I wouldn't be that quick to condemn it. It's not like they're going to sell off microscopic droplets for $500 each or something stupid like that, else they'd send a whole bottle up and auction that off when it returned.
Distillation and aging of alcohol is actually a very interesting hobby in addition to a huge business. Even if you don't do it yourself, for those who actually enjoy the taste of good whisky (as opposed to chugging a mass-marketed bottle of honky-tonk juice), it's not hard to see that this can be done for perfectly scientific reasons (and food chemistry is only for starters). IMHO, the timespan involved was the bare minimum at best for aging a drinkable whisky in the first place (and the quantity tested way too low given the typical barrel size, no accounting for venting-off of higher-level spirits through a typically semi-porous container, etc), but when every cubic centimeter of ISS has to be accounted for, I get it. Not something I would design, but I get the limitations.
Overall, if it was all about marketing, why didn't one of the mass-marketed spirits makers do it? Ardbeg only has two main stills and only moderate output as far as Scottish distilleries go, if memory serves. It has a recognized name among the glass-sniffing crowd, but it's not exactly a mass-market brand.
Certainly I'll admit that the whole "in spaaaaace!" aspect is there, no doubt. On the other hand, I doubt they'll be slacking off when it comes to analysis, either.
If I were to hire a PR firm, I sure wouldn't want to be supervising everything they do. If I was going to do that, I'd just do my own PR.
If you indeed did that, you may not want to look *too* surprised when your company name is excoriated in the press due to something dumb on the PR firm's part.
Here's a clue: When you hire a PR firm, you do it to get ideas out of them, and to have them do the grunt-work of buying ads, setting up and running booths at shows, order/buy cheap swag on your behalf for your TAMs and reps to give away, and crap like that. Once you hire them, you had damned well better approve everything they do that interacts with anyone outside of your company. You approve the swag, you approve the sales pitches, you approve the ads, you approve the schmoozing of bloggers and journalists so that shit like this does not happen.
It's your company, your brand, your reputation.
Otherwise, Microsoft can point the finger all they want, but they're the beneficiary of the shill-job, so they get to eat the blame when it's discovered.
I have to agree... I mean, besides the LED street lights outside my home, they do make/sell full-spectrum LED lighting that has more than sufficient candlepower to do the job of growing plants, especially when placed pretty close to the plants themselves.
More importantly when will the marijuana growers start using this tech? Washington and Colorado need DIRT CHEAP weed, because it's grown without dirt!
Funny thing (from an Oregonian's point-of-view): marijuana growing is actually an industry where experimentation with hydroponics and efficiency is usually bleeding-edge. Back when it was still illegal, you wanted the efficiency so that your power consumption was low enough to not alert anyone to those high-intensity full-spectrum lights in your basement/apartment/whatever for 18-19 hours a day. The clandestine nature of the task also demanded that you be as efficient with as much of the hydroponics as possible.
Now that the stuff is legal, a lot of folks have taken this experience and knowledge to ramp things up to an industrial level, where you still have to be efficient. For instance, a new grow farm was looking to establish themselves in the countryside near my in-laws on the Washington peninsula, and the neighbors' biggest worry was that it would lower the water table too much (believe it or not, most of the Pacific Northwest does have a dry season for a couple of months during the summer, so well water is considered a rather precious commodity, even out here). Anyway, the farm had to demonstrate the efficiencies they had in place in order to persuade said neighbors that yes, the new greenhouses won't dry up their wells... and they even showed the improvements they were working on to make things even more efficient (note that it also saves them money overall as well.)
Trade Secrets and such, I suspect (but then, "nutrients" does sound a lot more palatable than "highly diluted poop".)
I find that if arable land is the big issue, you could just as easily convert some floor in an office building, or even use the rooftops (though you'd have to figure in temperature and evaporation - but on the plus side you get rain and free sunlight during most of the growing day).
It's not like going underground is the only solution towards getting more arable land to work with. It's a good one, but not the only one...
Good news: The Board of Directors doesn't shift very often (if at all - it's kind of glacial at best), and those members are usually among those in the dock when a company is accused of something bad.
Either way, the current management will eat the FTC fines (if any), and if the activity was criminal, I'm pretty sure the authorities can locate and drag in the former CxO's for the time period in question... while fining the current company if there are financial repercussions.
So no, it's not as if a company can get out of something by shuffling the business card titles.
So, let's summarize: In order to maybe(!) be able to clearly near an entire credit card number and expiration date clearly, over a baby monitor**, someone has to be in your street or neighbor's yard for hours on end (if not days) holding an antenna in full view of any and all neighbors, listening intently, and hoping that the numbers are enunciated loudly and clearly enough, all while standing close enough to the baby's crib (where the mic is). Oh... and our burglar would have to know that the victim family has XYZ brand of baby monitor, and know when it'll be on, and know how to exploit it, *spend* time exploiting it, and...
Have you any idea how fucking dumb and contrived that scenario is? Seriously, do you?
I mean, dude, if I'm going to steal credit card numbers? I think that an anonymizing VPN account and an hour on some small business owner's poorly-constructed eStore front will get me far more useful information for far less exposure, dontchathink?
The 'researchers' had to specifically and literally disable the default security protections on their machine in order to have that happen.
Otherwise, it would have popped up a window refusing to run the application at all, instead demanding that you go into System Preferences to allow that specific application.
It's like cutting the brake lines on a Toyota, then showing a video of it running into something while claiming that the car company has a serious brake design problem.:/
Even more interesting is the attorney who's pursuing this. Carl Crowell (based out of Salem, IIRC) is pretty damned prolific about this - enough that he has a rather slick operation (see article) that chews through a lot of these each month. I find it interesting that they're willing to settle for $750/ea (though IMHO that's still a bit too high), while most settlements average $5k-$7.5k or so.
Like most copyright suits, he almost always gets the money via settlement. It all still hinges on IP addresses, the ISP, and how well they keep records, though. I'm guessing that Popcorn Time likely blares your IP addy out nice and loud for the world to see by other torrenters, though one would wonder about sharing a movie in order to sue other sharers over the same movie...
No, really, go talk to them... they've been doing just that as a community for a lot longer, and probably have nearly all the stuff on your list and then some.
One is the codification of an multi-millennium-old text written down from an even older oral history (e.g. The Great Flood) that has no claim to being anything else.
The other is a specific text written in a much, much more recent era - a text that was claimed to have been written directly on word from the Almighty, dictated right then and there.
As for your second claim, Christianity sprang from Judaism, and does not (indeed, cannot) claim otherwise. The "every religion around" myth tends to fall apart with even the smallest amount of research that doesn't involve Facebook memes or coffeehouse pontification.
Oh, and the Council of Nicaea (that 'voted on' thing you refer to) was a final and formal attempt to winnow out the texts which were unprovable or obviously falsified to fit an agenda (that agenda usually being Gnostic or Nestorian in origin); it was done primarily to prevent (okay, fend off) splintering and adulteration of scripture (and until Martin Luther showed up and altered the text/composition, managed to do that reasonably well. )
1) The Shroud of Turin is not central to (or even any part of) scripture, teaching, or dogma. In fact, most Christians believe it to be a medieval construct as well, and it remains a curiosity at best, even among the majority of Catholics.
2) The alleged tomb that Jesus was laid in is probably not the one - that particular spot was picked by Helena of Constantinople nearly 4 centuries later, based on some local legends. She also allegedly found the cross, but that's most likely bunk sold to her by locals who were eager to curry favor. As with #1, it has approximately bupkis to do with scripture, teaching, or dogma (Heck, the Council of Nicaea probably hadn't even convened yet when this alleged tomb was found.) Today, it serves as a nice place to worship, and to meditate on the Passion and Resurrection, but it has no real significance otherwise.
Meanwhile... the Quran is the actual scripture of Islam; if it was found to have existed *before* the founder existed (let alone wrote it, received it from Heaven, whatever)? That's kind of like kicking the pillars out from under a rather delicate tower... it would be akin to finding a written account of Jesus' life that carbon-dates to 30-40 BCE... now *that* would be faith-shaking.
All that said, here's the fun part: the calendar we use is rather error-prone and isn't fully accurate. Most scientists and archaeologists know this, and correct for it. This is why Jesus' actual life may have begun as early as 6-10 BCE. I'm hoping these guys in TFA have managed to do those calculations for correction, and more important, did them correctly... because they're about to buy themselves a rather nasty shit-storm if they didn't. Even if they're right, I'm willing to bet that the very first counter-argument will point right to our calendar's not-so-perfect history.
One small problem: Just try and find a place that you can rent on a $30/hr wage in that area, without having to commute 120 minutes or more in total each workday.
You could write a web browser in any language and claim it is open source, even if you call out to external proprietary libraries to do all of the grunt-work.
FTFY, but only to properly frame the BS that Microsoft is trying to perpetrate. You see, EdgeHTML is quite proprietary.
1) "undue burden" - FFS... I'm not normally a grammar nazi, but that's just plain irritating.
2) If a court said it was "unlawful", they meant "unlawful", exactly as stated. Courts use specific words and do so in a specific language for a reason.
Actually, I'm not arguing against new cars in general - I'm arguing against using gee-whiz toys in it as any kind of valid justification for buying a new car.
Agreed - a bluetooth connection is all that is really needed, with maybe the ability to act as a larger remote screen (or device mirror) for what's on the phone (for GPS and etc).
Come to think of it, I can buy an aftermarket kit that does that now... (yeah, this one is double-DIN in height, but so is my existing car stereo kit.)
So why buy a car that will have this built-in (and will become obsolete in less than 10 years) when I can just buy a kit that fits into my car now? Hell, I could bolt this under the dash of an old 1960's era car if I wanted to...
First, I agree perfectly with regards to Fiorina... I wouldn't let her run a gas station, let alone the Oval Office (and note that you and I share vastly differing ideologies and politics).
Second, I don't think Cook will become another Sculley. First off, Cook spent well over a decade under Jobs' tutelage, and likely ran the release of the iPad (not sure, but it's a real good guess). Sculley on the other hand was dragged in from a totally unrelated industry after Jobs got the boot, so the leadership shift was abrupt and way out of line with what Jobs had built.
Here are some backstory that recasts the myth in a different light:
Microsoft's $150 stock investment was the result of a settlement of a lawsuit. In fact, the investment was just an initial payment for other "substantial balancing payments" that would be spread out over then next few years, then Apple CFO Fred Anderson said at the time.
The exact amount of the settlement is still unknown as far as I am aware. I've seen estimates from $500 million to more than $1 billion.
The two companies would cross-license all their existing patents, and any new patents that would become available during the next five years.
That Apple would make Internet Explorer the default browser for the Mac. If this seems strange, then understand that it meant that Microsoft would support IE for the next 5 years, during a time when IE was the primary browser on the market and when sites were designed specifically to support it.
What was this legal action that gave Apple so much leverage over Redmond? It was a strange one: the Apple Computer v. San Francisco Canyon Co. lawsuit.
You do realize that when anyone even suggests shutting down this thing, the suggestion will be immediately followed by "...you hate the environment! You're causing global warming!" by every ideologue, politician, and corporation with an interest in seeing it continue. Thanks to such demagoguery, it'll stay alive forever...
I suspect that the corporate world (and not a few politicians who cashed in on it) knew that it was a shell game from the outset... can't prove it, but seriously, as you said, without any metric for enforcement (or even confirmation), what else could it be?
Slashdot Mirror
I wouldn't be that quick to condemn it. It's not like they're going to sell off microscopic droplets for $500 each or something stupid like that, else they'd send a whole bottle up and auction that off when it returned.
Distillation and aging of alcohol is actually a very interesting hobby in addition to a huge business. Even if you don't do it yourself, for those who actually enjoy the taste of good whisky (as opposed to chugging a mass-marketed bottle of honky-tonk juice), it's not hard to see that this can be done for perfectly scientific reasons (and food chemistry is only for starters). IMHO, the timespan involved was the bare minimum at best for aging a drinkable whisky in the first place (and the quantity tested way too low given the typical barrel size, no accounting for venting-off of higher-level spirits through a typically semi-porous container, etc), but when every cubic centimeter of ISS has to be accounted for, I get it. Not something I would design, but I get the limitations.
Overall, if it was all about marketing, why didn't one of the mass-marketed spirits makers do it? Ardbeg only has two main stills and only moderate output as far as Scottish distilleries go, if memory serves. It has a recognized name among the glass-sniffing crowd, but it's not exactly a mass-market brand.
Certainly I'll admit that the whole "in spaaaaace!" aspect is there, no doubt. On the other hand, I doubt they'll be slacking off when it comes to analysis, either.
Hint: What you described is anarchy, not libertarianism.
Please learn the difference...
If I were to hire a PR firm, I sure wouldn't want to be supervising everything they do. If I was going to do that, I'd just do my own PR.
If you indeed did that, you may not want to look *too* surprised when your company name is excoriated in the press due to something dumb on the PR firm's part.
Here's a clue: When you hire a PR firm, you do it to get ideas out of them, and to have them do the grunt-work of buying ads, setting up and running booths at shows, order/buy cheap swag on your behalf for your TAMs and reps to give away, and crap like that. Once you hire them, you had damned well better approve everything they do that interacts with anyone outside of your company. You approve the swag, you approve the sales pitches, you approve the ads, you approve the schmoozing of bloggers and journalists so that shit like this does not happen.
It's your company, your brand, your reputation.
Otherwise, Microsoft can point the finger all they want, but they're the beneficiary of the shill-job, so they get to eat the blame when it's discovered.
I have to agree... I mean, besides the LED street lights outside my home, they do make/sell full-spectrum LED lighting that has more than sufficient candlepower to do the job of growing plants, especially when placed pretty close to the plants themselves.
More importantly when will the marijuana growers start using this tech? Washington and Colorado need DIRT CHEAP weed, because it's grown without dirt!
Funny thing (from an Oregonian's point-of-view): marijuana growing is actually an industry where experimentation with hydroponics and efficiency is usually bleeding-edge. Back when it was still illegal, you wanted the efficiency so that your power consumption was low enough to not alert anyone to those high-intensity full-spectrum lights in your basement/apartment/whatever for 18-19 hours a day. The clandestine nature of the task also demanded that you be as efficient with as much of the hydroponics as possible.
Now that the stuff is legal, a lot of folks have taken this experience and knowledge to ramp things up to an industrial level, where you still have to be efficient. For instance, a new grow farm was looking to establish themselves in the countryside near my in-laws on the Washington peninsula, and the neighbors' biggest worry was that it would lower the water table too much (believe it or not, most of the Pacific Northwest does have a dry season for a couple of months during the summer, so well water is considered a rather precious commodity, even out here). Anyway, the farm had to demonstrate the efficiencies they had in place in order to persuade said neighbors that yes, the new greenhouses won't dry up their wells... and they even showed the improvements they were working on to make things even more efficient (note that it also saves them money overall as well.)
Trade Secrets and such, I suspect (but then, "nutrients" does sound a lot more palatable than "highly diluted poop".)
I find that if arable land is the big issue, you could just as easily convert some floor in an office building, or even use the rooftops (though you'd have to figure in temperature and evaporation - but on the plus side you get rain and free sunlight during most of the growing day).
It's not like going underground is the only solution towards getting more arable land to work with. It's a good one, but not the only one...
It's not as if you actually expected Microsoft to go "yep... we did that. Our bad." ...right?
Good news: The Board of Directors doesn't shift very often (if at all - it's kind of glacial at best), and those members are usually among those in the dock when a company is accused of something bad.
Either way, the current management will eat the FTC fines (if any), and if the activity was criminal, I'm pretty sure the authorities can locate and drag in the former CxO's for the time period in question... while fining the current company if there are financial repercussions.
So no, it's not as if a company can get out of something by shuffling the business card titles.
So, let's summarize: In order to maybe(!) be able to clearly near an entire credit card number and expiration date clearly, over a baby monitor**, someone has to be in your street or neighbor's yard for hours on end (if not days) holding an antenna in full view of any and all neighbors, listening intently, and hoping that the numbers are enunciated loudly and clearly enough, all while standing close enough to the baby's crib (where the mic is). Oh... and our burglar would have to know that the victim family has XYZ brand of baby monitor, and know when it'll be on, and know how to exploit it, *spend* time exploiting it, and...
Have you any idea how fucking dumb and contrived that scenario is? Seriously, do you?
I mean, dude, if I'm going to steal credit card numbers? I think that an anonymizing VPN account and an hour on some small business owner's poorly-constructed eStore front will get me far more useful information for far less exposure, dontchathink?
The 'researchers' had to specifically and literally disable the default security protections on their machine in order to have that happen.
Otherwise, it would have popped up a window refusing to run the application at all, instead demanding that you go into System Preferences to allow that specific application.
It's like cutting the brake lines on a Toyota, then showing a video of it running into something while claiming that the car company has a serious brake design problem. :/
Even more interesting is the attorney who's pursuing this. Carl Crowell (based out of Salem, IIRC) is pretty damned prolific about this - enough that he has a rather slick operation (see article) that chews through a lot of these each month. I find it interesting that they're willing to settle for $750/ea (though IMHO that's still a bit too high), while most settlements average $5k-$7.5k or so.
Like most copyright suits, he almost always gets the money via settlement. It all still hinges on IP addresses, the ISP, and how well they keep records, though. I'm guessing that Popcorn Time likely blares your IP addy out nice and loud for the world to see by other torrenters, though one would wonder about sharing a movie in order to sue other sharers over the same movie...
No, really, go talk to them... they've been doing just that as a community for a lot longer, and probably have nearly all the stuff on your list and then some.
One is the codification of an multi-millennium-old text written down from an even older oral history (e.g. The Great Flood) that has no claim to being anything else.
The other is a specific text written in a much, much more recent era - a text that was claimed to have been written directly on word from the Almighty, dictated right then and there.
As for your second claim, Christianity sprang from Judaism, and does not (indeed, cannot) claim otherwise. The "every religion around" myth tends to fall apart with even the smallest amount of research that doesn't involve Facebook memes or coffeehouse pontification.
Oh, and the Council of Nicaea (that 'voted on' thing you refer to) was a final and formal attempt to winnow out the texts which were unprovable or obviously falsified to fit an agenda (that agenda usually being Gnostic or Nestorian in origin); it was done primarily to prevent (okay, fend off) splintering and adulteration of scripture (and until Martin Luther showed up and altered the text/composition, managed to do that reasonably well. )
Small problem with your argument (well, two...)
1) The Shroud of Turin is not central to (or even any part of) scripture, teaching, or dogma. In fact, most Christians believe it to be a medieval construct as well, and it remains a curiosity at best, even among the majority of Catholics.
2) The alleged tomb that Jesus was laid in is probably not the one - that particular spot was picked by Helena of Constantinople nearly 4 centuries later, based on some local legends. She also allegedly found the cross, but that's most likely bunk sold to her by locals who were eager to curry favor. As with #1, it has approximately bupkis to do with scripture, teaching, or dogma (Heck, the Council of Nicaea probably hadn't even convened yet when this alleged tomb was found.) Today, it serves as a nice place to worship, and to meditate on the Passion and Resurrection, but it has no real significance otherwise.
Meanwhile... the Quran is the actual scripture of Islam; if it was found to have existed *before* the founder existed (let alone wrote it, received it from Heaven, whatever)? That's kind of like kicking the pillars out from under a rather delicate tower... it would be akin to finding a written account of Jesus' life that carbon-dates to 30-40 BCE... now *that* would be faith-shaking.
All that said, here's the fun part: the calendar we use is rather error-prone and isn't fully accurate. Most scientists and archaeologists know this, and correct for it. This is why Jesus' actual life may have begun as early as 6-10 BCE. I'm hoping these guys in TFA have managed to do those calculations for correction, and more important, did them correctly... because they're about to buy themselves a rather nasty shit-storm if they didn't. Even if they're right, I'm willing to bet that the very first counter-argument will point right to our calendar's not-so-perfect history.
One small problem: Just try and find a place that you can rent on a $30/hr wage in that area, without having to commute 120 minutes or more in total each workday.
You could write a web browser in any language and claim it is open source, even if you call out to external proprietary libraries to do all of the grunt-work.
FTFY, but only to properly frame the BS that Microsoft is trying to perpetrate. You see, EdgeHTML is quite proprietary.
1) "undue burden" - FFS... I'm not normally a grammar nazi, but that's just plain irritating.
2) If a court said it was "unlawful", they meant "unlawful", exactly as stated. Courts use specific words and do so in a specific language for a reason.
Actually, I'm not arguing against new cars in general - I'm arguing against using gee-whiz toys in it as any kind of valid justification for buying a new car.
Agreed - a bluetooth connection is all that is really needed, with maybe the ability to act as a larger remote screen (or device mirror) for what's on the phone (for GPS and etc).
Come to think of it, I can buy an aftermarket kit that does that now... (yeah, this one is double-DIN in height, but so is my existing car stereo kit.)
So why buy a car that will have this built-in (and will become obsolete in less than 10 years) when I can just buy a kit that fits into my car now? Hell, I could bolt this under the dash of an old 1960's era car if I wanted to...
Yes and No.
First, I agree perfectly with regards to Fiorina... I wouldn't let her run a gas station, let alone the Oval Office (and note that you and I share vastly differing ideologies and politics).
Second, I don't think Cook will become another Sculley. First off, Cook spent well over a decade under Jobs' tutelage, and likely ran the release of the iPad (not sure, but it's a real good guess). Sculley on the other hand was dragged in from a totally unrelated industry after Jobs got the boot, so the leadership shift was abrupt and way out of line with what Jobs had built.
Then Microsoft bailed them out to avoid anti-trust problems.
Incorrect - Microsoft coughed up the cash because they were facing a massive copyright infringement lawsuit that they would surely lose, and took the settlement way out.
Here's the relevant bit:
Thinking the same thing here... I don't consider anything made after 1980 to be "vintage".
Stupid headline had me thinking how they managed to stuff all of this into a 1963 Chevy II Nova SuperSport...
You do realize that when anyone even suggests shutting down this thing, the suggestion will be immediately followed by "...you hate the environment! You're causing global warming!" by every ideologue, politician, and corporation with an interest in seeing it continue. Thanks to such demagoguery, it'll stay alive forever...
I suspect that the corporate world (and not a few politicians who cashed in on it) knew that it was a shell game from the outset... can't prove it, but seriously, as you said, without any metric for enforcement (or even confirmation), what else could it be?
You don't understand!
You see, it becomes less religious (and way more sciency) when Morgan Freeman explains it.