a lot less political baggage when the enemy is demoted to "insurgent" status: he's no longer worthy of legal protection under the international laws barring war crimes, and he's no longer worthy of media protection under the international rules of "conflict journalism." The aggressor (who is nearly always the stronger party) is no longer conquering somebody else's land by force, but rather is simply "putting down a rebellion." We didn't invent these rules of war under the Bush administration; we imported them to the "New World" even before the Washington administration, and then tried putting a sugar coating all over the whole business by drafting up a "Constitution" to govern the land that we were stealing from the natives (using a variety of "new rules of war" techniques). Eh, I guess I'm not being terribly patriotic here, eh? Well, as long as we're "one nation under God," my loyalty to my God comes ahead of my loyalty to my nation, and yours should too. (Otherwise, who can blame the Nazis for simply following orders during World War II?) Besides, just like Hitler's worst casualty was Germany itself, the US itself is the worst casualty when we lose our own humanity by lying to ourselves. I'm proud to be an American because of the things that America has a right to be proud of, but if your version of America is proud of committing atrocities, then I'm obviously not proud to be your version of an American. If a guy can't say a bloody thing without being called "unpatriotic" (which is a rather dangerous label, when you have laws like the "Patriot Act" running around, committing drive-by shootings constantly), then where is our fabled Bill of Rights? What the heck are we fighting Muslim terrorism for, if we don't disagree with them when they say that humans don't have inalienable rights? Is your version of America some sort of Ku Klux Klan about WASP dominance of the whole world? You certainly can't expect me to be proud of your quest to become the next Hitler, just because you call that "Patriotic." I'm not proud of being an American because that's where I've lived my whole life and/or because that's all I know and/or because that's what the educational system brainwashed me into believing, while I was growing up; I'm proud of being an American because America respects me as a person more than my own birthplace (which admittedly isn't saying a whole lot - again, without anybody recognizing my right to take back my own six billionth of the planet so I can just live my life in peace, my right to self-determination is meaningless, and so picking the lesser of two institutionalized evils is the best option available to me). Just to be clear, I agree with that Chris guy that there's a problem with what the US was (and obviously still is) doing with these "death squads," but the biggest problem I see is one of a lack of transparency in government, not the violation of your right to be tried before being killed.
Joe and Tristan: I think both of you are kinda missing the point here re: DNSSEC/DNSCurve, in that DNSCurve isn't an intermediate step towards DNSSEC, but rather the critical step towards transport security. DNSSEC doesn't give you transport security, but rather authenticates the data itself against some trusted authority, merely achieving the same end-result in a suboptimal manner. Network protocols are typically most vulnerable on the network, and so it's the network that needs securing. In that respect, DNSSEC is at most "a step towards" DNSCurve, in that DNSCurve (a) provides far stronger cryptography, and (b) also protects you against eavesdropping. DNSSEC's protection of the zone data against tampering is rather useless, in that if you can't keep foreigners out of your own DNS servers, DNS hijacking isn't your biggest problem. The only reason I can think of to deploy DNSSEC is if you're a bit uneasy with the steady stream of BIND vulnerabilities, and if that's the case, you might as well switch to a nameserver that's secure by design, like tinydns, rather than bloating BIND with a complex protocol that may itself become yet another source of vulnerabilities. Think of DNSCurve as equivalent to deploying HTTPS to secure your conversation with the bank, while DNSSEC prefers to sign the contents of your bank account ;-P As for securing "the last mile" between the recursive resolver and the client, there are two important points to bring up: (a) the DNS cache is the logical replacement for /etc/hosts files, and as such should be as close to the clients as practical (ideally, on the same physical network); and (b) even if you're hellbent on taking the OpenDNS approach, there's nothing in the DNSCurve spec preventing DNSCurve from being deployed on the last mile between the DNS cache and the client. (After all, if you're willing to go and upgrade all your clients' resolver libraries to support DNSSEC signature validation, upgrading them to support DNSCurve security is dead simple by comparison, as the underlying protocol is dead simple.) (Disclaimer: Yes, I'm from the DNSCurve "crowd," and have been a very satisfied user for many months. I find it rather humorous (and extremely sad - DNSCurve will most likely fail miserably in the marketplace because of these types of marketing blunders) that I deployed it myself nearly a year - and counting - before dnscurve.org itself.) As for the IPv6 fiasco, this is the wrong forum, but I'll happily give you a piece of my mind on the right forum. Peace, - Dave
- Your Name
- Dave Cohen
- Your Email Address
- [omitted to avoid SPAM]
- Your Name Again For Our Records
- Dave Cohen
- Your Phone Number
- [omitted to avoid Panscient]
- Address
- [omitted for same reason]
- City
- [ditto]
- State/Province
- [ditto again]
- Country (if outside the United States)
- [blank]
- Have you accepted Jesus Christ as your Savior?
- Why
- Please include a brief testimony.
- Belief comes from inside. The word 'testimony' implies that I can testify (i.e., to what I have seen). Unfortunately, Christ has not graced me with the opportunity to actually see him yet.
- How did you find (locate) our site?
- World Christianship Ministries
- Are you requesting Ordination at this time?
- Y
- Do you pledge to never perform a same-sex marriage or so called civil union?
- Y
- Additional Information You'd Like to Include (optional)
- I just wanted to thank you, Brother Dave, for giving me this opportunity to preach my beliefs.
KNOW ALL MEN BY THESE PRESENTS - - that Saint Luke Evangelical Christian Ministries accepts Dave Cohen, having demonstrated by actions and by statement of faith a love for Our Lord Jesus Christ and His Word, into the world-wide ministry of Saint Luke Evangelical Christian Ministries. ON OATH I, Rev. Dr. David M. Ford, on behalf of this ministry and all its members, do hereby select, appoint, and anoint you, Dave Cohen, a legally ordained independent minister of Saint Luke Evangelical Christian Ministries, and authorize you to perform all standard Christian religious services including the rites of marriage and baptism, on this day, May 26, 2010.I'd like to thank everybody who crossed his fingers for me. I suppose that means I'm now triple-ordained. Cool, eh? If you'd like to follow in my footsteps, you'll want to head over to Saint Luke Evangelical Christian Ministries, and please tell Brother Dave that Reverend Dave sent you. (The actual URL to get ordained is at First International Church Of The Web.)
If you look more closely at the email you just sent me, you'll notice
that (a) the last few messages are completely absent from the transcript,
and (b) some of the longer messages got cut off in the middle. You may
want to have your programmers fix both of those bugs when they finish
polishing off their next pizza. ("Eh, a varchar(255) ought to be enough
for any message!") It'd be even cooler if you could send me an unabridged
transcript after you've fixed your system.
Thanks a bunch,
- Dave
BTW - If you take a quick look at my account, you'll notice I've been
along with you for most of the ride. This type of unprofessionalism
was expected back in '97, but it's rather laughable today. Now, I can
appreciate that your programmers are busy working on The Next Great Thing
(TM), but many of my best friends have already left eBay because you've
been slacking off on the core functionality of the system. (The only
reason I still keep one of my buying accounts open here is that I keep
hoping that you'll someday get your act together again, like back in
the good ol' days. I guess it just hurts to see something so good waste
itself away.)
Needless to say, I'm not in the mood for dealing with their chat crap again, and trying to make heads or tails out of their accent on the phone only adds insult to injury. If they're determined to make it difficult for users to explain what's wrong, far be it from me to spoil all their fun. When I get some free time, I hope to get ProductExchange online.Thank you for writing to eBay Customer Support. To better serve our members, we're changing the way we work with you when you have a question. In most cases, a Customer Support agent can assist you more quickly by chatting with you online or through a quick phone call. To contact a Customer Support agent: 1. Go to http://contact.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ContactUsNextGen. 2. Sign in with your eBay user ID. (This will help us find your account information.) 3. Enter your question or tell us about your issue. 4. We may need to ask you a couple of questions to make sure that we put you in touch with the agent who can best answer your question. Click the link that best matches your question. Please don't reply to this message. Any replies will not be read. We apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused. Sincerely, eBay Customer Support