Posts by Don Jefe

MYSTERIOUS Siberia CRATER: ALIENS or METEOR not involved, officials insist

Re: Great Old Ones incoming

Worship Cthulhu. Make sacrifice unto Cthulhu. Venerate Cthulhu. Obey Cthulhu. Fear Cthulhu. Give unto Cthulhu willingly and long for the eternal silence and peace to be found in the darkness of His eternal embrace.

Do not blame, accuse, doubt Cthulhu. Seek not to chastise Cthulhu. Lest yours will be the eternal screaming of your soul and the reek of the burning flesh from all you know and love. Yea, transgress not against The Child of Light and Father of Despair would ye hope for peace eternal when the rude clay imprisoning your True Being is destroyed.

This big fucking hole is consistent with a big fucking hole. That much is certain. Beyond that it's consistent with a lot of things.

A big hole like this is consistent with, but not proof of, the Ninth Seal of Y'Gloth being washed in the menstrual blood of a virgin Laplander born under a Sulphur Moon as the final element in awakening Cthulhu, Lord of Silence, to rend in twain the Angelic Gates imprisoning Leviathan and begin the March of 'The Not'.

The big hole is certainly interesting, but you're melding a number of issues together and causing you unnecessary concern, and leading your thoughts in the wrong direction. Regardless of your beliefs/feelings/happy ignorance, you're doing yourself, and others, a disservice with crazy talk. There are a lot of questions and concerns about fracking, there's no doubt. As it stands right now I have declined to lease my property in Western Pennsylvania because as an Engineer I'm not satisfied with the information that's presently available. I'm not saying anything beyond I want to know more. It's far too early for anyone to have valid information regarding the mega-fracking projects. This is a time for watching, not acting.

But when you pop off with factually limited commentary like that you're giving the 'other side' ammunition; that's pretty dumb. You can't draw corollaries between the pockmarked surface and the Big Hole. The not Big Hole and other undulations in the permafrost are a natural function of permafrost. It looks solid and it feels solid (and cold) but it's actually a very delicate thing that a few research projects I'm aware of are studying permafrost as a model in chaotic numbers theories.

Permafrost is kind of like a box packing peanuts. It fills a void, but is not very dense. Permafrost is a lattice work of solids like rocks and dirt with the spaces in between filled with ice. Natural disturbances in the Earth (tectonic movements for example) don't have to be strong enough to move the solids in the lattice, just disturb the ice enough to allow some solids to move. Gravity, being impervious to the cold, still works though, so the solids drop onto solids below and that chain reaction occurs until the solids encounter a space where the lattice can support the new solids.

Less common, but extra cool, is ice 'lensing' where, for example, a rock on the surface is heated sufficiently by the Sun to partially melt the snow and ice it is resting on (it really doesn't take much) and a sudden temperature drop (very common) 'flash freezes' the melted snow/ice. It can create a surprisingly clear lens that let's sunlight beneath the surface of the snow/ice. The resultant heat is then trapped in a very well insulated place thus being much more efficient at melting the ice above, and below. My previous paragraph deals with how the liberated solids behave.*

Incidentally, risks of melting the ice in the permafrost lattice is why buildings down in the Tundra and Steppe are built on stilts and, in big structures, air is pumped out from the underside of the buildings. The air trapped beneath an insulated building is more than sufficient to change an above grade building into a below grade bunker very quickly.

If you're interested in something neat, check out the heat pipes that support the Alyeska Pipeline in Alaska. There's something like 125,000 of those posts that support the pipeline. They transfer ground heat into the air to prevent it from destabilizing the permafrost and causing the pipeline to collapse. It's really cool.

Anyway, my point wasn't to be a dick (hope I didn't come off as one). I just thought it was important you knew that disturbances in permafrost are common, varied, and sometimes (like with the Big Hole) really bizarre. Jumping straight to a commercial culprit (any culprit beyond 'nature' really) without understanding other naturally occurring possibilities first isn't ever going to result in factual answers (factual being, I assume, what you prefer).

*That lensing effect I mentioned earlier is a very, very cool thing. When we still had a field office in Dead Horse, Alaska the phenomenon would sometimes occur when exhaust from a piece of equipment left idling would partially thaw the ice and would instantly freeze again when the equipment was moved. It sometimes created a startlingly clear window through the ice. Sometimes even far enough down to see the road we drove on in the summer. Very cool.

HP CEO Meg Whitman dons TRIPLE CROWN of POWER

Re: Corporate governance—crowned

I'm not sure who told you that's what a Board is supposed to do, but don't take investment advice from them.

Your Board of Directors most important function is to facilitate the high level components of strategies developed by Executive Management. That's why it's so crucial who your Board Members are. Your Board is your very own high power lobbyist conglomerate you send out to enable things and to solve problems. Your Board is also how you squash activist investors like Ralph Nader and ensure Congressmen vote the right way on pending legislation.

A really good way to assess strategic potential in a company is to look at how many of the Board Members belong to institutional investors and who they replaced. You'll always have a few representatives of your largest institutional investors on your Board (note: those Board Members only represent the interests of the institutions they represent, not other investors) but if you've got an investor heavy Board that's really bad. Additional Investor Board Members are typically put in place because the company didn't have the wherewithal to prevent it. It's a punishment. It also means your Board my be heading towards impotence and you need to replace the weaker Members.

If you're on top of your game, the Board works for you. If there are big problems in the company and institutional investors are creeping onto the Board it's a very bad sign. Those investor Board Members have only their investors in mind, fuck the other investors and fuck the company.

I tend to start pulling money out of companies when investors start shaking up their Boards. Those are the Board Members who are always responsible for stopping R&D, advocating for shitty manufacturing and breaking companies into wee bits to be sold off to their buddies. Any Board that isn't the Strategic Special Forces for a company is an impending disaster.

Native Americans KILLED AND ATE DUMBO, say archaeologists

Re: Lovable Gomphothere

Fools. You give me a Wikipedia reference? WTF! Their tag line isn't 'The Encyclopedia Anyone Can Edit', not 'The Encyclopedia any Human can edit'. Of course the whistle pigs are going to edit the entries about their bloodlust. Christ.

I've never eaten a whistle pig. Never had the chance. My 220 Swift varmint rifle left nothing but a fine red mist and some teeth. The teeth are cool for cuff links, and for filler in piñatas, but not good for eating. I'm all about varmint management through engineering and science now anyway. I built some tiny tanks to drive into their dens so I could engage them at close range, but the umbilical gets snagged too easily and radio won't penetrate that deep. I'm working on a system of micro repeater arrays that I will hide in baited whistle pig food and then deposit around their dens, so as to let their own greed be their undoing.

Whistle Pig brand Rye Whiskey is good. It's not my favorite, but their 3-Liter travel bottle is nice for an afternoon with a couple of friends who may not like more robust whiskey. It's also useful as a last ditch tactic in strategic retreats where a small alcohol fire can give you time to throw women and children at the enemy. Everybody should have a barrel or two around the house.

Lovable Gomphothere

I wish I had known the word gomphothere before just now. That's a great username.

I take exception to the 'lovable' descriptor though. Humans are terrible at assessing behavior based on looks. Just look at copperhead snakes and whistle pigs. 'Everybody' is scared of the mildly poisonous snake and thinks the whistle pig is cute. That's just stupid. The snake is slow, not really dangerous and wants nothing to do with you. The whistle pig on the other hand wants to tear your face off, is capable of doing so and will lay traps to disable the unwary by breaking their legs to prevent escape while their young feast on your dying, but not yet dead, body. They can also kill a dog almost instantly, but generally have no malice toward other quadrupeds.

Also. The hippopotamus! You rarely see depictions of a hippo covered in the entrails and fluids of their trampled foes. But that's how they normally appear in the wild. That's why they hang out in the water so much you know. Trying to clean the fear shit of enemies from their hide. So I think assuming the gomphothere was lovable is not only foolishly arrogant, it is dangerous.

MPs wave through Blighty's 'EMERGENCY' surveillance laws

Re: unsurprised, but ...really?

Tonga!

Re: Priceless

You can learn a lot from metadata, but at the end of the day there's a lot of assumption and somewhat less than logical correlation of information involved. Content removes a lot of that speculation and marketing research, but that's the nastiest part of all of this. Collecting content, plus metadata, is going to be pushed, and pushed hard, as a way to improve the accuracy of various terrorist detectors and reduce false positives in profile analysis.

You watch. People are going to support having their content captured if it means the anti-terror people will stop raiding their homes and offices in the course of 'following a lead'. They'll support it when a 'publicly convicted' terrorist goes free because his defense team argued marketing companies (you do know that's who creates the profile algorithms for the UK and US govts?) don't have the knowledge necessary to identify a terrorist. Whatever the specifics turn out to be, a massive miscarriage of justice will pave the way for everyone's content to be grabbed and people will consider it the lesser of two evils.

Dungeons & Dragons relaunches with 'freemium' version 5.0

Re: What changes?

Saving throw modifiers are more complex for one example. The new system includes [You need the version of 'Saving Throws and You' designed for your race. Visit the website to purchase]. As you can see, while a little more complex, the new system does seem to more accurately reflect reality.

Can it be true? That I hold here, in my mortal hand, a nugget of PUREST ... BLACK?

Re: hmmmm

The beam could care less about the color/material your car is painted/made of. As long as the windows are made of safety glass you'll bounce more than enough signal back for an accurate speed reading. Same with your headlamps. You're pushing at least two fairly efficient reflectors in front of you everywhere you go (in your car).

In movies and various 'tales of urban wisdom' you'll hear people say 'cops aim for the chrome bumper on your car so they can get a better reading'. Obviously, few cars have chrome bumpers these days, but the shiny bumper was never the point. They aim for the bumper because that gives the beam the longest exposure with the vehicle. To the best of my knowledge, 'single reading' systems haven't been used by police since the 1960's. Since that time they average your speed which is, generally, better for you assuming you aren't accelerating at a rate that's going to blow past the limit in a blink anyway :)

Groundbreaking

'This [Vantablack] is not a groundbreaking thing," sniffed professor George Stylios at the school of textiles and design at Heriot-Watt university to the Graun. "It's a progression of a group of scientists, of companies....

What an asinine thing for someone to say. Of course it's a progression. Everything is a progression. It's not like carbon nanotubes were just falling out of the sky and a random ape descendent, half sloshed on fermented beverages picked them up. Then, taken with their exceptional blackness, invented an alphabet and language so the acrylic packaging for the product would be attractive and informative to the potential buyers from an aerospace sector that suddenly appeared behind him, waving fistfuls of standardized trade tokens, then popped on over to his personal computer to draft a press release.

What an ass.

British data cops: We need greater powers and more money

Data needs cops because without oversight government agencies and private businesses could root through every aspect of your life. Tailoring propaganda and marketing messages to frighten/appeal, specifically, to you. Without data cops you could get on some kind of list, composed by analyzing you and potentially getting you in trouble for something you don't even know you did (Know any brown people or Muslims? How about any Irish?).

Even worse, without data cops, people could get access to your personal info without paying the proper fees or establishing some sort of quango to manage large fee schemes. Would you really deny your MP's those funds? That might get you on a list you know.

Re: FUCK OFF

Yeah, that bit about chasing fuckers down and punishing their failures, that never happens. Doesn't matter what country or government. Did you notice how they were unable to collect over half of the fines they levied? That's not just poor performance, that's abject failure.

It is far, far worse to levy fines and not collect them than to not levy them at all. It's a huge sign on their back that says 'pussy'. Only an idiot (I'm not calling you an idiot) would assess that particular glass as 'half full'. Entities taking risks with the data they oversee look at a 50%+ failure rate as evidence they can take more, and larger, risks. It also encourages those who need to shift budget figures around to become risk takers.

With a more than 50% chance any fines will be greatly reduced, or not collected at all, you're entering the statistical probability territory most often occupied by cats, falling pianos and Catholic abortion doctors. You're going to see call volume rise and prosecution fall as more and more people realize the odds are on their side. Odds will just get better for not getting fined as less and less money is dumped into a hole where half of any potential return is wiped out before the budget is even submitted.

As with most things, money won't fix this problem. It'll just make everything worse. If this were a company I had purchased, or had been sent to correct, I would scuttle the whole thing and rebuild based on avoiding the legal mechanisms that had destroyed revenue from fines. No way in hell I would dump more money into it. It's better to be toothless than to feign prowess at biting, but actually be toothless.

Will GCHQ furtle this El Reg readers' poll? Team Snowden suggests: Yes

Financial Damage

'Part of our mission is to protect against those who would do us financial damage. To accomplish that we are going to need £18,000,000,000 in our budget this year to protect us from $100,000,000 in potential damage'.

Phab-u-less: Huge MONSTER iPhone 6 not due until 2015 – claim

Re: I for one

The humor angle was what I was aiming for :) I'm 100% for people using what is comfortable for them.

Re: I for one

Got wee little hands eh? Don't let it get you down. Surely that fact would make your willy look bigger.

LightSquared backer sues FCC over spectrum shindy

Re: STUPIDITY!

You've over complicated things. The technical issues were actually just the last problem, the entire idea had been screwy from the start. LightSquared came as close as it's possible to come to outright fraud.

They positioned their provisional license as an intermediary step on the way to full regulatory approval. That was never the case. The provisional license was issued to ascertain if frequency bleed over concerns expressed by everyone, except LightSquared, were valid concerns. That was it. If the tests went well the potential was there for more discussion, but the tests didn't go well. LightSquared got exactly what they were promised.

Back to the almost-fraud, LightSquared did disclose the reality of the situation (they're shady, not stupid). However, that disclosure utilized every sketchy legal argument and penis pill style 'gotcha' known to man. As far as I know, they didn't do anything illegal, but they didn't do anything ethical either. It is fucking hilarious that Harbinger got burned by the same tactics they use though.

This entire fiasco needs to be ended and buried. Put it in textbooks as an object lesson to future MBA's. The SEC could put a quick fast end to all this if they wanted to. They might not find anything, but it would be just great to tie up the money of everybody involved for years. Jackasses.

LOHAN seeks stirring motto for spaceplane mission patch

Getting High - In Space

Getting High - In Space

Canuck reader threatens suicide over exact dimensions of SPAAAACE!

Interview

I suspect Babcock may be a terrorist. Who else would think such extreme measures over a wholly insignificant issue could be justified. You should have the email he sent you checked for Anthrax.

FBI: We found US MILITARY AIRCRAFT INTEL during raid on alleged Chinese hacker

220MB File

The 220MB F-22 file is useless. All it shows is how to cut F-22 pilots out of the cockpit with a chainsaw when the canopy won't open.

Not really.

Dead letter office: ancient smallpox sample turns up in old US lab

Re: Is it just me.....

As incredibly destructive as nuclear weapons eventually became there are a lot of people who see it as a positive thing. Between WWI and the nuclear bombng of Hiroshima and Nagasaki the world had been pouring nearly unlimited resources into chemical and biological weapons research. Nuclear arms didn't stop the research into those things, but it did make them a secondary issue, especially after hydrogen weapons testing began in the USSR.

The world 'chose' nuclear as the vehicle of mass destruction and pretty much everybody except truly mad weapons scientists were pretty happy with that. Everybody was, rightly, afraid of biological weapons. You can't reliably control them once they've been deployed and the capraciousness of the natural world isn't something most people want as the only safeguard between killing the enemy and killing the enemy and everybody on your side as well.

It's all a great big fucked up mess, but I'm glad nuclear was the route we went down.

Fair enough.

'Apple is terrified of women’s bodies and women’s pleasure' – fresh tech sex storm

Re: "Whilst I hate censorship, and clit should obviously be allowed,"

It made perfect sense in its original form, but his comment has obviously been censored by a rouge faction of the Censorship Council on Censorship. It's a wonder his comment got posted at all.

Re: An Insightful Person Once Told Me...

You've got your Societal Collapse Indicator turned wrong way round. The 'Noble Savage' is an artifice created by elements of a society who wish to differentiate themselves from the peasants in futile attempts to appear greater than they are. The 'Noble Savage' is the equivalent of a plot hole filler that serves as a contemporary, anthropological 'missing link'.

The entire concept is an underdeveloped 'logical step' that establishes an imaginary bridge between socioeconomic classes. That bridge is a crucial element in societies embracing vertically oriented classism because it creates a route by which people can 'move up' in society. If the peasants can become middle class then those in the middle class can become part of the upper class. But the key word there is 'imaginary'. There is no permanent 'bridge' and each person my devise ways to create their own bridge.

But that's hard. People would rather go to great lengths to make themselves appear to belong to a higher class by adopting attitudes and affectations they believe are indicative of the behavior of higher classes. You can always tell what's going on when people think savagery, or lack thereof, is a function of socioeconomic status. A confused middle class believes savagery falls of as class rises, but the reverse is actually the case. Savagery falls off in the middle class, due to mediocrity, but increases in either direction. The savagery of the peasants is very visible because it tends to happen on a small scale that individuals can relate to. Upperclass savagery is far nastier, but the scale is so large people mistake it for randomized currents in a huge system simply because they don't like reminding themselves they are effectively no closer to the upperclass than the hobo waving the broken beer bottle at them.

From my perspective societal artifices like 'Noble Savage' are like the mechanics of farting. The first person to bring it up is the source of their own complaint.

Re: Is this really Apple gender discrimination rubbing out

A pomegranate cut in half looks like disease ridden female genitalia. It's OK to have second thoughts if you see a vagina that looks like that. Now a sheep on the other hand, that's a dead ringer for an Eskimo with her pants half down.

Forget the mobile patent wars – these web giants have patented your DATA CENTER

Re: We don't have to honor invalid patents

The Supreme Court determines if something is Constitutional or not. They can't rule in a way that's unconstitutional simply because they decide what's Constitutional.

Re: @keithpeter - Non-obviousness

No, it's still patentable in the UK. The information I provided isn't sufficient for someone else to actually replicate what I've done. Your point ties in very well with the 'obvious' component in this discussion. Transferring heat through a pressurized system has been obvious since some incredibly bright spark invented distilled beverages. In my earlier comment I said my process is 'just' an extra leg in a system lots of people use, but the magic is in that 'just'. Actually making it work took years of research and several million dollars. It's a system of superheated gasses plumbed through molds containing molten metal, so it's actually very complicated.

Had I not already had the patent and had described the actual working details on an industry site it might have caused trouble. But simple public disclosure isn't enough to prevent someone else from receiving a patent. But since I already have the patent the information is publicly available, others just can't use it without a license or the patent protection period expires.

The previous sentence ties in with the other persons comment (I forgot your username, apologies). For competitive advantage purposes I generally don't patent the idea. Those things stay in house as trade secrets. If someone came at me with infringement claims on our secrets I have little doubt I would be able to get the suit tossed out (that a whole different ball of wax though).

The things I do seek patents on generally meet some pretty specific criteria. Firstly, I want those things to be applicable across large swaths of my industry. I want confidence that a majority of the industry will want to use the technology through licensing. I also want it to directly, or indirectly, drive customers to me for our primary mission which is the design, engineering and manufacture of bespoke manufacturing equipment. Licensing the technology should create new opportunities for the licensee and they'll come to us for equipment to realize those opportunities. It should also be suitable for licensing. If it doesn't do those things I probably won't seek patent protection for it. I'll just keep it internal.

But those things are a business decision that works for me. It's certainly not the only way to do things.

Re: Non-obviousness

The USPTO isn't privatized. That's for god damn certain. They're more insular, secretive and bureaucratic than the FBI or State Department.

Cost is not a factor in the patent review process, read my post above. Stuff gets through because there's a limited amount of information available for reviewers to use in the patent granting process.

Re: Non-obviousness

The non-obvious part and prior art are the two most misunderstood part of the US Patent system and they're quite interconnected.

In your summary of 'non-obvious' you mention the 'specialist in the field', that specialist is really hard to find. That's because you and the USPTO have different ways of finding that specialist. When your patent application is being reviewed it is sent to a USPTO patent attorney who has knowledge of the field (knowledge usually gleaned through their undergrad studies before entering the law college. So 4+ years out of date once they start at USPTO). With their outdated knowledge they are then restricted to a set of officially sanctioned sources and the USPTP Prior Art database.

That last bit is crucial for anyone interested in how the system actually works. For the purpose of granting a patent the reviewing attorney has a list of approved research materials (usually largely comprised of leading industry journals) and the Prior Art database. If no conflicts are found within that material and only that material the patent will be granted if everything else is in order.

Tying this all together, for the purposes of granting a patent, Prior Art is only what is in the Prior Art database and the approved research materials list. That's it, no exceptions. Not in those places means it is not Prior Art.

Furthermore, Prior Art does not mean that 'Widget-1' must be completely unique. It means that some aspect of 'Widget-1' must be substantially different from other 'Widgets' that reach the same ends/does the same thing. For example, I have a patent dealing with controlling the temperature of molds used in metal casting with a variety of high pressure gasses. That's obviously not a new idea, but my system uses the superheated gasses that have been through molds in process and sends them back to preheat 'cold' molds. Reduces energy costs for mold temperature control more than 20% over the traditional systems. It's the same system everybody else uses, mine 'just' has an extra leg.

The bulk of my patent application was the Prior Art of others (which is the whole idea of Prior Art). I demonstrated what those other patented systems did and I demonstrated how mine was different. The existence of Prior Art makes it easier to get a patent if you are actually doing something unique. For the true inventor and innovator Prior Art is the best thing since sliced bread, as it has worked out kinks long before you came along.

Now, move to defending yourself against accusations of infringement and everything above changes. If you can demonstrate you were doing (whatever) long before your accuser came along or demonstrate that someone else was doing so and it was documented knowledge then you've got a real defense. Mention in pay for publication journals or websites not considered emblematic of the art in question won't do, but if it's real information that meets some fairly low standards then you've got a real chance of having the patent overthrown and getting PITA compensation from your accuser.

Yes, there is a lot fucked up in the patent system, a whole lot, but there's a lot of misunderstandng among the general public about how it all actually works and what terms mean to the USPTO and what they mean to you. The process of getting a patent and defending against an accuser are wholly, 100% separated processes and if you try to amalgamate them you'll just leave more confused than when you came in.

The entire system is not broken, the system is being abused by entities that are destabilizing things for legitimate inventors and innovators. Software has no place in the current patent system. I don't know if software needs its own protection system or should be kept a trade secret if you don't want to share, I really don't know. But I'm absolutely certain it shouldn't be included in the patent system that does actually work pretty well if not abused.

Do your execs take mobile security seriously?

Re: Questions

Yeah. I suppose I am overly concerned about it all. People have always told me I had odd priorities anyway. I mean, the ankle bracelet is pretty good at broadcasting my location. The resolution on that thing is pretty phenomenal you know. If I go more than a meter or so outside my compound the security service has people out there immediately screaming at me to go back. I've tried talking to the those guys, but they're a bunch of assholes. What the fuck kind of state is 'Trooper' anyway?

Yeah, I got that too. It has taken me hours to drive around and redo the survey 25-30 times to test if my initial IP address was somehow causing the formatting problem. You should try that too.

Questions

I like surveys that ask 'Where are you located geographically?'. I don't know that it's any of their business, but it raises some important questions.

What if I'm in a plane, or ship, over/in international waters?

What if I've reversed the Schrodinger's Cat exercise and therefore not only not know where I am, I'm not able to confirm I'm actually anywhere. The 'outside' may exist, but then again, it might not. For arguments sake, let's say I looked and there did appear to be an 'outside'. Since that was after I had read the question does it want me to respond with what I knew, or didn't, before or after the existence of 'outside' confirmed?

What if, either by science, or ancient forbidden knowledge, I was in two or more places simultaneously? Which me is the 'index key' me? Take Voldemort for example. He was able to divide his being into multiple parts so that of he were killed he could return to life as long as at least one of those parts was extant. Therefore, each part must contain a complete copy of Voldemort. Since we know he did not lose memories the individual parts are, in fact, real time 'mirrored servers', which one is the question directed at?

On the science side, if I'm using a matter teleportation device it's possible for me to be in three places at once, Cmdr. William Riker has documented the experience. At the same time it's possible for me to be completely in the pattern buffer which just gets difficult. Presumably the 'Don Jefe' image would be too large for a single component so it would be split across multiple storage arrays in the most efficient way possible. Which component would be the correct answer? Since digital data is just another take on Schrodinger's Cat, it gets even more difficult.

The survey industry really needs to step up their game. If they want to know where I'm at they they should at least add a text field to that question.

Military-grade bruiser: Getac F110 rugged tablet... is no iPad

Re: !!!

I see where you could get confused. There's a very outdated assumption that Western militaries are there to defend the citizens of their countries and the various interest of those countries. Nearly every day, since mid-August 1945 that assumption has become a little less valid. Militaries have been reorganized to act as a kickstand for industrial infrastructure that helps support ignorance 'Knowledge economies'.

With that in mind, Windows is perfect for modern military use. You can't artificially support economies with FOSS you know. You've got to have expensive licenses and a deliberate lack of interoperability to support today's modern warfighter, and the economy that (kind of) pays them.

You can have serviceability and a completely sealed case. Submariners the world over report being pleased with the technology.

But you're right about the ports. We have a lot of ruggedized gear here and it's (almost) always either heat or something creeping in through a poorly sealed port. It doesn't actually take a whole lot of sand, metal shavings, sawdust, etc... to slip in unnoticed when you've got a port opened and compromise a seal when you close it back up. Despite their apparent differences, sand and metal shavings are both imbued with the same ancient black magic that allows those things to creep behind things like seals and happily cut there way trough a bit more evertime you open and close the port. Evil. Pure fucking evil.

Satya Nadella: Microsoft's new man presses all the old buttons in LONG memo

Re: "Wheels of change are in motion at Microsoft. "

If you're going to copy and paste comments you should branch out and try it on other sites, your message will travel further. After the third or fourth time you've posted the exact same comment people start to lose attention.

The consistent message tactic is very effective, but you've got to slim it down to a sentence, or less. Politicians and infomercial people are the only ones that don't understand that. You don't want to get grouped in with the dicks and penis pill people.

Get ready for LAYOFFS: Nadella's coma-inducing memo, with subtitles

You're not very good at math are you? It's OK. Lots of people have that problem too. Perhaps you compensate with creative prose or may... Oh. No. I guess not. That sucks.

Re: MS are Floundering

None of this is pro MS, just large business in general. There's a point beyond which a company cannot grow without wildly throwing things into the crowd to see what happens. You become so large that it's impossible to have company wide strategies that you can summarize without being ridiculously vague (we're a services company) or insanely granular (we're a services company with offerings tailored to every possible use imaginable. Please review our latest 35,000 page roadmap).

Hidden behind any large company's flagship products are other products and services nobody even knows exists. Little sub-groups that are bigger than most other businesses, all operating fairly autonomously and there's very little intergroup collaboration or communication. It's all just too large to manage centrally and it's folly to even try. You give those little autonomous groups the resources they request, and enough room to hang themselves, and see what happens. You don't actually get involved unless something goes terribly wrong.

Since everything is under a single brand (Microsoft in this case) it gives the impression that some senior executive is discussing individual products and services with the CEO, but that's not how it works. That's what Directors and Group Directors are for you know.

There's nothing 'wrong' with the shotgun approach, like I said, it's required past a certain point, but the trick is to learn from what doesn't work. You can throw $80M at a project and cancel it in six months, that's fine, but you've got to know why it had to die. You can't just execute a project because the numbers weren't solid without knowing why they weren't solid. It's that part where MS is slipping. They aren't listening or learning. They've become so huge and insular they are mistaking their internal logic as reality. Maybe new guy can fix it. So far he seems like a boring person and that's never good for fixing anything.

Re: I can't believe

There are very, very few companies that last more than a few decades and keep the same focus they had when founded. A well run company will keep a name but evolve to god knows what as the years pass. NCR, IBM, Siemens, Thales, General Electric, Alcoa, Honda, the list goes on. Thales would have raised a few eyebrows if they started business as 'A leading global provider of elevators (and motorized mobile cannon turrets)'.

Of course any company can die, eventually, but it's nearly impossible to kill a well run company. Massive, highly diversified companies can absorb stunning losses and be no worse for wear but companies with small catalogs of offerings are always incredibly vulnerable to changes in fashion and sea changes in their sector no matter how profitable they might be today.

Eventually, all companies must die (and be resurrected in China with hilariously off the mark products) but there's a lot, a whole, whole lot more to staying in business and making fucktons of money than terms like market share or profit and other terms people toss around as if those things meant anything by themselves.

Re: I can't believe

I can't believe it either! They finally invented a time machine that let's users travel back to 1985 and steal 'Letters to the Editor' then bring them into the present to be published online. Fascinating technology.

UK's emergency data slurp: IT giants panicked over 'legal uncertainty'

Re: Let's see if they do retire it in 2016.

@Vimes

You've hit on an issue a lot of people don't know much about. The 'think tank' approach to lawmaking has been extremely popular in the US and UK since the end of WWII. It's kind of like catalog shopping for laws.

It's not that those think tanks are at the center of a huge conspiracy. It's that they spend their time writing up policy and law proposals. The variety of nearly turn-key law proposals is stunning and exhaustively comprehensive. You tell them what your looking for and they give you a suitable, 99.9% complete, law proposal for anything you can imagine. It's all really fucked up.

Re: Hasty ??

Somewhere I have the response my Congressional Representative at the time sent to me regarding my protestation of the PATRIOT Act. He agreed some of the measures were heavy handed, but extreme measures were needed to ward off terrorists. Besides, he said, the specific parts of the Act you don't approve of have sunset clauses and require Congress to reauthorize them or they automatically expire.

He says 'I will not be voting for an extension of the Act when the time to vote arrives'. Yeah, he voted for the extension. The Moosedick.

Re: Hasty ??

No type of 'emergency' legislation should ever become part of any (democratic) country's legal structure. If there's a state of permanent emergency that means the government, any government, has failed, completely and utterly. They are obviously incapable of 'leading' a country using the tools and resources already in place.

You know, the those tools and resources they promised to use so effectively if the people only believed in them and voted to put them in office. If they can't make things work within the bounds of 'non-emergency' legislation they are simply unfit for purpose.

All democracies put up with quite a bit of bullshit from their elected lawmakers, because there's the idea those elected know what they're doing. Otherwise not many people would have anything to do with the greasy, ethically deficient grundle scrapers that run for office. They sell themselves as beneficial for the nation because they understand the intricacies of the law and can get the most accomplished because of that self professed expertise.

But if they can't get their job done unless they change the rules there's simply no need for the public to fuck around with sleezeballs you wouldn't let within 1000m of your daughter, or livestock. It doesn't require any special skills to make up new rules that suit your purposes, anyone can do that. Since anyone can make up new rules, let's move to elect fun, hilarious people with interesting personalities. Get rid of the predatory used car salesmen and replace them with people who are at least entertaining.

'Green' Apple: We've smudged a bit off our carbon footprint

Re: BS Flag

The key there is the word 'offset'.

User serviceability isn't automatically 'green'. Sure, sometimes that serviceability can reduce waste, but break even is generally the best case and dig a hole to fill up with baby penguins levels of waste is more common.

The big factor most everyone misses is the overproduction of parts that are packaged for individual markets. Super, ultra simplified, to ensure on demand parts availability globally, at all authorized locations you've got to make fucktons of each part you offer because your supply chain is at least 90 days out. That means you've got to buy enough raw materials or individual components to cover regular production plus warrantable spares plus spares for the channel, have it all ready at the same time and packaged into 'brand cohesion' market specific packaging and do it three or more months in advance. If you make a significant change, like the locking tab on a battery cover (for example) that means you're producing two different parts that all need the packaging bit as well.

The above is negligently simplified, but the point is that it takes enormous amounts of resources to produce spare parts for user serviceable stuff. Most of which won't sell. Some intern in the channel will be assigned to disappearing huge quantities of spare parts every time there's a significant revision or a model is retired.

Yes, it is possible to reduce waste with user serviceable products. But it isn't a given and requires incredible amounts of effort just to figure out if exploring the idea is worthwhile. I'm not saying serviceability is 'bad', but it isn't automatically good either. When you're talking about millions of spare anythings it can snowball really fast and create crazy huge levels of waste.

IBM's $3bn bet on next-gen computers: Carbon nanotubes, neuro chips

Re: O tempora, o mores...

'Very unique' is kind of like that too. The 'very' part can be a differentiator between one of a group of similar, but not identical things, like dogs. 'I use Bloodhounds as Prole Hounds on my estate. The pack leader is very unique because I had fully functional Human arms grafted to it because it was cheaper than engineering paw friendly firearms'. Before that Lord of the Seas Quetzelquatiol Fett Esq. was nearly indistinguishable from his pack mates.

Re: Genius!

My liver uses cutting edge sugar reclamation technology that keeps it supersaturated in pure grain alcohol which acts as a preservative. Half measures are deadly you know.

R&D funds repatriation regulations aren't a rebate, but an exemption. Those regulations are why I call bullshit when large companies cite taxation as an impediment to R&D. You're allowed to completely break it all out; for example, instead of booking $1B in stateside funds as R&D you can book $1B in offshore funds as R&D and that $1B is not taxed. It's a sweet deal, the liberation of existing stateside funds means you now have an $1B in tax exempt (the taxes were already paid on that money) funds to allocate as you wish. Modify departmental margins, offset debt service costs, buyback stock, use as a one time dividend or throw a really big party for yourself.

It's all another of those taxation mechanisms that is perfectly legal, but you've got to be shifting really large amounts of money for it to be worthwhile. But it's also one of those things executives, bent politicians and idiots in the general public 'forget' to mention when raging about taxes. There is, and has been for ~20 years, a direct, dollar for dollar reward for companies willing to actually invest in R&D. A multifaceted reward that affects every aspect of a publicly traded company in the US, but companies don't actually want to do R&D. They just don't want to pay taxes.

Genius!

It's uncanny, the serendipitous coincidence is certainly the work of decades of research into improbability theory. To think, the $2.3 billion pending sale of a server division to an overseas company happening in the same fiscal year as the announcement of a $3 billion research initiative that also meets penalty and tax free fund repatriation regulations for R&D spend.

The odds of that all happening at once are unfathomable. If often seems fortunate when so many great things just happen to fall into place at the same time, but you've got to be careful. You can quickly find yourself in a negative luck equity situation. I sure hope IBM doesn't do something crazy now and enter into long term funds matching projects with the Federal government. Surely they can't be so lucky as to get out of taxes on repatriated funds and have the taxpayer cover several billion in IP generating research that the government will buy in the future. Can any one company be so very lucky?

Snowden leaks latest: NSA, FBI g-men spied on Muslim-American chiefs

Re: We are all humans first....

Dissolution of borders will not happen without actually having a single government to 'rule' the planet. I don't know about you, but I don't know any government, except with me as Supreme Chancellor of Earth, that I want in charge of everything.

Borders are like giving your kids separate bedrooms. You don't have to do it, but it greatly reduces the chances of the weaker ones getting killed in a violent territorial dispute.

That's always the problem with internal conflicts, they cause too much trouble and sooner or later your slutty cousin ends up marrying one of the troublemakers (or whatever) and it gets awkward to deal with, especially with the Internet around. That's why everybody knows it's best to find enemies in a far off land, ideally that look different and speak a different language, if you're going to artificially support your economy by militarizing your heavy industry sector.

The Middle Easterners turned out to be a really shitty choice for bad guys. They've got zero style or exciting media presence. Beheadings? WTF is that? Your message is just lost if your propaganda has to be heavily edited to get on the news. You're just going to piss people off with that sort of shit.

I liked the USSR. As enemies go, snappily dressed guys marching around in snow with mobile ICBM platforms and great color coordination is hard to beat. The Commies may be gone, but now we've got an actual comic book supervillain who hunts apex predators with a crossbow while he's shirtless. That's what we need to take advantage of. No religious crap, no 2,000 year old real estate disputes, just full scale global annihilation one Big Red Button away. Everybody can get behind that. Plus there's a real chance an entire new field of anti-Russia blockbuster films would emerge. Movies have been stuck on repeat since the Commies went broke you know.

Re: Not surprised

But without those camps we wouldn't have George Takei. At least not George Takei as a retired Starfleet Officer, playwright and all around hilarious person.