So bad executive behavior, which has been immortalized in dilbert for *decades*, is now worthy of an essay?

There's a certain sense of irony here.

At the jury level this is expected. The appeal was expected either way. And in the longer term this may turn out differently.

Anti-trust concerns usually do benefit the consumer in the short term. And as the article points out, the jury specifically wrote that the features have an immediate benefit to the consumer.

Usually anti-trust problems are not immediately bad for the consumer. In the short term the consumer sees a lower price, easier access, and other conveniences.

In the long term the market ends up with monopolies and oligopolies, a loss of vibrancy, a slowdown in innovation, less desire to follow expensive advances, and worse customer experiences. Think of your local telco and cable companies as prime examples.

I expect that like so many other technical cases the jury's verdict will be overturned on appeal because juries in the US rarely understand the actual law. While criminal law is usually pretty straightforward for a lay jury, things like IP law and business law are often miscommunicated or misunderstood when handed to a jury of random citizens.

Gack.

I remember long bus rides. In the summer, it was kind of 50-50 you'd get a bus with air conditioning. No AC? Now you sweat like a pig, which is really awesome on the way into work. This was marginally less oppressive on the way home, but only marginally less oppressive because when you got home you could strip off your sweaty clothes.

In the winter not enough heat wasn't the problem, too much heat was. Since I had to walk six blocks to the stop and wait at least 10 minutes, I had to dress for whatever outside was like in Minnesota in January, which usually meant dressing for 10-20F. Then you get on the bus and it's like entering a crematorium -- the heat blowing batshit, making it like 80 degrees. And it's crowded and you can only take off so much of your winter stuff, because there's no room to put any of it.

I did do a fair amount of reading, but working? The buses I rode were all like coach airline seats (although not as extreme as coach has recently become). There was no room to practically use a laptop and of course no tray table or anything to put it on.

I eventually gave up the bus and plowed an extra $200/month into a paid parking spot and it was actually LESS stressful. The climate control worked. The seating more comfortable. And despite periodic traffic headaches, it was less stressful to commute for 25 minutes in my car than to wait 10-15 minutes outside for the bus, sit on the bus for 45-50 minutes, and then walk another six blocks to get home. The daily one-way trip time from door-door was almost double on the bus.

It will be a cold day in hell before I commute on a bus again. I might be swayed if I had less than a five minute walk, the stop was climate controlled, and the ride actually on par with driving time AND the seating approximated a first class airline seat in terms of room and a tray table, etc.

With 8 TB drive sizes I would think you would want double parity and some kind of hotspare. The rebuild times on that could be glacial.

Or would that just be considered a gag gift?

I think they do this already -- a recent newspaper article about our local police department detailed a half-dozen officers terminated for various reasons.

But I think it begs the larger question of what remaining officer morale is like if the kinds of "fire 'em all" mindset towards swift and harsh discipline takes place.

I'm not trying to defend bad police behavior, I'm trying to put into the context of a bunch of highly unionized employees who aren't trivially monitorable like $10/hr clerical employees working in some 3,000 square foot desk farm.

There are ways (and I'm sure most experienced officers know them) of simply doing less that no level of oversight can measure let alone measure to the level that satisfies union work rule disciplinary procedures. Sure, fire them all, but who the hell are you going to be hiring to do the job?

It's a common theme, but it begs the question -- do we just live in a state of anarchy now, where the "order" the police provide is merely illusory and most people are law abiding because of social convention, etc? Or does policing actually provide some kind of utility function to maintaining order?

I wonder about this, but I also wonder what the secondary of effects of harsh punishments would be. What happens if the police end up being just deliberately ineffective?

It's not like they don't have myriad ways to be ineffective that are basically impossible to control or punish -- evidence lost, conclusions not reached, investigations short-shrifted.

Maybe some or all of these happen now, but could they get worse and what would the larger effect be?

It doesn't seem to be in Windows 8.1 from my experience on a Surface Pro 2 -- it's a nice display and very high resolution, but it's scaling options leave a lot to be desired.

I can only imagine the same phenomenon would be true on super high resolution screens, although a lot of people seem to like 4k monitors, but it's hard to know what these would be like in day-day usage.

Incredible pixel density is nice, but it seems like (IMHO, anyway) that UIs and applications need to have a lot more flexibility about how they work with very high resolution displays.

Yes, cloud is great as a convenience for you.

It is also great as a convenience for NSA and other agencies. The text of the bill allows that anything that was encrypted can be kept indefinitely. If your web site says HTTPS then it is fair game for permanent governmental storage.

Also, they can retain it forever for a number of reasons:

From the bill now on its way to the President's desk: "(3)(B) A covered communication shall not be retained in excess of 5 years unless ... (ii) the communication is reasonably believed to constitute evidence of a crime ... (iii) the communication is enciphered or reasonably believed to have a secret meaning; (iv) all parties to the communication are reasonably believed to be non-United States persons;"

#2 should be troubling. Does your communication (which is not limited to just email, but also includes web pages and any other data) have any evidence of a crime? Evidence that you downloaded a movie or software from a warez site, or looked at porn as a minor, or violated any of the policy-made-crimes that even the federal government has declared they are not countable? With an estimate of over 300,000 'regulations-turned-crime', plus laws that incorporate foreign laws (the Lacey Act's criminalization of anything done "in violation of State or foreign law"), pretty much anything you do probably violates some law somewhere in the world. Better preserve it just in case somebody eventually wants to prosecute you for that crime someday.

#3 refers back to a vague definition of "enciphered" that does not just mean encryption. The "secret meaning" could be as simple as data inside a protocol, Who is to say that the seemingly random bytes "d6 0d 9a 5f 26 71 dd a7 04 31..." used as part of a data stream are really not an encrypted message? Better record it just in case.

And of course #4, the law has a careful wording about communications between "non-United States persons". Considering the "internet of things", all those devices talking to other devices are not communications between United States persons. It was your camera (a non-United States person) communicating with a data warehouse (a non-United States person), so better exempt that from the 5-year retention policy as well.

PRIVATE encryption of everything just became mandatory.

Go look back at the bill, start at page 22.

Observe that unencrypted communications can be retained for five years. But any encrypted communications can be kept indefinitely.

Also note that the law doesn't say anything about who enciphered it nor about if they are able to decipher it. If it was encrypted at any point along the journey it qualifies for unlimited retention.

The pope is treated as having political importance not because of the efficacy of his theology but because he is the spiritual leader of 1+ billion Catholics, a large portion of which actually believe in the doctrine of papal infallibility.

That is another classic way to skirt the law, and is often done innocently as a lack of understanding.

Employers can use comp time in some circumstances, but it must be at the overtime rate. That is, if you were at the 1.5x rate they need to compensate you 1.5x the hours, if you were at the 2.0x rate they need to compensate you 2.0x the hours.

Many employers will compensate the hours 1:1. They cannot simply shift the hours from one week to the next and tell you "don't show up for x hours". It needs to be "don't show up for (1.5*x) hours" or whatever your proper overtime rate is.

I think users have been clamoring for years for a way to moderate stories but I'm pretty sure CmdrTaco and the other original founder/editors never wanted it implemented out of sheer ego to prevent their genius story ideas from being moderated into oblivion.

I'm curious how data sharing works in those countries with nationalized health systems. I'd wager there's at least as much information sharing there as anywhere else.