Given his opinions, I wouldn't give him $0.01, let alone 13 million. And as far as demanding to be paid in bitcoins, ROFLCopter!

If you voluntarily associate yourself with the murderers of innocent people, it says a lot about you. His own judgment is obviously very suspect (both for choosing associates and for assessing his worth). He comes off as a narcissist and a troubled soul who is projecting his rage at the outside world, rather than accepting responsibility and dealing with his own issues.

He is neither hero, patriot, nor poor soul. He has made his own choices and has no ability (as far as I can see) to accept the consequences of his own decisions and their consequences. If this pattern repeats, he'll end up back in jail again.

If he was smart, he'd take his freedom and run with it and spend some time fixing up his own problems.

A friend of mine who works for NASA (or at least in the downstream distribution of NASA satellite data) and is an amateur astronomer and photographer sent me this information: (Thanks Indy!) - Maybe it'll be useful to some....

So, this coming weekend, specifically Friday night/Saturday morning, there is to be a brand spanky new meteor shower happening. So brand spanky new it hasn't been observed before, because the dust from the associated comet has not intersected with Earth's path until now. And because of all the uncertainty with the debris stream, there are heavy caveats to "this MAY happen" - but if it does...brand new event never before seen!

Given that it's so new, that nothing is *known* about it, anything could happen. It could fizzle. Or it could become the most spectacular thing to happen since the Leonid meteor storm of 2002 (it is unlikely, however great this meteor shower gets, that it'll get THAT good!).

So, first, the nuts and bolts for this weekend. The meteor shower is *predicted* to reach it's peak between the hours of 2am and 4am Eastern Daylight Time on the morning of May 24th (adjust your times accordingly with respect to your time zones; example, midnight to 2am Mountain Time). BUT, because there are uncertainties in exactly where the dust ball is that we will be passing by, it could peak upwards of a few hours on either side of that. However, the meteor folk who have been tracking this stuff are reasonably confident on their predict times.

Further to this, it's not known how distributed the debris cloud is. It could be pretty compact, in which case the peak may last only a few minutes. Or it could be fairly distributed, in which case the peak could last for hours. Or it could be clumpy, in which case there may be more than one peak! Again, new brand spanky new meteor shower, we have no idea yet! :-D

Second, the meteor shower will appear to be coming out of the *very* obscure constellation of Camelopardalis, which is situated to the right of the Big Dipper, left of Cassiopeia, and below the Little Dipper (see attached image). It's a pretty sparse area of sky. The constellation is so obscure that in the decades of my looking at the sky, I've never tried tracing it out. Maybe this weekend I finally will. :-D

So, given the above radiant, your best option to face during the shower is to the north (and if you're not sure where that is - and not everyone does, especially if they are directionally challenged - remember where the sun went down, then stand so that direction is off to your left :-) ). But don't *focus* on staring to the north! Look around. Face east a bit. West. Look overhead! Meteors can fall all around. It's just that you will likely see more (albeit shorter, quicker) meteors coming out of the north than you will to the west, east, or overhead (which will be longer, and slower, but relatively fewer). But don't restrict yourself to only northward-looking.

Darkness. If at all possible, you want to find the darkest location you can to see this. That means, getting out of and AWAY from the cities. Light pollution will utterly swamp the sky, and you won't see ANYthing. :-( The further away from lights you can get, the better. And get to a location where you have open skies, a view to the north, and can see as much of the sky as possible (being in the middle of the woods - dark or not - won't do you a bit of good in viewing the sky much)

Dressing for the Weather. Assuming it'll be clear where you are, check the forecasted temperature lows, and dress as if it will be 10-15 degrees cooler/colder than that. Hats are good. :-) Meteor watching - heck, night sky watching in general - is not among the more heat-inducing activities. ;-) Also, lawn chairs or blankets, and sleeping bags, are nice to have. Be comfortable!

What you MIGHT expect to see? Really, nobody *knows* for certain, but I've seen some healthy numbers tossed out that you COULD MAYBE see upwards of 100-400 meteors/hour (comes out to 1.5 to almost 7 meteors/minute). That's a healthy number, but it is not a storm (you need 1000+ meteors/hour to make it a meteor storm; don't let any popular media fool you on this). The vast majority of meteor showers that occur during the year only yield 10-20 or so meteors/hour. The most popular meteor showers - the Perseids and the Geminids - have usual runs going from 50-120 meteors/hour (they are popular because the meteors are plentiful - averaging 1-2 meteors/minute - and bright). This new meteor shower...it could fizzle to be something on the order of 5-10 meteors/hour, or it could meet the predicts and be a pretty spectacular show! We won't know until Saturday morning.

Note: if you see meteors moving across the sky from directions other than the general vicinity of Camelopardalis, those would probably be sporadics, random meteors that burn through our skies all the time (but fairly infrequently), not associated with any specific meteor shower. They often have characteristics different from those of a meteor shower (faster, slower, different color, brightness/dimness, etc). Just an fyi, in case you see any and they aren't "behaving" like the Camelopardalids (assuming this new meteor shower kicks off as is hoped).

Unfortunately for a vast majority of the people in the world, they won't get to see this show. Because it's coming out of the north, and from the nominal circumpolar constellations, folks in the southern hemisphere are unlikely to see anything. And for those in the northern hemisphere, the further south one is in the hemisphere, the less one will see. Also, due to the predicted timing of the peak, the majority of the meteors are supposed to occur in the wee hours for the eastern United States and Canada. But because the radiant is so high in the north, even western US/Canada will get their opportunity to see it in their hours earlier than the Eastern folks (remember, adjust for the time zones; consider the peak time to be the benchmark and adjust your views accordingly).

Also, those folks in Europe/Asia will be in daylight during the peak of the shower. :-( (well, the Europeans did get to see 1000+ meteors/hour during the great Leonid Meteor Storm of 2002; I "only" got to witness a rate around 600-800/hour by the time this part of the world rotated into the stream).

Finally, just because the peak is slated for 2-4am Saturday morning does not mean there won't be meteors falling earlier or later. We don't know how broad or sharp the peak is, so there could be a good show going on a couple hours before or after the peak time. We Just Don't Know. But we will find out! :-)

Some links for you:
Earth-Sky:
http://earthsky.org/space/comet-209p-linear-meteor-shower-storm-may-2014

Universe Today:
http://www.universetoday.com/111474/may-meteor-storm-alert-all-eyes-on-the-sky/

Bad Astronomy Blog:
http://www.slate.com/blogs/bad_astronomy/2014/05/20/camelopardalids_a_new_meteor_shower_from_comet_209p_linear.html

Astro Bob's Blog:
http://astrobob.areavoices.com/2014/05/19/the-sky-is-falling-surprise-meteor-shower-may-strike-saturday-morning/

If it's cloudy where you are, or you are in a part of the world where you'll be unable to view the show, you can view it life here:
http://events.slooh.com/

If you want to try your hand at photographing the shower, tons of sites out there with good base 'how to' info:
https://www.google.com/search?q=how+to+photograph+meteor+showers

Perhaps -- but right now, it looks like the treatment may work best on people who have not been vaccinated.

In other words, the anti-vac population may have yet anotther reason to tell people not to get their vaccination.

I already pay Shaw (I'm in Canada) $60/month for a 10megabit connection. If I then have to pay Netflix extra money so that they can pay Shaw to allow the connection to run at 10Mb/s, then Shaw is double-dipping. If I've paid for 10Mb/s then I should GET 10Mb/s if it's technically feasible to do so.

Anything else is false advertising, contractual interference, and/or a Sherman Act violation.

If you don't have a problem with Hot Pockets, then you probably have a freezer section that borderline doesn't work. If a hot-pocket is nearly thawed when you throw it into the microwave, it will have pockets of semi-liquid that quickly heat up and help to thaw the internals which then heat up nicely. It doesn't have a whole lot to do with the power of your microwave.

The other solution is to run the thing on 'defrost' for a couple of minutes -- (a short blast of microwaves every 10 seconds or so, with time for the recently-heated liquids to thaw the area around them)... then follow the normal directions to get a properly hot hot-pocket.

Playing with large data sets is more of a pain in a spreadsheet ... and if they have 10K records now, it's not a shock that they'll grow to 100K in a few years. If you're designing for growth, then putting the break, today, at 10K is reasonable. Also, if you've got over 10K records, chances are that you will (eventually) be answering yes to some of the other questions -- like having multiple people doing updates and/or queries on the data.

That's part of the 'invisible hand of the market'. If I don't like the fact that you're pissing on my color/orientation/clothing style, I can refuse to do business with you and discourage my friends from doing so.

It's called 'leverage'. If you don't like it, you don't have to participate in the marketplace. ---- "rather than pissing and moaning about" people talking to their friends.

Touche. All European (and colonial) scientists shared latin. Scientists in other great cultures around the world just used their local 'universal' languages.

2.4million is 0.03% of their NET income in 2013. it's ... what, $.01 per customer per month??

Similar in a fashion to this story....

Some geographers tried to use the math model that describes the migration of particles between atoms to try to describe population migrations between population centers. This (if I recall) was called the Gravity Model. And it was a huge attempt to make the softer sciences a bit harder by 'mathing them up'. Beyond that, it was trying to shoe-horn the data to fit the theory.

It failed and fell into just disrepute.

I have a feeling that much of the 'amazing power' of Big Data is going to turn out to be a) not as useful as anyone thinks and b) even where it is statistically accurate, it will tell little or nothing about individual instances, thus limiting utility for many purposes.

Big Data can do some things. I can collate and correlate vast data samples and perform other useful descriptive statistical tasks. When they start to move off into inferential activities, I suspect things start to break down.

I don't feel like the data about what I do with my smart phone will usefully tell anyone much about me that they could not have obtained otherwise. And its value as a tool to sell me things is fairly dubious.

I, on the other hand, have had a mixed experience with Indian workers.

I worked on one team with 3 of them. One was female, the other two male. One of the males had a good business head and presentation and passable technical skills. The other fellow was out of his depth and was compensating by trying to talk over everyone. The gal was the smartest of the lot and new her stuff (the QC side of things) better than either of the male devs, but their cultural propensity to just marginalize or ignore the female (or try to speak for her) meant the best way to let her excel was to arrange interactions with her that did not involve the two indian males.

On another project I worked on, offshoring a code base for a major US Telco, I will tell you that there were some smart devs (they got what I was presenting) and there were others who struggled and I don't think ever did fathom the complex code.

Frankly, the Russians I worked with were better as far as offshore resources go - thorough, smart, logical, didn't try to claim what they didn't actually know and figured out a lot of things as required (and did a good job of being thorough).

I think the only two objections I have overall (as a generalization) to Indian workers are a) tendency to be patriarchal and not listen to and respect females and b) a tendency to say yes to everything when it comes to 'can you do X by time Y?' even if the thing they are agreeing to do is well beyond them. They can't seem to say no or it'll take longer. Everything is yes. We learned that we could not depend on any time estimates and routinely doubled their estimates and sometimes even then had to get in and solve the problems ourselves.

Any group of devs is going to reflect the amount and nature of their education and their cultural perspectives. Being Canadian, I've had some good fortune to work in very diverse settings with many cultural groups and nationalities. As long as you know who you are dealing with and allow for that, you can work well together.

In the case of IT work, the skillset required for broader business aspects of that field require a broad knowledge of many technologies, a broad knowledge of business practices, and the business to treat the IT staff less like a cost center and more like a critical piece of infrastructure - provide training, support sufficient time for projects and manpower resources, and to generally not try to get the IT staff to be responsible for everything, all of the time, in all respects, with few or no resources. That's the most common failing in IT departments - how companies see them as an expense and try to minimize that to the detriment of employee quality and their overall business in the long run.

10 or 15 years ago, that wouldn't have been something to take into account. A couple of people would have groused about it, and their friends might have paid attention, but the macro effect on the company would have been trivial.

Consider that Microsoft, for example, has gotten away with language like that in a piece of software that 90%+ of desktop computers are sold with, and that it's actually difficult to buy a computer without. Meaningful protests??? Roughly zero.

In this case, "legal' means "a court will rule that the clause as valid". Clauses that force you to go to arbitration rather than court (including class-action lawsuits) have been held as valid in the past -- including for things like software 'licenses' for purchased software.

This clause was pushing the envelope even further, and it's unlikely to have been held as valid (under these specific circumstances), but the fact that it's there might be enough to cause an unhappy customer to cave in and settle for less than (s)he might have in the absence of this clause.

The marketing debacle, on the other hand, isn't something that lawyers normally pay close attention to.

Yeah, but talk about proof that Caffeine can arrest development.

... and I bet that any kid that starts out this way is gonna be a mondo caffeine addict.