You need to read your prospectuses: "Past performance is no indicator of future success."
Monty's not the golden goose; he will not lay golden eggs each time he squats. He is not the child of destiny, the master of The Street, the database Messiah. He's just a very naughty boy. Ok, maybe not. But he is a guy who created a good product, sold it to desperate overcapitalized suckers, and jumped ship just before the balloon collapsed and sent the economy screaming "Oh the Humanity" into the ground.
I wouldn't even credit him with a good sense of timing, if he thinks this is the time for a startup like he's proposing.
Really, any recommendation about an Islay should include a warning that what you're recommending isn't your usual mild and tender dram (like a Speyside). Islays have teeth and texture. You kinda have to commit to drinking an Islay. If you get taken by surprise, you'll react badly, confusing your sup with medicine or even creosote. If you know what you're getting into, it's wonderful, but among the many acquired tastes of whisky, Islay takes the most acquiring IMHO.
BT was part of BC, true, but Blizz did roll out Quel'Danas (with its 25-man, Sunwell Plateau... though I don't know many raid guilds that ran that particular raid too much.) And that was "free" (or, from a more cynical perspective, it was part of Burning Crusade but delivered very very late).
But, yeah, Blizzard seems to be living well off the maxim "Charge what the market will bear".
In software engineering, it's called "coincidental cohesion". It's bad. Slapping things together because they seem related when, functionally, they are not is careless and potentially confusing.
I tried to reply to you in pictographs and hieroglyphs, but accursed slashcode forces me to use text.
I would rather have these programmers focus their efforts on Krusader ? It seriously needs some love.
So jump right in! Meanwhile, no programmers are being drafted against their will to work on one program over another.
(This is a longstanding gripe of mine at the fringes of Free Software. "That developer shouldn't be wasting his time on <program x>; <program y> needs the attention more!" "Free Software" is not a monolithic corporate product with its own integrated master schedule with a list of prioritized deliverables. It's the aggregate of dozens of labors of love, and if Developer Joe decides he wants to spend time with mc rather than Krusader, who are you to say otherwise?)
"his children go to school XYZ. they're let out at this time. the youngest has brown hair and a distinguishing mole on her left cheek, just below the corner of her eye. She wears an Elmo backback. Send them a message."
"Hi, how are you? Could you please give your daddy this note? <hands little girl folded piece of notebook paper> Maybe you should put it into your cute Elmo backpack so you don't have to hold onto it. OK, thanks, bye-bye!"
And that's what makes it a marvelously effective troll. Only the bigots can detect the substitution*. (As a notable corollary, only the bigots care.) The rest of us lol a bit, mostly at the joke, but juuuust a little at the bigots slapfighting each other. ("No, you're a tard, Mac!" "No, you're a tard, PC!")
*"substitution" == pretending the joke is supposed to be on the other guys. In truth, it's on both of you.
Guess what, 'greatest generation', now we want to spend tax money on something that is GOOD for the nation.
Like rampant botnets? These are people who have said, out loud and with conviction, that they wouldn't use broadband if they had it. If you make it some kind of mandatory, they'll use it... but they won't take care of it. To use a/.-mandatory car analogy, make automobiles mandatory to go the the doctor's office, and you'll find unmaintained cars breaking down in the middle of the road all over, because the car hasn't been made that doesn't need tire replacement, oil-and-filter changes, and other periodic maintenance. If the driver can't be convinced they're responsible for that, the rest of us are boned.
Give every non-enthusiasts any network-connected computing device and you've just multiplied the attack space for worms and trojans by perhaps an order of magnitude. Are you volunteering to be tech support for those folks?
And, so help me $DIETY, if you Mactards and Linux zealots* start smugging on about how the whole maintenance and vulnerability issue vanishes if you just give Ma and Pa Kettle Macs or Ubuntu boxen, I swear I'll reach through the internet and smack you. Again, I'll say it: the car hasn't been built yet (and never will) that doesn't need periodic maintenace, and the same is even more true of computing boxes. Period. Given a large enough target zone, blackhats will find and exploit vulnerabilities. And Grandpa and Grandma won't know or care. "Educate 'em!", you say? Feh. To quote Calvin: "You can present the material, but you can't make me care".
I didn't want the war foisted upon us by lying politicians and the gullible and cowardly older generation, but here it is.
Non-sequitur. Strawman. Absolutely irrelevant. You don't want the war foisted on you, but at least no one is putting a gun in your hand and making you responsible for fighting it. "Mandatory" broadband in the hands of the untrained, unwilling, and uninterested is the functional equivalent.
But hey, don't let me stand in the way of your emo-angst irrationality. I'm sure the purported GWOT and the necessity of universal broadband are intimately connected somehow in your mind.
*Full disclosure: I am, after a fashion, a Linux zealot. I'm also a realist. Linux is not the answer to all life's problems. Linux is not Superman. Linux is not invulnerable. Linux is just far less evil than most of the alternatives. And speaking of evil, I am not a Mac enthusiast, because Apple's corporate and IP policies disgust me.
Well, I think the crucial difference between what TFA is talking about and you're talking about is bendable screens that keep working after you bend them.
All externally-visible indicators (i.e., what you can see from seismography or other remote sensing, rather than watching the actual test instrumentation) were pretty unimpressive for any full-fledged nuclear detonation. Either it was faked (not that easy to do) or a fizzle.
And a fizzle is exactly the kind of failure that you have if you mis-engineer the tamper, the containment, or even the explosive lens. I.E., why you can't just run down to the local home improvement superstore and whip up everything except the fissile.
Getting the plutonium is hard; it requires a pretty large infrastructure investment in breeder reactors, centrifuges, etc., and also takes a long time. Getting the rest of the bomb is "just engineering", but it's very precise engineering with some very specific critical knowledge which is not generally available (and takes some serious experimentation to figure out for yourself).
BTW, I like the quote in the Wikipedia "fizzle" article:
This North Korean debut test was weaker than all other countries' initial tests by a factor of 20,[8] and considered possibly the worst initial test in history.[9]"
Businesses have to answer to the customer EVERY DAMN DAY.
That's the most persistent illusion about business responsibilities in this sad sad world, and probably the primary source of dissonance between business theory and practice.
Large businesses have to answer to the shareholder. Every quarter. And they have to pacify, mislead, or (if large and predatory enough) ignore the customer. Continually. While spending a relative (and relatively effective) pittance on PR and marketing, to cover the fact that the customer is the least important participant in the process.
In this latter fact, they share uncomfortable resemblance to the "public sector."
RE Nagasaki, Bockscar's primary was Kokura, another "major nexus" as you put it. (HQ, barracks, logistical hubs, etc.) In fact, it looks like Kokura was second on the unified target list, after Hiroshima, and would have been the first city nuked if Hiroshima had to be skipped.
When Bockscar arrived at Kokura, it was cloud-obscured, and their attack orders specified visual bombsighting only. (Rather than radar targeting, which was an option.) So, they left Kokura, proceeded to their secondary (Nagasaki), found it obscured also, and loitered until close to the end of their mission time. The cloud cover broke, they prosecuted their attack, and history was written.
Apparently, Nagasaki was a planned secondary, mostly for industrial, transport, and military value. Nagasaki was one of the most important civil seaports, and home of military naval base Sasebo and the Mitsubishi shipyard (source of ships like Musashi). So definitely, inasmuch as any major industrialized city can be a valid and high-value military target, Nagasaki was so.
In light of the enormity of the historical event, a trivial personal note: If Bockscar had hit her primary, I might not exist. My mother is Japanese and was a teenager living close to Kokura that day.
Not to mention that it would seem that it would be in their best interests to get the word out to minimize losses.
Oh, they've already got that covered:
Baldwin said it was not appropriate for Heartland to offer affected consumers credit protection or other identity theft protection services.
"Identity theft protection is appropriate when there is enough personal information lost that identity theft is possible," he said. "In this case, the amount of information we know they did not get is long enough that except in very circumscribed cases identity theft is just not possible.
In other words, "Yeah, technically it was a breach, but you know, not enough data got released for us to actually be provably liable. So if your CC gets raped, you know, it's not our fault. Really. Trust us.;)"
In related news, now we know what happened to the Iraqi Information Minister: He changed his name and became President and CFO of a large credit card payment processing company.
For many slashbots, "common" == those folks who agree with what I think is important, appropriate, or valuable. So, if you need VBscripts or mailmerge, you're out there on the fringe.
A corollary group of slashbots, zealots, extend this to mean that "If my chosen software package doesn't do it, it doesn't ever need to be done. If you think you need it, think again, because you're wrong and stupid."
We need to be honest with the shortfalls of Free or Open software, because love it or hate it, the market leader has pioneered and obscenely large feature set and you can't compete unless you're trying to support the really important ones. The ones that get used in settings outside of Mom's basement, that is.
[Heartland Payment Systems President and CFO] Baldwin said Heartland worked to disclose the breach last week.
"Due to legal reviews, discussions with some of the players involved, we couldn't get it together and signed off on until today," Baldwin said.
"Legal reviews": "Holy crap, we're gonna get our butts sued off if this breach becomes a big news story! You have to delay this until we can start a war or something to distract the press!"
"Will the inauguration hype of the first African-American President of the United States work as a distraction?"
None, of course, unless we're going to pretend there's some archaeology-grade research activity going on in computer museum collections. And even that analogy is faulty; I don't believe that Egyptologists even fantasize about finding 9th Dynasty new-old stock.
Naah, this is just collector angst. Apparently, they think a sealed box gathering dust has greater utility than, say, the actual utility of the artifact in question.
Slashdot Mirror
Or, an even more technically accurate title, "Utah mulling not mulling a database...". Nauseating, but accurate.
Or, a good flamebait title, "Utah mulling not having database...". That's in the classic pattern of "When are you going to stop <hideous vice>?"
You need to read your prospectuses: "Past performance is no indicator of future success."
Monty's not the golden goose; he will not lay golden eggs each time he squats. He is not the child of destiny, the master of The Street, the database Messiah. He's just a very naughty boy. Ok, maybe not. But he is a guy who created a good product, sold it to desperate overcapitalized suckers, and jumped ship just before the balloon collapsed and sent the economy screaming "Oh the Humanity" into the ground.
I wouldn't even credit him with a good sense of timing, if he thinks this is the time for a startup like he's proposing.
We shall see.
Hence, gamma-ray bursts. The advanced-technology equivalent of flaming laptop batteries.
Macallan 18. Yum Glenmorangie 10. Hey, it was good enough for Connor MacLeod. I'm down with you on Lagavulin though.
Really, any recommendation about an Islay should include a warning that what you're recommending isn't your usual mild and tender dram (like a Speyside). Islays have teeth and texture. You kinda have to commit to drinking an Islay. If you get taken by surprise, you'll react badly, confusing your sup with medicine or even creosote. If you know what you're getting into, it's wonderful, but among the many acquired tastes of whisky, Islay takes the most acquiring IMHO.
BT was part of BC, true, but Blizz did roll out Quel'Danas (with its 25-man, Sunwell Plateau... though I don't know many raid guilds that ran that particular raid too much.) And that was "free" (or, from a more cynical perspective, it was part of Burning Crusade but delivered very very late).
But, yeah, Blizzard seems to be living well off the maxim "Charge what the market will bear".
Only if they're from Idaho...
I'll have to remember that next time I get pulled over for driving "alone" in the high-occupancy vehicle lane.
In software engineering, it's called "coincidental cohesion". It's bad. Slapping things together because they seem related when, functionally, they are not is careless and potentially confusing.
Do text apps still have a place in today's world?
I tried to reply to you in pictographs and hieroglyphs, but accursed slashcode forces me to use text.
I would rather have these programmers focus their efforts on Krusader ? It seriously needs some love.
So jump right in! Meanwhile, no programmers are being drafted against their will to work on one program over another.
(This is a longstanding gripe of mine at the fringes of Free Software. "That developer shouldn't be wasting his time on <program x>; <program y> needs the attention more!" "Free Software" is not a monolithic corporate product with its own integrated master schedule with a list of prioritized deliverables. It's the aggregate of dozens of labors of love, and if Developer Joe decides he wants to spend time with mc rather than Krusader, who are you to say otherwise?)
NOTE: I am not attempting to profit. Hence, "???" and "PROFIT!" are absent from this list by design.
"his children go to school XYZ. they're let out at this time. the youngest has brown hair and a distinguishing mole on her left cheek, just below the corner of her eye. She wears an Elmo backback. Send them a message."
"Hi, how are you? Could you please give your daddy this note? <hands little girl folded piece of notebook paper> Maybe you should put it into your cute Elmo backpack so you don't have to hold onto it. OK, thanks, bye-bye!"
Message delivered. Mwah hah hah hah!
And that's what makes it a marvelously effective troll. Only the bigots can detect the substitution*. (As a notable corollary, only the bigots care.) The rest of us lol a bit, mostly at the joke, but juuuust a little at the bigots slapfighting each other. ("No, you're a tard, Mac!" "No, you're a tard, PC!")
*"substitution" == pretending the joke is supposed to be on the other guys. In truth, it's on both of you.
"Don't be evil*"
*for small values of "evil"
Guess what, 'greatest generation', now we want to spend tax money on something that is GOOD for the nation.
Like rampant botnets? These are people who have said, out loud and with conviction, that they wouldn't use broadband if they had it. If you make it some kind of mandatory, they'll use it... but they won't take care of it. To use a /.-mandatory car analogy, make automobiles mandatory to go the the doctor's office, and you'll find unmaintained cars breaking down in the middle of the road all over, because the car hasn't been made that doesn't need tire replacement, oil-and-filter changes, and other periodic maintenance. If the driver can't be convinced they're responsible for that, the rest of us are boned.
Give every non-enthusiasts any network-connected computing device and you've just multiplied the attack space for worms and trojans by perhaps an order of magnitude. Are you volunteering to be tech support for those folks?
And, so help me $DIETY, if you Mactards and Linux zealots* start smugging on about how the whole maintenance and vulnerability issue vanishes if you just give Ma and Pa Kettle Macs or Ubuntu boxen, I swear I'll reach through the internet and smack you. Again, I'll say it: the car hasn't been built yet (and never will) that doesn't need periodic maintenace, and the same is even more true of computing boxes. Period. Given a large enough target zone, blackhats will find and exploit vulnerabilities. And Grandpa and Grandma won't know or care. "Educate 'em!", you say? Feh. To quote Calvin: "You can present the material, but you can't make me care".
I didn't want the war foisted upon us by lying politicians and the gullible and cowardly older generation, but here it is.
Non-sequitur. Strawman. Absolutely irrelevant. You don't want the war foisted on you, but at least no one is putting a gun in your hand and making you responsible for fighting it. "Mandatory" broadband in the hands of the untrained, unwilling, and uninterested is the functional equivalent.
But hey, don't let me stand in the way of your emo-angst irrationality. I'm sure the purported GWOT and the necessity of universal broadband are intimately connected somehow in your mind.
*Full disclosure: I am, after a fashion, a Linux zealot. I'm also a realist. Linux is not the answer to all life's problems. Linux is not Superman. Linux is not invulnerable. Linux is just far less evil than most of the alternatives. And speaking of evil, I am not a Mac enthusiast, because Apple's corporate and IP policies disgust me.
Well, I think the crucial difference between what TFA is talking about and you're talking about is bendable screens that keep working after you bend them.
No nuclear nation failed to detonate its first implosion device.
Well, maybe one.
All externally-visible indicators (i.e., what you can see from seismography or other remote sensing, rather than watching the actual test instrumentation) were pretty unimpressive for any full-fledged nuclear detonation. Either it was faked (not that easy to do) or a fizzle.
And a fizzle is exactly the kind of failure that you have if you mis-engineer the tamper, the containment, or even the explosive lens. I.E., why you can't just run down to the local home improvement superstore and whip up everything except the fissile.
Getting the plutonium is hard; it requires a pretty large infrastructure investment in breeder reactors, centrifuges, etc., and also takes a long time. Getting the rest of the bomb is "just engineering", but it's very precise engineering with some very specific critical knowledge which is not generally available (and takes some serious experimentation to figure out for yourself).
BTW, I like the quote in the Wikipedia "fizzle" article:
I've been looking for a computer powered by zero-point energy drawn from vacuum fluctuation.
Maybe I can transplant the power supply into my car and get infinite miles per gallon?
Businesses have to answer to the customer EVERY DAMN DAY.
That's the most persistent illusion about business responsibilities in this sad sad world, and probably the primary source of dissonance between business theory and practice.
Large businesses have to answer to the shareholder. Every quarter. And they have to pacify, mislead, or (if large and predatory enough) ignore the customer. Continually. While spending a relative (and relatively effective) pittance on PR and marketing, to cover the fact that the customer is the least important participant in the process.
In this latter fact, they share uncomfortable resemblance to the "public sector."
RE Nagasaki, Bockscar's primary was Kokura, another "major nexus" as you put it. (HQ, barracks, logistical hubs, etc.) In fact, it looks like Kokura was second on the unified target list, after Hiroshima, and would have been the first city nuked if Hiroshima had to be skipped.
When Bockscar arrived at Kokura, it was cloud-obscured, and their attack orders specified visual bombsighting only. (Rather than radar targeting, which was an option.) So, they left Kokura, proceeded to their secondary (Nagasaki), found it obscured also, and loitered until close to the end of their mission time. The cloud cover broke, they prosecuted their attack, and history was written.
Apparently, Nagasaki was a planned secondary, mostly for industrial, transport, and military value. Nagasaki was one of the most important civil seaports, and home of military naval base Sasebo and the Mitsubishi shipyard (source of ships like Musashi ). So definitely, inasmuch as any major industrialized city can be a valid and high-value military target, Nagasaki was so.
In light of the enormity of the historical event, a trivial personal note: If Bockscar had hit her primary, I might not exist. My mother is Japanese and was a teenager living close to Kokura that day.
And Linux is always better than Windows on Slashdot, because every day is Pedantic Asshole day here!
Not to mention that it would seem that it would be in their best interests to get the word out to minimize losses.
Oh, they've already got that covered:
In other words, "Yeah, technically it was a breach, but you know, not enough data got released for us to actually be provably liable. So if your CC gets raped, you know, it's not our fault. Really. Trust us. ;)"
In related news, now we know what happened to the Iraqi Information Minister: He changed his name and became President and CFO of a large credit card payment processing company.
I think you're missing a point.
For many slashbots, "common" == those folks who agree with what I think is important, appropriate, or valuable. So, if you need VBscripts or mailmerge, you're out there on the fringe.
A corollary group of slashbots, zealots, extend this to mean that "If my chosen software package doesn't do it, it doesn't ever need to be done. If you think you need it, think again, because you're wrong and stupid."
We need to be honest with the shortfalls of Free or Open software, because love it or hate it, the market leader has pioneered and obscenely large feature set and you can't compete unless you're trying to support the really important ones. The ones that get used in settings outside of Mom's basement, that is.
"Legal reviews": "Holy crap, we're gonna get our butts sued off if this breach becomes a big news story! You have to delay this until we can start a war or something to distract the press!"
"Will the inauguration hype of the first African-American President of the United States work as a distraction?"
"Brilliant!"
None, of course, unless we're going to pretend there's some archaeology-grade research activity going on in computer museum collections. And even that analogy is faulty; I don't believe that Egyptologists even fantasize about finding 9th Dynasty new-old stock.
Naah, this is just collector angst. Apparently, they think a sealed box gathering dust has greater utility than, say, the actual utility of the artifact in question.