Commercial cases like this between big companies is exactly what the law is supposed to do. When negotiation breaks down, the next level is litigation in which a third party (judge) assesses the case based on expert interpretation of the evidence. In non-civilised societies that next level doesn't exist and commercial disputes are dealt with with weapons. Recourse to the law is a sign that at least one party is unreasonable, but it is better than the alternative.
I'm going to stand up for the "drones" a bit. To a certain extent pay peanuts get monkeys. But in fact there are a lot of people out there who are not hugely bright or who even have "learning difficulties", but who can do boring jobs for extended periods and are pretty accurate and reliable. I worked for a pharmaceutical manufacturer for a bit while at U, and they looked for people like this and gave them jobs in packing and QA. The difference is that instead of treating them like Walmart they worked hard to keep them motivated, told them that their work was valuable and that all the work of the chemists and the engineers was wasted if the wrong product got out of the door, and made sure that students like me understood this, and that we were easily replaceable while they weren't. They are "good finds" who won't move on. They are not stupid, they just have limitations that are different from those of, say, social ineptness. A lot of that is automated nowadays, but there are still a few, mostly smaller places without the Walmart/Bain/you name it view of replaceable monkeys, and they are often successful because they don't get the level of staff theft and they appeal to older people who value helpful and friendly staff.
Learn some history. Afghanistan is in a state of more or less perpetual war. They have seen off British pacification attempts numerous times. Germany and Japan were organised societies with social structures which meant that they understood concepts like "losing a war". The inhabitants of Afghanistan and the Tribal Areas do not. They cannot surrender because there is no overarching authority who can tell people to stop shooting.
As it was, the US defeated Japan but made a half-baked attempt to invade Europe, resulting in the Russian takeover and the Cold War. Nothing else was politically possible because, with Japan beaten, Eisenhower (and Montgomery) were not allowed high-casualty operations. This, as Max Hastings observes, is entirely correct because, if they had been, we wouldn't have been Western democracies any more.
Too many Slashdot readers don't understand that war is simply the sharp end of politics, and politics has many dimensions. Japan was a credible threat to the US West Coast and had to be stopped. People didn't see why a lot of people had to die to defeat a Germany that was losing anyway. In the same way, they can't see why (and nor can I) high casualties should be wasted on Afghanistan. The domino effect turned out to be a myth in Indo-China. Is it actually worth having you or your neighbour die in defence of your right to own SUVs versus small economical cars?
It was meant to be a humorous observation. I am well aware that from a purely geometric point of view it makes no difference at all where in the Solar System you take as the reference point. However, there is the awkward matter of why the laws of motion apply. Once we add in the gravitational equation, it is obvious that the centre of the Solar System is a point around which the Sun itself wobbles as the planets move in their orbits.
The problem with Brahe's interpretation was that it made no sense at all. The Sun, Mercury and Venus orbit the Earth. Mars, Jupiter and Saturn orbit the Sun in paths which cause them for half the time to be on the other side of the Earth from the Sun. Forget orbital mechanics, this is a simple application of Bill Ockham's shaving appliance.
While this is true, there is no possibility of confusion. Just about everything that happens in real Boston (Mass.) could never happen in Boston UK, which is slightly more isolated, bucolic and generally hopeless than Ultima Thule. Boston UK is in Lincolnshire, compared to which Lincolnshire the Chicago suburb is paradise. The only interesting thing about Lincolnshire, England, is that it has a village named Mavis Enderby.
In the UK, if you are an accountant doing private work you are registered as a tax agent. And you have a number to call if you suspect someone is money laundering. Sadly, my wife hasn't found an excuse to try it yet.
I checked the link.... I'm probably not the only Slashdot reader who isn't interested in US comics, amazing as it may seem. I assumed that it was a film of the children's book by Ted Hughes, who I can't stand, and never investigated further.
Worse. Named after an astronomer who made very accurate observations but whose celestial mechanics were comprehensively wrong (he thought that the sun with all the planets orbited the Earth.) Do you want to travel in a space vehicle named after someone who got space wrong?
I don't care for underground railways and caving is my idea of Hell. If I'm going to die, I'd rather do it in the open air, thank you. Perhaps irrationally I don't get claustrophobic in sailplanes, which are hardly very big inside. This vehicle has achieved something I thought impossible: it travels through the air and it makes me feel claustrophobic just looking at the picture.
The jury awarded the ridiculous damages. You should be asking what is wrong with ordinary Americans that they can so easily be persuaded that inordinate punishments are acceptable. At least in Europe such things can be challenged under human rights legislation, which is presumably one reason why the media companies* in the UK are anti-EU; it has some weird idea that law should be on the side of ordinary people.
I quote the Wikipedia article, though I do have much better (but less readily available) sources:
This paradox has contributed to the spread of different versions of religious practices and Wahabism, as well as political Islamism (including movements such as the Taliban) having a key presence in Pashtun society.... Many Pashtuns want to reclaim their identity from being lumped in with the Taliban and international terrorism, which is not directly linked with Pashtun culture and history.
What people see as Taliban extremism (the maltreatment of women and the utter lack of religious toleration) are Wahabi practices, not Pashtun. (Yes, yes, I know, calling it Wahabi is an oversimplification...but Saudi Islam is a mixture of Wahabi theology and nomadic Arab culture.) The fact that a majority of the Taliban are ethnically Pashtun is irrelevant; a majority of the British National Party are British, and follow many British cultural practices such as drinking beer, but the British people as a whole are far from being neo-Nazis.
And in fact the evidence in the days before the IPO is that even that would be excessive. Advertising worth less than on Google? Facebook phone when Google was just cleared to take over Motorola Mobility, and already is far down the development path with phones and software? Anybody buying those shares was either in a state of denial or just didn't understand the industry.
I think you've stated the facts very clearly. It's perhaps also worth pointing out that the hassidim are an Eastern European sect (their clothes, for instance, are those of upper-middle-class Poles of the period of their foundation). A lot of extreme sects confuse a core religion with their own local behaviour. The Taliban, for instance, seem to have adopted the more backward practices of some Arab nomadic tribes; exactly the people who Mohammed was trying to convert away from their tribal religions. It is just unfortunate that their high visibility and aggressive promotion of their beliefs causes people to think that they are more numerous, and more representative of a religion, then they really are.
I always find it slightly bizarre, for instance, that in the UK the British Government tends to listen to the Orthodox Chief Rabbi whereas, if asked for the name of a typical rabbi, far more people would remember the Reform rabbi Lionel Blue.
I don't think the mainstream Jewish community does "coddle" the ultra-Orthodox, and everything you write applies to lots of other groups. The problem seems to be that in Israel there are enough of them to affect politics, and politicians have to support them. (And they should not be all tarred with the same brush...there are anti-Zionist ultra-Orthodox, for instance. They are not a monolithic belief community.) The worrying thing about, specifically, the Hassidim is their treatment of women, and it could perhaps be that the truth is that male chauvinist pigs are drawn to or remain in the Hassidim and the Taliban, whereas more rational men escape, leaving a more and more irreducible core of extremists. (The Amish, by contrast, are much more egalitarian and some people might think their ideas about the separation of work from private life and avoiding over-dependence on technology are actually pretty advanced. Perhaps that's why they seem to be flourishing.) The UK had a similar problem when the Major Government of the 1990s was dependent on the support of Northern Irish Unionists, a similar collection of people you wouldn't want to meet down a dark alley.
So I disagree with you. I don't think this is anything to do with Judaism, which in general terms has been a pretty benign religion whose core beliefs have given a huge push to literacy, science, and social progress, and everything to do with testosterone-addled knuckle-draggers who tend to form extremist groups. The desire for "purity" ( to prevent the members from finding out that other people don't agree with them) is common among them, so this development isn't surprising.
Writing as a pedant, the start menu actually is pretty silly, mixing things up with a lack of logic. I've been using computers since 1966 and it still seems to me odd that documents, file systems and control panels are all mixed up in a text menu. I can only guess that your computer illiterate family all work designing Government forms.
Looking at your list, Facebook has a huge deployment of an instant messaging system using XMPP. If your list went FTP,SMTP,HTTP...XMPP rather than mixing protocols up with companies it might make more sense.
The issue for Facebook, however, is that none of the other protocols made anybody silly rich, and XMPP is a freely available and very easy to deploy server based system. I do wonder how many "investors" realise just how much of Facebook's technology is replicable at very low cost.
Sorry for double post. I just noticed the exact figures in the Telegraph:
Share price implausible.
The tl;dr is that of $16 billion, nearly $12 billion had to be bought by the usual suspect banks: Morgan Stanley, JP Morgan and Goldman Sachs. Among all the hype, that is actually a huge failure.
One of the biggest pieces of statistical bullshit is "market cap" when most of a company's shares are nonvolatile. In this case a market only exists in a fraction of the company, and the share price is unchanged. To argue that if the 10% of a company that is liquid shares is traded at X, its total value is 10X, is completely wrong, no matter how popular it is with people whose job it is to hype shares.
The conditions under which Facebook would be really worth $100 billion are that somebody with $100 billion in cash was prepared to offer that much for it, and it was accepted. The IPO is, in effect, designed to prevent us finding out the true market value of the company. All we know is that people who almost all already had shares were prepared to exchange them for Facebook shares. Those people might have thought that their shares were about to tank, or that they might make short term profits. We don't know.
The historical analogy, although the exact terms of the deal were very different, is the Time Warner/AOL merger. The merger valued the entire group at around $350 billion. It turned out that the analysts and the investors were comprehensively wrong.
Don't get me wrong; in the Wall Street casino, people may get rich dealing in Facebook shares. But, as set up at the moment, the actual value of the company cannot be inferred from the share price, and all the predictions of a change in world culture are as reliable as the same predictions that were made about the AOL merger.
The detonation is bad because of the rate of pressure rise, which causes shock loading which temporarily destroys oil films, causing rapid wear. The object is to design an engine with a controlled burn by careful design of the swirl, fuel stratification, and combustion chamber shape. I've had this argument on Slashdot before and someone always cites some Wikipedia article which says the spark plug causes an explosion but it should not; it should cause a controlled burn with a moderate rate of flame propagation so that the bulk of the pressure rise occurs as the combustion space starts to expand. Doing this well results in a long lived, quiet engine.
It isn't really an Atkinson cycle. Toyota use variable valve timing, and an oversquare 4-valve engine with slipper pistons, to reduce fuel spill through the exhaust and lengthen the angle of the power stroke before the exhaust opens. It is a rather expensive, low power but beautifully engineered engine.
One major advantage of the gasoline engine is that the compression ratio can be reduced for starting so that less power is used by the stop start cycle. You can't do that with Diesels, so a much heavier starter motor is needed. The Prius uses the electric drive motor to start the gasoline engine, too, so that it does not need a conventional starter motor at all (unlike a stop/start Diesel).
It's clever optimisation rather than revolutionary technology.
Actually Diesel is denser than gasoline so a gallon of Diesel contains more hydrocarbon molecules and more available energy than a gallon of gasoline. I think that you will find that the tax is almost exactly the same per joule of energy.
If I had to read 'cyclic adenosine mono phosphate' everywhere cAMP is referenced in a molecular biology textbook, a lot more trees would need to be felled. Do we call it jargon when we read 'nut' rather than 'hexaform internally helically threaded rotational compression fixture'? I sympathise with the reviewer, but if you want to understand how evolution works you need to learn a little biochemistry.
There may be some truth in this, but basically it is a claim that is very hard to prove but is used to sell space.
The only thing that seems certainly to work is that watching films with naked women in causes many men to want to have sex with them, but I'm not sure that this counts as "subtle product placement".
I really cannot argue with someone who uses meaningless expressions and argues from 'obviousness'. Did you realise that things are only supposed to be patentable if they are not obvious?
I imagine, however, that it is all moot, because Ford isn't going to go with your gut feeling engineering.
As for paint- depends on function. Powder paint processes are nothing to do with powder metallurgy. Appropriate paint is all about substrate, environment and usage (like you cannot touch up powder paint or use it on abs, so it is no good for cars).
Slashdot Mirror
Commercial cases like this between big companies is exactly what the law is supposed to do. When negotiation breaks down, the next level is litigation in which a third party (judge) assesses the case based on expert interpretation of the evidence. In non-civilised societies that next level doesn't exist and commercial disputes are dealt with with weapons. Recourse to the law is a sign that at least one party is unreasonable, but it is better than the alternative.
The argument "We are litigating about X so we can void contracts about Y" doesn't work in court.
I'm going to stand up for the "drones" a bit. To a certain extent pay peanuts get monkeys. But in fact there are a lot of people out there who are not hugely bright or who even have "learning difficulties", but who can do boring jobs for extended periods and are pretty accurate and reliable. I worked for a pharmaceutical manufacturer for a bit while at U, and they looked for people like this and gave them jobs in packing and QA. The difference is that instead of treating them like Walmart they worked hard to keep them motivated, told them that their work was valuable and that all the work of the chemists and the engineers was wasted if the wrong product got out of the door, and made sure that students like me understood this, and that we were easily replaceable while they weren't. They are "good finds" who won't move on. They are not stupid, they just have limitations that are different from those of, say, social ineptness. A lot of that is automated nowadays, but there are still a few, mostly smaller places without the Walmart/Bain/you name it view of replaceable monkeys, and they are often successful because they don't get the level of staff theft and they appeal to older people who value helpful and friendly staff.
As it was, the US defeated Japan but made a half-baked attempt to invade Europe, resulting in the Russian takeover and the Cold War. Nothing else was politically possible because, with Japan beaten, Eisenhower (and Montgomery) were not allowed high-casualty operations. This, as Max Hastings observes, is entirely correct because, if they had been, we wouldn't have been Western democracies any more.
Too many Slashdot readers don't understand that war is simply the sharp end of politics, and politics has many dimensions. Japan was a credible threat to the US West Coast and had to be stopped. People didn't see why a lot of people had to die to defeat a Germany that was losing anyway. In the same way, they can't see why (and nor can I) high casualties should be wasted on Afghanistan. The domino effect turned out to be a myth in Indo-China. Is it actually worth having you or your neighbour die in defence of your right to own SUVs versus small economical cars?
The problem with Brahe's interpretation was that it made no sense at all. The Sun, Mercury and Venus orbit the Earth. Mars, Jupiter and Saturn orbit the Sun in paths which cause them for half the time to be on the other side of the Earth from the Sun. Forget orbital mechanics, this is a simple application of Bill Ockham's shaving appliance.
While this is true, there is no possibility of confusion. Just about everything that happens in real Boston (Mass.) could never happen in Boston UK, which is slightly more isolated, bucolic and generally hopeless than Ultima Thule. Boston UK is in Lincolnshire, compared to which Lincolnshire the Chicago suburb is paradise. The only interesting thing about Lincolnshire, England, is that it has a village named Mavis Enderby.
In the UK, if you are an accountant doing private work you are registered as a tax agent. And you have a number to call if you suspect someone is money laundering. Sadly, my wife hasn't found an excuse to try it yet.
I checked the link.... I'm probably not the only Slashdot reader who isn't interested in US comics, amazing as it may seem. I assumed that it was a film of the children's book by Ted Hughes, who I can't stand, and never investigated further.
Worse. Named after an astronomer who made very accurate observations but whose celestial mechanics were comprehensively wrong (he thought that the sun with all the planets orbited the Earth.) Do you want to travel in a space vehicle named after someone who got space wrong?
I don't care for underground railways and caving is my idea of Hell. If I'm going to die, I'd rather do it in the open air, thank you. Perhaps irrationally I don't get claustrophobic in sailplanes, which are hardly very big inside. This vehicle has achieved something I thought impossible: it travels through the air and it makes me feel claustrophobic just looking at the picture.
*(Barclay Brothers, Murdochs, Rothermeres.)
What people see as Taliban extremism (the maltreatment of women and the utter lack of religious toleration) are Wahabi practices, not Pashtun. (Yes, yes, I know, calling it Wahabi is an oversimplification...but Saudi Islam is a mixture of Wahabi theology and nomadic Arab culture.) The fact that a majority of the Taliban are ethnically Pashtun is irrelevant; a majority of the British National Party are British, and follow many British cultural practices such as drinking beer, but the British people as a whole are far from being neo-Nazis.
And in fact the evidence in the days before the IPO is that even that would be excessive. Advertising worth less than on Google? Facebook phone when Google was just cleared to take over Motorola Mobility, and already is far down the development path with phones and software? Anybody buying those shares was either in a state of denial or just didn't understand the industry.
I always find it slightly bizarre, for instance, that in the UK the British Government tends to listen to the Orthodox Chief Rabbi whereas, if asked for the name of a typical rabbi, far more people would remember the Reform rabbi Lionel Blue.
So I disagree with you. I don't think this is anything to do with Judaism, which in general terms has been a pretty benign religion whose core beliefs have given a huge push to literacy, science, and social progress, and everything to do with testosterone-addled knuckle-draggers who tend to form extremist groups. The desire for "purity" ( to prevent the members from finding out that other people don't agree with them) is common among them, so this development isn't surprising.
Writing as a pedant, the start menu actually is pretty silly, mixing things up with a lack of logic. I've been using computers since 1966 and it still seems to me odd that documents, file systems and control panels are all mixed up in a text menu. I can only guess that your computer illiterate family all work designing Government forms.
The issue for Facebook, however, is that none of the other protocols made anybody silly rich, and XMPP is a freely available and very easy to deploy server based system. I do wonder how many "investors" realise just how much of Facebook's technology is replicable at very low cost.
Share price implausible. The tl;dr is that of $16 billion, nearly $12 billion had to be bought by the usual suspect banks: Morgan Stanley, JP Morgan and Goldman Sachs. Among all the hype, that is actually a huge failure.
The conditions under which Facebook would be really worth $100 billion are that somebody with $100 billion in cash was prepared to offer that much for it, and it was accepted. The IPO is, in effect, designed to prevent us finding out the true market value of the company. All we know is that people who almost all already had shares were prepared to exchange them for Facebook shares. Those people might have thought that their shares were about to tank, or that they might make short term profits. We don't know.
The historical analogy, although the exact terms of the deal were very different, is the Time Warner/AOL merger. The merger valued the entire group at around $350 billion. It turned out that the analysts and the investors were comprehensively wrong.
Don't get me wrong; in the Wall Street casino, people may get rich dealing in Facebook shares. But, as set up at the moment, the actual value of the company cannot be inferred from the share price, and all the predictions of a change in world culture are as reliable as the same predictions that were made about the AOL merger.
The detonation is bad because of the rate of pressure rise, which causes shock loading which temporarily destroys oil films, causing rapid wear. The object is to design an engine with a controlled burn by careful design of the swirl, fuel stratification, and combustion chamber shape. I've had this argument on Slashdot before and someone always cites some Wikipedia article which says the spark plug causes an explosion but it should not; it should cause a controlled burn with a moderate rate of flame propagation so that the bulk of the pressure rise occurs as the combustion space starts to expand. Doing this well results in a long lived, quiet engine.
One major advantage of the gasoline engine is that the compression ratio can be reduced for starting so that less power is used by the stop start cycle. You can't do that with Diesels, so a much heavier starter motor is needed. The Prius uses the electric drive motor to start the gasoline engine, too, so that it does not need a conventional starter motor at all (unlike a stop/start Diesel).
It's clever optimisation rather than revolutionary technology.
Actually Diesel is denser than gasoline so a gallon of Diesel contains more hydrocarbon molecules and more available energy than a gallon of gasoline. I think that you will find that the tax is almost exactly the same per joule of energy.
If I had to read 'cyclic adenosine mono phosphate' everywhere cAMP is referenced in a molecular biology textbook, a lot more trees would need to be felled. Do we call it jargon when we read 'nut' rather than 'hexaform internally helically threaded rotational compression fixture'? I sympathise with the reviewer, but if you want to understand how evolution works you need to learn a little biochemistry.
The only thing that seems certainly to work is that watching films with naked women in causes many men to want to have sex with them, but I'm not sure that this counts as "subtle product placement".
I imagine, however, that it is all moot, because Ford isn't going to go with your gut feeling engineering.
As for paint- depends on function. Powder paint processes are nothing to do with powder metallurgy. Appropriate paint is all about substrate, environment and usage (like you cannot touch up powder paint or use it on abs, so it is no good for cars).