Posts by AGR 16 publicly visible posts • joined 7 Dec 2012
I happen to live on the cusp of the signals coming from two directions (and I live in a built-up area). In order for a DAB signal to reach into my brick-built house, I would need to connect DAB devices to an external aerial. (Learned that at the expense of two different DAB receivers.)
That's innovation.
I can only receive BBC 6Music through a desktop/laptop or through my Freeview telly. Frustrating.
I had a QNap box that stopped speaking to my Macs after Mountain Lion was released. Apple apparently messed about with AFP and Qnap has been slow in catching up with the changes. I then had problems getting consistent smb mappings with QNAP.
Moved to Synology for my NAS and have had no problems with SMB mappings at all using the Macs.
Up until I bought the Synology box, I always found it a nightmare to do any home network sharing.
I ended up buying Apple because I got tired of having to rebuild my wintel machines every six months or so. It was taking up some valuable life credit units. Although all is not sunny with OS X, I'm still a fan (not a fanboi, though.)
Not to mention their virtual suppression of the DAT recording technology - after buying Columbia - that was on its way to becoming affordable enough to allow DIY musicians the ability to distribute their work in digital format. How much different the music industry would have been had Sony not bought Columbia and hitched its wagon to the Mob-style tactics of music industry lawyers.
Sorry, actually don't have the time to go look it up. I saw it in two different places and can't recall where. And I should clarify that it was about lobbyists and not campaign contributions.
Having worked at an energy company, though, I can tell you that climate change legislation is looked at as an opportunity and not a threat.
As of about 4 or 5 years ago, the amount of pro-Warmist lobbying money floating around Washington DC was running at about 20-1 compared to anti-Warmist, most of that corporate (I'm not sure what the split is now….)
Some of the biggest petitioners for warmist laws are industry. GE and Enron were the biggest under the Bush administration. GE because they had sunk a lot of R&D into light bulb and wind farm technology that couldn't be commercially viable without subsidies both direct (government grants) and indirect (laws requiring the use of their technology). Enron because their energy trading technology could be converted to trading carbon credits (just as all the other trading floors run by the various energy and oil companies have done since.)
The oil and energy companies actually have a vested interest in making their product more scarce, and laws are as good as anything else at making that happen. And if they can get government grants and subsidy in the process, why not lobby for more? Big companies don't mind regulation…It's a barrier to entry for smaller leaner operations.
It is not just hippies vs. the Man. The Man has a lot of vested interest in raising the spector of global warming, too.
The US Army got concerned in the 90s about how so many new recruits were coming in and scoring perfectly on the firing range without ever having used a weapon before. Turns out that Duck Hunt (and games like it) were responsible.
Do video games cause violent outbreaks?...Nah...But they do improve accuracy.
A more realistic study would be looking into the use of psychiatric drugs; I don't think I've heard of any mass shootings where the perpetrators had not been on some kind of anti-depressant other substance that affects brain chemistry. Doubt that would happen because big Pharma is a big political campaign contributor.
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