Oh, I'd be the last to argue that he isn't weaseling around (while the 'incentives alignment' theory of stock options is noble, implementation has... encountered assorted complexities under field conditions, to put it politely).
My point was merely that (ironically enough), the guy who was decrying 'socialism' was actually using a we-worship-rich-guys version of the 'labor theory of value' argument(a socialist classic), while the person he was arguing against was using the (more common among people who describe themselves as 'socialists'; but theoretically quite similar) 'no one man's labor can possibly be worth 24534x another's!' labor theory of value(also a fairly common, as well as fairly direct, implication of the labor theory of value).
Had Ellison been a midlevel engineer or something, Mr. Capitalism never would have gone with the 'But without Ellison, PRODUCT X would have crashed and burned! He deserves 200 million if he wants it!' argument. Damn employee can take his salary, and like it, and if he think's he's worth more, he can ask for a raise or man up and start his own company...
The numbers are bigger (owning a little over 20% of Oracle stock is Not Small); but if you want to be a not-socialist, the CEO is still just an employee, working for the shareholders, and he gets the salary market forces command (Har, har, because that's how executive compensation works... In your dreams), and absolutely fuck-all for having 'made this company'. Even if he made it 100%, he only owns 20-odd%, and works for the people who own the rest.
Or, y'know, somebody familiar with the concept of 'property'. Oracle is a publicly traded company (not that this is always a good idea; but they did it), not some sole proprietor outfit. It sold substantial chunks of itself to assorted third parties, so now they get a say. That's about as far from 'socialism' as you can reasonably get.
It doesn't matter whether or not the claim that "Larry Ellison made that company" is true or not because he doesn't own most of it. He is a major shareholder(a trifle under 25%, I think); but he gets paid as an employee of a company owned by a collection of people, including himself, not because Oracle is his personal candy jar and he can get paid what he likes.
He's certainly the most identifiable personality; but charisma is not the foundation of property rights...
Tell the guy with the laptop that if he can't handle it, he should push his graphics settings down from 'hurt me plenty' to one of the lower difficultly levels.
50,000 hours at 10 hours a day is 13.7 years. I certainly don't watch 10 hours of TV a day. Probably maxes out most days around 4, meaning that the TV would last me about 34 years. Assuming something else didn't break first. 50,000 hours is quite a long time.
The usual nuisance is uneven wear. Y'know those solid-colored bullshit-ticker-bars that 'news' stations love or the channel watermark in the upper right on some stations? Well, those subpixels are getting a little extra workout (and, just for extra fun, R, G, and B tend not to wear at exactly the same rate...) and it can take rather less than 50,000 hours for pronounced nonuniformity to show itself if you try to display something like an all-white test screen.
"The more onscreen objects there are the more slowdown there is."
Even when the framerates are fully in order, that one's a kicker: How did the developers ensure that framerates would be adequate on consoles, and on average PCs? By keeping the amount of stuff on screen down. And so we have pop-in, RPGs where a 'city' has maybe 100 people (spread across multiple areas with lots of clutter to occlude sightlines, and various other deviations from either the realistic or the epic, depending on what the occasion demands.
Arguably (as with physics acceleration for destructible environments) that's the more difficult chicken-and-egg problem: If it's just a matter of how pretty things are, I can make it work on weak hardware, and if you have a nice GPU you can crank up the resolution, anti-ailias you little heart out, and set all the draw distance sliders to maximum.
If, however, it simply isn't possible to cater to people who I need as customers if my environment has 500 NPC armies clashing or if castles can be knocked down one stone at a time, with realistic friction/leverage/impact, I can't just 'dumb down' for weaker systems, I'd actually need to rebalance the game, since the weak system version might never have you facing more than 20 NPCs, and can't have any puzzles/requirements that involve destructible environments (or I need a whole separate set of game assets with scripted quest-destructables that just have hit points and 'damaged' textures). It's a different game.
This isn't to say that the effort to support all levels of prettiness is zero, I've no doubt that it isn't; but unless a contemporary rendering engine is downright broken, it should at least be possible for the gamer enthusiasts to render at substantially higher resolutions, more AA, longer draw distances, higher poly models and higher rez textures at greater distances, etc. without any changes to the core game. The same is Not true of changes that require power but are also integral to gameplay. If some people are seeing 'real' backgrounds (with actual NPCs and scenery doing their thing, and the laws of perspective applied) and other people are getting skyboxes and a few low-detail mountains, you can't let either party interact at great distances, or you'll risk changing the game.
Also, they tend not to have swap files, which makes a difference. A PC will run like dirt if it is actually swapping all the time; but if a program gets optimistic about what it will need, or is sitting idle, it's basically free to shove it onto the disk and forget about it.
Without that, it's either in memory or taken out back and shot. This has led to some improvements in applications designed to be tolerant of sudden death; but if you need to terminate a program because you can't store its state, the amount of state you can preserve for when you restart the program is obviously somewhat constrained.
It also helps that cheap and dreadful audio systems (looking at you, PC speakers...) commonly have runs of unshielded signal cable sitting between the audio-out and the actual amplifier. Picking up enough RF interference to actually drive a speaker would be a bit alarming (with a high-efficiency mono earpiece, passive AM receivers can do it, crystal radio style; but that's because the whole system is built around the challenge of turning the whisper of power from a big AM antenna into sound); but enough RF interference to be faithfully amplified by the amplifier, which more or less just cranks up anything within its capabilities and dumps the output to the speaker, doesn't take much power.
Noise on the low voltage, pre-amplifier side of things gets amplified, so its effects are disproportionately audible. Noise picked up by the big, chunky, post-amplifier speaker cables? usually trivial.
I find it interesting they are sustaining the physical disk format as it seems to lend its self to being ripped, while a purely digital format could possibly have "better" drm?
BD-ROM is pretty paranoid; plus it's just plain big (especially for video, where there isn't any reason to not fill the entire disk, unless your movie is so short that you'd go over the maximum supported data rate by doing so). Even in areas where ISPs aren't fucking around, 50GB is a big download. Plus, that's only 20 disks/TB, assuming no unpacking of assets for better access times. Storing BD rips is cheaper than it used to be, especially with 3.5 inch disks; but with a single 2.5 in the console, that's actually a pretty low ceiling.
DLNA is a standard so dreadful that it's hard to imagine that it wasn't written as some kind of joke, except that you never, ever, hit the punchline, it just keeps hurting.
However, it should be noted that, with the PS3, Sony didn't let that stop them: They put out a DLNA client and, because their hardware was about the single most common DLNA client that anybody actually used (I think WMP, at least some versions, is nominally a DLNA client; but sharing from computer to computer, when both machines are Windows boxes and you could just use SMB, isn't much of a use case compared to streaming to your TV), people sucked it up and tailored their DLNA server support to the PS3. That's why "http://www.ps3mediaserver.org/" is called what it is. It's a DLNA server, it isn't locked to PS3s only or anything; but wherever something was fucked up or unclear (with DLNA, this is normal) the PS3's behavior was taken into account.
Either Sony's figures suggested that only.01% of users ever used the feature, and it isn't worth the terrible burden of recompiling it for x86, or they actively wish to de-support streaming of 3rd-party media, for reasons of their own.
Given that aircraft fly around in a veritable EM soup (AM, FM, VHF transmission towers, the spark gaps of an angry god, etc.), I would hope that every phone on the plane draining its battery in a coordinated RF scream would be a survivable event. Whether all the chatter raises the noise floor or introduces errors into sensitive measurements is a subtler but more likely issue.
Who's the more wooshed? In Fight Club, that's the question that the guy in the airline seat asks after the recall decision algorithm is described. The answer is "A major one."
The NYT does do some tech stuff (mostly softpedal consumer electronics reviews with no real depth); and I suppose they could expand that to a "Cool App of the week, a week after you've already heard about it" or synergize by having a little circle jerk for the website of some 'entrepreneur' that is being written up in the business section; but the notion that 'We should have reviews for software, like we do for movies!' seems either trivial to the point of worthlessness (pick up a random trashy computer-oriented magazine, now condense it down to less than a newspaper page, how much will fit?) or to be a serious misunderstanding of the breadth of 'software' (not all stuff shot to tape is a 'movie' in the sense that a reviewer would care about; but with 'software', probably 90+ percent of the world's code is invisible almost to the point of being incomprehensible, and uninteresting, to the layman, or even the specialist in a specific part of it.)
This seems like a bizarre lament: We have plenty of software reviews, for various flavors of software, mostly located on the parts of the internet where people who care would find them(since 'Medal of Warfare 3: Gorepocalypse Now' and 'Oracle Enterprise Resource Dominance Solution 11' are somewhat less similar than a bad summer action movie and an occupational safety training video, they aren't reviewed by the same people or in the same places). Who is the audience for the 'NYT Software Review'? What are their perceived interests? What do they not know that they should? Why do they need to get their reviews from a dead tree rather than the internet?
Also, what 'category' would they be shooting for? Movie reviews (implicitly or explicitly) exist largely in the context of assuming that movies are some combination of entertainment and art/culture(exactly what the mix is depends on how highbrow the review is supposed to be). Software, though, does just about everything. What aspects of it is the NYT supposed to care about?
"How's that hopey-changey stuff workin' out for ya?":: winks:::: snaps gum::
As much as I think Obama is a two-faced prick, the vision of Palin with unfettered access to CIA killbots and the world's largest surveillance database is pretty chilling...
Australia, in addition to being one of our Valued Partners in Totally Legal Intelligence activities, is crucial to the supply of judicial marsupials that help keep these activities legal.
If FISA were denied the lovable noses and endearing antics of the noble Kangaroo, and forced to make do with goats or something, we'd be in serious trouble inside a week! Why, it might get as bad as that time, during the Church Commission, when we had to pretend to be reformed characters. That was harrowing.
Not entirely: "Regulatory capture" is the term for a process (often a complex, multi-channel one) where a regulated sector comes to exert control over the relevant regulatory body.
'Graft', and its utility for rewarding... cooperative... officials is one technique; but a variety of other factors come into play: if most of the perceived expertise about an industry works in that industry, regulatory job openings tend to be filled by people who have expertise; but also have personal and past professional connections with the people they are supposed to be regulating. Outright bribery is crass and generally illegal (unless it's a campaign contribution, of course) so that isn't preferred; but 'revolving door' hiring mechanisms are pretty effective.
Regulatory capture may also be more coercive (the tobacco industry's showdown with the FDA is perhaps the prototypical example): if there are (or if sympathetic congresscritters can add) any chinks in the regulatory legislation, the ability to drag the would-be-regulator into court for a few years every time they propose to touch just about anything, and the willingness to do so, can really scare a comparatively weak body, especially if their historical mandate (and internal talent pool) is more about techie-nerd stuff like RF interference or foodborne pathogens, rather than high-pressure courtroom work against hostile "Product defense consultants".
This is not to excuse old-school Tammany Hall Machine and slipping-the-officer-a-$20-with-your-license-and-registration style corruption; but if your model of regulatory capture (and your attempts to halt it) relies on nice, visible, bagmen and suitcases full of cash as being the conduits of influence, it will fail.
And let's not even talk about the 'tiny town where sheriff Cletus is the law, and only his cousins and the high school football team are above it' problem.
Not much of a regulatory capture issue, since there just isn't much on the table; but small-scale governance offers some thrilling opportunities for misgovernance according to humanity's oldest tribal atavisms...
Are there any manufacturing/polymer types (or even armchair chemists) around who would want to hazard a guess as to why a PC component would have that smell?
My understanding is that chassis materials don't differ wildly from laptop to laptop (ABS or ABS+PC seem to the the typical plastics, Aluminum or coated magnesium-alloy the usual metals, with some assorted adhesives and things). Is there some plasticizer, or mould-release agent, or incomplete-polymerization impurity, or particularly malodorous-if-the-proportions-aren't-right two-part adhesive out there?
Apple's support model is (with the exception of prosaic stuff like 'hard drive is dead, sounds like coffee-grinder', where the ability to get retail support from somebody other than the geek squad is quite a blessing for people without corporate support contracts):
1. Deny that a problem exists. Reports of the problem will silently disappear from their message boards, CSRs will either emit cluelessness, or (if challeged) suggest that customer misuse was the cause.
2. Wait. Despite the outward appearance of not giving a fuck, Apple clearly isn't oblivious to the level of buzz, and apparent frequency with which a problem is occuring.
3. One of two options: if the buzz level of step 2 was low enough, continue to insist that product N is absolutely without fault, until it's time to release revision N+1, where the problem will silently be fixed, with absolutely no acknowledgement that the change was made to address any particular issue. If the buzz level of step 2 is high enough, Apple will then offer repair replacement, sometimes even for otherwise-out-of-warranty hardware.
Fair enough(due to my disinterest in actually owning either, I haven't been in a position to distrust-and-verify every alleged capability on the spec sheet, just what they say they can do, plus first-impression type reviews).
My point was that Samsung built a product that could not possibly have not sucked (short of unobtanium fuel modules that don't exist or something), while Pebble adopted a spec level that (while they could certainly fuck it up), can actually be done with contemporary technology.
Whether you can succeed at executing the possible is what distinguishes good engineering from poor engineering. Attempting to succeed at executing the impossible shows a form of incompetence that nullifies even your finest engineering prowess before you start.
Facts aren't decided by politics. Can the Chinese government tell residents of Taiwan what to do? If not, then Taiwan is de facto independent.
Binary decision trees also tend to be of limited use in the real world: Does Beijing deliver the mail and fine you for traffic violations in Taiwan? No. Are there things that Taiwan could theoretically do; but never would because that would make China rage out? Quite possibly.
Strictly speaking, it's probably most accurate to say that Dell was right about Apple 1997 except that they'd just recently made; but not yet seen the payoff from, the choice to get Jobs and NEXT.
Their "Hey, let's sell a confusing selection of increasingly antique PPCs in beige cases for increasingly risible prices, on the strength of our mostly-obsolete OS" strategy wasn't going anywhere, and would only have gotten worse as time went on (The price/performance of Wintels was improving, the sheer nastiness was decreasing (remember the good old days before bootable ATAPI CD drives and other basics? That's the kind of shit that made Apple's tendencies toward SCSI seem classy rather than merely expensive), and Apple's in-house attempt to modernize Classic MacOS was a miserable failure).
He's been trying to predict the future for the last 40 years. Unless everything he writes gets stamped 'above top secret: incinerator's eyes only' surely we have enough material to evaluate his efficacy by now?
It doesn't help (for Samsung, at least) that whatever small 'smartwatch' market exists is largely being catered to by outfits who are more realistic about how much you can actually cram into something that fits on the wrist.
I have absolutely no interest in owning either; but the 'Pebble' outfit managed to get not-totally-ridiculous battery life, along with reasonable size; by being realistic about what they could do: low power transreflective display, limited firmware (with SDK; but not one connected with any broader ecosystem).
Samsung just goes and bolts the guts of a first/second gen-ish Android phone, minus the cell modem and wifi, to your wrist. Glowy color screen, CPU that's fast enough to gobble battery (but not fast enough to make Samsungified Android run smoothly), integrated perv cam that makes the strap impossible to swap, the thing's a bulbous mess to fit a battery large enough to last a day, and they managed to make it compatible with almost nothing(it is Android; but it's already on the edge of acceptable battery life, has anemic performance, and a small display, so it isn't meaningfully 'compatible' with the broader ecosystem, and its notification display features only work with a small number of applications). Brilliant work.
I'm not sold on 'smartwatch' as a concept; but even if we accept the goodness of the idea as a foundational assumption, Samsung fucked it up.
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If it's going to be more like Iraq, anybody who isn't us can damned well have it; but I don't want any part of that adventur.
Oh, I'd be the last to argue that he isn't weaseling around (while the 'incentives alignment' theory of stock options is noble, implementation has... encountered assorted complexities under field conditions, to put it politely).
My point was merely that (ironically enough), the guy who was decrying 'socialism' was actually using a we-worship-rich-guys version of the 'labor theory of value' argument(a socialist classic), while the person he was arguing against was using the (more common among people who describe themselves as 'socialists'; but theoretically quite similar) 'no one man's labor can possibly be worth 24534x another's!' labor theory of value(also a fairly common, as well as fairly direct, implication of the labor theory of value).
Had Ellison been a midlevel engineer or something, Mr. Capitalism never would have gone with the 'But without Ellison, PRODUCT X would have crashed and burned! He deserves 200 million if he wants it!' argument. Damn employee can take his salary, and like it, and if he think's he's worth more, he can ask for a raise or man up and start his own company...
The numbers are bigger (owning a little over 20% of Oracle stock is Not Small); but if you want to be a not-socialist, the CEO is still just an employee, working for the shareholders, and he gets the salary market forces command (Har, har, because that's how executive compensation works... In your dreams), and absolutely fuck-all for having 'made this company'. Even if he made it 100%, he only owns 20-odd%, and works for the people who own the rest.
No, he shouldn't
Spoken like a true socialist.
Or, y'know, somebody familiar with the concept of 'property'. Oracle is a publicly traded company (not that this is always a good idea; but they did it), not some sole proprietor outfit. It sold substantial chunks of itself to assorted third parties, so now they get a say. That's about as far from 'socialism' as you can reasonably get.
It doesn't matter whether or not the claim that "Larry Ellison made that company" is true or not because he doesn't own most of it. He is a major shareholder(a trifle under 25%, I think); but he gets paid as an employee of a company owned by a collection of people, including himself, not because Oracle is his personal candy jar and he can get paid what he likes.
He's certainly the most identifiable personality; but charisma is not the foundation of property rights...
Tell the guy with the laptop that if he can't handle it, he should push his graphics settings down from 'hurt me plenty' to one of the lower difficultly levels.
50,000 hours at 10 hours a day is 13.7 years. I certainly don't watch 10 hours of TV a day. Probably maxes out most days around 4, meaning that the TV would last me about 34 years. Assuming something else didn't break first. 50,000 hours is quite a long time.
The usual nuisance is uneven wear. Y'know those solid-colored bullshit-ticker-bars that 'news' stations love or the channel watermark in the upper right on some stations? Well, those subpixels are getting a little extra workout (and, just for extra fun, R, G, and B tend not to wear at exactly the same rate...) and it can take rather less than 50,000 hours for pronounced nonuniformity to show itself if you try to display something like an all-white test screen.
"The more onscreen objects there are the more slowdown there is." Even when the framerates are fully in order, that one's a kicker: How did the developers ensure that framerates would be adequate on consoles, and on average PCs? By keeping the amount of stuff on screen down. And so we have pop-in, RPGs where a 'city' has maybe 100 people (spread across multiple areas with lots of clutter to occlude sightlines, and various other deviations from either the realistic or the epic, depending on what the occasion demands.
Arguably (as with physics acceleration for destructible environments) that's the more difficult chicken-and-egg problem: If it's just a matter of how pretty things are, I can make it work on weak hardware, and if you have a nice GPU you can crank up the resolution, anti-ailias you little heart out, and set all the draw distance sliders to maximum.
If, however, it simply isn't possible to cater to people who I need as customers if my environment has 500 NPC armies clashing or if castles can be knocked down one stone at a time, with realistic friction/leverage/impact, I can't just 'dumb down' for weaker systems, I'd actually need to rebalance the game, since the weak system version might never have you facing more than 20 NPCs, and can't have any puzzles/requirements that involve destructible environments (or I need a whole separate set of game assets with scripted quest-destructables that just have hit points and 'damaged' textures). It's a different game.
This isn't to say that the effort to support all levels of prettiness is zero, I've no doubt that it isn't; but unless a contemporary rendering engine is downright broken, it should at least be possible for the gamer enthusiasts to render at substantially higher resolutions, more AA, longer draw distances, higher poly models and higher rez textures at greater distances, etc. without any changes to the core game. The same is Not true of changes that require power but are also integral to gameplay. If some people are seeing 'real' backgrounds (with actual NPCs and scenery doing their thing, and the laws of perspective applied) and other people are getting skyboxes and a few low-detail mountains, you can't let either party interact at great distances, or you'll risk changing the game.
Also, they tend not to have swap files, which makes a difference. A PC will run like dirt if it is actually swapping all the time; but if a program gets optimistic about what it will need, or is sitting idle, it's basically free to shove it onto the disk and forget about it.
Without that, it's either in memory or taken out back and shot. This has led to some improvements in applications designed to be tolerant of sudden death; but if you need to terminate a program because you can't store its state, the amount of state you can preserve for when you restart the program is obviously somewhat constrained.
It also helps that cheap and dreadful audio systems (looking at you, PC speakers...) commonly have runs of unshielded signal cable sitting between the audio-out and the actual amplifier. Picking up enough RF interference to actually drive a speaker would be a bit alarming (with a high-efficiency mono earpiece, passive AM receivers can do it, crystal radio style; but that's because the whole system is built around the challenge of turning the whisper of power from a big AM antenna into sound); but enough RF interference to be faithfully amplified by the amplifier, which more or less just cranks up anything within its capabilities and dumps the output to the speaker, doesn't take much power.
Noise on the low voltage, pre-amplifier side of things gets amplified, so its effects are disproportionately audible. Noise picked up by the big, chunky, post-amplifier speaker cables? usually trivial.
I find it interesting they are sustaining the physical disk format as it seems to lend its self to being ripped, while a purely digital format could possibly have "better" drm?
BD-ROM is pretty paranoid; plus it's just plain big (especially for video, where there isn't any reason to not fill the entire disk, unless your movie is so short that you'd go over the maximum supported data rate by doing so). Even in areas where ISPs aren't fucking around, 50GB is a big download. Plus, that's only 20 disks/TB, assuming no unpacking of assets for better access times. Storing BD rips is cheaper than it used to be, especially with 3.5 inch disks; but with a single 2.5 in the console, that's actually a pretty low ceiling.
DLNA is a standard so dreadful that it's hard to imagine that it wasn't written as some kind of joke, except that you never, ever, hit the punchline, it just keeps hurting.
.01% of users ever used the feature, and it isn't worth the terrible burden of recompiling it for x86, or they actively wish to de-support streaming of 3rd-party media, for reasons of their own.
However, it should be noted that, with the PS3, Sony didn't let that stop them: They put out a DLNA client and, because their hardware was about the single most common DLNA client that anybody actually used (I think WMP, at least some versions, is nominally a DLNA client; but sharing from computer to computer, when both machines are Windows boxes and you could just use SMB, isn't much of a use case compared to streaming to your TV), people sucked it up and tailored their DLNA server support to the PS3. That's why "http://www.ps3mediaserver.org/" is called what it is. It's a DLNA server, it isn't locked to PS3s only or anything; but wherever something was fucked up or unclear (with DLNA, this is normal) the PS3's behavior was taken into account.
Either Sony's figures suggested that only
Given that aircraft fly around in a veritable EM soup (AM, FM, VHF transmission towers, the spark gaps of an angry god, etc.), I would hope that every phone on the plane draining its battery in a coordinated RF scream would be a survivable event. Whether all the chatter raises the noise floor or introduces errors into sensitive measurements is a subtler but more likely issue.
Who's the more wooshed? In Fight Club, that's the question that the guy in the airline seat asks after the recall decision algorithm is described. The answer is "A major one."
The NYT does do some tech stuff (mostly softpedal consumer electronics reviews with no real depth); and I suppose they could expand that to a "Cool App of the week, a week after you've already heard about it" or synergize by having a little circle jerk for the website of some 'entrepreneur' that is being written up in the business section; but the notion that 'We should have reviews for software, like we do for movies!' seems either trivial to the point of worthlessness (pick up a random trashy computer-oriented magazine, now condense it down to less than a newspaper page, how much will fit?) or to be a serious misunderstanding of the breadth of 'software' (not all stuff shot to tape is a 'movie' in the sense that a reviewer would care about; but with 'software', probably 90+ percent of the world's code is invisible almost to the point of being incomprehensible, and uninteresting, to the layman, or even the specialist in a specific part of it.)
This seems like a bizarre lament: We have plenty of software reviews, for various flavors of software, mostly located on the parts of the internet where people who care would find them(since 'Medal of Warfare 3: Gorepocalypse Now' and 'Oracle Enterprise Resource Dominance Solution 11' are somewhat less similar than a bad summer action movie and an occupational safety training video, they aren't reviewed by the same people or in the same places). Who is the audience for the 'NYT Software Review'? What are their perceived interests? What do they not know that they should? Why do they need to get their reviews from a dead tree rather than the internet?
Also, what 'category' would they be shooting for? Movie reviews (implicitly or explicitly) exist largely in the context of assuming that movies are some combination of entertainment and art/culture(exactly what the mix is depends on how highbrow the review is supposed to be). Software, though, does just about everything. What aspects of it is the NYT supposed to care about?
"How's that hopey-changey stuff workin' out for ya?" :: winks :: :: snaps gum ::
As much as I think Obama is a two-faced prick, the vision of Palin with unfettered access to CIA killbots and the world's largest surveillance database is pretty chilling...
Australia, in addition to being one of our Valued Partners in Totally Legal Intelligence activities, is crucial to the supply of judicial marsupials that help keep these activities legal.
If FISA were denied the lovable noses and endearing antics of the noble Kangaroo, and forced to make do with goats or something, we'd be in serious trouble inside a week! Why, it might get as bad as that time, during the Church Commission, when we had to pretend to be reformed characters. That was harrowing.
Not entirely: "Regulatory capture" is the term for a process (often a complex, multi-channel one) where a regulated sector comes to exert control over the relevant regulatory body.
'Graft', and its utility for rewarding... cooperative... officials is one technique; but a variety of other factors come into play: if most of the perceived expertise about an industry works in that industry, regulatory job openings tend to be filled by people who have expertise; but also have personal and past professional connections with the people they are supposed to be regulating. Outright bribery is crass and generally illegal (unless it's a campaign contribution, of course) so that isn't preferred; but 'revolving door' hiring mechanisms are pretty effective.
Regulatory capture may also be more coercive (the tobacco industry's showdown with the FDA is perhaps the prototypical example): if there are (or if sympathetic congresscritters can add) any chinks in the regulatory legislation, the ability to drag the would-be-regulator into court for a few years every time they propose to touch just about anything, and the willingness to do so, can really scare a comparatively weak body, especially if their historical mandate (and internal talent pool) is more about techie-nerd stuff like RF interference or foodborne pathogens, rather than high-pressure courtroom work against hostile "Product defense consultants".
This is not to excuse old-school Tammany Hall Machine and slipping-the-officer-a-$20-with-your-license-and-registration style corruption; but if your model of regulatory capture (and your attempts to halt it) relies on nice, visible, bagmen and suitcases full of cash as being the conduits of influence, it will fail.
And let's not even talk about the 'tiny town where sheriff Cletus is the law, and only his cousins and the high school football team are above it' problem.
Not much of a regulatory capture issue, since there just isn't much on the table; but small-scale governance offers some thrilling opportunities for misgovernance according to humanity's oldest tribal atavisms...
Are there any manufacturing/polymer types (or even armchair chemists) around who would want to hazard a guess as to why a PC component would have that smell?
My understanding is that chassis materials don't differ wildly from laptop to laptop (ABS or ABS+PC seem to the the typical plastics, Aluminum or coated magnesium-alloy the usual metals, with some assorted adhesives and things). Is there some plasticizer, or mould-release agent, or incomplete-polymerization impurity, or particularly malodorous-if-the-proportions-aren't-right two-part adhesive out there?
Apple's support model is (with the exception of prosaic stuff like 'hard drive is dead, sounds like coffee-grinder', where the ability to get retail support from somebody other than the geek squad is quite a blessing for people without corporate support contracts):
1. Deny that a problem exists. Reports of the problem will silently disappear from their message boards, CSRs will either emit cluelessness, or (if challeged) suggest that customer misuse was the cause.
2. Wait. Despite the outward appearance of not giving a fuck, Apple clearly isn't oblivious to the level of buzz, and apparent frequency with which a problem is occuring.
3. One of two options: if the buzz level of step 2 was low enough, continue to insist that product N is absolutely without fault, until it's time to release revision N+1, where the problem will silently be fixed, with absolutely no acknowledgement that the change was made to address any particular issue. If the buzz level of step 2 is high enough, Apple will then offer repair replacement, sometimes even for otherwise-out-of-warranty hardware.
Fair enough(due to my disinterest in actually owning either, I haven't been in a position to distrust-and-verify every alleged capability on the spec sheet, just what they say they can do, plus first-impression type reviews).
My point was that Samsung built a product that could not possibly have not sucked (short of unobtanium fuel modules that don't exist or something), while Pebble adopted a spec level that (while they could certainly fuck it up), can actually be done with contemporary technology.
Whether you can succeed at executing the possible is what distinguishes good engineering from poor engineering. Attempting to succeed at executing the impossible shows a form of incompetence that nullifies even your finest engineering prowess before you start.
Facts aren't decided by politics. Can the Chinese government tell residents of Taiwan what to do? If not, then Taiwan is de facto independent.
Binary decision trees also tend to be of limited use in the real world: Does Beijing deliver the mail and fine you for traffic violations in Taiwan? No. Are there things that Taiwan could theoretically do; but never would because that would make China rage out? Quite possibly.
Strictly speaking, it's probably most accurate to say that Dell was right about Apple 1997 except that they'd just recently made; but not yet seen the payoff from, the choice to get Jobs and NEXT.
Their "Hey, let's sell a confusing selection of increasingly antique PPCs in beige cases for increasingly risible prices, on the strength of our mostly-obsolete OS" strategy wasn't going anywhere, and would only have gotten worse as time went on (The price/performance of Wintels was improving, the sheer nastiness was decreasing (remember the good old days before bootable ATAPI CD drives and other basics? That's the kind of shit that made Apple's tendencies toward SCSI seem classy rather than merely expensive), and Apple's in-house attempt to modernize Classic MacOS was a miserable failure).
He's been trying to predict the future for the last 40 years. Unless everything he writes gets stamped 'above top secret: incinerator's eyes only' surely we have enough material to evaluate his efficacy by now?
How did it go?
It doesn't help (for Samsung, at least) that whatever small 'smartwatch' market exists is largely being catered to by outfits who are more realistic about how much you can actually cram into something that fits on the wrist.
I have absolutely no interest in owning either; but the 'Pebble' outfit managed to get not-totally-ridiculous battery life, along with reasonable size; by being realistic about what they could do: low power transreflective display, limited firmware (with SDK; but not one connected with any broader ecosystem).
Samsung just goes and bolts the guts of a first/second gen-ish Android phone, minus the cell modem and wifi, to your wrist. Glowy color screen, CPU that's fast enough to gobble battery (but not fast enough to make Samsungified Android run smoothly), integrated perv cam that makes the strap impossible to swap, the thing's a bulbous mess to fit a battery large enough to last a day, and they managed to make it compatible with almost nothing(it is Android; but it's already on the edge of acceptable battery life, has anemic performance, and a small display, so it isn't meaningfully 'compatible' with the broader ecosystem, and its notification display features only work with a small number of applications). Brilliant work.
I'm not sold on 'smartwatch' as a concept; but even if we accept the goodness of the idea as a foundational assumption, Samsung fucked it up.