I think the issue is that he would not get a fair trial, or possibly not even get a trial at all.
At best, the trial would suffer years of delay after delay after delay, throughout which he would still be imprisoned of course, while every avenue of defense was contested and denied, in secret, for "national security reasons". More likely, they'd just skip the formality of a trial, declare him an "unlawful enemy" or some such, and drop him into some gulag like Guantanamo Bay. Possibly, they'd even go the "extraordinary rendition" route, and shuffle him off to some third-world craphole to be tortured and murdered by the CIA.
In no case, barring a massive reform and house-cleaning of the federal government and its intelligence agencies, do I see things working out well for Snowden if he returns.
Ahrends basically took the uniform of UK chavs and convinced Americans that it's high-end sophisticated fashion. That's more than knowing how to "deal with" the fashion market; that's full-out genius-level *manipulation* of the fashion market.
I think the Apple Watch will do fine in the fashion world, and the/. "no wireless less space than a nomad lame" contingent will be ignored.
I wonder what irrelevant, fourth-rate, POS country that would a complete mismatch and no one in their right mind would ever want anything to do with anyway she has in mind to merge with the USA?
My first two cars were American (A Chrysler and a Ford). Then I bought my first Japanese car (A Subaru). It outlasted both American cars combined, twice over, and then some.
So yeah, in my own experience as well, American cars are rubbish. Going forward, if the VIN doesn't start with the letter "J", I want no part of the thing.
> Have you ever watched any of the spin-off Top Gears, like Top Gear US or Top Gear > Australia? They've already tried to "reinvent" the show, multiple times. It's yet to work.
> The simple fact of the matter is that Jeremy Clarkson is the reason people watch Top > Gear. Without Clarkson, there's no reason to watch.
I've tried to watch the spinoffs. They are dreadful. To be fair though, I don't think it's *just* Clarkson that makes Top Gear work. I think it's the combination of him, May, and Hammond altogether. They just have a chemistry that makes for some of the most entertaining programming on television and which is unmatched by any of the other random clusters of people that have been thrown together to try to present the spin-offs.
The most entertaining episodes are not the ones where one on the three presents a car and hands it off to The Stig. The best of the best are, IMO, the specials (Vietnam, Bolivia, Botswana, etc.) where the three of them are thrown together in some awkward situation. Clarkson, May, and Hammond suffering, competing, pranking, complaining, and triumphing together is what really makes the show for me... far more than seeing cars that I will probably never own driven around that airport.
And I'm pretty sure they all know that they're a package deal as well. Remember when Hammond was injured in that rocket-car crash? Clarkson and May refused to go on with the show until Hammond had recovered and could return so the three of them could be together.
More likely, they'll look at Apple's market share numbers (You know, the same numbers that, in other posts, you lot would be citing to show that Android is completely dominating and Apple is obviously doomed... or even "beleaguered".). And seeing that Apple has no monopoly, they'll shrug and move on.
Also, I've never gotten into an Uber and smelt the stink of smoke, vomit, or pee. No Uber driver has whined or refused when I asked to be taken out to the avenues, bayshore, or the outer mission. And I've always been able to get an Uber in those neighborhoods with no more than about a 15-minute wait.
> I don't know where you get your 'facts' from about Uber, but you sure as hell > don't normally get a higher-end car or SUV. You usually get a Prius or > Camry or something of that ilk.
Wrong.
You may get an economy cat like that if you request UberX. However, If you summon an Uber, it will be a Towncar or something similar.
Yeah. I always used to laugh at how the tinfoil-hat-brigade freaked out about GPS being in every cellphone these days. Jusy from having the phone turned on, you can be traced to half a block or so. And that's easily enough to send in the vans with the triangulation gear.
The notion that one should bear the blame for a crime based on the notion that a family member may have been present is just disgusting. This is not Star Trek, and we are not Klingons.
This should have been a career-ender for everyone involved... cops, judge, their supervisors; the whole bloody lot of them should be tossed out into the cold as unfit to serve the public under any circumstances.
It's not really hard at all to defend Assange. In fact, he should never have needed a defense in the first place. Though he may be something of an attention-seeking douchebag; he's also never, to my knowledge, been either a citizen or resident of the United States. So there's no legitimate reason for him ever to be subject to our laws or for him to pay heed to them in any way whatsoever. Our government's subversion and manipulation of both the Swedish and British justice systems in order to (try to) get their clutches on him is overreach and abuse of the highest order.
And while they may not be quite so heinous as the abuses revealed by Snowden (Though the collateral murder video is particularly damning of its participants.), there are plenty of wrongdoings that were revealed by Wikileaks well before anyone had ever heard of Snowden.
Border/customs agents have the au-thor-i-tah to cause massive grief for just about anyone, on nothing more than a whim, with no checks on their power (In the US, for example, the constitutional requirement of probable cause and protecting against unreasonable search and seizure and such don't apply to their kind.), or recourse for their victims. Given the nature of the position, I'd expect it to attract the sort of people who would revel in that abuse... ie. raging assholes... no matter what country they work for.
And all national stereotypes aside, I'm pretty sure that no country on this earth has a monopoly on, or shortage of, raging assholes.
With telephone service, it's fairly simple. In the US, it wasn't a case of the government looking at AT&T and thinking to themselves: "That looks nice, I want it.". AT&T was granted a legal monopoly on telephone service in exchange for being regulated as a public utility, providing universal lifeline service, and all that. Many other nations followed the US's lead and set up similar telephone monopolies.
In the '80s... during the Reagan administration no less... the US government finally realized how stupid a move that was and broke AT&T up into the "Baby Bells". Unfortunately, the government seems to have regressed to 1900's thinking and has been letting AT&T reassemble itself and to allow the other bandwidth companies to follow suit; leading to the sack of crap that our telecom infrastructure is and the reason that net neutrality is even an issue.
That aside, you're right. It is absolutely ludicrous to suggest regulating Google or Facebook as though they were utilities. Will they be granted similar legally-mandated search engine and social network monopolies in exchange for having their destinies essentially stolen from them? Either way, it's be the death of both companies. AT&T may have had Bell labs turning out some neat technologies. But the pace of innovation and upgrades of their network was appallingly lethargic. Any tech company forced to labor under the same conditions would just die the second the monopoly was broken, and no longer legally-mandated, under a more enlightened administration. (To be fair, that may be these particular regulators' goal.)
Modern datacenters may not necessarily create a great many old-style rank 'em & stack 'em manual labor jobs. But if you know what to do said servers... Well, my year-and-a-half old resume version that's still in some databases from my last job hunt still gets me daily emails and not-infrequent phone calls trying to recruit me.
Also, I have my doubts about that "only one employee" claim. 24/7 on-site security, for example, should count for at least a dozen staffers, probably more. Services like this are probably contracted and don't technically count as "employees". Still, it's misleading at best to make the "only one employee" claim.
There are certianly hundreds, maybe thousands, of jobs in businesses that utilize the gear in that data center. Maybe that one small town in Oregon didn't consider that you can operate computers remotely and got themselves a bad deal. But to say categorically that (many) jobs are not being created is profoundly ignorant.
Another wannabe here... in my case I was trying to decide between the Navy and the Air Force when cancer made the decision for me.
There are some really good books coming out now about submarines that are not the usual Tom Clancy-ish rah rah America Fuck Yeah fare; but give insight into what it really was like for the average nuke.
I just finished reading one called Rig Ship for Ultra Quiet. It was written by a mid-level enlisted guy who served at the tail end of the cold war and covers the final deployment of the USS Plunger, one of the old Thresher/Permit class. It's non-fiction, no great adventure or drama, just an account of the author's experiences and feelings during said deployment and naval service. I found it quite good.
It's not about what drug you care to consume or how much pleasure it gives you. It's about the method of ingestion. The problem with "vaping" is that, like smoking, it is a means of ingesting your drug-of-choice that inflicts it on others as well as yourself.
Swallow a pill. Have a drink. Chew some gum. Have an edible. Slap on a patch. Stick a sugarcube or piece of blotter under your tongue. Use a straw (or $100 bill) to suck some powder up your nose. It's all 100% A-OK hunker-dorey in my book. Smoking "vaping" are not, because in addition to ingesting the for yourself, you are also imposing it on others.
And if you look at the restrictions being put on "vaping" in California, there have been no outright bans on the drug or equipment. It's basically cannon-sence rules pretty much identical to those that are there to protect non-smokers. Restaurants, workplaces, schools, public transit... go outside to "vape" and you're in the clear, just like the smokers.
There's no magic to it. We could have density and good public transit here too if we were to decide that a McMansion out in the sprawl is no longer a status symbol.
I wonder if the whole Secret Wars move is really Marvel playing hardball with fox and sony. "Start playing nice with the licenses you extracted when we were hard up for money, or we just end the entire universe and make said licenses worthless by default." Battleworld just sounds so contrived that it's difficult to believe that it's not part of some strategic move, rather than any reasonable plot creativity.
I wonder if we'll be able to buy "exhaust tones" like we do ringtones? It might actually be amusing if you could download a $1.99 file from the iTunes store to make your Prius have the "exhaust" sounds of a Lamborghini. And by "amusing" I mean "a big steaming pile of suck". FFS people, we've been trying to cut down on noise pollution for decades! We finally have a good way to get rid of a large chunk of it and now we have people whining about it!
I swear... if any car I buy comes with this crap, there'd better be a way to turn it off. Otherwise, I'd be looking to find a way to make the (external) speakers play a non-stop mix of Katy Perry, Rebecca Black, and Hanson; so as to have at least a little bit of revenge against the luddite brigade for making my car more noisy than it properly should be.
"The wars of the future will not be fought on the battlefield or at sea. They will be fought in space, or possibly on top of a very tall mountain. In either case, most of the actual fighting will be done by small robots. And as you go forth today remember always your duty is clear: To build and maintain those robots.
Thing is... Windows XP's lifespan wasn't short. It was unnaturally long for any OS that doesn't run on IBM big iron. It was absurdly long even my Microsoft's own development cycle.
Just look at what came right before XP from Microsoft. In the same 13 years that XP was around; everyone would previously have gone from Windows 3.1, to 95, to 95 OSR2, to 98, to 98 SE, to NT 4, to 2000, to ME, and then to XP. And even that's actually skipping a few versions that were especially craptacular or never really escaped from some very specialized use cases like 3.11, windows for workgroups, pre-4.0 versions of NT, and that bastard hybrid scheme of Windows running inside Novell Netware.
I may even be missing a few more versions there. I also didn't include the half-dozen service packs for NT 4; any one of which (But especially the odd-numbered ones.) was just as likely to break everything as a full OS upgrade. Plus a decent number of people still ran on various versions of MS-DOS for about half of that time frame.
So when I hear whining about the hassle of finally having to upgrade from XP, or about Linux vendors LTS being "only" five years, I really have to wonder just how the hell did these people manage before Microsoft went stagnant for a decade? Were all of the 1990s basically a solid, continuous, hissy-fit on the part of the world's MCSEs?
Sorry. But for all the other reasons I hate Microsoft, finally taking XP out back and shooting it just isn't one of them. It was one of MS's GOOD moves. And it was long overdue.
See... if there is a narnia somewhere that the legacy taxi companies don't suck and aren't a bunch of scumbags, and Uber is unnecessary there... why not let it fail on its own merits instead of squashing it at the political level?
No corporation... not YellowCab, not LuxorCab, not Uber or Lyft... is entitled to its profits and whatever profits they bring in should *not* be protected by the law. If the legacy taxi companies really *do* provide better service in some area than Uber, then they should be able to beat Uber in that area without buying off politicians or bullying the public.
Yeah. I know the feeling. The REAL solution here is, of course, to fix and enhance public transportation so that Uber, Lyft, Sidecar, taxis, and owning a car, are all unnecessary in the first place.
I despair of that ever happening in this country though because public transportation is, you know, communism and makes the baby jesus cry and all that.
Cute how you lot will defend the legacy taxi companies under-serving people in areas where they don't prefer to go; but scream bloody murder when Uber initiates surge pricing in order to get the people who need rides in those areas served.
In that case, the solution is to simply mandate the appropriate minimum insurance coverage, and be done with it. But that's not what these governments are doing, is it?
Actual restrictions on Uber and the like, rather than your simple insurance requirement, ARE there just to protect the monopolies and cartels that have sleazed their way into their protected positions. Said monopolies and cartels need to be broken. And the politicians supporting them need to be brought low. A pox on all their houses.
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I think the issue is that he would not get a fair trial, or possibly not even get a trial at all.
At best, the trial would suffer years of delay after delay after delay, throughout which he would still be imprisoned of course, while every avenue of defense was contested and denied, in secret, for "national security reasons". More likely, they'd just skip the formality of a trial, declare him an "unlawful enemy" or some such, and drop him into some gulag like Guantanamo Bay. Possibly, they'd even go the "extraordinary rendition" route, and shuffle him off to some third-world craphole to be tortured and murdered by the CIA.
In no case, barring a massive reform and house-cleaning of the federal government and its intelligence agencies, do I see things working out well for Snowden if he returns.
I think you're on to something here.
Ahrends basically took the uniform of UK chavs and convinced Americans that it's high-end sophisticated fashion. That's more than knowing how to "deal with" the fashion market; that's full-out genius-level *manipulation* of the fashion market.
I think the Apple Watch will do fine in the fashion world, and the /. "no wireless less space than a nomad lame" contingent will be ignored.
... what she did to HP?
No thank you.
I wonder what irrelevant, fourth-rate, POS country that would a complete mismatch and no one in their right mind would ever want anything to do with anyway she has in mind to merge with the USA?
My first two cars were American (A Chrysler and a Ford). Then I bought my first Japanese car (A Subaru). It outlasted both American cars combined, twice over, and then some.
So yeah, in my own experience as well, American cars are rubbish. Going forward, if the VIN doesn't start with the letter "J", I want no part of the thing.
> Have you ever watched any of the spin-off Top Gears, like Top Gear US or Top Gear
> Australia? They've already tried to "reinvent" the show, multiple times. It's yet to work.
> The simple fact of the matter is that Jeremy Clarkson is the reason people watch Top
> Gear. Without Clarkson, there's no reason to watch.
I've tried to watch the spinoffs. They are dreadful. To be fair though, I don't think it's *just* Clarkson that makes Top Gear work. I think it's the combination of him, May, and Hammond altogether. They just have a chemistry that makes for some of the most entertaining programming on television and which is unmatched by any of the other random clusters of people that have been thrown together to try to present the spin-offs.
The most entertaining episodes are not the ones where one on the three presents a car and hands it off to The Stig. The best of the best are, IMO, the specials (Vietnam, Bolivia, Botswana, etc.) where the three of them are thrown together in some awkward situation. Clarkson, May, and Hammond suffering, competing, pranking, complaining, and triumphing together is what really makes the show for me... far more than seeing cars that I will probably never own driven around that airport.
And I'm pretty sure they all know that they're a package deal as well. Remember when Hammond was injured in that rocket-car crash? Clarkson and May refused to go on with the show until Hammond had recovered and could return so the three of them could be together.
More likely, they'll look at Apple's market share numbers (You know, the same numbers that, in other posts, you lot would be citing to show that Android is completely dominating and Apple is obviously doomed... or even "beleaguered".). And seeing that Apple has no monopoly, they'll shrug and move on.
Also, I've never gotten into an Uber and smelt the stink of smoke, vomit, or pee. No Uber driver has whined or refused when I asked to be taken out to the avenues, bayshore, or the outer mission. And I've always been able to get an Uber in those neighborhoods with no more than about a 15-minute wait.
None of that is true of taxis.
> I don't know where you get your 'facts' from about Uber, but you sure as hell
> don't normally get a higher-end car or SUV. You usually get a Prius or
> Camry or something of that ilk.
Wrong.
You may get an economy cat like that if you request UberX. However, If you summon an Uber, it will be a Towncar or something similar.
Yeah. I always used to laugh at how the tinfoil-hat-brigade freaked out about GPS being in every cellphone these days. Jusy from having the phone turned on, you can be traced to half a block or so. And that's easily enough to send in the vans with the triangulation gear.
Bingo.
The notion that one should bear the blame for a crime based on the notion that a family member may have been present is just disgusting. This is not Star Trek, and we are not Klingons.
This should have been a career-ender for everyone involved... cops, judge, their supervisors; the whole bloody lot of them should be tossed out into the cold as unfit to serve the public under any circumstances.
It's not really hard at all to defend Assange. In fact, he should never have needed a defense in the first place. Though he may be something of an attention-seeking douchebag; he's also never, to my knowledge, been either a citizen or resident of the United States. So there's no legitimate reason for him ever to be subject to our laws or for him to pay heed to them in any way whatsoever. Our government's subversion and manipulation of both the Swedish and British justice systems in order to (try to) get their clutches on him is overreach and abuse of the highest order.
And while they may not be quite so heinous as the abuses revealed by Snowden (Though the collateral murder video is particularly damning of its participants.), there are plenty of wrongdoings that were revealed by Wikileaks well before anyone had ever heard of Snowden.
Border/customs agents have the au-thor-i-tah to cause massive grief for just about anyone, on nothing more than a whim, with no checks on their power (In the US, for example, the constitutional requirement of probable cause and protecting against unreasonable search and seizure and such don't apply to their kind.), or recourse for their victims. Given the nature of the position, I'd expect it to attract the sort of people who would revel in that abuse... ie. raging assholes... no matter what country they work for.
And all national stereotypes aside, I'm pretty sure that no country on this earth has a monopoly on, or shortage of, raging assholes.
With telephone service, it's fairly simple. In the US, it wasn't a case of the government looking at AT&T and thinking to themselves: "That looks nice, I want it.". AT&T was granted a legal monopoly on telephone service in exchange for being regulated as a public utility, providing universal lifeline service, and all that. Many other nations followed the US's lead and set up similar telephone monopolies.
In the '80s... during the Reagan administration no less... the US government finally realized how stupid a move that was and broke AT&T up into the "Baby Bells". Unfortunately, the government seems to have regressed to 1900's thinking and has been letting AT&T reassemble itself and to allow the other bandwidth companies to follow suit; leading to the sack of crap that our telecom infrastructure is and the reason that net neutrality is even an issue.
That aside, you're right. It is absolutely ludicrous to suggest regulating Google or Facebook as though they were utilities. Will they be granted similar legally-mandated search engine and social network monopolies in exchange for having their destinies essentially stolen from them? Either way, it's be the death of both companies. AT&T may have had Bell labs turning out some neat technologies. But the pace of innovation and upgrades of their network was appallingly lethargic. Any tech company forced to labor under the same conditions would just die the second the monopoly was broken, and no longer legally-mandated, under a more enlightened administration. (To be fair, that may be these particular regulators' goal.)
Modern datacenters may not necessarily create a great many old-style rank 'em & stack 'em manual labor jobs. But if you know what to do said servers... Well, my year-and-a-half old resume version that's still in some databases from my last job hunt still gets me daily emails and not-infrequent phone calls trying to recruit me.
Also, I have my doubts about that "only one employee" claim. 24/7 on-site security, for example, should count for at least a dozen staffers, probably more. Services like this are probably contracted and don't technically count as "employees". Still, it's misleading at best to make the "only one employee" claim.
There are certianly hundreds, maybe thousands, of jobs in businesses that utilize the gear in that data center. Maybe that one small town in Oregon didn't consider that you can operate computers remotely and got themselves a bad deal. But to say categorically that (many) jobs are not being created is profoundly ignorant.
Another wannabe here... in my case I was trying to decide between the Navy and the Air Force when cancer made the decision for me.
There are some really good books coming out now about submarines that are not the usual Tom Clancy-ish rah rah America Fuck Yeah fare; but give insight into what it really was like for the average nuke.
I just finished reading one called Rig Ship for Ultra Quiet. It was written by a mid-level enlisted guy who served at the tail end of the cold war and covers the final deployment of the USS Plunger, one of the old Thresher/Permit class. It's non-fiction, no great adventure or drama, just an account of the author's experiences and feelings during said deployment and naval service. I found it quite good.
Wrong.
It's not about what drug you care to consume or how much pleasure it gives you. It's about the method of ingestion. The problem with "vaping" is that, like smoking, it is a means of ingesting your drug-of-choice that inflicts it on others as well as yourself.
Swallow a pill. Have a drink. Chew some gum. Have an edible. Slap on a patch. Stick a sugarcube or piece of blotter under your tongue. Use a straw (or $100 bill) to suck some powder up your nose. It's all 100% A-OK hunker-dorey in my book. Smoking "vaping" are not, because in addition to ingesting the for yourself, you are also imposing it on others.
And if you look at the restrictions being put on "vaping" in California, there have been no outright bans on the drug or equipment. It's basically cannon-sence rules pretty much identical to those that are there to protect non-smokers. Restaurants, workplaces, schools, public transit... go outside to "vape" and you're in the clear, just like the smokers.
There's no magic to it. We could have density and good public transit here too if we were to decide that a McMansion out in the sprawl is no longer a status symbol.
I wonder if the whole Secret Wars move is really Marvel playing hardball with fox and sony. "Start playing nice with the licenses you extracted when we were hard up for money, or we just end the entire universe and make said licenses worthless by default." Battleworld just sounds so contrived that it's difficult to believe that it's not part of some strategic move, rather than any reasonable plot creativity.
I wonder if we'll be able to buy "exhaust tones" like we do ringtones? It might actually be amusing if you could download a $1.99 file from the iTunes store to make your Prius have the "exhaust" sounds of a Lamborghini. And by "amusing" I mean "a big steaming pile of suck". FFS people, we've been trying to cut down on noise pollution for decades! We finally have a good way to get rid of a large chunk of it and now we have people whining about it!
I swear... if any car I buy comes with this crap, there'd better be a way to turn it off. Otherwise, I'd be looking to find a way to make the (external) speakers play a non-stop mix of Katy Perry, Rebecca Black, and Hanson; so as to have at least a little bit of revenge against the luddite brigade for making my car more noisy than it properly should be.
Sounds familiar:
"The wars of the future will not be fought on the battlefield or at sea. They will be fought in space, or possibly on top of a very tall mountain. In either case, most of the actual fighting will be done by small robots. And as you go forth today remember always your duty is clear: To build and maintain those robots.
Thank you."
Thing is... Windows XP's lifespan wasn't short. It was unnaturally long for any OS that doesn't run on IBM big iron. It was absurdly long even my Microsoft's own development cycle.
Just look at what came right before XP from Microsoft. In the same 13 years that XP was around; everyone would previously have gone from Windows 3.1, to 95, to 95 OSR2, to 98, to 98 SE, to NT 4, to 2000, to ME, and then to XP. And even that's actually skipping a few versions that were especially craptacular or never really escaped from some very specialized use cases like 3.11, windows for workgroups, pre-4.0 versions of NT, and that bastard hybrid scheme of Windows running inside Novell Netware.
I may even be missing a few more versions there. I also didn't include the half-dozen service packs for NT 4; any one of which (But especially the odd-numbered ones.) was just as likely to break everything as a full OS upgrade. Plus a decent number of people still ran on various versions of MS-DOS for about half of that time frame.
So when I hear whining about the hassle of finally having to upgrade from XP, or about Linux vendors LTS being "only" five years, I really have to wonder just how the hell did these people manage before Microsoft went stagnant for a decade? Were all of the 1990s basically a solid, continuous, hissy-fit on the part of the world's MCSEs?
Sorry. But for all the other reasons I hate Microsoft, finally taking XP out back and shooting it just isn't one of them. It was one of MS's GOOD moves. And it was long overdue.
See... if there is a narnia somewhere that the legacy taxi companies don't suck and aren't a bunch of scumbags, and Uber is unnecessary there... why not let it fail on its own merits instead of squashing it at the political level?
No corporation... not YellowCab, not LuxorCab, not Uber or Lyft... is entitled to its profits and whatever profits they bring in should *not* be protected by the law. If the legacy taxi companies really *do* provide better service in some area than Uber, then they should be able to beat Uber in that area without buying off politicians or bullying the public.
Yeah. I know the feeling. The REAL solution here is, of course, to fix and enhance public transportation so that Uber, Lyft, Sidecar, taxis, and owning a car, are all unnecessary in the first place.
I despair of that ever happening in this country though because public transportation is, you know, communism and makes the baby jesus cry and all that.
Cute how you lot will defend the legacy taxi companies under-serving people in areas where they don't prefer to go; but scream bloody murder when Uber initiates surge pricing in order to get the people who need rides in those areas served.
In that case, the solution is to simply mandate the appropriate minimum insurance coverage, and be done with it. But that's not what these governments are doing, is it?
Actual restrictions on Uber and the like, rather than your simple insurance requirement, ARE there just to protect the monopolies and cartels that have sleazed their way into their protected positions. Said monopolies and cartels need to be broken. And the politicians supporting them need to be brought low. A pox on all their houses.