Are the majority of mod chip users 'pirates' or are they legitimate users with legitimate applications for the modifications that Bray hasn't considered?
The majority of the mod chip users that I know are pirates.
The hungarian parliament explicitely forbid the use of hungarian airspace for the Iraq war. The U.S. ignored it. Technically the U.S. is at war with Hungary at the moment.
Absolutely untrue. I point you to the press release from the Hungarian Embassy:
In approving the request of the United States and Great Britain to use Hungarian airspace, the Government has taken into consideration the fact that the majority of EU and NATO member states are supporting the steps taken by the governments of the Unites States, Great Britain and Spain to enforce UN resolutions regarding Iraq. Not even France and Germany, who have voiced concerns regarding the use of military force against Iraq, are hindering the Allies from enforcing UN resolutions.
The Government therefore acknowledges that the relevant authorities, acting on the basis of a standing parliamentary authorization, have allowed the use of Hungarian airspace and designated airfields with a view to enforcing UN resolutions. At the same time, Hungary, in accordance with the position of the European Council, regards the use of force only as a last resort.
Austria forbid the use of its airspace too, and U.S. didn't stop to ignore it until Austria said it would shot down the next american airplane entering its airspace.
That's almost laughable. Austria's Air Force is composed of 50-year-old Saab Dragon fighter jets with no radar or computers. They might be able to shoot down an airliner, but that's about it. In fact, as soon as Austria closed its airspace to US military overflights, the US just few around Austria. Austria isn't exactly a big roadblock on the way to Iraq.
If you go abroad and do something wrong, you shall be subject to the local laws. If you know the laws will turn out bad for you, don't go there. This applies to everyone. Even if they are U.S. citizens.
Local laws apply, even to US citizens. That was not the point of the International Court. All that the US will do for its citizens being prosecuted in a foreign judicial system is check on their treatment in custody and assist them in obtaining a lawyer...the same things that any country's consular staff would do.
Your complaint in this case seems to be in regard to military personnel who are accused of crimes in foreign countries. Their prosecution depends upon the status of forces agreement that those countries have negotiated with the US. They cover the rules for dealing with military personnel when they are on duty. In the case of rapes in Japan, you conveniently omitted the change in the SOFA that permits the Japanese government to prosecute the military personnel in those cases (and they have, with success). In the case of the Italian incident, the SOFA did not allow the local prosecutors to charge the pilot. Perhaps your complaint should be against those governments that do not negotiate SOFAs that allow for local prosecution of foreign military personnel.
It's kind of sad to see a superior product (IMHO) like the Rio Karma get sidelined due to the iPod mini's momentum/marketing/teenybopper appeal.
You bought the Karma because you thought that it was superior - just like I bought a Neuros for the same reason. I'm not broken up because iPods are selling like crazy and Neuroses are not. DI sells enough of them to stay in business and keep developing the product. Same with Rio (or whatever the company du jour is now).
At the risk of torturing an analogy to death, it's like the difference between Windows and Linux.
Brought to us by the same genius thinking that gave us Leap Days, no doubt.
Genius indeed.
The reason that NTSC frame rates are not an integer fraction of the 60Hz power frequency is because at that frequency, the color carrier and the sound carrier would tend to "beat" with each other, or experience intermodulation distortion at a frequency that was not an integer multiple of the scan rate. At 30fps, the beating was potentially visible on some monochrome sets of the time. RCA picked a frame rate that was very close to the AC frequency, but off just enough that the beat frequency of the intermodulation distortion was almost exactly the 117th harmonic of the frame rate, so the beating was not visible.
But here's the rub - looking back over time, it appears that the monochrome sets of the time were perfectly capable of filtering out the interfering beat frequency. But RCA had the political might to create quite a bit of FUD about the potential problem, so we got a 0.1% change in frame rates and a much more complicated system than the CBS version. And, to pile on even more, HDTV sticks with the same frame rate...because that's the way it's always been done.
As to leap days...well, I guess I prefer July to be in the summer. I don't think that the standard of one year = 365.25 days was set by committee.
I'll second or third Monkelectric. I'm an electrical engineer and I work in an area of signal analysis that has a lot of guys with "equivalent experience" in lieu of degrees. It turns out that most of them are pretty good at what they do, as long as they don't have to do anything new. They have no foundation in math, so, while they recognize that, for instance, a badly designed high speed transmission line will generate reflections, they cannot show you why that is.
The papers and proceedings that I get might as well be written in Sanskrit for them. And god help me if I try to explain why something is not working with a mathematical formula. If you can't use an analogy, then forget it.
Sadly (at least, I think it's sad), these guys are at the peak of their careers, but they've been in the same positions for 15 or 20 years. They'll never move up and they can't go to another company because they have no degree. So, they do the same thing, day after day, without really learning new methods or skills. Then they get bitter because guys like me come in, fresh from school and become a project leader after a year or two. I say it's sad because I'm 41 and got my degree two years ago after 15 years in the Navy. I could have just as easily been one of those guys.
Who would fardles bear To grunt and sweat under a weary life -- But that the dread of something after death, The undiscovered country, from whose bourn No traveler returns, puzzles the will, And makes us rather bear those ills we have, Than fly to others that we know not of.
A fardle is a bundle carried on one's back...a backpack.
And they all said that making engineers take liberal arts classes was a waste of time!
I was a high school senior in 1979. There was an ATM at the bank down the road from my house if I needed cash after hours. I still can't spend $2000 to get my left eye fixed, thanks...medical science has yet to figure out how to rebuild an optic nerve. We had cable TV. 40 channels.
I had a computer. Sure, I had to load the program by tape, but it was a computer.
If I wanted to know what was playing at the local theater, I picked up the telephone and called. If I wanted directions to a location, I looked in the map in the phone book.
Yeah, my digital watch (with LEDs) was a gimmick at the time and no, we didn't have cell phones (but I did have a CB radio, good buddy). We had a microwave, too.
Lest you think that this was in the big city, let me ease your mind...this was in Boise, Idaho, population (at the time) maybe 50,000 (and the biggest city in the state).
-h-
Re:Wiping out life on Europa
on
Melting Europa
·
· Score: 1
Even around Chernobyl 18 years later life seems to be going on as usual.
Well, I wouldn't say that it is "as usual", but life isstill going on.
Based on this logic manufacturers of headphones, amplifiers, loudspeakers, stereo units and the like would be fair game too. The "illegal" music that could "possibly" be on the iPod is nothing but bits and bytes without the electronic conversion to acoustic energy.
Not so. Those "bits and bytes" are not just random patterns of data - they represent something very specific. Encoded on a hard drive, CD-ROM or the like, the data is relatively permanent. You can pick up a hard drive and say that there is a copy of a song on it. You cannot pick up a loudspeaker and say the same thing. The music does not exist on a loudspeaker or in an amplifier. There is no structure within those devices that are capable of storing the data at given instant of time. You can examine a loudspeaker and say that some voltage and current is present in the voice coil, or some displacement from rest is present in the cone, but that's all. You can examine a CD at a given instant of time and say that there is, encoded in a digital pattern, a complete copy of a song.
The problem with this "bits and bytes" argument is that fails to resolve the fact that the law (in this case) isn't concerned with the reproduction of the acoustic energy, it's concerned with the actual representation of that data on some storage medium. The law isn't interested in whether or not you actually listen to the music. Headphones, amplifiers, etc are not storage media.
Nonetheless, I have a philosophical problem with the idea that the media should be taxed on the assumption that if it can be used for some illegal purpose, it will be used for some illegal purpose. Besides, as others have pointed out, it sure does seem to give a free pass to copying the music...and effectively sets the value of a CD's or hard drive's worth of songs to whatever the tax is. That's fair to neither the artists nor the media purchaser.
Yes, but worth repeating as there are still countless journalists out there who are creating headlines as if the payment was primarily for linux licences, and, therefore, substantiating SCO's case. It is lazy journalism by hacks who are unable to research past SCO's press releases.
Amen, brother! And at the top of the lazy journalism crowd is Taco with a headline that was virtually ripped from a SCO press release:
Not at all. Most OEMs get it massively discounted, for something like $1 per machine. It's one of the major leverages Microsoft have had over the OEMs.
I worked for a major OEM for several years. I don't know where you got your figure (but I can guess...), but it's wrong. OEMs pay about $45 per license. The price hasn't changed for years. It used to be $45 for WfWG, about $50 for NT 4 and the same for 98 and up. And that was back when MS was strong-arming exclusive contracts.
We had to consider the cost of every component that went into a PC, down to the screws. So even back when a hot computer was Pentium 166, that $45 was a chunk of change. You can bet that it's virtually intolerable today.
What really made us grit our teeth, though, was that we paid $45 to $50 for a copy of Windows, but we were responsible for all of the manufacturing costs, from the media to the packaging. We had to contract our own mastering, printing and packaging services. So, while we paid Microsoft their money, we also had to pay Phoenix another few bucks for the actual media. And when a new version of Windows came out, we had to pray that Microsoft would actually get us a master soon enough so that we could ship systems with their OS on the announced release date.
At the time, we were the second largest build to order PC company (behind Dell). I'd hate to think of how things would have been if it was a tiny outfit.
Sorry, but there is definitely somebody being blatantly dishonest here. There is NO WAY in HELL that some podunk sheriff's office web site gets 3.5 million visitors per month.
It's not Macon County, Georgia, it's Macomb County, Michigan - as in Detroit.
But even if it was a complex, graphically intensive site, the bandwidth bill for such a site would be tiny. I host several similar sized sites on a 10 dollar a month shared hosting account without the slightest problem. In short, the idea of this level of traffic generating a $300,000 bandwidth bill is laughable.
His "bill" may not have been for bandwidth. Here's the article from the Detroit Free Press. That's not to say that he deserves it - on the face of it, I don't think that he does - just that he seems to be asking for more than bandwidth money.
It's no different than what happened after TWA 800 was shot down by the Navy. They screamed "Terrorist! Terrorist!" and so they placed all these onerous security restrictions on the public (having to show your papers when travelling, for instance.) But once they agree on a cover story implicating the center fuel tank exploding (something that had never happened before and has never happened since), do they restore our privacy and our liberty?
Well, at least when they take us to trial we'll be able to appeal the conviction based on the fact that the gold-fringed American flag represents an Admiralty Court, but, as civilians, we're not subject to Admiralty law.
Why doesn't Evolution support importing mailboxes?
I guess that reviewing a beta version of Evolution counts as cutting edge, but it's sort of an apples and oranges comparison with stable releases of other products. The current (stable) version supports importing mailboxes as well as emoticons (for what they're worth).
And, as mentioned elsewhere, calling Outlook 2002 a cutting edge mail client isn't very accurate. Outlook 2003 is a much better program.
While I'm willing to give any company the benefit of the doubt, it does seem rather suspicious that Micron chose to sell off their PC arm and focus instead on, the implied, more lucrative memory manufacturing business line. Circumstantial yes, but it never made sense why Micron would sell of a business line that was the only good alternative to Dell.
Micron owned ~60% of MicronPC. The business was losing money at a fantastic rate and shareholder pressure was on Micron to divest itself of businesses that were not part of its core competency. MicronPC itself was straying well out of its own core business by operating a rather poorly-run Internet services company, as well as making a huge departure from its niche of being a no-compromise performance PC company. MicronPC was a terribly mismanaged company.
Micron either sold or closed a number of other businesses as well. The company used to be in the construction management business, RFID business, flat panel display business and property management business. They even manufactured semiconductor processing equipment. The problem was, though, that the company was a semiconductor manufacturer. During the dot bomb days, that was well and good, but, like many other companies that strayed from what they did best, when the bubble burst, Micron was stretched a little thin.
But, to the point, Micron did not sell MicronPC. They donated their entire holdings to the Micron Foundation. MicronPC "sold" (and by "sell" I mean that they paid Gores to take the business) the computer business to a turnaround company and merged with Interland to further its ISP business.
It's possible that 6 or 7 years ago MicronPC was a good alternative to Dell, but, up until a year or so ago, that certainly wasn't the case. As soon as MicronPC started trying to directly compete with Dell, the company began tanking. The product quality suffered tremendously and the company simply didn't have the management quality necessary to make the jump from a niche manufacturer to an industry giant. It's interesting that in the past year, MPC is now making a profit and building a focused range of no-compromise systems...much as it did in the early days.
Micron Technology recognized what was happening at MicronPC years ago and pretty much turned its back on MicronPC quite a while before the company split up.
Try Nottingham (the english one) for some really nice crossings...
Or they could just have the Sheriff of Nottingham afoot to draw and quarter the villains! Ever since that varlet Robin came around, those Merry Men have been the scourge of rush hour traffic. Verily, the commute to Sherwood Forest is mightily unbearable.
I think that you'll find that the officer was not required to provide an explanation. She had probable cause to ask for his ID. He didn't cooperate. He got arrested.
Now, I'll go along with anyone who says that the officer didn't handle things nearly as diplomatically as she could have. And I'll agree that she probably should have said what you suggested. In fact, if I was the supervisor that day, everybody would be standing in front of me getting a lesson in how to handle a situation like that better. But the police don't have to stop and give a suspect a detailed explanation of what their probable cause is. You can probably think up plenty of reasons why that is. Watch your average Saturday hour of COPS and you'll see why.
I suppose that the next question is that if the police don't explain what the probable cause was, then how do we know that they had it? That's what a court is for. And if they didn't have probable cause, then the state loses. And people notice stuff like that...a local PD near my town had patterns of flimsy or no PC several years ago. A significant number of officers were fired, many were reprimanded, the city lost a lawsuit and paid out a lot of money.
So let me get this straight: you write about police officers who arrest a "person of interest" in a domestic violence case because said person won't produce any identification to help them determine whether or not they were a party to the case. Is your position, then, that if an individual that the police feel may be connected to such a case refuses to produce any ID that said individual should just be set loose without any ado? That's what happened in this case.
Or is it your position that if an officer walks up to you out of the blue, without any particular reason or suspicion and demands your ID that you should be able to refuse? Now THAT I'd buy. But I have to say that if said officer came up to me and asked for my ID, I'd probably hand it over. I have better things to do with my time than fight over whether or not I have the right to refuse.
And you conclusively know that this was caused by alcoholics then ?
Easy there, Chester! Not only do I not know if they were alcoholics, I never said that they were. They took a safe and alcohol. That's all I said. Relax...
Did they take money ? perhaps they're spend-a-holics ? What about jewelry? maybe they were women?
They stole a safe. They stole alcohol. I guess they could have been women, but I'm told that in this enlightened age men wear jewelry. Even here in Idaho. But hey, it's possible that they were spend-a-holic women. Maybe they were spend-a-holic, alcoholic women. Or maybe they were just a couple of people who knew that they could steal some stuff out of my house. Who knows? Not me and not the cops.
Good point...the only time that we got robbed resulted in them ripping our small safe out of the closet floor and taking every last bottle out of the liquor cabinet. Funny you should mention that!
Slashdot Mirror
Al Gore
No, really! 1337 and old school at the same time!
...a beowulf cluster full of pigeons.
Nasty!!!
That's always possible...I guess it also goes to show the value of anecdotal evidence.
-h-
The majority of the mod chip users that I know are pirates.
-h-
Absolutely untrue. I point you to the press release from the Hungarian Embassy:
In approving the request of the United States and Great Britain to use Hungarian airspace, the Government has taken into consideration the fact that the majority of EU and NATO member states are supporting the steps taken by the governments of the Unites States, Great Britain and Spain to enforce UN resolutions regarding Iraq. Not even France and Germany, who have voiced concerns regarding the use of military force against Iraq, are hindering the Allies from enforcing UN resolutions.
The Government therefore acknowledges that the relevant authorities, acting on the basis of a standing parliamentary authorization, have allowed the use of Hungarian airspace and designated airfields with a view to enforcing UN resolutions. At the same time, Hungary, in accordance with the position of the European Council, regards the use of force only as a last resort.
Austria forbid the use of its airspace too, and U.S. didn't stop to ignore it until Austria said it would shot down the next american airplane entering its airspace.
That's almost laughable. Austria's Air Force is composed of 50-year-old Saab Dragon fighter jets with no radar or computers. They might be able to shoot down an airliner, but that's about it. In fact, as soon as Austria closed its airspace to US military overflights, the US just few around Austria. Austria isn't exactly a big roadblock on the way to Iraq.
If you go abroad and do something wrong, you shall be subject to the local laws. If you know the laws will turn out bad for you, don't go there. This applies to everyone. Even if they are U.S. citizens.
Local laws apply, even to US citizens. That was not the point of the International Court. All that the US will do for its citizens being prosecuted in a foreign judicial system is check on their treatment in custody and assist them in obtaining a lawyer...the same things that any country's consular staff would do.
Your complaint in this case seems to be in regard to military personnel who are accused of crimes in foreign countries. Their prosecution depends upon the status of forces agreement that those countries have negotiated with the US. They cover the rules for dealing with military personnel when they are on duty. In the case of rapes in Japan, you conveniently omitted the change in the SOFA that permits the Japanese government to prosecute the military personnel in those cases (and they have, with success). In the case of the Italian incident, the SOFA did not allow the local prosecutors to charge the pilot. Perhaps your complaint should be against those governments that do not negotiate SOFAs that allow for local prosecution of foreign military personnel.
-h-
You bought the Karma because you thought that it was superior - just like I bought a Neuros for the same reason. I'm not broken up because iPods are selling like crazy and Neuroses are not. DI sells enough of them to stay in business and keep developing the product. Same with Rio (or whatever the company du jour is now).
At the risk of torturing an analogy to death, it's like the difference between Windows and Linux.
Don't sweat it.
-h-
Genius indeed.
The reason that NTSC frame rates are not an integer fraction of the 60Hz power frequency is because at that frequency, the color carrier and the sound carrier would tend to "beat" with each other, or experience intermodulation distortion at a frequency that was not an integer multiple of the scan rate. At 30fps, the beating was potentially visible on some monochrome sets of the time. RCA picked a frame rate that was very close to the AC frequency, but off just enough that the beat frequency of the intermodulation distortion was almost exactly the 117th harmonic of the frame rate, so the beating was not visible.
But here's the rub - looking back over time, it appears that the monochrome sets of the time were perfectly capable of filtering out the interfering beat frequency. But RCA had the political might to create quite a bit of FUD about the potential problem, so we got a 0.1% change in frame rates and a much more complicated system than the CBS version. And, to pile on even more, HDTV sticks with the same frame rate...because that's the way it's always been done.
As to leap days...well, I guess I prefer July to be in the summer. I don't think that the standard of one year = 365.25 days was set by committee.
-h-
I'll second or third Monkelectric. I'm an electrical engineer and I work in an area of signal analysis that has a lot of guys with "equivalent experience" in lieu of degrees. It turns out that most of them are pretty good at what they do, as long as they don't have to do anything new. They have no foundation in math, so, while they recognize that, for instance, a badly designed high speed transmission line will generate reflections, they cannot show you why that is.
The papers and proceedings that I get might as well be written in Sanskrit for them. And god help me if I try to explain why something is not working with a mathematical formula. If you can't use an analogy, then forget it.
Sadly (at least, I think it's sad), these guys are at the peak of their careers, but they've been in the same positions for 15 or 20 years. They'll never move up and they can't go to another company because they have no degree. So, they do the same thing, day after day, without really learning new methods or skills. Then they get bitter because guys like me come in, fresh from school and become a project leader after a year or two. I say it's sad because I'm 41 and got my degree two years ago after 15 years in the Navy. I could have just as easily been one of those guys.
-h-
Who would fardles bear
To grunt and sweat under a weary life --
But that the dread of something after death,
The undiscovered country, from whose bourn
No traveler returns, puzzles the will,
And makes us rather bear those ills we have,
Than fly to others that we know not of.
A fardle is a bundle carried on one's back...a backpack.
And they all said that making engineers take liberal arts classes was a waste of time!
-h-
-h-
I had a computer. Sure, I had to load the program by tape, but it was a computer.
If I wanted to know what was playing at the local theater, I picked up the telephone and called. If I wanted directions to a location, I looked in the map in the phone book.
Yeah, my digital watch (with LEDs) was a gimmick at the time and no, we didn't have cell phones (but I did have a CB radio, good buddy). We had a microwave, too.
Lest you think that this was in the big city, let me ease your mind...this was in Boise, Idaho, population (at the time) maybe 50,000 (and the biggest city in the state).
-h-
Well, I wouldn't say that it is "as usual", but life is still going on.
-h-
Not so. Those "bits and bytes" are not just random patterns of data - they represent something very specific. Encoded on a hard drive, CD-ROM or the like, the data is relatively permanent. You can pick up a hard drive and say that there is a copy of a song on it. You cannot pick up a loudspeaker and say the same thing. The music does not exist on a loudspeaker or in an amplifier. There is no structure within those devices that are capable of storing the data at given instant of time. You can examine a loudspeaker and say that some voltage and current is present in the voice coil, or some displacement from rest is present in the cone, but that's all. You can examine a CD at a given instant of time and say that there is, encoded in a digital pattern, a complete copy of a song.
The problem with this "bits and bytes" argument is that fails to resolve the fact that the law (in this case) isn't concerned with the reproduction of the acoustic energy, it's concerned with the actual representation of that data on some storage medium. The law isn't interested in whether or not you actually listen to the music. Headphones, amplifiers, etc are not storage media.
Nonetheless, I have a philosophical problem with the idea that the media should be taxed on the assumption that if it can be used for some illegal purpose, it will be used for some illegal purpose. Besides, as others have pointed out, it sure does seem to give a free pass to copying the music...and effectively sets the value of a CD's or hard drive's worth of songs to whatever the tax is. That's fair to neither the artists nor the media purchaser.
-h-
Amen, brother! And at the top of the lazy journalism crowd is Taco with a headline that was virtually ripped from a SCO press release:
"Computer Associates Pays Off SCO"
Way to go, Taco!
-h-
I worked for a major OEM for several years. I don't know where you got your figure (but I can guess...), but it's wrong. OEMs pay about $45 per license. The price hasn't changed for years. It used to be $45 for WfWG, about $50 for NT 4 and the same for 98 and up. And that was back when MS was strong-arming exclusive contracts.
We had to consider the cost of every component that went into a PC, down to the screws. So even back when a hot computer was Pentium 166, that $45 was a chunk of change. You can bet that it's virtually intolerable today.
What really made us grit our teeth, though, was that we paid $45 to $50 for a copy of Windows, but we were responsible for all of the manufacturing costs, from the media to the packaging. We had to contract our own mastering, printing and packaging services. So, while we paid Microsoft their money, we also had to pay Phoenix another few bucks for the actual media. And when a new version of Windows came out, we had to pray that Microsoft would actually get us a master soon enough so that we could ship systems with their OS on the announced release date.
At the time, we were the second largest build to order PC company (behind Dell). I'd hate to think of how things would have been if it was a tiny outfit.
Not a dollar. Not even close.
-h-
It's not Macon County, Georgia, it's Macomb County, Michigan - as in Detroit.
But even if it was a complex, graphically intensive site, the bandwidth bill for such a site would be tiny. I host several similar sized sites on a 10 dollar a month shared hosting account without the slightest problem. In short, the idea of this level of traffic generating a $300,000 bandwidth bill is laughable.
His "bill" may not have been for bandwidth. Here's the article from the Detroit Free Press. That's not to say that he deserves it - on the face of it, I don't think that he does - just that he seems to be asking for more than bandwidth money.
-h-
Well, at least when they take us to trial we'll be able to appeal the conviction based on the fact that the gold-fringed American flag represents an Admiralty Court, but, as civilians, we're not subject to Admiralty law.
-h-
Well, the phone call that did them in was a minute of silence. That seems about as secure a conversation as you could have.
I guess that reviewing a beta version of Evolution counts as cutting edge, but it's sort of an apples and oranges comparison with stable releases of other products. The current (stable) version supports importing mailboxes as well as emoticons (for what they're worth).
And, as mentioned elsewhere, calling Outlook 2002 a cutting edge mail client isn't very accurate. Outlook 2003 is a much better program.
-h-
Micron owned ~60% of MicronPC. The business was losing money at a fantastic rate and shareholder pressure was on Micron to divest itself of businesses that were not part of its core competency. MicronPC itself was straying well out of its own core business by operating a rather poorly-run Internet services company, as well as making a huge departure from its niche of being a no-compromise performance PC company. MicronPC was a terribly mismanaged company.
Micron either sold or closed a number of other businesses as well. The company used to be in the construction management business, RFID business, flat panel display business and property management business. They even manufactured semiconductor processing equipment. The problem was, though, that the company was a semiconductor manufacturer. During the dot bomb days, that was well and good, but, like many other companies that strayed from what they did best, when the bubble burst, Micron was stretched a little thin.
But, to the point, Micron did not sell MicronPC. They donated their entire holdings to the Micron Foundation. MicronPC "sold" (and by "sell" I mean that they paid Gores to take the business) the computer business to a turnaround company and merged with Interland to further its ISP business.
It's possible that 6 or 7 years ago MicronPC was a good alternative to Dell, but, up until a year or so ago, that certainly wasn't the case. As soon as MicronPC started trying to directly compete with Dell, the company began tanking. The product quality suffered tremendously and the company simply didn't have the management quality necessary to make the jump from a niche manufacturer to an industry giant. It's interesting that in the past year, MPC is now making a profit and building a focused range of no-compromise systems...much as it did in the early days.
Micron Technology recognized what was happening at MicronPC years ago and pretty much turned its back on MicronPC quite a while before the company split up.
-h-
Or they could just have the Sheriff of Nottingham afoot to draw and quarter the villains! Ever since that varlet Robin came around, those Merry Men have been the scourge of rush hour traffic. Verily, the commute to Sherwood Forest is mightily unbearable.
HardCase of Meridian
Now, I'll go along with anyone who says that the officer didn't handle things nearly as diplomatically as she could have. And I'll agree that she probably should have said what you suggested. In fact, if I was the supervisor that day, everybody would be standing in front of me getting a lesson in how to handle a situation like that better. But the police don't have to stop and give a suspect a detailed explanation of what their probable cause is. You can probably think up plenty of reasons why that is. Watch your average Saturday hour of COPS and you'll see why.
I suppose that the next question is that if the police don't explain what the probable cause was, then how do we know that they had it? That's what a court is for. And if they didn't have probable cause, then the state loses. And people notice stuff like that...a local PD near my town had patterns of flimsy or no PC several years ago. A significant number of officers were fired, many were reprimanded, the city lost a lawsuit and paid out a lot of money.
-h-
Or is it your position that if an officer walks up to you out of the blue, without any particular reason or suspicion and demands your ID that you should be able to refuse? Now THAT I'd buy. But I have to say that if said officer came up to me and asked for my ID, I'd probably hand it over. I have better things to do with my time than fight over whether or not I have the right to refuse.
-h-
Easy there, Chester! Not only do I not know if they were alcoholics, I never said that they were. They took a safe and alcohol. That's all I said. Relax...
Did they take money ? perhaps they're spend-a-holics ? What about jewelry? maybe they were women?
They stole a safe. They stole alcohol. I guess they could have been women, but I'm told that in this enlightened age men wear jewelry. Even here in Idaho. But hey, it's possible that they were spend-a-holic women. Maybe they were spend-a-holic, alcoholic women. Or maybe they were just a couple of people who knew that they could steal some stuff out of my house. Who knows? Not me and not the cops.
-h-
Good point...the only time that we got robbed resulted in them ripping our small safe out of the closet floor and taking every last bottle out of the liquor cabinet. Funny you should mention that!