Posts by Dan Paul 1582 publicly visible posts • joined 3 Jul 2007
I guess that France just wants to rob American companies to pay for Frances inability to provide a better product or compete. Too bad that soon the whole internet is going to become unavailable for the entire EU because of it. Why should they pay an unjust and capricious tax when they can just blackhole any European IP address and send them a 404 error? Oh and might as well "forget them".
There is a wider world out there beyond the borders of France and this amounts to the same kind of tactics that China is doing. Economic Blackmail. Witness cases against Qualcomm who has valid patents on chips and technology that Chinese companies don't wish to pay for.
Note to US Companies: Don't negotiate with terrorists or blackmailers.
These people aren't your romantic notion of pirates, they are thieving criminals, plain and simple.
Taking away all their ill gotten gains and sending them to jail will stop them eventually.
Their "customers" are another matter. They will get caught (all those shipping and credit card records) and will whine and complain they didn't do anything wrong when they clearly bought stolen property and facilitated a criminal enterprise across state lines. Technically that makes the whole thing eleigible for RICO statutes and that puts a whole new perpsective on them, a FEDERAL one.
Let's see $140 for real Win 7 Pro on NewEgg vs a couple of years in the pokey and confiscation of all your worldly goods and a felony criminal record that prevents you from ever having a real job or even voting.
I know what choice I would make.
all the scenarios that crop up when driving. Maybe some but not all. If there were such software, then GPS would be infallible, never making ANY mistakes. We all know that isn't true.
On large freeways on long trips, driverless cars could be reasonably safe, but city driving will be much less safe than an experienced human driver would make it, especially if you wanted to get there in a reasonable time. Then add the complexity of places where the simple act of driving yourself equates to insanity such as Italy, India, China, NYC, LA and many others. Machines have a hard time compensating for the random actions of humans.
Have an upvote, theres no "maybe" about it. Obama has meddled in the affairs of almost every agency in the administration. He has a difficult time letting people do their jobs and has lost several key military and staff advisers because of it. He does not like the fact that the people responsible for the NSA and CIA already know more than Obama ever will. His advice goes unheeded because it's useless. The NSA and CIA are not charged with protecting private business.
The solution is the create another agency that is entirely beholden to him so he can point at it and say he is "tough on hackers" (when nothing could be further from the truth) while bending the new bureaucracy to his will. On a political perspective, it gives him his own personal spy agency. Given how the IRS has acted during the Obama Administration, that becomes a very scary proposition.
Not Obama, or any other Green AGW fool. They want us all in the cold and dark living in huts with mud floors and wearing hairshirts, paying their artificial carbon taxes.
The "economy" would be alot better off if conservatives ran it because they would not have printed us into 20 TRILLION dollars of debt. That's American OIL and the resulting low cost of gasoline that is helping to bring the US out of a depression, not "green hot air". The democrats have stymied every bill that republicans have ever offered and Obama can't even begin to be honest or transparent about his agenda. He'd rather veto even bipartisan legislation and manipulate his cabinet to regulate any republican successes into oblivion.
Hate to break it to you but ANY media device that connects to the Internet will divulge your viewing habits.
It's the 2014 equivalent of having a Neilsen ratings box. If you can't sling ad's, monitize the data.
The only reason we might want the capability is to update the firmware of the TV/DVD/Bluray player. I've only had to do this twice but the DRM from the studios sometimes needs to be updated in the player or it won't read the disk.
My older wired ethernet media equipment had to be updated manually but newer equipment might do that "automagically" since all the new ones are WIFI capable.
Phillips just came out with a new 40" UHD Monitor only with no TV tuner that would accommodate a PC and not need a TV LIcense over there. Maybe some of the other TV vendors will follow suit.
And there's people out there who actually WANT the "Internet of Things".
Dear Brid-Anne,
Please get a grip on yourself. ALL SCIENCE FICTION MOVIES do not agree with the "critics" because the "critics" only know how to criticize. I'll go out on a limb and bet this wasn't a review you relished doing.
If this or a similar movie is going to bother you, please only review "films" not science fiction movies.
Taking yourself so seriously is only going to result in excess lines around your eyes, migrain headaches, a hitch in your panties and incredibly nasal whining. You should avoid it at all costs.
Please assign movie revues to someone who posesses a sense of humor as life is difficult enough without someone sucking all the joy out of it.
I saw the movie myself this weekend and while the acting wasn't spectacular it wasn't as bad as BAP wants to make it. I have seen much worse, that was reviewed by the "critics" as being better.
Even my girlfriend liked the movie, much more than she expected.
If you like "Space Opera" as a genre, this flick was not too bad. The scope of the story was too fast and condensed to make much of the characters, a common problem with movies that should have been multi-part or even longer. Unfortunately, "critics" only think that better writing or dialog is the solution when I think too much of the movie ended up up on the cutting room floor. Some subjects just need more time. Space Opera is one of them as most fiction of the genre is multi-part.
The visuals were quite well done and in many movies that is a feat by itself. This was not a "Sci-Fi" made for TV movie with effects from District Nine. The fly over of Jupiter was amazing. The landings though the clouds were very nice. There weren't any obvious issues except the minor overuse of flying the anti-gravity boots.
Mila Kunis was a better, more believable choice for Jupiter the scullery maid/Cinderella than Portman, Eddie Redmayne was the best pompous villain I've seen in a while, regal, arrogant and vicious, Tatum Channing was a good bodyguard/soldier character but wasn't given enough screen time to develop the romance between he and Jupiter Jones. This DID come off as contrived. There were a dozen other characters that were kind of glossed over and could have been given more time as well.
It was enjoyable as long as you didn't confuse it with a serious "film". You had to take it at face value, a Science Fiction movie done by the Wachowski brothers. Given their heritage, you were expecting "War and Peace"?
Second that, you race baiting schmuck.
Privilige has nothing to do with the fact that there are no blacks even attempting to get into programming or other technical trades. There "might" be say 5% females that are in the curriculum and almost all get hired if they don't drop out.
If there are no black candidates available, how is that racist if they don't get hired to be a programmer or engineer?
If no one wants the training and almost all minorities will get a free ride thru college including room and board here in the US; then the real issue is the culture itself.
It difficult to feel sorry for a self fullfilling prophecy.
The FCC needs to regulate Time Warner and Comcast, prevent their merger, and mandate that they BOTH share each others systems so there can be some form of competition.
They must provide published pricing that is no greater than their "Bundled" pricing, allow alacarte channel offerings and full descriptions of the channels in each "package". The practice of renting equipment must be banned. You can buy it outright, buy it from a retailer or over time but when it's paid for the charges STOP.
Either they share the cable systems with each other or the FCC must allow Verizon or Google to share them. Come hell or high water, there WILL be some competition in cable TV and Internet.
If there is not competition, then it is readily apparent that the FCC has been bought off.
Obama is just a lame duck president and he will be gone in 2016. The fact he would jump from VMware to the Cabinet makes me think something else is going on.
Funny thing but "appointees" from the prior administration are usually the first ones to go in the new administration. Not as much of a "golden parachute" in the government versus the private sector, for sure.
Obama's record of successful IT projects and CIO's, is to be kind; less than stellar.
miming everything that Associated Press used to put on the teletype? Print media did this forever and still do even though the teletype no longer rattles in the corner.
If you browse the web news site, most stories are recaps of other sites news which are lifted from some other source.
The Register does this regularly.
Banks and Credit card companies regularly change their T&C's without telling you by inserting a line in all their contracts stating "We reserve the right to change blah, blah, blah" which legally covers any changes.
They cannot do that to your mortgage (thats a binding contract) but they can do it to your account and credit cards.
If you get all paranoid over the data gleaned from your web browsing habits, just think a minute.
You all have credit or debit cards.
Do you honestly think that those companies do not sell you personal info to the highest bidder?
Better think again.
Location, purchases, balances, frequency, gender, etc are all sold to marketing companies. And I would expect there is even more info available for those who want to pay for it.
Credit reporting agencies, banks, retailers, etc are already buying that info.
Where do you think those pre-approved credit offers come from?
What about your utilities? They sell your demographic info as well.
How about drivers liscences? In New York State, they already sell your demographics and address to marketing companies. Same with email addresses and phone numbers.
How about Government? Are they really above selling the info contained in your taxes?
I don't think so.
You have a whole lot more to be paranoid about than a simple website!
Have an upvote. I was just going to use the Supermarket Loyalty Card example and you beat me to it.
I learned the following from a co-worker who used to support the database of the distributor of many grocery products. The loyalty card data from your shopping saves the store owner thousands over it's lifetime. Combined with all shoppers data, it is enough money to pay for a new Point of Sale system outright and leave plenty left.
The data not only tells them what you purchase but when and whether a sale influences your purchase of alternative products. So your card tells the store owner what to buy and how often so there is less waste and more profit.
It is proof that the data has value and the store renumerates you by giving you a lower price.
If it wasn't for all the paranoia out there, that would be considered a "fair trade".
What we really need is an identification system that cannot be hacked, then the loss of data would have less impact
A successful demo of a robotic hotel will set a precedent for the entire service industry here in the USA. All those lower paying jobs that inexperienced workers were doing will all be gone, leaving us with another huge percentage of unemployment, welfare, foodstamps, medicare increases across the board.
The companies that would be most interested are already the cheapest that exist. There will be no business that can afford to ignore the cost difference and they will ALL follow suit.
No more human bartenders, waiter/waitresses, maids, carwash attendants, nurses, janitors, garbagemen, lawncare & landscaping, etc. The list is endless and will become even longer as robots become more sophisticated.
And don't trot out the comment that "It will create jobs servicing the machines" because we already know that is a whole lot of baloney. Maybe you get 1 new job for every 100 lost.
Humankind would require a whole new re-tooling of the very concepts of society, employment and renumeration and that is highly unlikely.
Facebook, Google etc are the big sites who have the financial wherewithal to create a workaround. They'll still get your data, someway, somehow, don't worry.
What do you think will happen with data from small sites that don't have the finances to change? It will be the same as it was before.
Any privacy legislation will be as ineffectual as the UN.
The whole concept of "keyless" auto's is crazy as a loon. Landrovers are almost uninsurable because it is so easy to steal the entry info and the car. If it is possible to make an iPhone unlock a Tesla, what else can one do with it?
Man in the middle attacks are able to get keycodes from fobs for many vehicles now and since smartphones are even more powerful it will just be a matter of time before some unscrupulous programmer makes an "app" that automatically filches the data from any car for later use.
Expect higher insurance premiums and less coverage as a result of the "convenience".
"Excellent. now where do I get unlimited steaming from. I've got a few shirts that needs steam ironing ;-)"
I hear that Gwyneth Paltrow already has "Unlimited Steaming" service......for her vagina (look it up) and it must have taken a "dive" . Looks like she could press your shirt right after the steam using only her thighs. And note that it slices, it dices too, maybe they are just better when they are warm.
But that's one way to clean up.....
http://satireworld.com/us-news-headlines/201502011439/uninteded-consequences-paltrows-vagina-so-clean-it-squeaks/
http://bestvegetablesteamer.net/news-and-info/gwyneth-paltrow-is-really-into-steamed-vegetables/
The issue with unmanned vehicles success here, is that taxi's, truckers and bus drivers in the US have very militant unions that won't stand still for automation. Just as fully automatic steam boilers are still required to have their human "tender's" be onsite 24/7/365 in most cities, the same will happen with unmanned vehicles.
Exactly, what part of this do the readers not understand? Is communism really that well entrenched over there?
Seems all these fools actually WANT to give their money to the government.
Government is the most inefficient way to distribute money. The best way is not to to take it from the taxpayer in the first place.
A flat tax is really the only way to deal with the inefficient bureaucracy of the tax departments. Kill them all off and save the money then all this "repatriation" nonsense goes away.
10% on everyday people (including government and state employees) and 15% on corporations, NO LOOPHOLES EVER! And EVERY country needs to be at the same rate to avoid tax havens. No VAT, no Sales tax, period end of discussion.
You would be surprised how that concept would affect the efficiency of government. If you combined it with decriminalization of drugs, there would be the largest government surplus in history. More than enough to pay for social welfare for those who need it and run neccesary government services..
Lots of agencies gave the local residents of New Orleans, LA and Muscle Shoals Al areas lots of money, first for Katrina aid and then for the BP Oil platform that blew out and ruined the fishing.
Funny thing Tim, many there still don't have a "pot to piss in". and there was PLENTY of demand. The trouble is that unscrupulous people (including FEMA) took advantage of the food, housing and building products scarcity and charged too much and did too little while residents didn't do enough to fight back. Not to mention the Corps of Engineers that still hasn't fixed the levees and pumps permanently.
Your and Sens methodology just results in wasting even more money. (If that's even possible)
You could give all the money in the world directly to starving orphans in Darfur. That doesn't mean they will get better, it means that Boko Haram will just come in and kill everyone for the money.
If they gave food, they would just steal that too.
If you did directly give money to the chronically poor in the USA or Europe, they would likely buy drugs before food or rent.
Unfortunately, half the USA is run by left leaning liberal morons who want to buy the vote of the lazy underachievers while preventing anyone else from getting rich enough to tell the rat race to piss off. Robin Hood economics doesn't work.
You can tell who the "Gun toting flag waving facists" are as they are the only ones who work for a living.
Tell me how well that socialism is working for you folks? You don't have an economy to speak of (EU or Individual countries) and what little is there, is tanking it. You can't continue to give away what doesn't exist.
There will be even LESS jobs as a result of your preferred government style so even more handouts will occur until (it may have already happened) there are less people working than on the dole. Welcome to Greece! Your money has no value to them, why should they live up to their obligations?
No, companies have the right to ignore the opinions of the stupid and ignorant. Especially if the "opinion" was unfounded.
Starting a conversation by saying the equivalent of "Burn the Witch" doesn't put you in the company of the best and brightest to begin with.
LISTENING to someone who says that is even worse.
I AM an animal lover. And neither I nor my children or their children are living in Mummy's basement. AND they learned long ago to respect animals.
I just don't care for ignorant weeping whining libtards that used an online specious petition site to unfairly penalize a company (Go Daddy wasn't the brightest either, I'm pissed they even listened to the morons) that created a fictional advertisement about selling a dog online for no reason other than the idiots didn't like the concept without understanding any of it.
Online or offline or stapled to a telephone pole, an ad for a dog is just an ad to sell a dog or any other animal. No animals were hurt in the creation of an ad that never saw daylight and wouldn't have been even if it had.
Replace the word "Dog" with any other and you might be able to see, IF you were not an overreacting basement dwelling bleeding heart liberal fool that values animals over people.
Sorry, domesticated animals are property, not people.
The problem is that the whining libtards want this "handwringing" to be the way EVERYTHING works. THEY are the ones behind the "Thought Police" concept, the Nanny state, Group-think, New-speak, etc.
Their mindset is "You must be protected at all costs as you are obviously too stupid to make any decisions on you own" when it is they and their policies, we need protection from.
ANYTHING that ruffles the feathers of the basement brigade will earn their ire. Even if it never happened or couldn't happen, they will react and strike out blindly. After all, they have the time since most of them don't have a real job.
No, Amorous Cowherder,
I am sick of a vocal minority of bleeding heart liberals being listened to by overly cautious marketards (and politicians). Go Daddy will now be held hostage by opinions, not facts.
No crime was commited by the ad, no actual dog sale ocurred. A fictional character posed a fictional scenario and the stupid marketards for Go Daddy caved in to "demands" from a petition on a website. A website that apparently gets to pick and choose what it thinks is relevant.
date online, hook up online, buy or sell almost anything online (Including drugs apparently) but heaven forbid it's not okay to sell a dog online (or create a commercial showing that kind of business).
What's different than selling the dog in person? Nothing, because the person you sold the dog to "online" still needs to come to pick it up in person.
Sheesh, you have more statistical possibilty to hook up with an axe murderer online than to sell a dog to the wrong person.
In regards to the petition site, they sent me a letter saying that the petition I signed (along with 67,000 others) to have an overreaching DOJ official fired "was an inappropriate use" of the site.
These bleeding heart liberals make up the rules as they go along and "change" them when they don't like the outcome. This "vocal" minority of douchebags needs to be ignored by business. They never will be a customer anyway as they all still live in their Mommy's basement....
I was going to say that there is no such thing as a PhD in advertising or marketing. Why you ask? Because no one is quite that stupid. They certainly are "Grade A Wankers" at the very least but likely they are fat lonely saddos that binge watch re-runs of the Kardassians.
is no change to the way the system is handled at all.
There NEVER has been such a thing as a "benevolent" Dictator. They are always as corrupt as any Republic could be. "Benevolence" is usually reserved for friends and family, if at all. See China, Russia, North Korea etc. for examples.
There is no "Freedom" under a Monarchy because that freedom can be taken away at will for no reason by the ruling class. Happens all the time. See any and all Monarchies (including the UK) for examples.
You monarchists, communists and socialists will see it differently.
I am in complete agreement, no political, religious or social concern should be allowed to derail any websites in another country.
The United Nations (an oxymoron if there ever was one) has a track record of doing the wrong thing for soley political reasons. Control over the Internet by similar agencies will be a spectacular failure and as you say this is an "Obvious" attempt to censor the Internet
Where is the UN spine to take on Islamic Terrorism? Nowhere, because they are all chickenshits. Do they condemn it? Depends on who you ask. They'd rather condemn Israel than anything to do with Islam.
I say no transfer of anything! No one can prove they can do it better and I am unwilling to listen to the speeches of politicians because it means their lips are moving, much like my bowels.
Militant shareholders like Carl Icahn and their ilk need to be burnt alive at the stake then nuked from orbit. If there's anything left, piss on it.
Real companies should ignore these leeches and continue to do what made them successful in the first place. The mere act of listening to these Wallstreet scum pollutes what's left of your brain.
"Yield maximum shareholder value", my left ball. Keep on jiggling my danglies, you'll get a surprise.
Too bad moron. Short term profitability is for idiots or Icahns (Same thing). As said elswhere we need to throw out that type of thinking when dealing with a tech company. Laying off the brain trust is the same stupidity that HP, Kodak and Xerox did. Look where they are now! Mostly useless bystanders being abused by militant stockholders for their brands, shadows of their former selves.
Just as the Morons in NYC overreacted (I'm from Buffalo you NYC wimps) and shut down the whole city as they declared a "State of Emergency" over 4-6" of snow, the internet has overreacted at the temporary loss of social media.
Really, who fucking cares if some twit can send pics of his private parts to some slut on Tinder or Instagram or Snapchat.
It seems that these narcissists can't live without their "fix" of instant gratification. On the informational front, there is NO factual information of any value that can be provided by social media, only opinion or hearsay.
This means that if you think you are missing the "News" because the Twatter feed is down, you are sadly mistaken and have no life. Please help save the world and use the suicide booth. The NEWS is not on social media, hipsters and bloggers can provide color commentary and opinion but not real news. The other issue is that there are almost no real journalists left, the good ones are anchors, the bad ones are bloggers and the really bad ones are at MSNBC.
Grow up and get a real relationship with someone that does not require a hardware/software intermediary for you to communicate with. You could try having an actual speaking conversation in "meatspace" you meathead! Sex is so much better when you do it with real people except you never learned how.
Exactly, except that 8 out of ten games today aren't even available for WINDOWS, only for consoles. The games use analogy is tired and out of date.
However, the productivity and communication software argument for Windows vs Linux is quite valid.
No developer will write tax software and support it for Linux because it's not PROFITABLE.
MS-DOS hasn't been a valid OS option since Windows XP came out. That was the last time they could even co-exist, as you said DOS doesn't like modern hardware. No one even writes DOS drivers anymore, (if they are sane). Try to come up with a working DOS system today. It won't be easy.
I just tossed seven contractor bags of old disks, books, ram and hardware I held on to. Not much reason to hold onto a zip drive when I have a USB3 500Gb hard drive. You couldn't read that USB3 drive under DOS even if you tried. Don't even ask about compatability with the Radeon Video card with 4 Gig ram. Maybe you could find an out of date generic driver, maybe.
I am sick of the piss poor predictions of companies by those who haven't got the brains that God gave geese.
Dot Com has a long way to go before it runs out of relevance. These "boutique" tlds ARE mostly done for defense against poachers anyway. If the dot com address is already registered, why not duplicate the popular ones with a newer tld (if you can afford it). The "good" dot coms don't get recycled or abandoned, they get bought.
Half of these companies like JP Morgan are reiterating what someone said in a steam bath. All hearsay,no facts, and just as much substance.
I'm from the Buffalo area. City schools continually fail to graduate students that can read and write at their grade level. Truly poor school districts in the country consistently put out more accomplished students with better grades and skills.
The city school teachers get paid twice what the country school teachers do so it's NOT about money.
What's the difference between them?
The city school students don't want to learn and would rather emulate people who think school is a waste of time and the country school students actually want to learn and emulate people who think schooling is what made them successful.
Why do you people think that you can make someone learn when they don't want to? Equality in education has nothing to do with it, regardless of race.
If you already wasted all the opportunities given to you, why should we give you more?
I'm tired of wasting money and time on people who don't care. They get what they deserve.
In the interests of "Equality", Obama will make the bar so low that there will be no value to the Community College system anymore. That exception will only be for the people who don't care to learn. That makes it reverse racism when they get preference soley because of race. (which has already been determined by a supreme court decision) see http://www.cnn.com/2014/04/22/justice/scotus-michigan-affirmative-action/
If you don't want to learn, there are plenty of jobs that don't require any education.
Just don't think that someone discriminated against you because that all you're qualified for.
YOU made your bed. NOW YOU have to lie in it.
And I should have used the words "Grade school" in front of "education system" because I was speaking of the lack of a decent education in city schools before you go to community college. They can't even read on a sixth grade level and still are allowed to "graduate" from high school. Great teachers eh? Not really.
"Equality" is not a good reason if it is the ONLY reason. THAT is reverse racism; the stock and trade of Obama. Especially when those who are being made "equal" clearly do not deserve it. They could have learned to read and write if they cared more about education than following the "thug" life, but that's not cool.
The COMMUNITY COLLEGE system works quite well because they don't let underperforming students in.
Obama is going to break that system and dilute what was once a good affordable solution and turn it into an extension of the poorly performing city grade schools.
You never lived in the states and in any major city have you?
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