But if an offer from Facebook ever comes, should he accept, or try to build something on his own?"
He's 19 years old for crying out loud... pick a giant magic number like $200 mil or so, and go to work for them... he can always become a billionaire later. Think of it as startup capital.:-P
There is just something about a 500hp wagen that makes me want one though;-)
I was out in front of the office one day, and saw a fairly mundane looking Benz wagon parked out front... then I saw the 6.3L badge on it, then I noticed the size of the brakes and the AMG logo as well.
By the time I googled it and realized it was a 500+ HP station wagon, I was in awe.
I can only imagine the bandwidth of that station wagon full of mag-tape. And your kid will never be late for a soccer game.;-)
I absolutely get why a 500hp wagon automatically sounds awesome. I'll never be able to afford one, but the sheer wow factor is pretty amazing.
LOL, took some googling, but I think I get "Sir, you're being a douche for sure".
I can't imagine why the Welsh have a reputation for being indecipherable.:-P
I met some Welsh guys on vacation once -- the younger guys I could follow, but the older guys might as well have been speaking Klingon their accents were so thick. Nice guys though.
If you are looking for a high performance (but not track) coupe or sedan, it shouldn't be ignored. And here in the States if you want a bad ass wagen then it's the only game in town. Unfortunately the wagen's cargo area is ridiculously small and the horrid MPG made it a non-starter for me
Hmmm... so it's bad ass because it's fast, but not because it's any use as a wagon? Lousy cargo space and horrible MPG aren't exactly selling points -- in fact, they're kind of the opposite.
Personally I like the German cars as they fit what I want the best, but the CTS-V is nothing to ignore simply because it's American.
Not because it's American, but because it's well out of my price range, and nothing like what I'd be looking for in the first place -- mostly because I'm not qualified to drive 500+ HP of car. A friend took me for a drive in his M5 once, and I quickly realized that would be way too much car for me even if I could afford one.:-P
You're absolutely correct, with a list price of FROM $64,515 - $74,910, it's a lot more than I'd spend on a car unless I suddenly became a lot more well off. And in that price range, BMW has some fine offerings.
And, really, my perception is that, like most North American cars... it can go hella fast in a straight line, but can't corner worth shit. I'm sure that's not true any more, but the few Cadillacs I've ever driven in have that overly mushy ride which I can't stand.
Hell, I could probably buy two really nicely equipped cars for the price of a single Cadillac, and I've not reached the point where I'd entertain spending the kind of money we're talking about on a car. Then again, I want all wheel drive and cargo space... so a Subaru Outback would suit my tastes a little better.:-P
The Cadillac target market seems to be eerily similar to the cognac target market: a combination of old, at least vaguely affluent, white guys and young hip-hop aspirants. I don't know how it happened.
Price, and marketing. Cadillac has always been sold as up-market luxury. Hell, the name is almost synonymous with luxury in America... "this is the Cadillac of (item)" conveys quality and luxury.
So the slightly older and affluent folks are the obvious choices because they have the money to buy one, and because older affluent folks have always bought Cadillacs. That's how they know they're affluent.:-P
I think that carried over into the nouveau riche because of the same cachet... in some circles, if you've made it, you drive a Cadillac. And, since they tend to make larger cars, people who need a little room (like pro athletes) go for them.
I largely think of them as for old men, wise guys (think Sopranos), people who want to put 21" rims, and mommy-tanks (the Escalade).
For me though, it's one of the last vehicles I'd want to own, but that's just personal taste. They're mostly massive cars.
Though, it is always amusing to see a Cadillac or a Hummer that someone has pimped out with huge rims and massive amounts of chrome -- there's a Hummer H3 in my area which has the most gigantic chrome spinners I've ever seen, and every piece that could be chromed has been. Seen the same thing applied to Caddies as well.
Why does a tablet need a file system browser, a registry editor, DirectX diagnostic tools, notepad, or a command prompt?
My guess is that no matter how much they polish it up to make it all tablet-ey -- underneath, it's still Windows, which has all the same crap as any other Windows, and you'll need this stuff to make work.
It sounds like they haven't made anything which lives in a smaller footprint.
Of course, Microsoft will say they needed that much space to cram in the awesomeness. Me, I'm just going to call it bloat they couldn't pare down.
Well, between the ads and other crap Microsoft has been injecting into my XBox lately... it might be time to log it out of my network and leave it disconnected. Ads in video games is starting to piss me off, and the on-line functionality isn't something I need to make use of.
And the idea of actually licensing based on how many people are in the room has been a goal of the content industry for quite a while. But I sure as hell don't plan on facilitating them.
Because no other car is going to burst into flames as a result of this.
Being wrecked beyond repaid, sure, but catching fire is a whole different animal.
Anybody who lives in places which get any significant amount of rain is eventually going to drive through a puddle.. if that leads to a smoking lithium flame, well, that's a horrible design flaw.
Yeah, but the asshats who own the business should be fair game for a little old school hanging or something.
You know, hang the cadavers in cages at the mouth of the harbor with a sign that says "Pirates, Ye be warned" or something.
Unfortunately, the rules which the so-called "legitimate" telemarketers insisted be in place for the do-not call mostly just serve to shield the fraudulent ones.
My wife gets this daily, somewhere between 3:30pm and 4pm... "Unknown Caller" all the time, same bullshit recorded message.
As I said when the article about how to stop this... stop allowing companies to spoof caller ids. The marketers will scream bloody murder, but if you need to put in false information of any sort, that's bordering on fraud.
I'd like to set my phone to say "don't receive calls from anything with a fake caller id, or a blocked caller id".
I've pretty much reached the point that my starting position is hostile to any phone call with an area code I don't recognize, any 800/888/877 number, and anything with Blocked/Unknown caller id.
Tell me someone was 'whacked' in the mafia sense of the word? Otherwise it's just a temporary shut down which will be back soon.
Because I get a tremendous amount of calls from these automated things claiming they can lower my interest rates.
This one is most common of these scam calls after the free cruise my wife wins every day at 3pm on her cell phone, and the morons who claim to be from "The Windows Service Provider".
Seems like our IP laws are really helping our industries right now. Soon all data centers will be located out of the reach of *AA ?
Out of reach? Given the way the US is exporting its IP laws with some serious diplomatic pressure... if SOCOM can rustle up someone to go in and do a raid where they're not supposed to be, I wouldn't put that past the influence of the *AAs.
American foreign policy is in large part driven by what those guys want. To the point that documents written by industry are part of governmental briefings -- even if the conclusions in the document is entirely in the service of the interests of the *AAs.
Welcome to the oligarchy. It's hard not to come to the conclusion that it's the industry calling the shots, not the government.
"The domain name associated with the website Me.ga has been seized pursuant to an order issued by the U.S. District Court"
Well, the rationale for seizing his other one was that since it was a.com, and America owns.com (apparently), it was within their rights.
A domain not registered with a US authority, for a company entirely based outside of the US... unless they can intimidate a local government into playing along, they may find themselves with no 'real' jurisdiction. A US District Court might get told that what they want is irrelevant.
Of course, it's not entirely without precedent for the US to do these things anyway without the knowledge or permission of the country where it takes place. And there's certainly loads of pressure they would be willing to apply in the form of trade sanctions and other diplomatic pressure.
Satirical scientific articles are a field of literature ripe for expansion.
I don't think it's so much satirical as a though experiment, albeit slightly bizarre.
It reads more like he took a description of the environment, and said "OK, if we were to experience this, it could be because these things would have to be true".
The material is fanciful, but what he's doing seems like he's doing solid math -- though, I confess, the math is mostly beyond me except in the abstract. But it reads more like Flatland and other things which try to describe Big Concepts with a little fun thrown in.
Conversely, what is the probability that the imagination of a layperson in the 1920â(TM)s would be able to accidentally describe not just the effects of gravitational lensing but also the consequential anomalous relationship between lines, angles and areas in a curved space?
Sounds much more like pointing out that there's some pretty accurate descriptions of some cool physics in Lovecraft.
Or, he's really reaching. Like I said, the math is a little beyond me.:-P
Well the funny thing is, they actually can make that argument. It's easily believable in a company with 6 digits of employees that the people who referenced it in 2009 have never in their lives spoken to the people who implemented it.
It's irrelevant if the people who implemented it knew nothing about the patent.
If Microsoft as a legal entity referenced someone else's patent in their own filing, they can't then say they knew nothing about it.
At which point their only recourse is to get the patent invalidated, prove theirs is different enough to not infringe, or license it. Saying "oh, the developers didn't know that" wouldn't work -- Microsoft has already legally admitted they knew about it.
"Microsoft had knowledge of the '403 patent at least as early as April 21, 2009," SurfCast's complaint said, as the software giant referenced the technology as relevant art during its patent application process.
If they actually referenced this patent in their own filing, they can't exactly argue they didn't know about it.
Of course, the nuances of patents makes it awfully difficult for a layperson to know if the resultant thing infringes or not. But it would hardly be the first time Microsoft has looked at someone else's stuff and said "hey, let's make something like that".
Tablets have ruined the computing environment. If it weren't for tablets we wouldn't have the clusterfuck of desktop UIs that are being pushed on us
You know, that's not the fault of the existence of tablets... that's the fault of people who have decided they need to get on the bandwagon, and implement a UI which is the absolutely wrong one for a desktop.
Blame marketing and the people who figure they need to emulate what other people are doing instead of coming up with something new. I have no idea why Microsoft would think the interface used on a tablet would be fine on my 24" non-touch monitor -- that has always sounded stupid to me.
We've hit the peak. I'm ready to become a grumpy old man at this point. Fuck the world.
Embrace the horror my friend. It doesn't get any better.
The flippant answer is that I absolutely need 7 different fart pianos. Some have different pitches, and some make squishier sounds. I'm composing my masterpiece of farts.;-)
The more serious answer is that if people perceive there's not as much software available for Win 8 phones, they're not going to buy one. If nobody is going to buy one, WTF would a developer invest his time into writing apps for it? I'd be surprised if anything more than tiny fraction of all mobiles in win 8 yet.
The reality is, Microsoft is coming to the game two years after everybody, proclaiming they have the best game in town, and the wondering why they only hear crickets in return.
oil lamps still seem like a lot of fire risk for little gain. Especially if he has small children (his, or neighbors that have come to share his power) or extra pets in the house. If you're using the generator to run the furnace, you don't really need heat from the oil lamps.
Well, since my parents are senior citizens... neither children nor pets factor in.
They're not going to go out and buy LED flashlights, and they only run the furnace enough to add a little warmth and keep the pipes from freezing if it's cold enough to worry about it.
It's my Dad's disaster plan, based on what they went through after being without power for a week, and it works for them.
They're sure as hell not looking to be charging batteries and the like, they're not interested enough in electronics to really care about that.
But when they do have an extended power outage, that's what they do. It seems to work for them.
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He's 19 years old for crying out loud ... pick a giant magic number like $200 mil or so, and go to work for them ... he can always become a billionaire later. Think of it as startup capital. :-P
I was out in front of the office one day, and saw a fairly mundane looking Benz wagon parked out front ... then I saw the 6.3L badge on it, then I noticed the size of the brakes and the AMG logo as well.
By the time I googled it and realized it was a 500+ HP station wagon, I was in awe.
I can only imagine the bandwidth of that station wagon full of mag-tape. And your kid will never be late for a soccer game. ;-)
I absolutely get why a 500hp wagon automatically sounds awesome. I'll never be able to afford one, but the sheer wow factor is pretty amazing.
LOL, took some googling, but I think I get "Sir, you're being a douche for sure".
I can't imagine why the Welsh have a reputation for being indecipherable. :-P
I met some Welsh guys on vacation once -- the younger guys I could follow, but the older guys might as well have been speaking Klingon their accents were so thick. Nice guys though.
But since this was done by a Welshman, nobody will be able to decipher the packets.
I kid, I kid.
Hmmm ... so it's bad ass because it's fast, but not because it's any use as a wagon? Lousy cargo space and horrible MPG aren't exactly selling points -- in fact, they're kind of the opposite.
Not because it's American, but because it's well out of my price range, and nothing like what I'd be looking for in the first place -- mostly because I'm not qualified to drive 500+ HP of car. A friend took me for a drive in his M5 once, and I quickly realized that would be way too much car for me even if I could afford one. :-P
Because KFC is nasty and not fit for human consumption? ;-)
The last two times I had KFC, after each I remember thinking "man, this stuff is gross, why do I eat it?".
But, to quote So I Married an Axe Murdered ... "he puts an addictive chemical in his chicken that makes ya crave it fortnightly, smartass! "
You're absolutely correct, with a list price of FROM $64,515 - $74,910, it's a lot more than I'd spend on a car unless I suddenly became a lot more well off. And in that price range, BMW has some fine offerings.
And, really, my perception is that, like most North American cars ... it can go hella fast in a straight line, but can't corner worth shit. I'm sure that's not true any more, but the few Cadillacs I've ever driven in have that overly mushy ride which I can't stand.
Hell, I could probably buy two really nicely equipped cars for the price of a single Cadillac, and I've not reached the point where I'd entertain spending the kind of money we're talking about on a car. Then again, I want all wheel drive and cargo space ... so a Subaru Outback would suit my tastes a little better. :-P
Price, and marketing. Cadillac has always been sold as up-market luxury. Hell, the name is almost synonymous with luxury in America ... "this is the Cadillac of (item)" conveys quality and luxury.
So the slightly older and affluent folks are the obvious choices because they have the money to buy one, and because older affluent folks have always bought Cadillacs. That's how they know they're affluent. :-P
I think that carried over into the nouveau riche because of the same cachet ... in some circles, if you've made it, you drive a Cadillac. And, since they tend to make larger cars, people who need a little room (like pro athletes) go for them.
I largely think of them as for old men, wise guys (think Sopranos), people who want to put 21" rims, and mommy-tanks (the Escalade).
For me though, it's one of the last vehicles I'd want to own, but that's just personal taste. They're mostly massive cars.
Though, it is always amusing to see a Cadillac or a Hummer that someone has pimped out with huge rims and massive amounts of chrome -- there's a Hummer H3 in my area which has the most gigantic chrome spinners I've ever seen, and every piece that could be chromed has been. Seen the same thing applied to Caddies as well.
My guess is that no matter how much they polish it up to make it all tablet-ey -- underneath, it's still Windows, which has all the same crap as any other Windows, and you'll need this stuff to make work.
It sounds like they haven't made anything which lives in a smaller footprint.
Of course, Microsoft will say they needed that much space to cram in the awesomeness. Me, I'm just going to call it bloat they couldn't pare down.
These things may be good in the abstract, in that Life can get nudged along by them.
But once life has formed, it's not so good for it .. just ask the dinosaurs. ;-)
With the caveat that the customers are the advertisers, and the people who watch are just there to keep the seats warm and bump the Nielsen ratings.
Well, between the ads and other crap Microsoft has been injecting into my XBox lately ... it might be time to log it out of my network and leave it disconnected. Ads in video games is starting to piss me off, and the on-line functionality isn't something I need to make use of.
And the idea of actually licensing based on how many people are in the room has been a goal of the content industry for quite a while. But I sure as hell don't plan on facilitating them.
Because no other car is going to burst into flames as a result of this.
Being wrecked beyond repaid, sure, but catching fire is a whole different animal.
Anybody who lives in places which get any significant amount of rain is eventually going to drive through a puddle .. if that leads to a smoking lithium flame, well, that's a horrible design flaw.
Yeah, but the asshats who own the business should be fair game for a little old school hanging or something.
You know, hang the cadavers in cages at the mouth of the harbor with a sign that says "Pirates, Ye be warned" or something.
Unfortunately, the rules which the so-called "legitimate" telemarketers insisted be in place for the do-not call mostly just serve to shield the fraudulent ones.
My wife gets this daily, somewhere between 3:30pm and 4pm ... "Unknown Caller" all the time, same bullshit recorded message.
As I said when the article about how to stop this ... stop allowing companies to spoof caller ids. The marketers will scream bloody murder, but if you need to put in false information of any sort, that's bordering on fraud.
I'd like to set my phone to say "don't receive calls from anything with a fake caller id, or a blocked caller id".
I've pretty much reached the point that my starting position is hostile to any phone call with an area code I don't recognize, any 800/888/877 number, and anything with Blocked/Unknown caller id.
Tell me someone was 'whacked' in the mafia sense of the word? Otherwise it's just a temporary shut down which will be back soon.
Because I get a tremendous amount of calls from these automated things claiming they can lower my interest rates.
This one is most common of these scam calls after the free cruise my wife wins every day at 3pm on her cell phone, and the morons who claim to be from "The Windows Service Provider".
Out of reach? Given the way the US is exporting its IP laws with some serious diplomatic pressure ... if SOCOM can rustle up someone to go in and do a raid where they're not supposed to be, I wouldn't put that past the influence of the *AAs.
American foreign policy is in large part driven by what those guys want. To the point that documents written by industry are part of governmental briefings -- even if the conclusions in the document is entirely in the service of the interests of the *AAs.
Welcome to the oligarchy. It's hard not to come to the conclusion that it's the industry calling the shots, not the government.
Well, the rationale for seizing his other one was that since it was a .com, and America owns .com (apparently), it was within their rights.
A domain not registered with a US authority, for a company entirely based outside of the US ... unless they can intimidate a local government into playing along, they may find themselves with no 'real' jurisdiction. A US District Court might get told that what they want is irrelevant.
Of course, it's not entirely without precedent for the US to do these things anyway without the knowledge or permission of the country where it takes place. And there's certainly loads of pressure they would be willing to apply in the form of trade sanctions and other diplomatic pressure.
I don't think it's so much satirical as a though experiment, albeit slightly bizarre.
It reads more like he took a description of the environment, and said "OK, if we were to experience this, it could be because these things would have to be true".
The material is fanciful, but what he's doing seems like he's doing solid math -- though, I confess, the math is mostly beyond me except in the abstract. But it reads more like Flatland and other things which try to describe Big Concepts with a little fun thrown in.
Sounds much more like pointing out that there's some pretty accurate descriptions of some cool physics in Lovecraft.
Or, he's really reaching. Like I said, the math is a little beyond me. :-P
I'm not sure that's actually true ... otherwise all of those lawsuits from patent trolls would be tossed out immediately, wouldn't they?
I was under the impression that once you have the patent, you "own" the rights to the invention.
It's irrelevant if the people who implemented it knew nothing about the patent.
If Microsoft as a legal entity referenced someone else's patent in their own filing, they can't then say they knew nothing about it.
At which point their only recourse is to get the patent invalidated, prove theirs is different enough to not infringe, or license it. Saying "oh, the developers didn't know that" wouldn't work -- Microsoft has already legally admitted they knew about it.
Especially, if as the article indicates:
If they actually referenced this patent in their own filing, they can't exactly argue they didn't know about it.
Of course, the nuances of patents makes it awfully difficult for a layperson to know if the resultant thing infringes or not. But it would hardly be the first time Microsoft has looked at someone else's stuff and said "hey, let's make something like that".
You know, that's not the fault of the existence of tablets ... that's the fault of people who have decided they need to get on the bandwagon, and implement a UI which is the absolutely wrong one for a desktop.
Blame marketing and the people who figure they need to emulate what other people are doing instead of coming up with something new. I have no idea why Microsoft would think the interface used on a tablet would be fine on my 24" non-touch monitor -- that has always sounded stupid to me.
Embrace the horror my friend. It doesn't get any better.
The flippant answer is that I absolutely need 7 different fart pianos. Some have different pitches, and some make squishier sounds. I'm composing my masterpiece of farts. ;-)
The more serious answer is that if people perceive there's not as much software available for Win 8 phones, they're not going to buy one. If nobody is going to buy one, WTF would a developer invest his time into writing apps for it? I'd be surprised if anything more than tiny fraction of all mobiles in win 8 yet.
The reality is, Microsoft is coming to the game two years after everybody, proclaiming they have the best game in town, and the wondering why they only hear crickets in return.
Well, since my parents are senior citizens ... neither children nor pets factor in.
They're not going to go out and buy LED flashlights, and they only run the furnace enough to add a little warmth and keep the pipes from freezing if it's cold enough to worry about it.
It's my Dad's disaster plan, based on what they went through after being without power for a week, and it works for them.
They're sure as hell not looking to be charging batteries and the like, they're not interested enough in electronics to really care about that.
But when they do have an extended power outage, that's what they do. It seems to work for them.