Both Musk and Broder have reason to defend their positions. For Musk, the credibility of his revolutionary auto manufacturer is at stake. For Broder, he would seem to have an interest in showing that Tesla's machine is not quite as magical as it appears. However, both men represent institutions we want to believe in. We want to believe that Tesla will bring about the end of our dependence on oil for autos and bring thousands of good manufacturing jobs to the old NUMMI plant in Silicon Valley, and we want to believe that The Times vets its reporters thoroughly. But both institutions are under intense financial pressure to deliver what we want to believe. Does Tesla have the money to make our dreams reality, unlike Solyndra? Does The Times have the money to do all the fact checking of its reporters stories to prevent another Jayson Blair? I don't think either institution is out to deceive us, and its even possible that neither of these men are lying.
A reporter can fabricate facts (or forget details), and logs can be fabricated (or erroneously-recorded in the first place).
They should have Broder do another test drive, and set up a camera in the back seat that can see the dashboard and the windshield. It's easy enough to do with a tripod and a seat belt. If you're worried about battery drain on the vehicle for the camera, buy a $40 emergency jump-start kit at K-Mart which is basically a battery with jumper cables and an accessory outlet, and plug the camera into that. Stick a large memory card in the camera and you can record the whole trip. If the results are in dispute after the second drive, post the video online and let people see for themselves what actually occurred.
For every business that Gartner "knows" is dropping IE standardization, there are 100 it doesn't know about who are continuing to mandate IE use because they bought some legacy Web-based app that is only used internally, and the people who wrote that app were too lazy or incompetent to write it in actual HTML (as opposed to "we played with it until it worked in this browser, so this is what your users must use").
My favorite example of a web-app developer who knew virtually nothing about HTML but shipped what "worked" had every single element on the page absolute-positioned with CSS. What looked like a simple table of 30 rows of data on the screen was actually hundreds of DIVs that had been rendered on the fly by the server with absolute position coordinates for each one. Even INPUT elements that were invisible had absolute positions calculated for them. Every time someone loaded a page, the server would calculate the offset for each "cell" in the table so it would look like a table, and for dozens of invisible form elements so they wouldn't collide with the table. The billion-dollar non-tech company that bought this couldn't figure out why the server frequently became unresponsive... They actually bought a second server from the developer and a load balancer to get around the fact that the developer didn't understand basic HTML, and have been using the app for 7 years. When I explained the problem to them, they reasoned that it would cost them more to ask the developer to do it properly that to just add additional servers as needed. They will probably be using it for the next 20 years. And the login page states that it requires IE.
Often this type of app lives on an internal server that will never be updated because the company doesn't want to pay for something that works well enough, but serves some essential purpose that hundreds or thousands of employees are required to use daily. IE standardization will die out in consumer applications long before it goes away in businesses. Microsoft knew this is how most businesses approach computers, and it's the reason the Windows/Office/IE monopoly was so successful. It's the reason Microsoft is still successful despite the Ballmer decade.
If he was only driving a Tesla Model S he would have ran out of fuel in no time.
According to Elon Musk, that would only be the case if John Broder was the driver. If anyone else had been driving the car would have kept going until it was somewhere in Connecticut.
Can you stop this explainable hatred on this tablet?
If it's as explainable as you say you should understand why we can't stop it. If its inexplicable, then you will never understand why we can't stop it, because we can't explain it to you.
It's a tool aimed at professionals like myself. I want productivity and ability to work with a full OS, not a castrated version barely capable of browsing porn. When iPad/Android will be able to run Diablo 3 on maximum settings we will have an adult discussion.
OK, you start off calling yourself a professional, but then you complain about castration, inability to view porn and promise "adult discussion." Exactly what sort of "professional" are you, sir?
The Wired article describes the Surface Pro as "glued and screwed," which seems to be a double entendre, referring to the construction of the device and the status of the repair-minded purchaser.
I also find it interesting that the device needs two fans. For me, part of the appeal of a tablet is the departure from the idea of it as a traditional computer. You can do many of the things you would do on a computer, but the computer gets out of the way and the device is more focused on becoming a more natural, simple, ultra-portable human interface. In many ways, it's about as close as you can come to a digital piece of paper. Somehow the idea of requiring a fan at all (let alone two fans) just seems anathema. If someone handed me a sheet of loose leaf with two fans embedded in it, my reaction would probably be something along the lines of: "What the hell is this? Microsoft makes paper now? Is the sheet supposed to be blue like that?"
Historically this is true. The makers of the Rosetta Stone knew this would be the case, so they introduced redundancy so we could still retrieve the information even of part of the tablet broke. They wrote everything three times! From what I understand, the Surface Pro is stuffed with lots of redundant code for the same reason.
Google announces they're tracking the flu (hey everyone, come see a map that will tell you how bad the flu is in your area!), Larry Page announces he's offering free flu shots to all kids in the Bay Area, and Google announces it's launching a flu shot locator. Of course searches for "flu" and "influenza" are going to increase. That will throw off the accuracy of your model. What they're really measuring is this: "people who are thinking about the flu and proactively reaching out to learn more."
That can't be true, because it's too good to be true. If a copy of office were tied to a single machine forever, that copy of office would die with the machine and eventually office would become extinct. You'd see beat up computers with yellowed cases and burned in screens in endangered software sanctuaries. Or the world would realize that equivalent software is available elsewhere for less money (or free). But we all know Microsoft won't let that happen because software survives by being propagated from computer to computer, paid or not.
Syfy is owned by NBC, and Comcast has already made changes there.
Syfy's Eureka series debuted in 2006. I was never a big fan, but it looked like it had promise, gained a following and did well. They'd throw out occasional references to things like the LHC and CERN, had Joe Morton (who played Miles Dyson in Terminator 2) as a regular character, and even brought in our buddy (and by that I mean he reads and posts on Slashdot) Wil Wheaton toward the end.
Comcast purchased a majority stake in NBC in January 2011. By August, Eureka was cancelled. The show had good ratings, good viewership, and was considered "the golden child" of Syfy, but Comcast killed it because it was not profitable enough. It wasn't losing money, but Comcast decided that if you have to spend money on special effects to sell the show to viewers, there are lots of cheaper, more profitable ways to get viewers' attention.
With Comcast poised to take full control of NBC sooner, expect more of the shows that drive Syfy's viewership to be cancelled in the next couple of years, and if they take it far enough eventually Syfy may go away.
When North Korea makes announcements it often comes off sounding schizophrenic. Before the "satellite" launch, it announced that it was merely a peaceful satellite. After the launch, it bluntly announced that it was actually a cover for an ICBM test to help it one day deliver a nuclear weapon to the U.S. Now it's back to calling it a peaceful satellite. I suspect three possibilities:
when you are as accustomed to crafting a manufactured reality as North Korea is, it's easy to lose track of what you claimed before. I have found that one of the most effective ways to catch a person lying is to ask for details until the person contradicts himself, indicating that rather than remembering what actually happened, he lost track of what lies he fabricated earlier. That may be what we are seeing here from the propaganda machine.
North Korea's propaganda machine changes the message as often as necessary to suit its needs of the moment. Think of Orwell's 1984, where "The Party" would say it was at war with Eastasia and in alliance with Eurasia, and this had always been the state of things, except Winston knew that four years ago it was not the case. And by the end of the book it switches back again, with the people accepting that it had always been that way. When it suits North Korea's purposes to tell its people that it is making scientific progress, it is launching a satellite. When it suits The Party's purposes to show that it is standing up to its "evil" sworn enemy (the U.S.), it is an ICBM test. When they have no data from their "satellite" to show, they claim the U.S. shot it down, which conditions people to be more accepting of an ICBM test in the future.
North Korean leadership is far from monolithic. There was actually speculation that the young new leader did not want to escalate tensions with the rest of the world, having been educated in Switzerland. However he might have to bow to the pressure of the military that was already in power. So analysts were waiting to see if he would truly depart from the confrontational stance his father took. If there were still any lingering doubts, this test shows that he is either unwilling or unable to deviate from that course. The changing messages from the propaganda machine may be an indication of internal conflicts: one group tells the propaganda machine to announce it has peaceful intentions, while the other bluntly announces it is preparing to nuke the U.S. The more extreme the contradictions, the more likely it is that you have two factions fighting over the same mouthpiece.
No, real men drink "Jum." At least that's what Janitor says. "It's Jum and Tonic: Gin, Rum and Tonic. You can't get drunk on Jum, it's a breakfast liqueur." video hererecipe here
The amount of fruit juice Kickstart actually has is 5%, Baker said....
The 5% level is just temporary until they get more funding for their Kickstarter campaign. At the $10,000 contribution level you get a case of 100% orange juice before the product hits store shelves.
This affects a large chunk of the planet's population and hasn't happened in 600 years.
Exactly. In a nerd world where "achievements" are virtual tasks completed in a virtual environment that has not been accomplished by anyone else in the last 5.2 seconds and "major events" involve hundreds of people around the world converging on a server for a virtual battle that causes a virtual time dilation, an event that has not occurred for 598 years (to be exact) an pd affects a billion people around the world is significant as "stuff that matters."
Because Alicia Keys is rumored to have been asked to succeed Benedict.
This could have profound consequences for the future of the Blackberry, which will either lose its creative director or become the official smartphone of God's consigliere. Forget the fact that there has never been a female priest in Catholicism and just think about it. She could do a lot more for turnaround efforts at the Vatican than she ever could at the company formerly known as RIM. She's young, beautiful, popular, already has more fans than Benedict, female, and has already demonstrated a taste for taking on roles that would seeM challenging and completely out of left field. Remember who said it first when you're pirating copies of her celebrating mass at the Superdome.
Actually, carrying a box that looks burdensome implies you are doing work, so people assume you belong there. I once walked into the courtyard of a large "fruit company" by helping a vendor carry in a box. He assumed I worked there, and they assumed I was with him. I even got a name tag at the door.
Diversifying investment portfolio is something that all good investors tend to do.
Agreed, but his Google assets were built by building up Google into one of the more diversified companies around. Sure they don't own any salt mines yet (depending on your definition of salt mine), but they went from building a search engine in Silicon Valley to laying fiber in Kansas, creating self-driving cars in Nevada, writing a cell-phone operating system used by manufacturers around the world, buying Motorola's cell phone business, operating stores for books, music and software, operating an email network that is contributing to the USPS's demise (I know, Congress is killing the USPS, but the growth of services like Gmail is a factor in the equation), operating a network of buses on 300 routes in the Bay Area, operating a video service so ubiquitous countries around the world complain when they do or do not pull controversial videos, operating a fleet of camera-wielding cars all over the world taking 360-degree photos, helping health officials track pandemics on a nationwide scale, investing in renewable energy, helping NORAD track Santa, and a million other random things that are pulling highly-skilled employees from fields that have nothing to do with selling ads and delivering search results.
Yes, 96% of their revenue comes from advertising programs, but it seems they've positioned themselves in other markets pretty well to support those advertising programs. I don't think he's worried about diversifying his own money. It's more likely he's taking a good chunk of his profits before the taxes on his profits get so high between the state and federal taxes that cashing out is a losing proposition. The NYTimes just ran a story 3 days ago pointing out that California millionaires are grumbling that between the two they are being taxed 51.9%, the highest personal income tax rate in the U.S. Regardless of whether he needs all that money, from a psychological standpoint, once you start paying more than half of what you earn in income taxes, you start to question why you're doing the job and whether it's still worth it.
Yes, but conveniently puts Washington D.C. dangerously close to and possibly inside the constitution free zone, depending on how far the actual border is considered to extend into the ocean from the shore. Because that would be awkward for laws to be written and constitutional issues decided in a place where the constitution does not apply.
In the late 90s, Circuit City tried to push an "innovative" new kind of DVD player that played regular DVDs and special DIVX (Digital Video Express) discs (more discussion of the format here), that were basically DVDs you bought for $4 that could only be watched for 48 hours after the initial viewing. After that, you would have to pay for the privilege of additional viewings. The player had a modem and would phone home to the service for authorization to allow you to watch the disc you bought.
Yes, it was about the service lending to you, and this is about you passing goods to others, but either way it's still planned obsolescence. We (as consumers) were smart enough to quickly defeat it then. If anything, it made people realize that those magical shiny new DVDs were not expensive to produce (at the time some retailers were regularly selling individual movies for $30-$50). Are we smart enough to defeat this?
I keep waiting for the day when Iran will claim to have invented a next-generation satellite dish that does not require line of sight to a satellite, works underground, and remarkably only receives state-approved channels. Upon inspection we will find it is a large plastic Tupperware bowl screwed onto a cable box, which in turn is hooked up to the local cable network.
Actually there's a very good reason for that. I used to work with a guy who was in the Iranian Air Force (he was granted asylum in the U.S.). He once told me that pilots/maintenance workers/etc were required to take English classes so they could read the training materials to fly and support the fighters we gave them. So they would be accustomed to reading English when dealing with fighters. If your brain has already been conditioned in "English mode" when operating/servicing a fighter, it's probably best to stick with it. The Soviets also gave them MiGs, so I'm sure they (or some of them) probably had to learn Russian, too.
"Works created by employees and/or students specifically for use by the Prince George’s County Public Schools or a specific school or department within PGCPS, are properties of the Board of Education even if created on the employee’s or student’s time and with the use of their materials."
Just wow. Normally I would say if you live in PG county, now is the time to move. But the sad reality is that PG county is much poorer than neighboring Montgomery county... it's always been time to move out if you could. I was once robbed at gunpoint in PG county. The only reason the criminal was ever caught was because he made the mistake of trying the same crime in Montgomery county an hour later. The police there found over a dozen wallets and purses in the car from people he had robbed in PG county.
Slashdot Mirror
Both Musk and Broder have reason to defend their positions. For Musk, the credibility of his revolutionary auto manufacturer is at stake. For Broder, he would seem to have an interest in showing that Tesla's machine is not quite as magical as it appears. However, both men represent institutions we want to believe in. We want to believe that Tesla will bring about the end of our dependence on oil for autos and bring thousands of good manufacturing jobs to the old NUMMI plant in Silicon Valley, and we want to believe that The Times vets its reporters thoroughly. But both institutions are under intense financial pressure to deliver what we want to believe. Does Tesla have the money to make our dreams reality, unlike Solyndra? Does The Times have the money to do all the fact checking of its reporters stories to prevent another Jayson Blair? I don't think either institution is out to deceive us, and its even possible that neither of these men are lying.
A reporter can fabricate facts (or forget details), and logs can be fabricated (or erroneously-recorded in the first place).
They should have Broder do another test drive, and set up a camera in the back seat that can see the dashboard and the windshield. It's easy enough to do with a tripod and a seat belt. If you're worried about battery drain on the vehicle for the camera, buy a $40 emergency jump-start kit at K-Mart which is basically a battery with jumper cables and an accessory outlet, and plug the camera into that. Stick a large memory card in the camera and you can record the whole trip. If the results are in dispute after the second drive, post the video online and let people see for themselves what actually occurred.
For every business that Gartner "knows" is dropping IE standardization, there are 100 it doesn't know about who are continuing to mandate IE use because they bought some legacy Web-based app that is only used internally, and the people who wrote that app were too lazy or incompetent to write it in actual HTML (as opposed to "we played with it until it worked in this browser, so this is what your users must use").
My favorite example of a web-app developer who knew virtually nothing about HTML but shipped what "worked" had every single element on the page absolute-positioned with CSS. What looked like a simple table of 30 rows of data on the screen was actually hundreds of DIVs that had been rendered on the fly by the server with absolute position coordinates for each one. Even INPUT elements that were invisible had absolute positions calculated for them. Every time someone loaded a page, the server would calculate the offset for each "cell" in the table so it would look like a table, and for dozens of invisible form elements so they wouldn't collide with the table. The billion-dollar non-tech company that bought this couldn't figure out why the server frequently became unresponsive... They actually bought a second server from the developer and a load balancer to get around the fact that the developer didn't understand basic HTML, and have been using the app for 7 years. When I explained the problem to them, they reasoned that it would cost them more to ask the developer to do it properly that to just add additional servers as needed. They will probably be using it for the next 20 years. And the login page states that it requires IE.
Often this type of app lives on an internal server that will never be updated because the company doesn't want to pay for something that works well enough, but serves some essential purpose that hundreds or thousands of employees are required to use daily. IE standardization will die out in consumer applications long before it goes away in businesses. Microsoft knew this is how most businesses approach computers, and it's the reason the Windows/Office/IE monopoly was so successful. It's the reason Microsoft is still successful despite the Ballmer decade.
If he was only driving a Tesla Model S he would have ran out of fuel in no time.
According to Elon Musk, that would only be the case if John Broder was the driver. If anyone else had been driving the car would have kept going until it was somewhere in Connecticut.
Can you stop this explainable hatred on this tablet?
If it's as explainable as you say you should understand why we can't stop it. If its inexplicable, then you will never understand why we can't stop it, because we can't explain it to you.
It's a tool aimed at professionals like myself. I want productivity and ability to work with a full OS, not a castrated version barely capable of browsing porn. When iPad/Android will be able to run Diablo 3 on maximum settings we will have an adult discussion.
OK, you start off calling yourself a professional, but then you complain about castration, inability to view porn and promise "adult discussion." Exactly what sort of "professional" are you, sir?
The Wired article describes the Surface Pro as "glued and screwed," which seems to be a double entendre, referring to the construction of the device and the status of the repair-minded purchaser.
I also find it interesting that the device needs two fans. For me, part of the appeal of a tablet is the departure from the idea of it as a traditional computer. You can do many of the things you would do on a computer, but the computer gets out of the way and the device is more focused on becoming a more natural, simple, ultra-portable human interface. In many ways, it's about as close as you can come to a digital piece of paper. Somehow the idea of requiring a fan at all (let alone two fans) just seems anathema. If someone handed me a sheet of loose leaf with two fans embedded in it, my reaction would probably be something along the lines of: "What the hell is this? Microsoft makes paper now? Is the sheet supposed to be blue like that?"
Nobody repairs tablets.
Historically this is true. The makers of the Rosetta Stone knew this would be the case, so they introduced redundancy so we could still retrieve the information even of part of the tablet broke. They wrote everything three times! From what I understand, the Surface Pro is stuffed with lots of redundant code for the same reason.
Google announces they're tracking the flu (hey everyone, come see a map that will tell you how bad the flu is in your area!), Larry Page announces he's offering free flu shots to all kids in the Bay Area, and Google announces it's launching a flu shot locator. Of course searches for "flu" and "influenza" are going to increase. That will throw off the accuracy of your model. What they're really measuring is this: "people who are thinking about the flu and proactively reaching out to learn more."
That can't be true, because it's too good to be true. If a copy of office were tied to a single machine forever, that copy of office would die with the machine and eventually office would become extinct. You'd see beat up computers with yellowed cases and burned in screens in endangered software sanctuaries. Or the world would realize that equivalent software is available elsewhere for less money (or free). But we all know Microsoft won't let that happen because software survives by being propagated from computer to computer, paid or not.
Syfy is owned by NBC, and Comcast has already made changes there.
Syfy's Eureka series debuted in 2006. I was never a big fan, but it looked like it had promise, gained a following and did well. They'd throw out occasional references to things like the LHC and CERN, had Joe Morton (who played Miles Dyson in Terminator 2) as a regular character, and even brought in our buddy (and by that I mean he reads and posts on Slashdot) Wil Wheaton toward the end.
Comcast purchased a majority stake in NBC in January 2011. By August, Eureka was cancelled. The show had good ratings, good viewership, and was considered "the golden child" of Syfy, but Comcast killed it because it was not profitable enough. It wasn't losing money, but Comcast decided that if you have to spend money on special effects to sell the show to viewers, there are lots of cheaper, more profitable ways to get viewers' attention.
With Comcast poised to take full control of NBC sooner, expect more of the shows that drive Syfy's viewership to be cancelled in the next couple of years, and if they take it far enough eventually Syfy may go away.
Real men just put OJ in their morning coffee
No, real men put OJ in their morning rum.
No, real men drink "Jum." At least that's what Janitor says. "It's Jum and Tonic: Gin, Rum and Tonic. You can't get drunk on Jum, it's a breakfast liqueur." video here recipe here
Mod parent up. I've noticed signs for this at my local Taco Bell drive-through for a while.
The amount of fruit juice Kickstart actually has is 5%, Baker said. ...
The 5% level is just temporary until they get more funding for their Kickstarter campaign. At the $10,000 contribution level you get a case of 100% orange juice before the product hits store shelves.
This affects a large chunk of the planet's population and hasn't happened in 600 years.
Exactly. In a nerd world where "achievements" are virtual tasks completed in a virtual environment that has not been accomplished by anyone else in the last 5.2 seconds and "major events" involve hundreds of people around the world converging on a server for a virtual battle that causes a virtual time dilation, an event that has not occurred for 598 years (to be exact) an pd affects a billion people around the world is significant as "stuff that matters."
Because Alicia Keys is rumored to have been asked to succeed Benedict.
This could have profound consequences for the future of the Blackberry, which will either lose its creative director or become the official smartphone of God's consigliere. Forget the fact that there has never been a female priest in Catholicism and just think about it. She could do a lot more for turnaround efforts at the Vatican than she ever could at the company formerly known as RIM. She's young, beautiful, popular, already has more fans than Benedict, female, and has already demonstrated a taste for taking on roles that would seeM challenging and completely out of left field. Remember who said it first when you're pirating copies of her celebrating mass at the Superdome.
Actually, carrying a box that looks burdensome implies you are doing work, so people assume you belong there. I once walked into the courtyard of a large "fruit company" by helping a vendor carry in a box. He assumed I worked there, and they assumed I was with him. I even got a name tag at the door.
Diversifying investment portfolio is something that all good investors tend to do.
Agreed, but his Google assets were built by building up Google into one of the more diversified companies around. Sure they don't own any salt mines yet (depending on your definition of salt mine), but they went from building a search engine in Silicon Valley to laying fiber in Kansas, creating self-driving cars in Nevada, writing a cell-phone operating system used by manufacturers around the world, buying Motorola's cell phone business, operating stores for books, music and software, operating an email network that is contributing to the USPS's demise (I know, Congress is killing the USPS, but the growth of services like Gmail is a factor in the equation), operating a network of buses on 300 routes in the Bay Area, operating a video service so ubiquitous countries around the world complain when they do or do not pull controversial videos, operating a fleet of camera-wielding cars all over the world taking 360-degree photos, helping health officials track pandemics on a nationwide scale, investing in renewable energy, helping NORAD track Santa, and a million other random things that are pulling highly-skilled employees from fields that have nothing to do with selling ads and delivering search results.
Yes, 96% of their revenue comes from advertising programs, but it seems they've positioned themselves in other markets pretty well to support those advertising programs. I don't think he's worried about diversifying his own money. It's more likely he's taking a good chunk of his profits before the taxes on his profits get so high between the state and federal taxes that cashing out is a losing proposition. The NYTimes just ran a story 3 days ago pointing out that California millionaires are grumbling that between the two they are being taxed 51.9%, the highest personal income tax rate in the U.S. Regardless of whether he needs all that money, from a psychological standpoint, once you start paying more than half of what you earn in income taxes, you start to question why you're doing the job and whether it's still worth it.
Will people have to register 3D printes with Homeland Security now?
No, you will have to register 3D printers with the BATFEP (Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, Explosives and Printers), but only if you buy two or more semi-automatic printers capable of printing items larger than 11 inches in any dimension with a detachable plastic-ink cartridge in a 5-day period in a state that shares a border with Mexico. Alternatively, you could just drive to Oregon to buy your printer and avoid the registration, sales tax and electronic waste fee.
Yes, but conveniently puts Washington D.C. dangerously close to and possibly inside the constitution free zone, depending on how far the actual border is considered to extend into the ocean from the shore. Because that would be awkward for laws to be written and constitutional issues decided in a place where the constitution does not apply.
McDonalds is the top PC vendor, if you include Big Macs.
I thought McDonald's was a server vendor, not a PC vendor. Billions and Billions Served.
Do tablets really count as a "PC"?
No, not all. Some tablets are only personal on the Surface. Under that veneer they're rather impersonal. Isn't that right, Siri?
Let me think. Here's what I found: Input Interpretation: "Last[{}] Microsoft"
Apparently she has a sense of humor. I think she just invented an emoticon depicting the Surface as a two-faced (multi-faceted) schizo in a box.
It is funny because the Surface gets dead.
OK, no more Pixar movies for you.
In the late 90s, Circuit City tried to push an "innovative" new kind of DVD player that played regular DVDs and special DIVX (Digital Video Express) discs (more discussion of the format here), that were basically DVDs you bought for $4 that could only be watched for 48 hours after the initial viewing. After that, you would have to pay for the privilege of additional viewings. The player had a modem and would phone home to the service for authorization to allow you to watch the disc you bought.
Yes, it was about the service lending to you, and this is about you passing goods to others, but either way it's still planned obsolescence. We (as consumers) were smart enough to quickly defeat it then. If anything, it made people realize that those magical shiny new DVDs were not expensive to produce (at the time some retailers were regularly selling individual movies for $30-$50). Are we smart enough to defeat this?
This is obviously targeted at Iranian audience.
I keep waiting for the day when Iran will claim to have invented a next-generation satellite dish that does not require line of sight to a satellite, works underground, and remarkably only receives state-approved channels. Upon inspection we will find it is a large plastic Tupperware bowl screwed onto a cable box, which in turn is hooked up to the local cable network.
Why is the "Danger" sticker in English?
Actually there's a very good reason for that. I used to work with a guy who was in the Iranian Air Force (he was granted asylum in the U.S.). He once told me that pilots/maintenance workers/etc were required to take English classes so they could read the training materials to fly and support the fighters we gave them. So they would be accustomed to reading English when dealing with fighters. If your brain has already been conditioned in "English mode" when operating/servicing a fighter, it's probably best to stick with it. The Soviets also gave them MiGs, so I'm sure they (or some of them) probably had to learn Russian, too.
"Works created by employees and/or students specifically for use by the Prince George’s County Public Schools or a specific school or department within PGCPS, are properties of the Board of Education even if created on the employee’s or student’s time and with the use of their materials."
Just wow. Normally I would say if you live in PG county, now is the time to move. But the sad reality is that PG county is much poorer than neighboring Montgomery county... it's always been time to move out if you could. I was once robbed at gunpoint in PG county. The only reason the criminal was ever caught was because he made the mistake of trying the same crime in Montgomery county an hour later. The police there found over a dozen wallets and purses in the car from people he had robbed in PG county.