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Comment Neowin is an idiot (Score 1) 171

"Neowin speculates that this large jump in version number is likely related to the massive overhaul of the underlying components..."

The version number and the amount of work on a project have nothing to do with one another. Does he (or they, whatever the hell a neowin is) really think that 40% of all the work that has ever gone into windows happened in this iteration? Version numbers are assigned by marketing and management. You have to name your product something, but what it is named has nothing to do with the engineers working on it.

And yes, I know that the actual name (windows 7, XP, Vista) is also assigned by marketing. But since people know the top name means nothing and look at the internal version number, marketing gets a hold of that and tries to manipulate it as well.

As Londo said... "It does not mean a thing!"

Comment Re:Optimum Temperature (Score 1) 367

Well, in the last two thousand years, we've had the Roman Warm Period, the Medieval Warm Period and the Little Ice Age. So we've had some genuinely large variation.

ummm...if we're picking, perhaps the median of all that? Like I said?

To clarify, when I said "what the global mean has been for the last few thousand years" I didn't mean "a singular worst case extreme". What we are essentially choosing is much worse than any of those worst case scenarios.

Thanks for educating me on the medieval warm period by the way. Now I feel even worse about our current situation. That anomaly was 0.2C above the 2000 year average and now we're 0.5C above and rising at an exponentially faster rate (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medieval_Warm_Period). The roman warm period had climates similar to that of the year 2000....locally, not globally. Please tell me why we should just "let it ride".

Comment Re:I bet Infosys and Tata are dancing in the stree (Score 1) 186

Title 8 of the US Code is 1000 pages long.

I'd bet money that buried in that 1000 pages is the justification White House lawyers can pull out to say that what he did is completely legal. Congress DID make the law. The Executive took advantage of some discretion clause somewhere. That's how 90% of the edifice that is the Executive Branch came into being. This is undoubtedly more of the same.

Comment Re:The United States is turning into Untied States (Score 1) 110

There was this thing called World war 1, World war 2 and the cold war. Jesus these days people on slashdot are fucking illiterate. Imagine you're being drafted to go fight in some war for some rich oligarchs and you're poor and not totally braindead. You'd have some sense of self preservation would you not? The downtrodden are alive and many of them are not totally braindead.

Judging by history, the poor and downtrodden are trivial to manipulate into completely discarding all thought of self preservation. "For king and country!" A rallying cry that worked for centuries. Nowadays it's "For God and country!" since kings are out of fashion. And I include recent history in that assessment. 407,000 American men died fighting World War II. Just how many oligarchs do you think were in those ranks? Zero. And how many sons of oligarchs? A few. A handful. Hundreds? Not likely. The American oligarchy is only 400 right now. It was even less then. Not a lot of sons available. You're claiming they fought because they were better off. I say they had forgotten how bad off they had been. The Great Depression was already a generation gone by the time World War II rolled around. Their parents remembered it, but those who fought and died were children in its aftermath, and unaware of their plight. No, they fought for the same old wheeze that worked before: "For king and country!"

Comment Benjamin Franklin + mod parent up (Score 1) 110

Benjamin Franklin's speech that ended the constitutional convention is often cut short but you will like it. He basically says all democracies fall to despotism and lets end the debate because what we have is good enough for now.

I don't have much faith that if Americans had to read some history that they are capable of learning from history enough to prevent it from repeating. Look at Vietnam and how easily Iraq happened despite a couple generations living thru that history.

The fall of Rome probably has many parallels given it took 100s of years to collapse while the USA is going to do it in less than 100. As far as functional democracy, that already is gone. Widespread success increases the rate of downfall as the citizens shirk their duties for selfish escapism. I bet TV would have tripled speed of Rome's demise.

Comment Re:I bet Infosys and Tata are dancing in the stree (Score 2) 186

Eventually Obama is going to be a civilian again. If he pleases the right people, he (or his immediate family) can make tremendous amounts of money as a lobbyist, consultant, guest speaker, etc...

Just look at the money that Chelsey Clinton earns from her array of jobs at various consulting, investment, educational, media and humanitarian companies and organizations. Her success was handed to her on a diamond platter as political thanks to her parents.

I don't know if Chelsea Clinton's employers are getting anything, but there's some truth to that.

For example, Billy Tauzin, the Republican representative from Louisiana, made sure that the Medicare Prescription Drug Bill would prohibit Medicare from negotiating cheaper prices with the drug companies, the way the health care systems do in every other country. After he left Congress, he went to work for the drug industry lobbying organization, PhRMA, for $2 million a year. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... Pretty good investment. PhRMA paid a few million dollars, and got back billions in higher drug prices. That's why all those new drugs cost $100,000 and more a year.

Comment Will this go the same way as the spintronics? (Score 2) 36

Not that long ago people were talking about the huge breakthrough the spintronics would bring - that we are going to have terabytes of DRAM which could retain their memory even when power was switched off, that we could turn on our PC and have an almost instantaneous boot-up

So where is the spintronics nowadays?

Comment If Google happens to be an EU corporation ... (Score 0, Troll) 334

If Google is an EU corporation EU will not do _anything_ to Google

EU doesn't care if Google is a monopoly or not - they only use "monopoly" as an excuse to do what they do

What EU really wants to achieve is to break America, starting by breaking American corporations, corporations such as Google

And if they can do Google in, Apple will be next

Comment Re:I bet Infosys and Tata are dancing in the stree (Score 1) 186

Comment The United States is turning into Untied States (Score 2) 110

No one has been punished and they are still spying on us all

That's the kicker, ain't it?

No matter how much the citizens have protested, TPTB still REFUSES to listen

We call ourselves a "democratic country" but are we truly democratic?

Our government, the government of the United States of America, is behaving exactly like a tyrannical regime - in which it not only conveniently ignores the wish of the citizentry, it continues to carry out programs which are designed to undermine the validity of the democratic principles within the country

Comment Re:Optimum Temperature for a Maunder Repeat? (Score 1) 367

I'm sure you pedantic scamps have plenty of anecdotes to "disprove" any reasonable take on what average temperatures are ideal for creatures currently living on earth. Yours in particular (which I'd group under outliers) would be less of a concern today because we are not limited to technology of the 1600's.

All I'm trying to say is it would be least disruptive to life on earth if we didn't suddenly create (among other things) a situation in which costal areas (where something like 90% of earth's human population lives) became unstable to the point where it was preferable for those 6 billion people to want to move somewhere else instead of trying to make the new situation work where they are at.

In simpler terms, the most amicable situation for the vast majority of everything as it is now, is for temperature/climate to remain as it is now or change very very gradually. I'm ready more anecdotes to refute that, maybe attack grammar and spelling while you're at it /openingpandora'sbox.

Comment Re:Google doesn't have a monopoly on ANYTHING. (Score 2) 334

Moreover, if Nokia wasn't run by absolute incompetents, they'd still be a huge player in the smartphone market.

But they farted around with OSes, libraries, and waffled and couldn't decide themselves out of a wet paper bag being while pushed off a cliff. To top it off, the board decided to welcome Microsoft's cukoo-egg into their nest because "OH MY GOD A BILLION DOLLARS."

Google is where it is because a lot of companies are run by boards that are more interested in feathering their own nests instead of what they largely give lip-service to - "innovation"

Look at Yahoo. Go ahead, look at 'em. Point And Laugh. They deserve it.

--
BMO

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