The full sentence on the Apple website as of now (leaving room for the possibility that they've modified it since the uproar) is:
"As you might imagine, we are upset at Windows for not being more hardy against such viruses, and even more upset with ourselves for not catching it."
The problem I have with that mea culpa is that the claim of being "upset at Windows" is little more than a backhanded way of saying "if our competition made a decent OS, this wouldn't have happened". The vulnerability of windows is well known and has existed for YEARS. It's like blaming your own spelling errors on the fact that the English language does not have a rational spelling system. This is the state of the world. Accept the blame and quit trying to make marketing hay out of fanciful statements of "if the world were somehow something different from what it is..." I am reminded of the scene at the beginning of Back to the Future where Biff is arguing with George after crashing George's car.
Biff: "I can't believe you'd loan me your car without telling me it had a blind spot."
I recently started bouncing all the spam my filters can detect to a GMail account. After 1 week of operation, here's what GMail is reporting:
"You are currently using 839 MB (30%) of your 2776 MB."
Gmail doesn't simply delete spam, it puts directly in a spam "folder", where it sits for 30 days before being automatically deleted. All that spam you've redirected is sitting there waiting for you, most of it probably tagged "spam". The number above tells us absolutely nothing about gmail's spam-catching ability.
I never thought that the "4x4" designation for "all wheel drive" cars made any sense, either.
I helps once you understand that the designation isn't limited to "cars", but applies to ALL wheeled vehicles. The format is (total number of wheels) x (number of driven wheels). For example, the US Army's M-939A2 5 ton truck is a 6x6-- 6 wheels, all driven-- and the M1074 PLS is a 10x10! Civilian trucking, by comparison, will usually make do with 10x8 on the tractor unit, being more concerned with weight capacity than offroad ability.
I used to be able to find web pages explaining how this urban legend started, but I can't find it any more, because it's totally drowned out by the legend itself. The funny thing is the numbers are different every single time.
The myth of the $600 hammer, By Sydney J. Freedberg Jr. is a good article on the reasons why federal budgeting seems inflated, but isn't. Most of the article is dry budget speak, but it explains the hammer explicitly, at least.
Some of those things are myths. Some of them rest are rumored to be 'covers' for black ops spending. The remaining ones are specialized things, such as $500 toilet seats for long range bombers that are integreated into the pilot's seat.
Indeed, nearly every one of those much-trumpeted examples of defense waste are not, in fact, nearly as stupid as people would like to think. The one you mention is a good example of how dumbasses read line items like "toilet seat" and automatically assume it's the same as the $30 toilet seat from Home Depot. Another classic one is the dumbshit who thought he'd be cute and show up at the IRS office to pay his $30,000 tax bill with three "Mr Coffees", because he read in the paper how the Air Force paid $10K for a coffee maker. In reality, the AF paid $10K each for built in hot soup/coffee/tea/water dispensers for the aircraft that ferry the Rapid Deployment Forces around, so the grunts in the back don't have to freeze their nadgers off on an 18 hour flight to Bumfuck. The ($250/$500/$random) Hammer is a good one too. Imagine a project where you're ordering 2500 Fancy Fighter Jets, and each jet comes with a specialized tool kit for field repairs. One item is a hammer. The budgeted "cost" of the hammer is $40-- $25 for the hammer, and $15 ($37,500/2500) for the amortized cost of the engineering team that put the specs for the tool kit together. Suddenly, the Air Force decides (or is told) they only need 250 Fancy Fighter Jets. Well, that hammer is still $25, but the engineering team cost is the same whether it's 1 hammer or a million, so now it's an $175 hammer. Anyone who thinks they hide black programs $250 at a time as "hammers" and "toilet seats" has seen too many movies and not read enough military budgets. Military budgets contain huge chunks of money specifically for black projects. All they have is a code name and a dollar amount, usually.
We wrote a driver to read and write fat 16 flash drives for an embeded system. The testing for it wrote and read full speed 24/7 for two weeks before they died. I assumed that was because of the limited read write settings. Or is it possible the low quality connection was to blame?
Since not even you seem to have any specs on the flash drives you were using, what sort of answer are you expecting? Maybe the drives were new but used old memory. Maybe the internal voltage regulators that drop it from 5v to 3.3v were crappy. With no more info than "they were flash drives" and the post-mortem consisting of "they died", any conclusion would be idle speculation.
Kuwait was exceeding an agreed maximum limit of oil production, an agreement made with the other OPEC nations, and undercutting them, with oil stolen from Iraq. I know it hurts, but think about it for a minute - we're talking millions of dollars, perhaps billions.
A legitimate reason for military action, perhaps. Take those slant-drilled wellheads and declare a proper border instead of the British-drawn one from WW I. But they didn't do that, did they. They rolled into Kuwait and took the whole damn country. They looted its cities and tortured, kidnapped, or killed many of its citizens. Hmmmm, not exactly an appropriate response to a border issue.
On top of that, there were several further reasons for the invasion of Kuwait...Merely because you are ignorant of them does not make you right
And merely because you vaguely cite their existence doesn't make them legitimate. Really, no more compelling reason has been offered than the slant drilling and OPEC overproduction monkeywrenching Iraq's loan repayment to Kuwait. Killing your neighbor because you owe him money? Not an appropriate response.
the US Ambassador responded with the statement: "Border skirmishes are not our concern." As well as the US giving such permission
The Iraqi army rolling into Kuwait, looting the cities, shooting up the place just for kicks, and murdering and torturing the citizens left behind does not constitute a "border skirmish", now does it.
"Hate speech is a controversial term for speech intended to degrade, intimidate, or incite violence or prejudicial action against a person or group of people based on their race, gender, age, ethnicity, national origin, religion, sexual orientation, gender identity, disability, moral or political views, etc."
If you disagree with that definition, feel free to say why, but "because I disagree" or "people are overly sensitive" isn't a valid response.
I disagree because the definition itself is an immensely broad brush. It covers anything from "kill all the niggers" (inciting violence/race), which is about as mindlessly hateful as you can get; all the way to "go somewhere else and spread your bullshit, you ignorant Nazi morons, we don't want you in our neighborhood" (degrade,intimidate/moral,political views), which is simply pretty solid 1st Amendment public protest. If the price of curbing "hate speech" is letting a bunch of skinhead fucktards have their rally while the rest of us smile and wave, well then fuck that.
Besides, we want the idiots who preach hate to have their public voices, so we can see who they are.
Um, could you?...I don't know where I'd get my hands on any explosives... And I have no idea how I'd scrounge up three limos in an untraceable fashion.
Yes, I could. Explosives? I saw stuff like old soviet antitank mines (chock full o' semtex!) for sale at bazaars in Afghanistan. The stuff's all over the place in the lawless parts of the world "foreign terrorists" frequently come from. Getting it into the US can't be too hard, judging by my ex-roommate's coke habit. As for a limo, where do you think the limo drivers get them? Enough cash will probably get you whatever you like, no questions asked.
Without checking, I doubt that even if you subscribe to Giganews (and not with an ISP that partners with Giganews or any other usenet provider), you'll get anything close to a 58 days retention. I think 30 days is a more accurate average of the retention you'll get for most binary groups.
Giganews has had 70 day binary retention for years, and last month they upped it to 90 days. Text retention is set for "forever" and is currently over 1200 days and climbing...
I know that with Comcast, they have a fairly complete newsfeed, but they limit you to 2GB per month of transfer; basically if you want to leech more than that, you have to go to a different provider like Giganews. (This is tremendously dumb on Comcast's part, because if I download gigs of stuff from somebody else's servers on the internet, Comcast has to pay for that traffic from their higher-tier ISP; if I download it directly from Comcast's servers, then it's free for them, since it only ever travels over their wires. They already have the content on the servers, so that's a sunk cost.)
Comcast doesn't have its own nntp servers. If you look at where newsgroups.comcast.net points, you find that they farm it out to... Giganews! They have nothing to gain by buying you a better Giganews account.
(the best indicator that your ISP doesn't host newsgroups itself is where they tell you to use your full email address (e.g. "johndoe@comcast.net") instead of just your userID.)
So, then... you don't mind if I -NOT STEAL- your SSN, driver's license info, ATM card # and PIN?
It's not "stealing" if I still have them, dimwit. It's just copying. Now if you choose to use them to obtain money or property at my expense, then you are guilty of fraud, not theft.
The concept of theft has grown to illicit copies of information.
It's also used to apply to interpersonal relationships, e.g. "that bitch stole my boyfriend". It doesn't, however, make such usage any less wrong. So what we have then, are the two usages of the term: "theft" in its correct legal sense, which involves depriving another of his property; and "theft" in its colloquial sense, which is a pejorative term intended to portray the "not actually theft" action as being the moral equivalent of theft. This being the case, it is perfectly reasonable to disagree with a statement claiming people are "stealing intellectual property" based on the fact that (1) copyright infringement does not meet the legal definition of theft, so it must therefor be (2) merely an opinion on the morality of copyright infringement, and (as opinions on morality vary greatly) is fair game to deride as idiotic.
Hence the classic american repo man. I'm not sure if this profession exists in Europe or not, but he's usually basically a hired thug that recovers leased property for a bounty, typically by means of aggression or breaking and entering.
I think "typically" is the wrong word. "Occasionally" would be more accurate. The vast majority of repo men repossess automobiles, and the lienholder hiring them generally has a set of keys. I worked with a former professional repo man who said the worst he ever did was cut locks off garage doors. He was a HUGE guy, which probably prevented anyone from confronting him very often, but when they did, he said he'd just walk away and try again later.
No, but the guns create a culture of violence that tells them its ok to shoot people.
Please. The "culture of violence" predates the invention of firearms by about 2 million years. We're positively tame compared to the Roman Empire, for example.
"a member of the largest council on what is now one of the oldest guilds in the world."
Surely if it is now one of the oldest guilds in the world, it has always been one of the oldest guilds in the world?
the set of "guilds in the world" does not include guilds that used to exist, but no longer do
And to all you scintillating geniuses pointing out that there are much older guilds in the REAL world: no fucking shit. The "world" to which he refers is obviously the World of Warcraft.
I'd also mention the way military health benefits have been cut recently, but that one may actually BE racist.
No, not racist, just generically shitty. The racial distribution of the military has pretty closely mirrored the general population since it went all-volunteer. Skewing towards greater numbers from minority groups was entirely a byproduct of the draft.
No, but people who are genetically predisposed to athleticism, and take advantage of this predisposition through exercise, diet, and (potentially) steroids will become world-famous athletes, and will end up with children who carry their athletic genes.
True, but entirely beside the point. Athletes of today are not more athletic than their predecessors by virtue of breeding, but rather by virtue of better diet, training, and hormone supplementation. In other words, these athletes are NOT genetically superior to past humans, as claimed by the original poster. You could just as easily take a germanic barbarian or roman citizen of appropriate fitness from 2000 years ago and, using modern methods, turn him into as strong and skilled an athlete as any you find today.
Umm, no it's not. You clearly have no understanding of evolution or genetics. It takes a liiitle longer than two or three generations to have a visible effect.
Additionally, unless you believe in the long-ago-discredited theory of Lamarckian Evolution, a bunch of musclehead athletes pumped up on steroids and scientifically tweaked diet and weight training programs will not end up with musclehead athlete children through genetics.
Right - it's the tungsten bulbs that drive the industry and these have designed obsolescence built in.
The short bulb life is a side effect of the "race to the bottom", not an intentional feature. Cheaper bulbs are made to sloppier tolerances, which result in shorter lives (1,000-2,000 hours for typical chinese crap bulbs). You can buy tungsten filament bulbs that last 10,000-plus hours, but they cost three times as much. Consumers are almost completely incapable of figuring out that 75 cents for 2000 hours is more expensive than $2.50 for 10,000 hours, so the cheaper bulb nearly always wins. The obsolescence is no more "planned" than is the short lifespan of a cheap ratchet set compared to a set made by Snap-On.
So they'd want everyone to still be on wax spools, but they want everyone to buy things in new formats. That makes no sense.
But it does make sense. He was mostly just being facetious with the "wax spools" bit, but there's a grain of truth behind it that goes right along with the recording industry's main aim. Back in the "olden days" of analog vinyl (and to some degree even wax cylinders), the recording industry basically gained cartel control over the business of distributing audio recordings because the equipment to make recordings was fairly expensive. One of the things they enjoyed with vinyl records was a certain degree of perishability, i.e. a record is only good for a certain number of plays before the physical contours in the record grooves began to wear down. Indeed, I find it quite likely that "if the RIAA ran the world" everyone would still happily pay for their favorite albums every 2-5 years to replace the old worn out copy. Given that they don't run the world, and that technological progress is unavoidable, they've opted for the next best thing: changing the latest and greatest audio format as the market will allow, essentially making people re-purchase all their favorite music for the new format. It's the next best thing to media that wears out. Heck, the recording industry's wet dream is a new format that you'll have to re-buy your content in, with an intentional obsolescence system (e.g. discs that decay when exposed to air). Fortunately, that's gotten the cold reception it deserves. But what really scares them is purely digital distribution. They're in the business of making and selling physical objects encoded with music. That worked great for them because they controlled the means of producing these physical objects. Now that music no longer requires a dedicated physical object, but rather can be copied to a readily available and cheaply obtained generic digital recording device with no loss of quality, they're facing the obsolescence of their entire means of making money.
The existing datacenters are already air-dropped piecemeal, then setup in a battlefield tent on the ground. I guess it's all about the packing.
Do you mean airdropped or just airlifted (parachute vs slingload under a helo)? I saw plenty slingloaded, but never saw anything but "soft" material airdropped.
The sandbagging was outright stupid (I guess several shelters collapsed from it), and the AC equipment was always on the fritz.
Tell me about it. I spent my "garrison" time in Afghanistan playing plumber and electrician, just trying to keep the lights on and the water running. And it was only by luck and obstinancy that any of it worked-- there were no "military electricians" there, just a few of use reservists who are electricians in "real life". We had to scrounge for everything, from tools to light bulbs. Of course the beauty of Afghanistan is that if you can get to "town", they have EVERYTHING for sale...
Seriously, I could see this being useful for the military. You simply air-drop the container, and *BAM* instant command and control. It would save the Army IT guys tons of time in getting the field systems deployed.
There's this nut with a website (how unusual, right?) that details the idea of completely ISO containerizing the Army for deployments instead of using tents and building makeshift shacks, bunkers, and guard towers out of plywood like they do now. The guy has some very sensible notions, but his presentation comes off very badly. His web pages run on and on without really laying out his point in a clear concise manner. Scroll down a bout 1/3 of the way and you'll see some pictures of mockups. An ISO container datacenter would fit in nicely with this. I wouldn't recommend air dropping anything like this though. Airdrops are extremely harsh, impact wise.
Slashdot Mirror
Biff: "I can't believe you'd loan me your car without telling me it had a blind spot."
(This is fun! Now someone do a libertarian one!)
And merely because you vaguely cite their existence doesn't make them legitimate. Really, no more compelling reason has been offered than the slant drilling and OPEC overproduction monkeywrenching Iraq's loan repayment to Kuwait. Killing your neighbor because you owe him money? Not an appropriate response.
The Iraqi army rolling into Kuwait, looting the cities, shooting up the place just for kicks, and murdering and torturing the citizens left behind does not constitute a "border skirmish", now does it.
Besides, we want the idiots who preach hate to have their public voices, so we can see who they are.
(the best indicator that your ISP doesn't host newsgroups itself is where they tell you to use your full email address (e.g. "johndoe@comcast.net") instead of just your userID.)
It's also used to apply to interpersonal relationships, e.g. "that bitch stole my boyfriend". It doesn't, however, make such usage any less wrong. So what we have then, are the two usages of the term: "theft" in its correct legal sense, which involves depriving another of his property; and "theft" in its colloquial sense, which is a pejorative term intended to portray the "not actually theft" action as being the moral equivalent of theft. This being the case, it is perfectly reasonable to disagree with a statement claiming people are "stealing intellectual property" based on the fact that (1) copyright infringement does not meet the legal definition of theft, so it must therefor be (2) merely an opinion on the morality of copyright infringement, and (as opinions on morality vary greatly) is fair game to deride as idiotic.
And to all you scintillating geniuses pointing out that there are much older guilds in the REAL world: no fucking shit. The "world" to which he refers is obviously the World of Warcraft.
Tell me about it. I spent my "garrison" time in Afghanistan playing plumber and electrician, just trying to keep the lights on and the water running. And it was only by luck and obstinancy that any of it worked-- there were no "military electricians" there, just a few of use reservists who are electricians in "real life". We had to scrounge for everything, from tools to light bulbs. Of course the beauty of Afghanistan is that if you can get to "town", they have EVERYTHING for sale...