Been there done that. This was the same thing touted by the folks at "iCache" who released a few test units of the "Geode" -- an iPhone jacket and universal card combo that could do this as well as provide support for barcodes using an e-ink window on the back of the case.
Unfortunately, the company -- after a successful Kickstarter and infusion of venture cash, crashed and burned. HARD.
As it turns out, there were huge limitations on where this type of "cloned" card could be used -- no ATMs, no "pull through" swipers like at gas pumps... It all fell apart quite noisily with accusations of fraud and deceit on the part of the company's founders.
The bottom line is this: Payment card providers require three things: 1) the card should be signed, 2) the card should be present so the merchant can verify the expiration and CVV (or pay a CNP fee), and 3) the card provider's logo must be visible on the card. Failure to comply with any of the three means a merchant may lose his ability to accept cards to the provider. The Geode could do ONE of those things; the same goes for this card, as technically interesting as it may be.
And of course this goes out the window as NFC or chip-and-pin cards eventually come into fashion in the US (as chip-and-pin already is in Europe).
This is a waveguide for a SNR-75 "Fan Song" fire-control radar for the Russian SA-2 (NATO) missile system. You can learn about it here (an SNR-75 set abandoned in Czechoslovakia): http://forum.valka.cz/viewtopic.php/t/74858
And you can see the waveguide cone pictured in the AP stories and twitter here: http://forum.valka.cz/attachments/1945/RSN-75M3_Fan_Song_E_1.jpg
And unless I miss my guess, this is the first _direct_ seizure we've seen of ACTUAL missile hardware on a North Korean ship.
P3P 1.0 doesn't allow for multi-site delclarations, only "cross-site" declarations. There can be one -- and only one -- P3P policy; by the standard it doesn't allow but ONE policy and states that others, if present, should be ignored. This just isn't how the Web works these days. Cloud services have pretty much become a defacto standard, but P3P forces site administrators to take a P3P policy from the integrated service and mash it into their own policy (and hope the service policy never changes). This just isn't practical.
A site admin CHOOSES to use +1 buttons and FB like buttons. Inclusion of these objects would optimally prompt an admin to adjust their _own_ P3P policy, but it's just a plain 'ol administrative nightmare to manually take the respective organizations' policies and create a master policy out of all of them. It's fully manual; it has no concept of "merging" policies to present users with enough information to make informed choices on the multitude of SaaS services sites now use. That's the issue.
The darn thing is broken. Period. Hard to claim "cop-out" when dealing with a protocol that's stuck in 2001.
In cases where the P3P vocabulary is not precise enough to describe a Web site's practices, sites should use the vocabulary terms that most closely match their practices and provide further explanation in the CONSEQUENCE field and/or their human-readable policy. However, policies MUST NOT make false or misleading statements.
This is correct. However, as stated further down in the same section, the effect of such policies is to be positive and declarative (meaning the policy should state what the site DOES do, not what it DOES NOT do), and be informative to the user. The standard allows for user agents to then use the P3P policy to make it the basis for "authorization" but then goes on to state that implementers of user-agents can make their own decisions as to what the declarations mean in the context of the connection.
This has led to situations where browsers that implement P3P and tie it to certain "security features" end up with a browser implementation that works dramatically different than other browsers for the very same privacy declaraion. In most cases, browsers do not even IMPLEMENT a user-readable informational dialog for P3P -- it is by standard the browser implementers' decision.
Google has been claiming "oopsies" almost weekly over the last couple months. In this case they put this in their policy: 'P3P: CP="This is not a P3P policy! See http://www.google.com/support/accounts/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=151657 for more info."' in what is meant to be a machine-readable field. Following the spec would have been easy-- omit the field altogether. Instead Google violates the spec in a way that benefits them. It's possible Google is just really incompetent over all these "oopsies", but they sure try to represent themselves as a company with above-average engineers. It has to be one or the other.
Can't say I really can fault Google for this. Explaining why would require an understanding of how P3P 1.0 objects are configured and how limited those types really are.
P3P 1.1 work has stalled (albeit in provisionally final state) and is likely to not restart; in its absence is P3P 1.0 which exists firmly in the world-as-it-was of 2000/2001. It covers cookies and certain types of form transmission, but doesn't cover privacy aspects of other types of persistent data, new transmission protocols (like SPDY), advanced caching techniques, or HTML5 storage. Technology has advanced past the point that P3P 1.0 is useful -- and quite simply, it's doubtful it ever really was. If you visit the link Google supplies it explains some of their reasoning, and it's pretty dang valid for a post-2007 view of the Web.
Those chucking bombs over this would be better served to focus their efforts on either modernizing or replacing P3P 1.0 -- or, better yet, trying something radically different like PRIME or Policy-Aware-Web tried to do.
Don't get me wrong; I'm all in favor of this -- I want earlier versions of IE to die a thousand silent deaths, but...
This will hurt some large enterprises who have specifically designed certain website features to work only in IE. Older versions of IE tended to have some quirky rendering behaviors and a lot of sites rely on those quirks. Taking the browser directly to the latest IE will render things in IE "Standards" mode which will break some of these sites.
They better read up on how to explicitly set IE rendering modes:
Three ways to do this: 1) do it in the page body with a META tag, 2) do it in the HTTP headers with the X-UA-Compatible header, or 3) push a GPO update to your internal IE clients that forces the browser to render the sites you specify in "IE Compatibility Mode".
HP is one of the vendors I tried to buy from who sat on my $150 for 3+ weeks, renewing the hold every Friday like clockwork until finally canceling it with no attempt to reconcile with me as a customer.
Just speaking as a person who tried and failed multiple times to get orders in for one of the firesale units with multiple vendors -- and went to multiple retail stores in search of one... only to be shut out by the douchebags who bought dozens at a time. And whose attempts to get orders in with a certain few vendors ended up tying up charges against my credit cards for weeks as, slowly -- one by one -- each vendor admitted "yeah, we just don't have enough. sorry for sitting on your cash."
Have fun, all you wild-eyed bargain hunters. I'll just sit this one out.
This should come in handy for doctors trained this way when a blue, eight-foot tall hermaphroditic troll shows up at a hospital emergency room complaining of chest pains.
The Internet has proven to be more than slightly "put off" by a well placed boat anchor, I think.
A more correct statement would be: Due to the extremely high traffic loads some core links carry and the inability for backups to primary network paths to keep up with the growth rate of network traffic, the internet was designed to limp around shouting "ow, ow, ow!" around bottlenecks and network damage while IT staff groan about another sleepless night of babysitting outsourcing engagements whose bandwidth is currently sucking seawater.
"Infinitely scalable" AND "carry a map of all the connections in the network"? As # nodes approaches infinity, the number of map entries would approach, what... infinity ^ 3? And the amount of memory needed to store a, say, 128 byte record of each routepath would require memory on the order of infinity ^ (3 * 128)?
I do not think that word means what you think it means.
A developing country with a limited infrastructure could get a whole lot more (excuse the expression) bang for their buck with smaller, cheaper reactors (>50 megawatt) rather than larger ones. It makes very little sense to build a big reactor to generate power for distribution if you have no distribution system to begin with. The biggest expense in any electrical grid is in fact the power distribution system as it entails installation of substations, branch lines, and so forth -- the reactors are cheap in comparison.
Think local power generation for a smaller area providing irrigation pumping, water desalination, and stable power for healthcare facilities, and you'll end up helping more people for less money than you will by making sure every hut has a power outlet. The goal is to jumpstart a sustainable economy, not to propel society 10 steps ahead at enormous expense.
Toshiba has completed lots of testing on this reactor design. It's a sea-change from the older commercial reactor designs that were derived from military reactor technology -- the use of the neutron moderating reflector is particularly ingenious. They're offering to install it in Galena, AK as a trial run pending NRC regulatory approval, which, of course, is not complete. That's because the NRC seems to believe that micro-reactors aren't viable, or aren't worthy of attention.
Toshiba has already developed this as a viable technology and is in the process of deploying something like this in Alaska as part of an NSF-funded replacement of a diesel-fired powerplant.
And Toshiba's not the only game in town as far as micro-reactors go. Why would the government spend a boatload to develop something that already exists commercially? Why not just allow countries to select the best commercial design that fits them and ease the regulatory barriers to permit easier US fueling of self-contained sub-50 megawatt reactors? Seems like the AEC is just caught flatfooted in response to new technology, that's all -- no need to develop anything, just rework the regulations to take into account new technologies.
Details his experience with the Carlyle Group. Interestingly, immediately following that:
"Mr. Norris acted as a principal financial advisor to Prince Al-Waleed bin Talal Al Saud of Kingdom Holding Company, in structuring and negotiating the re-capitalization of Citibank, which returned over $15 billion in profits on about $590 million of equity invested. He also advised or played a key role in other Kingdom Holding Company investments. He was appointed by former president George H.W. Bush and confirmed by the U.S. Senate to serve as one of five governing members of the $100 billion Federal Retirement System Thrift Investment Board."
This post, without coming out and saying it, actually explains why Sen. Clinton is probably not the best the Democratic Party can offer this election. Has anyone other than myself noticed that when referring to the field of candidates, people tend to refer to them by their last names, except when talking about Sen. Clinton? The lead post does that:
This story is to discuss the remaining democratic candidates for president. Please keep discussions limited to talk about Hillary and Obama. Keep discussions of the other party in the other story.
In the other posting about the Republican candidates, not a single candidate is referred to by first name:
This is the Republican half- please only discuss the republican candidates in this story. Huckabee, McCain, and Romney only.
Why single out Sen. Clinton by first name? Because, like it or not, the reaction most people have to her is highly personal and somewhat visceral -- and most always partly negative. I don't claim to know why that is, but it probably relates to the old "talk radio" chestnut of demeaning a President by refusing to make him "presidential". President Clinton was consistently referred to as "Bill" or "Willy" by those who had an ax to grind with him in order to remind people that he was just a... I don't know -- a person, I guess... whose presence in the office of President was somehow an insult. The same goes for those people who refer to President Bush as "George" or spit the mononom "Bush" as if it were an insult.
Sen. Clinton absolutely has been tarnished by her association with her husband, and the resulting way that she gained a reputation as a "first-name-only" figure as part of the "Bill and Hillary" couplet -- or, God help us, the "Billary" conglomeration. And regardless of whether she is capable of the office (she certainly is), she's gained her status over time as someone who -- strangely -- can be demeaned by the use of her first name. She's got a huge uphill battle.
I had a conversation with my fervently Republican father the other day where I mentioned the Democratic field and talk about comparing both Sens. Clinton and Obama's positions on key issues. His response? "Well, I'd vote for either of those guys (sic) just to keep Hillary out of there." He's lost the ability to connect her last name with her first name. And, strangely, so have our Slashdot editors. How can Sen. Clinton get past that?
Ever since I painted my living room, I've been having trouble selecting coordinating furniture to my fire-engine red walls. I'd been searching for a nice coffee table with a bright blue top, but could never seem to find one in just the right shade.
This looks like it just might be suitable -- I hear it's likely to turn a lovely shade of blue on a regular basis!
no offense to Jeff - probably a great guy, but there is something seriously screwed with the structure of human society to have private individuals so rich they can finance startups that take people into outer space
I think that's pretty much how the "New World" was colonized, wasn't it? A bunch of richer-than-God private individuals footing the initial bill to create startup companies importing, say, exotic foods (tea, rum, tobacco)?
I can't say the rate of return for a space-tourism venture would be on the same level, but it's pretty much how exploration has always traditionally been done.
Try to keep in mind that this isn't a criminal charge (libel). It's a civil offense. Charging a parent with negligent homicide when their child kills someone is completely different than holding them responsible for a civil offense they didn't commit.
A crime will affect body or property, whereas libel will likely only affect reputation. It's quite a bit different, and allowing such a transferrance would be dangerous at a civil level. It'd be only a matter of time before a whole family could be charged with libel because they didn't restrain a family member's mouth.
Allowing access to the Internet, unsupervised and without restraint poses an obvious and unreasonable danger that such children would utilize the Internet for illicit purposes.
I once saw a court case centered around this particular notion flame out after one exceptionally bright young attorney asked the jury, "Could YOUR mother do it?"
The difference here is that parents whose children grow up are supposed to transfer personal responsibility to them when they reach adulthood (unlike the pit bull).
(Unless the parents have a heated basement, three squares a day, and a broadband connection for an XBox, in which case personal responsibility may never develop.)
You won't find me arguing that parents need to be held accountable for their inattention towards their children, but the issue here is less a criminal matter than a civil one. It's not "involuntary manslaughter," it's "involuntary libel"... or "negligent defamation". Is that really something we want to introduce as a matter of law?
I mean, would YOU enjoy it if someone brought suit against you, personally, for not restraining or even becoming involved with what your brother or sister said about someone? Although the legal responsibility is different from parent to child, it still takes a "personal" civil offense and makes it a "group" offense. I find that scary.
According to the "PortalPlayer" site, this is, in effect, a PDA built into the lid of a laptop.
- It is a seperate QVGA display, but relies on a system-on-a-chip and custom board to drive it. It derives power presumably from the laptop battery, but more than likely at lower draw. - It is updated with new information when the laptop's main OS is on (ActiveSync, anyone?). - It runs XML-based "gadgets" -- my guess is something like Confabulator widgets -- that perform certain functions.
My question is, why on earth would you want this? I mean, one of the big benefits of a PDA is that it ISN'T attached to the laptop all the time. My laptop, while I'm traveling, usually stays safely inside my laptop bag -- I don't normally freehand my laptop from place to place (I paid too much for it to trust my own hand/eye reflexes). If its only function is to provide some insight into the information stored on the laptop while it is off, the PDA does a brilliant job of that today without me having to lug 5 pounds of lithium, electrolyte, plastic, and heavy metals around with me.
I didn't say that the companies I mentioned were on the bleeding edge, just that they're making serious inroads against ISS. Hell, all Cisco has to do is sneeze together an IPS solution and lots of companies would buy it based solely on the label and the fact that it fits into their Catalyst (and I would argue that they did exactly that with their current product lines). Last time I checked, wasn't Cisco now selling more IDS/IPS gear than anyone else in terms of revenue? Oh, yeah, this IS an economy of scale, isn't it?
Oh yeah, the XP firewall... wow, that was really a direct shot in the heart to ISS. Considering the huge number of enterprises currently running Vista, I can see how you might conclude there is no longer a market for 3rd-party desktop security agents.
I have no love for the stuff Microsoft gives us. I despise the build-in strategy they like to force on the marketplace. But it's FREE. It's bundled with the damn product we have to run anyway. It's totally FREE. And we sure as hell will go Vista when it comes because most of our backend systems will require it and our user systems will likely rely on Vista-integrated features. And then there's that FREE thing again. Good luck on that one, most companies like to get handouts because it makes you look good on the balance sheet -- and if it doesn't work, then you can blame Microsoft, which everyone does anyway, AND which never has any effect because there's really no other way you can go if you saddled yourself to that horse.
I could spend time explaining the performance advantages that Proventia brought to the table, or the fact that tech support calls per appliance sold took a drastic nosedive, or that a *majority* of customers have moved to Proventia, but you're clearly either a competitor or otherwise motivated by some negative interaction you had with the company, so I'll let it slide.
How in the hell did you figure out that I've had negative interaction with ISS? Good call! You're right that I have -- and that has indeed colored my view of the company, of which I have some pretty strong opinions. And those opinions of the company are based on the people, not the product -- I'm aware that the Proventias continue to improve. But that's hardly my fault, I've only been dealing with ISS as a customer since 1994 or so. Definitely not long enough to develop any empirical data to support my assertions that they're not customer-friendly. I take all of it back.
I am, after all, naive about how "a company" works -- it's definitely not about making customers happy AND making money. It's only about making money, isn't it? And as long as we're making money, the customers will stay with us! That's the ticket!
Mike Lynn resigned. To this day he doesn't have much bad to say about ISS the company, but does hold a handful of employees responsible for the situation that ensued.
Uh huh. Glad to see he's got class. He still left a company because of a disagreement that ISS exacerbated by refusing to defend him. I say "fired". And "bamboozled". And "removed". And "backhanded". And "sirloin". Whatever. He's got class where ISS refused to have any.
I trust IBM did it's homework a lot more thoroughly that you before performing this acquisition. And it's a good thing, since your version of homework is false accusations, half-truths and conjecture.
Yeah, I guess being a customer of a company gives you no insight to be able to judge how poorly a company performs for its customers. And now that you mention it, as I hadn't to this point actually engaged in false accusations, half-truths, and conjecture, I might as well.
False accusation: I find ISS's management to be not at all a big bunch of baboons with excessively large penchants for flinging shit in their customers' faces.
Half-truths: I find ISS's management to be a big bunch of baboons with excessively large penchants for flinging shit in their customers' faces.
Conjecture: IBM is likely to find itself up to its armpits in customers with shitty faces.
Slashdot Mirror
Been there done that. This was the same thing touted by the folks at "iCache" who released a few test units of the "Geode" -- an iPhone jacket and universal card combo that could do this as well as provide support for barcodes using an e-ink window on the back of the case.
Unfortunately, the company -- after a successful Kickstarter and infusion of venture cash, crashed and burned. HARD.
http://www.zdnet.com/icache-geodes-spectacular-crash-and-burn-7000014801/
As it turns out, there were huge limitations on where this type of "cloned" card could be used -- no ATMs, no "pull through" swipers like at gas pumps... It all fell apart quite noisily with accusations of fraud and deceit on the part of the company's founders.
The bottom line is this: Payment card providers require three things: 1) the card should be signed, 2) the card should be present so the merchant can verify the expiration and CVV (or pay a CNP fee), and 3) the card provider's logo must be visible on the card. Failure to comply with any of the three means a merchant may lose his ability to accept cards to the provider. The Geode could do ONE of those things; the same goes for this card, as technically interesting as it may be.
And of course this goes out the window as NFC or chip-and-pin cards eventually come into fashion in the US (as chip-and-pin already is in Europe).
This is a waveguide for a SNR-75 "Fan Song" fire-control radar for the Russian SA-2 (NATO) missile system. You can learn about it here (an SNR-75 set abandoned in Czechoslovakia): http://forum.valka.cz/viewtopic.php/t/74858
And you can see the waveguide cone pictured in the AP stories and twitter here:
http://forum.valka.cz/attachments/1945/RSN-75M3_Fan_Song_E_1.jpg
And unless I miss my guess, this is the first _direct_ seizure we've seen of ACTUAL missile hardware on a North Korean ship.
You're splitting hairs here.
P3P 1.0 doesn't allow for multi-site delclarations, only "cross-site" declarations. There can be one -- and only one -- P3P policy; by the standard it doesn't allow but ONE policy and states that others, if present, should be ignored. This just isn't how the Web works these days. Cloud services have pretty much become a defacto standard, but P3P forces site administrators to take a P3P policy from the integrated service and mash it into their own policy (and hope the service policy never changes). This just isn't practical.
A site admin CHOOSES to use +1 buttons and FB like buttons. Inclusion of these objects would optimally prompt an admin to adjust their _own_ P3P policy, but it's just a plain 'ol administrative nightmare to manually take the respective organizations' policies and create a master policy out of all of them. It's fully manual; it has no concept of "merging" policies to present users with enough information to make informed choices on the multitude of SaaS services sites now use. That's the issue.
The darn thing is broken. Period. Hard to claim "cop-out" when dealing with a protocol that's stuck in 2001.
The article answers this question by quoting a section from the P3P spec:
This is correct. However, as stated further down in the same section, the effect of such policies is to be positive and declarative (meaning the policy should state what the site DOES do, not what it DOES NOT do), and be informative to the user. The standard allows for user agents to then use the P3P policy to make it the basis for "authorization" but then goes on to state that implementers of user-agents can make their own decisions as to what the declarations mean in the context of the connection.
This has led to situations where browsers that implement P3P and tie it to certain "security features" end up with a browser implementation that works dramatically different than other browsers for the very same privacy declaraion. In most cases, browsers do not even IMPLEMENT a user-readable informational dialog for P3P -- it is by standard the browser implementers' decision.
If you're keeping score at home, that's bad.
Google has been claiming "oopsies" almost weekly over the last couple months. In this case they put this in their policy: 'P3P: CP="This is not a P3P policy! See http://www.google.com/support/accounts/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=151657 for more info."' in what is meant to be a machine-readable field. Following the spec would have been easy-- omit the field altogether. Instead Google violates the spec in a way that benefits them. It's possible Google is just really incompetent over all these "oopsies", but they sure try to represent themselves as a company with above-average engineers. It has to be one or the other.
Can't say I really can fault Google for this. Explaining why would require an understanding of how P3P 1.0 objects are configured and how limited those types really are.
P3P 1.1 work has stalled (albeit in provisionally final state) and is likely to not restart; in its absence is P3P 1.0 which exists firmly in the world-as-it-was of 2000/2001. It covers cookies and certain types of form transmission, but doesn't cover privacy aspects of other types of persistent data, new transmission protocols (like SPDY), advanced caching techniques, or HTML5 storage. Technology has advanced past the point that P3P 1.0 is useful -- and quite simply, it's doubtful it ever really was. If you visit the link Google supplies it explains some of their reasoning, and it's pretty dang valid for a post-2007 view of the Web.
Those chucking bombs over this would be better served to focus their efforts on either modernizing or replacing P3P 1.0 -- or, better yet, trying something radically different like PRIME or Policy-Aware-Web tried to do.
Don't get me wrong; I'm all in favor of this -- I want earlier versions of IE to die a thousand silent deaths, but...
This will hurt some large enterprises who have specifically designed certain website features to work only in IE. Older versions of IE tended to have some quirky rendering behaviors and a lot of sites rely on those quirks. Taking the browser directly to the latest IE will render things in IE "Standards" mode which will break some of these sites.
They better read up on how to explicitly set IE rendering modes:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc288325(v=vs.85).aspx
Three ways to do this: 1) do it in the page body with a META tag, 2) do it in the HTTP headers with the X-UA-Compatible header, or 3) push a GPO update to your internal IE clients that forces the browser to render the sites you specify in "IE Compatibility Mode".
HP is one of the vendors I tried to buy from who sat on my $150 for 3+ weeks, renewing the hold every Friday like clockwork until finally canceling it with no attempt to reconcile with me as a customer.
Just speaking as a person who tried and failed multiple times to get orders in for one of the firesale units with multiple vendors -- and went to multiple retail stores in search of one... only to be shut out by the douchebags who bought dozens at a time. And whose attempts to get orders in with a certain few vendors ended up tying up charges against my credit cards for weeks as, slowly -- one by one -- each vendor admitted "yeah, we just don't have enough. sorry for sitting on your cash."
Have fun, all you wild-eyed bargain hunters. I'll just sit this one out.
As a famous jerkwad once said: "Fool me once, shame on — shame on you. Fool me — you can't get fooled again."
First rule about DoD security and stability? Don't talk about DoD security and stability. :>
This should come in handy for doctors trained this way when a blue, eight-foot tall hermaphroditic troll shows up at a hospital emergency room complaining of chest pains.
The Internet has proven to be more than slightly "put off" by a well placed boat anchor, I think.
A more correct statement would be: Due to the extremely high traffic loads some core links carry and the inability for backups to primary network paths to keep up with the growth rate of network traffic, the internet was designed to limp around shouting "ow, ow, ow!" around bottlenecks and network damage while IT staff groan about another sleepless night of babysitting outsourcing engagements whose bandwidth is currently sucking seawater.
"Infinitely scalable" AND "carry a map of all the connections in the network"? As # nodes approaches infinity, the number of map entries would approach, what... infinity ^ 3? And the amount of memory needed to store a, say, 128 byte record of each routepath would require memory on the order of infinity ^ (3 * 128)?
I do not think that word means what you think it means.
A developing country with a limited infrastructure could get a whole lot more (excuse the expression) bang for their buck with smaller, cheaper reactors (>50 megawatt) rather than larger ones. It makes very little sense to build a big reactor to generate power for distribution if you have no distribution system to begin with. The biggest expense in any electrical grid is in fact the power distribution system as it entails installation of substations, branch lines, and so forth -- the reactors are cheap in comparison.
Think local power generation for a smaller area providing irrigation pumping, water desalination, and stable power for healthcare facilities, and you'll end up helping more people for less money than you will by making sure every hut has a power outlet. The goal is to jumpstart a sustainable economy, not to propel society 10 steps ahead at enormous expense.
Toshiba has completed lots of testing on this reactor design. It's a sea-change from the older commercial reactor designs that were derived from military reactor technology -- the use of the neutron moderating reflector is particularly ingenious. They're offering to install it in Galena, AK as a trial run pending NRC regulatory approval, which, of course, is not complete. That's because the NRC seems to believe that micro-reactors aren't viable, or aren't worthy of attention.
Toshiba has already developed this as a viable technology and is in the process of deploying something like this in Alaska as part of an NSF-funded replacement of a diesel-fired powerplant.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toshiba_4S
And Toshiba's not the only game in town as far as micro-reactors go. Why would the government spend a boatload to develop something that already exists commercially? Why not just allow countries to select the best commercial design that fits them and ease the regulatory barriers to permit easier US fueling of self-contained sub-50 megawatt reactors? Seems like the AEC is just caught flatfooted in response to new technology, that's all -- no need to develop anything, just rework the regulations to take into account new technologies.
Not really "bin Laden" money, but SNP is rife with capital from the Saud family. From the SNP website, the Bio of Mr. Norris:
http://www.snpartners.com/norris.html
Details his experience with the Carlyle Group. Interestingly, immediately following that:
"Mr. Norris acted as a principal financial advisor to Prince Al-Waleed bin Talal Al Saud of Kingdom Holding Company, in structuring and negotiating the re-capitalization of Citibank, which returned over $15 billion in profits on about $590 million of equity invested. He also advised or played a key role in other Kingdom Holding Company investments. He was appointed by former president George H.W. Bush and confirmed by the U.S. Senate to serve as one of five governing members of the $100 billion Federal Retirement System Thrift Investment Board."
This story is to discuss the remaining democratic candidates for president. Please keep discussions limited to talk about Hillary and Obama. Keep discussions of the other party in the other story.
In the other posting about the Republican candidates, not a single candidate is referred to by first name:
This is the Republican half- please only discuss the republican candidates in this story. Huckabee, McCain, and Romney only.
Why single out Sen. Clinton by first name? Because, like it or not, the reaction most people have to her is highly personal and somewhat visceral -- and most always partly negative. I don't claim to know why that is, but it probably relates to the old "talk radio" chestnut of demeaning a President by refusing to make him "presidential". President Clinton was consistently referred to as "Bill" or "Willy" by those who had an ax to grind with him in order to remind people that he was just a... I don't know -- a person, I guess... whose presence in the office of President was somehow an insult. The same goes for those people who refer to President Bush as "George" or spit the mononom "Bush" as if it were an insult.
Sen. Clinton absolutely has been tarnished by her association with her husband, and the resulting way that she gained a reputation as a "first-name-only" figure as part of the "Bill and Hillary" couplet -- or, God help us, the "Billary" conglomeration. And regardless of whether she is capable of the office (she certainly is), she's gained her status over time as someone who -- strangely -- can be demeaned by the use of her first name. She's got a huge uphill battle.
I had a conversation with my fervently Republican father the other day where I mentioned the Democratic field and talk about comparing both Sens. Clinton and Obama's positions on key issues. His response? "Well, I'd vote for either of those guys (sic) just to keep Hillary out of there." He's lost the ability to connect her last name with her first name. And, strangely, so have our Slashdot editors. How can Sen. Clinton get past that?
Ever since I painted my living room, I've been having trouble selecting coordinating furniture to my fire-engine red walls. I'd been searching for a nice coffee table with a bright blue top, but could never seem to find one in just the right shade.
This looks like it just might be suitable -- I hear it's likely to turn a lovely shade of blue on a regular basis!
I think that's pretty much how the "New World" was colonized, wasn't it? A bunch of richer-than-God private individuals footing the initial bill to create startup companies importing, say, exotic foods (tea, rum, tobacco)?
I can't say the rate of return for a space-tourism venture would be on the same level, but it's pretty much how exploration has always traditionally been done.
Try to keep in mind that this isn't a criminal charge (libel). It's a civil offense. Charging a parent with negligent homicide when their child kills someone is completely different than holding them responsible for a civil offense they didn't commit.
A crime will affect body or property, whereas libel will likely only affect reputation. It's quite a bit different, and allowing such a transferrance would be dangerous at a civil level. It'd be only a matter of time before a whole family could be charged with libel because they didn't restrain a family member's mouth.
Allowing access to the Internet, unsupervised and without restraint poses an obvious and unreasonable danger that such children would utilize the Internet for illicit purposes.
I once saw a court case centered around this particular notion flame out after one exceptionally bright young attorney asked the jury, "Could YOUR mother do it?"
Deliberation didn't even take that long.
The difference here is that parents whose children grow up are supposed to transfer personal responsibility to them when they reach adulthood (unlike the pit bull).
(Unless the parents have a heated basement, three squares a day, and a broadband connection for an XBox, in which case personal responsibility may never develop.)
You won't find me arguing that parents need to be held accountable for their inattention towards their children, but the issue here is less a criminal matter than a civil one. It's not "involuntary manslaughter," it's "involuntary libel"... or "negligent defamation". Is that really something we want to introduce as a matter of law?
I mean, would YOU enjoy it if someone brought suit against you, personally, for not restraining or even becoming involved with what your brother or sister said about someone? Although the legal responsibility is different from parent to child, it still takes a "personal" civil offense and makes it a "group" offense. I find that scary.
According to the "PortalPlayer" site, this is, in effect, a PDA built into the lid of a laptop.
- It is a seperate QVGA display, but relies on a system-on-a-chip and custom board to drive it. It derives power presumably from the laptop battery, but more than likely at lower draw.
- It is updated with new information when the laptop's main OS is on (ActiveSync, anyone?).
- It runs XML-based "gadgets" -- my guess is something like Confabulator widgets -- that perform certain functions.
My question is, why on earth would you want this? I mean, one of the big benefits of a PDA is that it ISN'T attached to the laptop all the time. My laptop, while I'm traveling, usually stays safely inside my laptop bag -- I don't normally freehand my laptop from place to place (I paid too much for it to trust my own hand/eye reflexes). If its only function is to provide some insight into the information stored on the laptop while it is off, the PDA does a brilliant job of that today without me having to lug 5 pounds of lithium, electrolyte, plastic, and heavy metals around with me.
I love responding to ISS people! I really do!
I didn't say that the companies I mentioned were on the bleeding edge, just that they're making serious inroads against ISS. Hell, all Cisco has to do is sneeze together an IPS solution and lots of companies would buy it based solely on the label and the fact that it fits into their Catalyst (and I would argue that they did exactly that with their current product lines). Last time I checked, wasn't Cisco now selling more IDS/IPS gear than anyone else in terms of revenue? Oh, yeah, this IS an economy of scale, isn't it?
Oh yeah, the XP firewall... wow, that was really a direct shot in the heart to ISS. Considering the huge number of enterprises currently running Vista, I can see how you might conclude there is no longer a market for 3rd-party desktop security agents.
I have no love for the stuff Microsoft gives us. I despise the build-in strategy they like to force on the marketplace. But it's FREE. It's bundled with the damn product we have to run anyway. It's totally FREE. And we sure as hell will go Vista when it comes because most of our backend systems will require it and our user systems will likely rely on Vista-integrated features. And then there's that FREE thing again. Good luck on that one, most companies like to get handouts because it makes you look good on the balance sheet -- and if it doesn't work, then you can blame Microsoft, which everyone does anyway, AND which never has any effect because there's really no other way you can go if you saddled yourself to that horse.
I could spend time explaining the performance advantages that Proventia brought to the table, or the fact that tech support calls per appliance sold took a drastic nosedive, or that a *majority* of customers have moved to Proventia, but you're clearly either a competitor or otherwise motivated by some negative interaction you had with the company, so I'll let it slide.
How in the hell did you figure out that I've had negative interaction with ISS? Good call! You're right that I have -- and that has indeed colored my view of the company, of which I have some pretty strong opinions. And those opinions of the company are based on the people, not the product -- I'm aware that the Proventias continue to improve. But that's hardly my fault, I've only been dealing with ISS as a customer since 1994 or so. Definitely not long enough to develop any empirical data to support my assertions that they're not customer-friendly. I take all of it back.
I am, after all, naive about how "a company" works -- it's definitely not about making customers happy AND making money. It's only about making money, isn't it? And as long as we're making money, the customers will stay with us! That's the ticket!
Mike Lynn resigned. To this day he doesn't have much bad to say about ISS the company, but does hold a handful of employees responsible for the situation that ensued.
Uh huh. Glad to see he's got class. He still left a company because of a disagreement that ISS exacerbated by refusing to defend him. I say "fired". And "bamboozled". And "removed". And "backhanded". And "sirloin". Whatever. He's got class where ISS refused to have any.
I trust IBM did it's homework a lot more thoroughly that you before performing this acquisition. And it's a good thing, since your version of homework is false accusations, half-truths and conjecture.
Yeah, I guess being a customer of a company gives you no insight to be able to judge how poorly a company performs for its customers. And now that you mention it, as I hadn't to this point actually engaged in false accusations, half-truths, and conjecture, I might as well.
False accusation: I find ISS's management to be not at all a big bunch of baboons with excessively large penchants for flinging shit in their customers' faces.
Half-truths: I find ISS's management to be a big bunch of baboons with excessively large penchants for flinging shit in their customers' faces.
Conjecture: IBM is likely to find itself up to its armpits in customers with shitty faces.
Ciao!