I like to think I'm one of those bright people, and (to your point) I currently live in Silicon Valley, having sold my (small) UK company to a large US company here (one of the requirements was relocation, which at the time - removes sunglasses.... wasn't a problem:)
I have a pretty good setup here, but I'm not planning on staying too much longer - mainly because although the money and the weather are good, the healthcare, paranoia (the TSA is generally approved of !) safety (seriously, metal detectors in schools to detect guns!), quality of life, and education system aren't as good as the UK. I find that as I get older (and more financially secure), things like that become more important to me and mine.
The golden handcuffs are wearing thin. A couple more years and we'll be out of here. It was nice while it lasted, the people are friendly, and it's a nice place to visit, but I don't want to *live* here. I don't think I'm alone in this.
... is that if you click through to the graph, on page 2, you can see that the US is stagnating, whereas pretty much every other country is bettering itself.
The US started at a relatively high position on the graph, so the educational issues haven't been too much of a problem, but the US is being rapidly overtaken by a whole host of other countries. It is disingenuous (see one of the articles between the summary and the graph) to claim that it has never mattered that the US's educational system is poor, so everything is peachy. Sure, it hasn't mattered *until* *now*... How does it go ? Past performance is no guarantee of future success...
Although, his (and your) point is a good one. In the UK we have ~650 people per square mile. In the US it's actually ~84 (http://www.infoplease.com/ipa/A0934666.html). The UK generally uses paper ballots, generally does recounts if necessary, and generally has the same over-the-top reporting of live results as they come in. The result is pretty much known the next day.
Sure, cities are where people live, lots more space in the US, yada yada. That's why they have postal and proxy ballot options, and if I can vote, 6000 miles away from where I live, I'm sure the US can figure something out.
Oh I see, you're position is that his useless personal anecdote is more compelling than my useless personal anecdote ?
You see, I didn't miss the point, I just didn't see how what he said could possibly be interpreted as anything other than "you are a liar" unless he was an idiot; which is why I responded as I did.
The fact that you presumably agree with him is not an argument in his favour.
Mutilation of children's bodies is generally considered to be harmful, yes.
When you're talking about physically cutting into a baby's body, the burden of proof lies with those who would cut, not those who would not. Quoting from an above post:
The British Medical Association said it had no policy on the issue because of the “absence of unambiguously clear and consistent medical data on the implications of the intervention."
As far as I'm concerned if the evidence is so ambiguous after all this time then there's no necessity for the operation. Look at it this way if it prevents the spread of HIV then why is the infection level in the UK a third of that in the US in percentage terms yet circumcision in the UK is very tiny
In the UK, there is no financial incentive for doctors to mutilate children. I tend to trust their version of affairs, rather than those with a financial incentive (the doctor is paid for his time, and the hospital sells the tissue).
I'd love to respond to you, but I don't understand what you've written. I suppose it's just possible that I'm the idiot here, but perhaps there's another explanation, huh ?
Samsung copied Apple flagrantly, not *just* copied, but *flagrantly* copied. The jury saw that, and decided that that was wrong. The result was that Apple won its case.
We're supposed to reward effort, and not reward those who cheat. Despite the clamour from the android community, pretty much everyone I've spoken to who aren't emotionally invested in the result are "pro" the jury and think it was a fair result. Samsung- (and by extension Android-) fans, deal, and move on in life. Or hate. Your call.
Do you *really* want someone to come up with a way to make a plastic gun ? I personally think the plastic wouldn't be strong enough, but I don't see any reason to tempt fate by saying it can't be done. Just like rebar strengthens concrete way beyond what you'd expect, there probably is a way.
I guess I'm not entirely happy with the idea that any moron who would have been denied a gun permit (even in the "sure! go kill someone" gun-happy USA) could possibly get a reprap or ordbot for a few hundred dollars and go print themselves their own damn killing device.
I used to own a small company (myself and 2 others started it, it grew to 8 people when we sold it, so it was never large.) By far the largest expense every year was the trade show budget. Even building (as far as union labour allows) our own booth / tearing it down / manning it ourselves / sharing hotel rooms, a trade show averaged to ~$50k, and we did two per year (NAB in Vegas and IBC in Amsterdam). if you consider the time taken out of normal working hours for all that, as well as how long we sweated over making sure the demos were as good as we could make them, it's a lot more than that.
If some clueless moron went around sabotaging the equipment that we set up "just so" to highlight what we were trying to show, I'd be furious. You get about 20 seconds to 'hook' someone hovering around your stand at a trade show, then a max of ~5 mins to show off your wares if they are interested. If *anything* goes wrong, it's game over, which is why we worked so damn hard to make our (very complex) system look effortless for every demo.
When a sale is worth ~$20k+, you have to come over as competent, what you're selling has to demonstrably do its job, and you generally have to give a good impression. None of that is achieved if you are suddenly scrambling to find why the fucking TV has turned off. You look like an incompetent maroon, and you've lost the potential sale.
To a large company, this is an inconvenience; to a small company, trade shows are lifeblood. You *need* word of mouth to consistently generate sales, and more people will talk about "that little company that made best-of-show" (which we did, twice) than something they saw in an ad, or something that a cold-call salesman phoned them up about.
Ours was a happy story, we wrote the asset management that still (to my knowledge) runs ILM (amongst others) today, and we got a pretty good deal for the company, but it was touch and go for a year or two and during those years something like this could have pushed us over the edge. Word of mouth works both ways.... ("they don't even know how to turn on a TV"). If it had, then thats a whole bunch of people out of work, as well as a massive financial mess for me and the other two owners.
You go into business knowing it is a risk, you try to minimise that risk as much as possible, but you don't plan for self-aggrandizing idiots intentionally trying to break your company for their own financial gain. Everything the bastards at Gizmodo do is about getting more page hits and therefore more ad revenue. For them, it's all about money in their pocket, and frankly they don't give a shit about how they do it or what consequences will fall on others because of their actions.
So yeah. They're a bunch of assholes as far as I'm concerned, too.
It's a popular idea, but the materials science guys tell us that re-melted plastic has different properties than "fresh" plstic, and the more times you melt it, the worse it gets (more brittle, different melting temp. etc)
If you want accurate prints, you're going to need fresh plstic. Sad but true.
Faster in CPU MHz ? No, probably not, but that's not the only measure of capability. It was common practice to edit 2k films in real-time on an Onyx running Discreet's Flame or Inferno software when I was working in the Post-production industry back then. I can't see *any* ARM-based device editing uncompressed 4 megapixel RGB frames with effects applied in real-time at 25/30 fps any time soon...
SGI's machines were bandwidth monsters, for their time. We used the low-end 'Challenge S' (an SGI Indy without the graphics) as a very capable web server / database server machine. Average-speed CPU for their day, but the throughput was so much faster than a comparable PC running Linux (and I'm a linux fan).
"If you (1) work hard and (2) have the talent, you can achieve greatness."
This sounds pretty much like the ideal statement of how to get on in a capitalistic society. You need to put the effort in, and you need to have intrinsic value. If you don't have *both* of those, you're screwed. That's how capitalism works - it's a re-definition of "selfishness" as applied to the working environment because the crux of the system is that the workforce is working for private owners, not the government. Those private owners do their best to exploit their employees to maximize their profit, because, well, they think the money ought to be in *their* hands rather than their employees.
Your plea is that not everyone has intrinsic value, and so they are screwed; that's not fair to them and ought not be tolerated (which I agree with, for what it's worth). Unfortunately, what you're suggesting is that the US adopt a more-socialist outlook, and the raving loonies on the right, as well as a lingering distrust of communism (unfortunately conflated with socialism) from the US-vs-Russia days make that... unlikely.
Socialism isn't the worst thing in the world. Example: in the UK, when a car hit me on my motorbike, the police, fire brigade (the bike was in flames) and ambulance were there in minutes (these are all socialised services), I was taken to hospital, operated on, cared for and released a week or so later. Cost to me at the time: $0 - healthcare is socialised as well - everyone pays a little (much less than I pay for health insurance in the US now, for example) and no-one ever goes bankrupt because of medical fees... In addition, I obtained grants (from the government) to go to college, and the govt. paid me to do a PhD, not the other way around. This is more socialism.
The UK is still a capitalistic society because capitalism is a fine way to harness the innate desire to better oneself. I'm happy about this - I was free to create a startup company, go bust, create another and sell it for a handsome profit - in a non-capitalistic society that would have been far harder to do. I do like the socialist safety nets that underpin UK society though, my theory goes like this: capitalism is like a fine blade - it's a lot better when it's tempered. The problem for a lot of Americans seems to be that one uses Socialism to temper Capitalism, then you get the best of both worlds by treading the middle-path rather than veering too far to the right or to the left. As it stands, the US is in danger of veering so far to the right that I'm not even sure it could come back without some major upheaval in US society. This is the major reason I haven't switched citizenship - I used to joke that retaining my UK citizenship (even though I'm married with a kid) was the fallback plan. It's not a joke any more, I doubt my long-term future is in the US - once I've made enough cash, we'll probably be off.
Blinks. Looks at 3 30" monitors. Takes out a measuring tape and checks. Yup, all 30"
Watchooalkinabout Willis ?
I still use multiple virtual desktops. There's ne'er any shortage of things to take up screen real-estate, I mean Xcode can easily take all 3 screens, Eagle too (1 for schematic, 1 for layout, 1 for libraries etc), actually pretty much anything I do... A better question is "who needs a computer (raher than a ipad, say) and *couldn't* use multiple 30" monitors ?"
Foxconn employs 800,000 people, it's the tenth largest company (by head count) in the world. Are you *really* suggesting that Apple goods account for a majority of those people's jobs ? Really ? You think that FoxConn employ over 400,000 people on Apple production lines ?
You, sir, are either an Apple hater, spouting venom without cause or woefully misinformed.
Here's a hint for you: cause generally precedes effect; Tim Cook's comments were based around the NY Times piece, not the Daisey Debacle. Neither did he whitewash away any blame (which is generally the result of 'Spin'). Here's his comments en toto:
As a company and as individuals, we are defined by our values. Unfortunately some people are questioning Apple's values today, and I'd like to address this with you directly.
We care about every worker in our worldwide supply chain. Any accident is deeply troubling, and any issue with working conditions is cause for concern. Any suggestion that we don't care is patently false and offensive to us. As you know better than anyone, accusations like these are contrary to our values. It's not who we are.
For the many hundreds of you who are based at our suppliers' manufacturing sites around the world, or spend long stretches working there away from your families, I know you are as outraged by this as I am. For the people who aren't as close to the supply chain, you have a right to know the facts.
Every year we inspect more factories, raising the bar for our partners and going deeper into the supply chain. As we reported earlier this month, we've made a great deal of progress and improved conditions for hundreds of thousands of workers. We know of no one in our industry doing as much as we are, in as many places, touching as many people.
At the same time, no one has been more up front about the challenges we face. We are attacking problems aggressively with the help of the world's foremost authorities on safety, the environment, and fair labor. It would be easy to look for problems in fewer places and report prettier results, but those would not be the actions of a leader.
Earlier this month we opened our supply chain for independent evaluations by the Fair Labor Association. Apple was in a unique position to lead the industry by taking this step, and we did it without hesitation. This will lead to more frequent and more transparent reporting on our supply chain, which we welcome. These are the kinds of actions our customers expect from Apple, and we will take more of them in the future.
We are focused on educating workers about their rights, so they are empowered to speak up when they see unsafe conditions or unfair treatment. As you know, more than a million people have been trained by our program.
We will continue to dig deeper, and we will undoubtedly find more issues. What we will not do -- and never have done -- is stand still or turn a blind eye to problems in our supply chain. On this you have my word. You can follow our progress at apple.com/supplierresponsibility.
To those within Apple who are tackling these issues every day, you have our thanks and admiration. Your work is significant and it is changing people's lives. We are all proud to work alongside you.
Buy hey, if being a dickhead and hating on Apple defines you, go ahead and waste your life as much as you like.
If you listened to the actual recording of the conversation, you'd hear someone (can't remember who) ask how iPad sales went. Tim Cook said he wasn't going to talk much about it on this conference call, but that Apple had a record opening weekend of iPad sales.
The stated intent of the buyback is to prevent dilution of outstanding shares when Apple gives RSU shares to its employees. I guess that means they spend $15B/year on their employee share bonuses.
No. This is ass-covering. This is "oh shit, someone actually looked at my data, that I tried to hide by claiming my source was now incommunicado. WTF do I say now ?"
He presented stuff as fact. At no point did he say "This is mainly fiction", or "Some of this shit I just made up for dramatic effect", or *anything* in fact that would give the game away.
Even *if* we give him a pass on the monologues, there's no excuse for lying when asked direct questions by interviewers (multiple times, and not just TAL). Things like "did you meet the man with the hexane-poisened hand who was denied medical care and fired, that you claim to have met", answer: "yes"; reality: no.
He's a proven liar. He's been outed. Nothing he says has any credibility any more. Nothing. Which is a shame when it comes to raising the standards of living in China.
Exactly how are "Apple spinning the entire report as false" ?
I've not read *anything* about this from Apple. I've read a whole spectrum of pieces from idiotic through incisive reporting from both sides, I've read real journalists eviscerate Daisey once the truth came out, and I've read his "account" of things he "saw". Apple have remained quite impressively restrained on the matter, as far as I can tell. I'm not sure I could be as restrained if some douchebag was lying about me in a public forum.
I tend to use the first letters of every word in a line Or two from a poem. At one time I used 'cargoes' by John Masefield, giving me QoNfdOrhthisP, or "Quinquireme of Ninevah from distant Ophir, rowing home to haven in sunny Palestine".
Trivial to remember if you know the poem (and the name of the poem makes a good password hint without giving too much away) but pretty much impossible to brute-force or dictionary-attack. You can still throw in the o->0, I->1 transformations etc., but there's probably already enough entropy there already unless someone "clever" is insisting on 2 numbers, 2 upppercase letters, etc.
Not really; peer pressure is a real force to be reckoned with in any community. Ridicule is an easy method of applying peer pressure, and (generally) the ridicule is pointing out that the ID believers are the bunch of dicks, not the scientists.
Slashdot Mirror
I like to think I'm one of those bright people, and (to your point) I currently live in Silicon Valley, having sold my (small) UK company to a large US company here (one of the requirements was relocation, which at the time - removes sunglasses .... wasn't a problem :)
I have a pretty good setup here, but I'm not planning on staying too much longer - mainly because although the money and the weather are good, the healthcare, paranoia (the TSA is generally approved of !) safety (seriously, metal detectors in schools to detect guns!), quality of life, and education system aren't as good as the UK. I find that as I get older (and more financially secure), things like that become more important to me and mine.
The golden handcuffs are wearing thin. A couple more years and we'll be out of here. It was nice while it lasted, the people are friendly, and it's a nice place to visit, but I don't want to *live* here. I don't think I'm alone in this.
Simon.
... is that if you click through to the graph, on page 2, you can see that the US is stagnating, whereas pretty much every other country is bettering itself.
The US started at a relatively high position on the graph, so the educational issues haven't been too much of a problem, but the US is being rapidly overtaken by a whole host of other countries. It is disingenuous (see one of the articles between the summary and the graph) to claim that it has never mattered that the US's educational system is poor, so everything is peachy. Sure, it hasn't mattered *until* *now*... How does it go ? Past performance is no guarantee of future success...
Simon.
*whoosh*
Although, his (and your) point is a good one. In the UK we have ~650 people per square mile. In the US it's actually ~84 (http://www.infoplease.com/ipa/A0934666.html). The UK generally uses paper ballots, generally does recounts if necessary, and generally has the same over-the-top reporting of live results as they come in. The result is pretty much known the next day.
Sure, cities are where people live, lots more space in the US, yada yada. That's why they have postal and proxy ballot options, and if I can vote, 6000 miles away from where I live, I'm sure the US can figure something out.
Simon.
Oh I see, you're position is that his useless personal anecdote is more compelling than my useless personal anecdote ?
You see, I didn't miss the point, I just didn't see how what he said could possibly be interpreted as anything other than "you are a liar" unless he was an idiot; which is why I responded as I did.
The fact that you presumably agree with him is not an argument in his favour.
Simon
Mutilation of children's bodies is generally considered to be harmful, yes.
When you're talking about physically cutting into a baby's body, the burden of proof lies with those who would cut, not those who would not. Quoting from an above post:
The British Medical Association said it had no policy on the issue because of the “absence of unambiguously clear and consistent medical data on the implications of the intervention."
As far as I'm concerned if the evidence is so ambiguous after all this time then there's no necessity for the operation. Look at it this way if it prevents the spread of HIV then why is the infection level in the UK a third of that in the US in percentage terms yet circumcision in the UK is very tiny
In the UK, there is no financial incentive for doctors to mutilate children. I tend to trust their version of affairs, rather than those with a financial incentive (the doctor is paid for his time, and the hospital sells the tissue).
Simon
I'd love to respond to you, but I don't understand what you've written. I suppose it's just possible that I'm the idiot here, but perhaps there's another explanation, huh ?
Simon.
That's just not true
Excuse me ? Are you telling me you know better than I how *my* conversations went ?
I can assure you it absolutely is true.
Simon.
Samsung copied Apple flagrantly, not *just* copied, but *flagrantly* copied. The jury saw that, and decided that that was wrong. The result was that Apple won its case.
We're supposed to reward effort, and not reward those who cheat. Despite the clamour from the android community, pretty much everyone I've spoken to who aren't emotionally invested in the result are "pro" the jury and think it was a fair result. Samsung- (and by extension Android-) fans, deal, and move on in life. Or hate. Your call.
Simon.
Is /. *really* that hard up for page-views ?
Do you *really* want someone to come up with a way to make a plastic gun ? I personally think the plastic wouldn't be strong enough, but I don't see any reason to tempt fate by saying it can't be done. Just like rebar strengthens concrete way beyond what you'd expect, there probably is a way.
I guess I'm not entirely happy with the idea that any moron who would have been denied a gun permit (even in the "sure! go kill someone" gun-happy USA) could possibly get a reprap or ordbot for a few hundred dollars and go print themselves their own damn killing device.
Simon. Not impressed.
I can, if you like.
I used to own a small company (myself and 2 others started it, it grew to 8 people when we sold it, so it was never large.) By far the largest expense every year was the trade show budget. Even building (as far as union labour allows) our own booth / tearing it down / manning it ourselves / sharing hotel rooms, a trade show averaged to ~$50k, and we did two per year (NAB in Vegas and IBC in Amsterdam). if you consider the time taken out of normal working hours for all that, as well as how long we sweated over making sure the demos were as good as we could make them, it's a lot more than that.
If some clueless moron went around sabotaging the equipment that we set up "just so" to highlight what we were trying to show, I'd be furious. You get about 20 seconds to 'hook' someone hovering around your stand at a trade show, then a max of ~5 mins to show off your wares if they are interested. If *anything* goes wrong, it's game over, which is why we worked so damn hard to make our (very complex) system look effortless for every demo.
When a sale is worth ~$20k+, you have to come over as competent, what you're selling has to demonstrably do its job, and you generally have to give a good impression. None of that is achieved if you are suddenly scrambling to find why the fucking TV has turned off. You look like an incompetent maroon, and you've lost the potential sale.
To a large company, this is an inconvenience; to a small company, trade shows are lifeblood. You *need* word of mouth to consistently generate sales, and more people will talk about "that little company that made best-of-show" (which we did, twice) than something they saw in an ad, or something that a cold-call salesman phoned them up about.
Ours was a happy story, we wrote the asset management that still (to my knowledge) runs ILM (amongst others) today, and we got a pretty good deal for the company, but it was touch and go for a year or two and during those years something like this could have pushed us over the edge. Word of mouth works both ways. ... ("they don't even know how to turn on a TV"). If it had, then thats a whole bunch of people out of work, as well as a massive financial mess for me and the other two owners.
You go into business knowing it is a risk, you try to minimise that risk as much as possible, but you don't plan for self-aggrandizing idiots intentionally trying to break your company for their own financial gain. Everything the bastards at Gizmodo do is about getting more page hits and therefore more ad revenue. For them, it's all about money in their pocket, and frankly they don't give a shit about how they do it or what consequences will fall on others because of their actions.
So yeah. They're a bunch of assholes as far as I'm concerned, too.
Simon.
It's a popular idea, but the materials science guys tell us that re-melted plastic has different properties than "fresh" plstic, and the more times you melt it, the worse it gets (more brittle, different melting temp. etc)
If you want accurate prints, you're going to need fresh plstic. Sad but true.
Simon
Faster in CPU MHz ? No, probably not, but that's not the only measure of capability. It was common practice to edit 2k films in real-time on an Onyx running Discreet's Flame or Inferno software when I was working in the Post-production industry back then. I can't see *any* ARM-based device editing uncompressed 4 megapixel RGB frames with effects applied in real-time at 25/30 fps any time soon...
SGI's machines were bandwidth monsters, for their time. We used the low-end 'Challenge S' (an SGI Indy without the graphics) as a very capable web server / database server machine. Average-speed CPU for their day, but the throughput was so much faster than a comparable PC running Linux (and I'm a linux fan).
Simon.
One of us doesn't understand capitalism.
"If you (1) work hard and (2) have the talent, you can achieve greatness."
This sounds pretty much like the ideal statement of how to get on in a capitalistic society. You need to put the effort in, and you need to have intrinsic value. If you don't have *both* of those, you're screwed. That's how capitalism works - it's a re-definition of "selfishness" as applied to the working environment because the crux of the system is that the workforce is working for private owners, not the government. Those private owners do their best to exploit their employees to maximize their profit, because, well, they think the money ought to be in *their* hands rather than their employees.
Your plea is that not everyone has intrinsic value, and so they are screwed; that's not fair to them and ought not be tolerated (which I agree with, for what it's worth). Unfortunately, what you're suggesting is that the US adopt a more-socialist outlook, and the raving loonies on the right, as well as a lingering distrust of communism (unfortunately conflated with socialism) from the US-vs-Russia days make that ... unlikely.
Socialism isn't the worst thing in the world. Example: in the UK, when a car hit me on my motorbike, the police, fire brigade (the bike was in flames) and ambulance were there in minutes (these are all socialised services), I was taken to hospital, operated on, cared for and released a week or so later. Cost to me at the time: $0 - healthcare is socialised as well - everyone pays a little (much less than I pay for health insurance in the US now, for example) and no-one ever goes bankrupt because of medical fees... In addition, I obtained grants (from the government) to go to college, and the govt. paid me to do a PhD, not the other way around. This is more socialism.
The UK is still a capitalistic society because capitalism is a fine way to harness the innate desire to better oneself. I'm happy about this - I was free to create a startup company, go bust, create another and sell it for a handsome profit - in a non-capitalistic society that would have been far harder to do. I do like the socialist safety nets that underpin UK society though, my theory goes like this: capitalism is like a fine blade - it's a lot better when it's tempered. The problem for a lot of Americans seems to be that one uses Socialism to temper Capitalism, then you get the best of both worlds by treading the middle-path rather than veering too far to the right or to the left. As it stands, the US is in danger of veering so far to the right that I'm not even sure it could come back without some major upheaval in US society. This is the major reason I haven't switched citizenship - I used to joke that retaining my UK citizenship (even though I'm married with a kid) was the fallback plan. It's not a joke any more, I doubt my long-term future is in the US - once I've made enough cash, we'll probably be off.
Simon.
Blinks. Looks at 3 30" monitors. Takes out a measuring tape and checks. Yup, all 30"
Watchooalkinabout Willis ?
I still use multiple virtual desktops. There's ne'er any shortage of things to take up screen real-estate, I mean Xcode can easily take all 3 screens, Eagle too (1 for schematic, 1 for layout, 1 for libraries etc), actually pretty much anything I do... A better question is "who needs a computer (raher than a ipad, say) and *couldn't* use multiple 30" monitors ?"
simon
Bollocks!
Foxconn employs 800,000 people, it's the tenth largest company (by head count) in the world. Are you *really* suggesting that Apple goods account for a majority of those people's jobs ? Really ? You think that FoxConn employ over 400,000 people on Apple production lines ?
You, sir, are either an Apple hater, spouting venom without cause or woefully misinformed.
Simon
Because Daisey said himself that he's a liar. Read / listen to the TAL follow-up.
Simon.
Here's a hint for you: cause generally precedes effect; Tim Cook's comments were based around the NY Times piece, not the Daisey Debacle. Neither did he whitewash away any blame (which is generally the result of 'Spin'). Here's his comments en toto:
Buy hey, if being a dickhead and hating on Apple defines you, go ahead and waste your life as much as you like.
Simon
If you listened to the actual recording of the conversation, you'd hear someone (can't remember who) ask how iPad sales went. Tim Cook said he wasn't going to talk much about it on this conference call, but that Apple had a record opening weekend of iPad sales.
So, I don't think they were horrible...
Simon
The stated intent of the buyback is to prevent dilution of outstanding shares when Apple gives RSU shares to its employees. I guess that means they spend $15B/year on their employee share bonuses.
Simon.
Its actually slightly higher than that - they're forecasting $45B over 3 years, but your point stands.
Simon
Seriously ? This is "informative".
No. This is ass-covering. This is "oh shit, someone actually looked at my data, that I tried to hide by claiming my source was now incommunicado. WTF do I say now ?"
He presented stuff as fact. At no point did he say "This is mainly fiction", or "Some of this shit I just made up for dramatic effect", or *anything* in fact that would give the game away.
Even *if* we give him a pass on the monologues, there's no excuse for lying when asked direct questions by interviewers (multiple times, and not just TAL). Things like "did you meet the man with the hexane-poisened hand who was denied medical care and fired, that you claim to have met", answer: "yes"; reality: no.
He's a proven liar. He's been outed. Nothing he says has any credibility any more. Nothing. Which is a shame when it comes to raising the standards of living in China.
Simon.
Exactly how are "Apple spinning the entire report as false" ?
I've not read *anything* about this from Apple. I've read a whole spectrum of pieces from idiotic through incisive reporting from both sides, I've read real journalists eviscerate Daisey once the truth came out, and I've read his "account" of things he "saw". Apple have remained quite impressively restrained on the matter, as far as I can tell. I'm not sure I could be as restrained if some douchebag was lying about me in a public forum.
Simon
I tend to use the first letters of every word in a line Or two from a poem. At one time I used 'cargoes' by John Masefield, giving me QoNfdOrhthisP, or "Quinquireme of Ninevah from distant Ophir, rowing home to haven in sunny Palestine".
Trivial to remember if you know the poem (and the name of the poem makes a good password hint without giving too much away) but pretty much impossible to brute-force or dictionary-attack. You can still throw in the o->0, I->1 transformations etc., but there's probably already enough entropy there already unless someone "clever" is insisting on 2 numbers, 2 upppercase letters, etc.
Simon
Not really; peer pressure is a real force to be reckoned with in any community. Ridicule is an easy method of applying peer pressure, and (generally) the ridicule is pointing out that the ID believers are the bunch of dicks, not the scientists.
Simon.