Posts by ChrisInAStrangeLand 165 publicly visible posts • joined 24 Jun 2009
It's been twelve years since project Constellation was launched by President George Bush Jr and NASA still has not been appropriated funding for any payloads other than a lunar flyby with a dummy capsule. And it's looking like they won't be before the test flights conclude and the rocket is cancelled.
What a collossal and criminal waste of $30B.
Hypothesis: Standing desks improve general health in later life, increasing lifetime workforce participation and national productivity.
Experiment: Test effect of standing desks on short term minute to minute productivity metrics.
Conclusion: We didn't measure anything worth measuring, give us more money.
The key issue is that "CVC" or "backhaul" to an ISP owned DSLAM via leased or owned fiber is less than 1/10th the cost per Mbit that NBN is charging for connection to their last mile infrastructure. ISPs can't afford to allow ANY services to run at fiber speeds because CVC is just so ludicrous compared to what they are paying now. NBN's position on the matter of CVC charges is "fuck you we're a national telecoms monopoly".
There's only one way to solve this, it's for the ACCC to mandate that NBN provide wholesale access to the unlit local fiber loop. ISPs can colocate equipment at every POP so as to avoid ludicrous CVC and AVC charges and offer the world class service that NBN won't provide.
"The mind boggles when attempting to understand how someone can be this stupid and yet manage to survive to 61."
The age is right for dementia. If he wasn't all there at court it would explain the ridiculously tiny sentence for committing two bank robberies.
No point wasting 50k per year incarcerating a man who isn't going to be able to tie his shoelaces in a few years.
In Google's defense, everyone in the industry was deliberately obstructing them in an entirely misguided and ludditic attempt to prevent the evil Google empire from establishing a standard for mobile payments. And now that Tim Cook's fruit company is that standard everyone is panicking and rushing back to Google for help.
Rinse and repeat with local banks in every market that first Google, then ISIS, then Apple, and then Google will enter.
The Reg has a collection of stock photography they cycle through in different stories. I'd guess that it was part of a set taken by an intern of "techy" objects lying around their office so as to avoid paying royalties.
If you do an image search you'll notice this one is reused on a few articles.
It is a legal requirement to have a warning label, but this is only to shield the doctor or pharmacist from liability in the case of a motor vehicle / heavy machinery accident. If you are taking any prescribed medication as directed, with the exception of medical cannabis which is legislated seperately, you are not legally intoxicated regardless of impairment.
The cop most likely pulled him out of the car because he saw a bottle, made an ass of himself, and then tried to book him with everything under the sun to save face.
"The law does not allow any drug/alcohol at all while in procession of an accessible firearm."
Unless that drug is prescribed and taken as directed, in which case you aren't legally intoxicated regardless of effects. Ask your doctor. And your lawyer.
McAfee is guilty of lots of things. But not intoxication while driving or carrying a firearm in the state of Tennessee.
Tesla is pouring the foundations on a new multibillion dollar battery facility, building a global charger network from scratch, and two new mass market models for release in 2016 so of course they're spending money. You don't just divide quarterly cash flow by number of cars and "OMG $4K PER CAR LOSS".
The reason for this is COPPA. Specifically it requires creating an orwellian audit trail of all personal information, or anything that might be construed as personal, or deemed personal, or contain content that is personal, of a child's activities. Basically Microsoft has to log everything every child on it's service does and email it to parents if at some time in the future they ask for it. Like every other provider they just say it's too hard and demand you tick the 13+ checkbox.
COPPA is the opposite of child protection and should be abolished.
The other benefit Google has is that they completed the sale using stranded offshore cash that would have to be repatriated to the US at a 35% tax rate. Asset sales to Arris and Lenovo do not incur a tax liability. That brings down the $12.5B purchase price to $8.1B.
So Google potentially made billions after tax.
What moved Qualcomm to "near monopoly" in the west wasn't "predatory pricing" it was "predatory competence". Everyone else failed to get an LTE chip to market in a timely manner.
Qualcomm has absolutely no leverage to bully other players out of the market. They build on the same foundries as everyone else and there are simply too many ARM licensees and radio manufacturers competing for business.
Tantalum is used in electrolytic capacitors, which will be very soon replaced with much cheaper and more plentiful laser scribed graphene. If you look at this list there are replacements for most of these elements. Despite being called a "rare earth", neodymium is in very very large supply, potentially millions of years, for permanent magnets.
"Maybe the Coroner KNOWS the idea is stupid. But by suggesting something totally stupid and unworkable it sparks debate and brings the issue into the public eye for consideration and possible better suggestions."
The Coroner's job is to identify causes of death, and suggest and highlight mechanisms that would prevent or lower the incidence of death. In this case the coroner has identified on the basis of mobile phone records that malfunctioning software (in the drive by wire system) was likely not the cause of death. They have proposed a solution to the actual cause of death that would help prevent future deaths. This is the coroners job.
It is the job of the legislature to weigh the social costs of this recommendation if it is addressed at all.
I think Google style "active ethernet to the pole", with optional FTTH (with customer paying full on premises cost up front) for those who want it, and picocells for the oldies would solve the problem. Why blow $3,000 + financing costs per premises if fiber is not being used?
Also, could they hurry the frack up and deploy it. 2021 is way too long to rot on DOCSIS 2.0 now that Optus have stopped investing in their network.
I had a Toshiba Lifebook P1610 from 2006 for notetaking, it was an awesome 10" convertible with better build quality, processor, battery life and screen than any netbook trash on the market five years later.
If they could make one thinner and lighter, with a bay trail processor, I'd gladly pay Surface Pro money for it.
"2010.... lol Try ca~2006/7 whenever it was that the C2D Conroe hit."
Yeah, three years ago I upgraded my desktop 2.4Ghz C2D Conroe to an Overstock.com Yorkfield Q9550 C2Q. Overclocked it to 4Ghz, for a total cost of $45 including a new cooler and shipping.
I'm thinking it'll do fine for another few years.
"Worse than prices rises is the fact that NBNCo are building a fibre network, while at the same time predicting that 50% will connect at 12/1Mbps."
What's worse is that 90% of customers could be immediately (within 2 years) serviced by 100Mbit/100Mbit VDSL2, with fiber hooked up on an at request/need basis, ala Google Fiber.
Instead we have a decade of infrastructure stagnation for the majority of customers who sit on obsolete and abandoned ADSL/Cable and are not connected to NBN fiber. Meanwhile Labor delays the build out as it tries to massage the expenditure numbers in the budget.
The reason is that Google pays a per user license. They're not paying Microsoft to make email work on non-standards compliant Microsoft phones.
If Microsoft wanted the could offer Activesync royalty free to Win8 phones. Boom, problem solved. But what they really want a scapegoat in the antitrust trial they just lost.
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