The bureaucrat isn't paid to be charming. He is being paid to be independent, honest and effective. Otherwise what you get is the politically motivated closing of the GWB.
It quite well may be. One thing the Chinese do on request is quality control.
The other side of the coin is that legitimate Western retailers and corporate partners like the NHL don't like being called out for labor abuses abroad.
Mind telling me exactly what the fuck they should be focused on this month, if their very job is to stop illegal trafficking of all kinds? Seems there's just a tiny bit of justification out there after a 20+ million-dollar bust, but hey, I could be wrong...
To put things in perspective, the total take from bank robbery in the US is around $30 million a year. Bank Robbery
Because counterfeit football merchandise is such a "clear and present danger" that it rates diverting resources from, you know, actual crime like bank robbery and human trafficking.
"Actual crime" is what the law defines as crime.
Crimes with an interstate or foreign dimension or a federal constitutional dimension become a federal responsibility.
Clear and present danger was a doctrine adopted by the Supreme Court of the United States to determine under what circumstances limits can be placed on First Amendment freedoms of speech, press or assembly.
U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), the largest investigative agency in the Department of Homeland Security, is responsible for enforcing the nation's immigration and customs laws. ICE has more than 20,000 employees working in 400 offices in the U.S. and around the world.
With more than 42,000 frontline CBP officers and Border Patrol agents protecting nearly 7,000 miles of land border and 327 ports of entry --- including official crossings by land, air, and sea --- CBP is uniquely situated to deter and disrupt human trafficking.
U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS)
USCIS helps protect victims of human trafficking and other crimes by providing immigration relief. Two types of immigration relief for victims of human trafficking and other crimes are available through USCIS: T Nonimmigrant Status (T Visa) and U Nonimmigrant Status (U Visa).
Maybe the reason the electric car stopped being popular was because batteries are NOT such a good way to power...a car?
To charge a bank of lead acid batteries you needed a convenient source of electric power. That was not a cheap or easy problem to solve once you reached the city limits. Delco-Light Farm Electric Plant It would remain a problem until the great public works projects of the thirties.
While petroleum products could be conveniently shipped and stored almost anywhere as early as the 1860s.
"Why would you in a city that gets one snow event every three years? Why would you buy 500 snowplows and salt trucks and have them sit around for 1,000 days, waiting for the next event?"
You don't.
You buy them as a state or regional co-operative as an emergency reserve to be drawn upon as needed.
Lease them out to others when they are not needed at home.
If it is only a one-in-three year event, you accept the inevitability of snow days and shut-downs, plan and budget for them --- and take the heat for closings under conditions that a northern pre-school would regard as perfectly safe for kids and staff.
In 2007 I honestly thought that the only reason MS introduced ribbons was their failure to make Word any better.
MS Office is focused on the productivity of the 9 to 5 clerical worker. Full time staff, Office Temp, Senior Volunteer. You can have hundreds and maybe thousands of these guys and gals on your payroll for every one who needs a precision tool like LaTex.
Microsoft markets Office as a component of an integrated office system that scales to an enterprise of any size. Think Outlook. The FOSS alternatives continue to be framed as the stand-alone office suite of the nineties.
It's a shame that San Diego is now so huge that there isn't a single spot to land between the pacific and Arizona...
Customs and Border Protection says the drone was on a border security mission when a mechanical problem developed about 20 miles southwest of San Diego late Monday night. Spokesman Mike Friel says the crew operating the drone from Texas decided to crash it in the ocean.
The $12 million surveillance drone was one of 10 that Homeland Security uses to patrol the border with Mexico. It was just one of two Predator B drones equipped with radar specifically designed to be used over the ocean.
Friel says the cause of the mechanical failure is unknown and that the remainder of the drone fleet has been temporarily grounded while the investigation into the incident continues.
The second direction the design took was the "Predator B-003", referred to by GA as the "Altair", which has a new airframe with an 84-foot (25.6 m) wingspan and a takeoff weight of about 7,000 pounds (3,175 kg). Like the Predator B-001, it is powered by a TP-331-10T turboprop. This variant has a payload capacity of 3,000 pounds (1,360 kg), a maximum ceiling of 52,000 feet (15.8 km), and an endurance of 36 hours.
In winter much of Norway is usually transformed into a snow-clad paradise.
The lower inland areas, both in the southern and northern parts of Norway, can have very low mean temperatures in winter. Temperatures can reach below -40 F/-40 C in the inner areas of Finnmark, Troms, Trondelag and Eastern Norway, even if this does not happen each winter.
By contrast, the coastal areas have comparatively mild winters. However, gales, rain and clouds can be frequent and heavy.
It doesn't matter whether you measure temperature in degrees Fahrenheit or Centigrade. What matters is whether you can keep your Tesla on the road through a Nordic winter.
Didn't IBM basically consider the entire PC product a commercial flop? Was it ever considered a success (ie profitable)?
By the end of 1982 IBM was selling a PC every minute of the business day. Although the PC only provided 2-3% of sales. IBM found that it had underestimated demand by as much as 800%, and because its prices were based on forecasts of much lower volume, the PC became very profitable. By 1983 the IBU had 4,000 employees and became the Entry Systems Division based in Boca Raton, and the PC surpassed the Apple II as the best-selling personal computer.
By 1984 IBM had $4 billion in annual PC revenue, more than twice that of Apple and as much as the sales of Apple, Commodore, HP, and Sperry combined. A Fortune survey found that 56% of American companies with personal computers used IBM PCs, compared to Apple's 16%.
It may be bad form to post a follow-up to your own post, but this story caught my attention:
For some, a job at Google is the stuff dreams are made of, but for security guard Manny Cardenas, it's been more of a nightmare.
While working as security guard at Google's Mountain View headquarters, 24-year-old Cardenas said he had to move back in with his mother and enroll his daughter in MediCal because his pay amounted to $1,000 a month at most, and he received no health benefits. He says Google's security guard contractor, Security Industry Specialists, doesn't provide a set number of work hours every week to its security guards at Google, which meant he's worked as little as one day a week some weeks. Even though he's paid $16 an hour, his monthly pay at its peak was less than what a full time job at minimum wage provides.
Members of a delegation of 400 Belgian business leaders who were visiting Google seemed to be bit surprised by the action.
''We are accustomed to strikes in Belgium, it's a democratic right,'' said Gael Lambinon, a member of the Belgian business group. ''It's nice to see that people are free to claim their rights, even at Google in Silicon Valley. Silicon Valley is not paradise --- that is what we tend to imagine.''
A young Googler approached the Voice to ask what the protest was about. Upon hearing a brief explanation, he said, ''Whatever, I don't give a (expletive).''
Mountain View resident Elena Pacheco said the situation was illustrative of there being ''two Silicon Valleys'' where ''the rich are getting more rich and the poor are getting worse.''
You have to have the place be self sustaining and provide something for everyone.
The very brief BBC broadcast on the 6 Oâ(TM)Clock News on the 24th January created an impression of disharmony within Bletchley Park.
The piece drew attention to three very different and separate issues;
The alleged treatment of volunteer guides
Private Collections being asked to leave the site
The access arrangements to The National Museum of Computing
In order to manage increasing numbers of visitors, and to make it more accessible and family friendly, the guided tour was reduced from 90 minutes plus to an hour. This revised tour was developed and implemented by a working group of staff and volunteers, and the great majority of our volunteers have embraced and supported the revised tours for nearly a year. Sadly, there was one exception where a tour guide who was unwilling to conduct tours in the agreed format has been asked to stand down from this role.
Some of the non-core private collections which have in recent years operated from the Bletchley Park site have been asked to relocate, as the parts of the site they occupy are to be restored to their wartime appearance and made available to help tell the remarkable story of WW2 Codebreaking. These buildings of high historic value, are artefacts in their own right and deserve to be interpreted accordingly, to reflect their importance and the profound impact of the work that took place inside them.
The National Museum of Computing was formed in 2006 and is run by a separate charitable trust. It willingly entered into a lease agreement with the Bletchley Park Trust to rent Block H on the Bletchley Park site to house its museum. This museum remains on-site and accessible, by way of a separate admission charge, to anyone visiting Bletchley Park. It is the Bletchley Park Trust's policy to have a solid working relationship with The National Museum of Computing and we intend that its exhibition should be enjoyed by visitors to Bletchley Park>p>Bletchley Park. The site is in the middle of a major, and much needed, £8 million Heritage Lottery Funded restoration project to bring the many historic buildings on the site back to a state of good repair and create an inspiring experience for its ever-increasing numbers of visitors. This will create a world class museum and heritage site which is a fitting memorial to the heroic codebreakers of Bletchley Park making the site much more sustainable and accessible to growing numbers of visitors.
This person will go down in history as the reason the computer revolution was delayed by a few decades, because he managed to push his sub-standard technology into the market in a small window of opportunity.
Microsoft cast a huge shadow across the eight-bit world. The 16 bit CP/M clone was the obvious migration path for small business ---- and there was never the slightest doubt that the new IBM micro would ship with a full suite of development tools from Microsoft.
Digital Research threatened legal action, claiming PC DOS/MS-DOS to be too similar to CP/M. IBM settled by agreeing to sell their x86 version of CP/M, CP/M-86, alongside PC DOS. However, PC DOS sold for $40, while CP/M-86 had a $240 price tag. The proportion of PC buyers prepared to spend six times as much to buy CP/M-86 was very small.
Gate's negotiation of a non-exclusive license for MSDOS was a stroke of brilliance. There were commercially viable MSDOS PCs on the market before the cloning of the IBM PC BIOS.
Digital Research would not have a plausible mass market alternative to MSDOS until the release of DR-DOS in 1988.
The Macintosh 128K was released in 1884.
$2500, $5439, adjusted for inflation.
Integrated 9 inch monochrome screen with a resolution of 512x342 pixels, No arrow keys, keypad or function keys. The GUI a resource hog.
The Mac would find success in niche markets, desktop publishing perhaps must visibly. But it was not, in the eighties, and beyond, positioned to challenge Microsoft on all fronts.
So much for the geek's "small window" of opportunity --- as open as eight lanes of expressway traffic at three a.m. in the morning would be closer to the truth.
I don't think so. Sure, he's a smart guy, but 99.999% of his success came from being at the right place at the right time.
i.e. writing DOS just as IBM entered the PC market. The rest is history.
Being at the right place at the right time isn't an accident.
MBASIC was the first program for the infant microcomputer market to generate the kind of sales and profit to be had in the mini and mainframe markets. In 1980, Microsoft had a full suite of well-regarded development tools for CP/M. It was not an unknown to IBM or to anyone else in the business.
Taking more classes on programming/software development would have been much more useful.
How many of your high school classmates became programmers? How many have spent more than a week abroad? How many are working in environments where language skills are a marketable asset?
Slashdot Mirror
Instead, they fall under Federal Dept. of Ed Work Training facilities.
I can't find a Google link to anything that remotely resembles whatever it is you are talking about.
Sounds like a real charmer...
The bureaucrat isn't paid to be charming. He is being paid to be independent, honest and effective. Otherwise what you get is the politically motivated closing of the GWB.
Why? Should garage sales be regulated?
Garage sales are regulated.
For traffic control, zoning violations and other reasons.
California, possibly the state that receives the biggest benefit from programmers (in the form of jobs and taxes paid)
What California needs are programmers with genuine talents and marketable skills. Not the diploma mill boot camp.
It quite well may be. One thing the Chinese do on request is quality control.
The other side of the coin is that legitimate Western retailers and corporate partners like the NHL don't like being called out for labor abuses abroad.
Mind telling me exactly what the fuck they should be focused on this month, if their very job is to stop illegal trafficking of all kinds? Seems there's just a tiny bit of justification out there after a 20+ million-dollar bust, but hey, I could be wrong...
To put things in perspective, the total take from bank robbery in the US is around $30 million a year. Bank Robbery
The modern state exists primarily to protect corporate profits. Anything else it does is just window dressing...
I'll admit to being curious about how you manage to make a living.
Because counterfeit football merchandise is such a "clear and present danger" that it rates diverting resources from, you know, actual crime like bank robbery and human trafficking.
"Actual crime" is what the law defines as crime.
Crimes with an interstate or foreign dimension or a federal constitutional dimension become a federal responsibility.
Clear and present danger was a doctrine adopted by the Supreme Court of the United States to determine under what circumstances limits can be placed on First Amendment freedoms of speech, press or assembly.
Clear and present danger
Law enforcement multi-tasks.
U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), the largest investigative agency in the Department of Homeland Security, is responsible for enforcing the nation's immigration and customs laws. ICE has more than 20,000 employees working in 400 offices in the U.S. and around the world.
Careers
No law endorsement agency is an island.
U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP)
With more than 42,000 frontline CBP officers and Border Patrol agents protecting nearly 7,000 miles of land border and 327 ports of entry --- including official crossings by land, air, and sea --- CBP is uniquely situated to deter and disrupt human trafficking.
U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS)
USCIS helps protect victims of human trafficking and other crimes by providing immigration relief. Two types of immigration relief for victims of human trafficking and other crimes are available through USCIS: T Nonimmigrant Status (T Visa) and U Nonimmigrant Status (U Visa).
Human Trafficking: Our Partners
For a look at the reality of bank robbery in the U.S:
Wanted Bank Robbers
Google Map and 287 photographs of robberies in progress,
Maybe the reason the electric car stopped being popular was because batteries are NOT such a good way to power...a car?
To charge a bank of lead acid batteries you needed a convenient source of electric power. That was not a cheap or easy problem to solve once you reached the city limits. Delco-Light Farm Electric Plant It would remain a problem until the great public works projects of the thirties.
While petroleum products could be conveniently shipped and stored almost anywhere as early as the 1860s.
I have repeatedly had people tell me that electric cars are "new technology that needs to be given time to mature."
The modern electric car is quite some distance removed from the lead-acid battery technologies of the 1880s.
"Why would you in a city that gets one snow event every three years? Why would you buy 500 snowplows and salt trucks and have them sit around for 1,000 days, waiting for the next event?"
You don't.
You buy them as a state or regional co-operative as an emergency reserve to be drawn upon as needed.
Lease them out to others when they are not needed at home.
If it is only a one-in-three year event, you accept the inevitability of snow days and shut-downs, plan and budget for them --- and take the heat for closings under conditions that a northern pre-school would regard as perfectly safe for kids and staff.
In 2007 I honestly thought that the only reason MS introduced ribbons was their failure to make Word any better.
MS Office is focused on the productivity of the 9 to 5 clerical worker. Full time staff, Office Temp, Senior Volunteer. You can have hundreds and maybe thousands of these guys and gals on your payroll for every one who needs a precision tool like LaTex.
Microsoft markets Office as a component of an integrated office system that scales to an enterprise of any size. Think Outlook. The FOSS alternatives continue to be framed as the stand-alone office suite of the nineties.
I'm surprised it's not higher.
The Neanderthals were not The Flintstones.
It's a shame that San Diego is now so huge that there isn't a single spot to land between the pacific and Arizona...
Customs and Border Protection says the drone was on a border security mission when a mechanical problem developed about 20 miles southwest of San Diego late Monday night. Spokesman Mike Friel says the crew operating the drone from Texas decided to crash it in the ocean.
The $12 million surveillance drone was one of 10 that Homeland Security uses to patrol the border with Mexico. It was just one of two Predator B drones equipped with radar specifically designed to be used over the ocean.
Friel says the cause of the mechanical failure is unknown and that the remainder of the drone fleet has been temporarily grounded while the investigation into the incident continues.
DHS Drone Crashes Into Pacific off Calif Coast
The second direction the design took was the "Predator B-003", referred to by GA as the "Altair", which has a new airframe with an 84-foot (25.6 m) wingspan and a takeoff weight of about 7,000 pounds (3,175 kg). Like the Predator B-001, it is powered by a TP-331-10T turboprop. This variant has a payload capacity of 3,000 pounds (1,360 kg), a maximum ceiling of 52,000 feet (15.8 km), and an endurance of 36 hours.
General Atomics MQ-9 Reaper
Ten tons. 36 hours. If your control of the aircraft is compromised, you bring it down over the water.
'below zero' Kelvin?
Winter
In winter much of Norway is usually transformed into a snow-clad paradise.
The lower inland areas, both in the southern and northern parts of Norway, can have very low mean temperatures in winter. Temperatures can reach below -40 F/-40 C in the inner areas of Finnmark, Troms, Trondelag and Eastern Norway, even if this does not happen each winter.
By contrast, the coastal areas have comparatively mild winters. However, gales, rain and clouds can be frequent and heavy.
Seasons and climate in Norway
It doesn't matter whether you measure temperature in degrees Fahrenheit or Centigrade. What matters is whether you can keep your Tesla on the road through a Nordic winter.
Didn't IBM basically consider the entire PC product a commercial flop? Was it ever considered a success (ie profitable)?
By the end of 1982 IBM was selling a PC every minute of the business day. Although the PC only provided 2-3% of sales. IBM found that it had underestimated demand by as much as 800%, and because its prices were based on forecasts of much lower volume, the PC became very profitable. By 1983 the IBU had 4,000 employees and became the Entry Systems Division based in Boca Raton, and the PC surpassed the Apple II as the best-selling personal computer.
By 1984 IBM had $4 billion in annual PC revenue, more than twice that of Apple and as much as the sales of Apple, Commodore, HP, and Sperry combined. A Fortune survey found that 56% of American companies with personal computers used IBM PCs, compared to Apple's 16%.
IBM Personal Computer
For some, a job at Google is the stuff dreams are made of, but for security guard Manny Cardenas, it's been more of a nightmare.
While working as security guard at Google's Mountain View headquarters, 24-year-old Cardenas said he had to move back in with his mother and enroll his daughter in MediCal because his pay amounted to $1,000 a month at most, and he received no health benefits. He says Google's security guard contractor, Security Industry Specialists, doesn't provide a set number of work hours every week to its security guards at Google, which meant he's worked as little as one day a week some weeks. Even though he's paid $16 an hour, his monthly pay at its peak was less than what a full time job at minimum wage provides.
Members of a delegation of 400 Belgian business leaders who were visiting Google seemed to be bit surprised by the action.
''We are accustomed to strikes in Belgium, it's a democratic right,'' said Gael Lambinon, a member of the Belgian business group. ''It's nice to see that people are free to claim their rights, even at Google in Silicon Valley. Silicon Valley is not paradise --- that is what we tend to imagine.''
A young Googler approached the Voice to ask what the protest was about. Upon hearing a brief explanation, he said, ''Whatever, I don't give a (expletive).''
Mountain View resident Elena Pacheco said the situation was illustrative of there being ''two Silicon Valleys'' where ''the rich are getting more rich and the poor are getting worse.''
SEIU protests at Google (2013)
So how is your average google engineer harming and exploiting "the peasants"? Please do clarify.
Being the pampered pet of the Lords of Creation doesn't win you any sympathy. Google's Engineers Are Well Paid, Not Just Well Fed
You have to have the place be self sustaining and provide something for everyone.
The very brief BBC broadcast on the 6 Oâ(TM)Clock News on the 24th January created an impression of disharmony within Bletchley Park.
The piece drew attention to three very different and separate issues;
The alleged treatment of volunteer guides
Private Collections being asked to leave the site
The access arrangements to The National Museum of Computing
In order to manage increasing numbers of visitors, and to make it more accessible and family friendly, the guided tour was reduced from 90 minutes plus to an hour. This revised tour was developed and implemented by a working group of staff and volunteers, and the great majority of our volunteers have embraced and supported the revised tours for nearly a year. Sadly, there was one exception where a tour guide who was unwilling to conduct tours in the agreed format has been asked to stand down from this role.
Some of the non-core private collections which have in recent years operated from the Bletchley Park site have been asked to relocate, as the parts of the site they occupy are to be restored to their wartime appearance and made available to help tell the remarkable story of WW2 Codebreaking. These buildings of high historic value, are artefacts in their own right and deserve to be interpreted accordingly, to reflect their importance and the profound impact of the work that took place inside them.
The National Museum of Computing was formed in 2006 and is run by a separate charitable trust. It willingly entered into a lease agreement with the Bletchley Park Trust to rent Block H on the Bletchley Park site to house its museum. This museum remains on-site and accessible, by way of a separate admission charge, to anyone visiting Bletchley Park. It is the Bletchley Park Trust's policy to have a solid working relationship with The National Museum of Computing and we intend that its exhibition should be enjoyed by visitors to Bletchley Park>p>Bletchley Park. The site is in the middle of a major, and much needed, £8 million Heritage Lottery Funded restoration project to bring the many historic buildings on the site back to a state of good repair and create an inspiring experience for its ever-increasing numbers of visitors. This will create a world class museum and heritage site which is a fitting memorial to the heroic codebreakers of Bletchley Park making the site much more sustainable and accessible to growing numbers of visitors.
Progress in Perspective
This person will go down in history as the reason the computer revolution was delayed by a few decades, because he managed to push his sub-standard technology into the market in a small window of opportunity.
Microsoft cast a huge shadow across the eight-bit world. The 16 bit CP/M clone was the obvious migration path for small business ---- and there was never the slightest doubt that the new IBM micro would ship with a full suite of development tools from Microsoft.
Digital Research threatened legal action, claiming PC DOS/MS-DOS to be too similar to CP/M. IBM settled by agreeing to sell their x86 version of CP/M, CP/M-86, alongside PC DOS. However, PC DOS sold for $40, while CP/M-86 had a $240 price tag. The proportion of PC buyers prepared to spend six times as much to buy CP/M-86 was very small.
DR-DOS
Gate's negotiation of a non-exclusive license for MSDOS was a stroke of brilliance. There were commercially viable MSDOS PCs on the market before the cloning of the IBM PC BIOS.
Digital Research would not have a plausible mass market alternative to MSDOS until the release of DR-DOS in 1988.
The Macintosh 128K was released in 1884.
$2500, $5439, adjusted for inflation.
Integrated 9 inch monochrome screen with a resolution of 512x342 pixels, No arrow keys, keypad or function keys. The GUI a resource hog.
The Mac would find success in niche markets, desktop publishing perhaps must visibly. But it was not, in the eighties, and beyond, positioned to challenge Microsoft on all fronts.
So much for the geek's "small window" of opportunity --- as open as eight lanes of expressway traffic at three a.m. in the morning would be closer to the truth.
I don't think so. Sure, he's a smart guy, but 99.999% of his success came from being at the right place at the right time.
i.e. writing DOS just as IBM entered the PC market. The rest is history.
Being at the right place at the right time isn't an accident.
MBASIC was the first program for the infant microcomputer market to generate the kind of sales and profit to be had in the mini and mainframe markets. In 1980, Microsoft had a full suite of well-regarded development tools for CP/M. It was not an unknown to IBM or to anyone else in the business.
Taking more classes on programming/software development would have been much more useful.
How many of your high school classmates became programmers? How many have spent more than a week abroad? How many are working in environments where language skills are a marketable asset?
Hence why I didn't call him a shill.
Who do you think you're kidding?
Taking in money doesn't necessarily mean anything unless you can actually make money.
$6.66 billion net. $24.52 billion gross.
That reads almost too much like a sales pitch/shill post.
Ars Technica posted a pitch-perfect headline demonstrating how a Slashdot geek responds to good news from Microsoft:
Beleaguered Microsoft posts record revenue for Q2 2014
Calling the poster a shill is the easy way out. Personally, I'd like to see more clear-headed --- hard-headed thinking --- around here.