I seem to recall that they collected so much money, they not only bought him an iPod, but a mac laptop as well.

As soon as I have a good-to-great experience with an MSI motherboard, this will be relevant to me.

They've been nothing but finicky to me.

Now, if ASUS, Intel or Gigabyte pick this up, or at least a few other mainstream manufacturers, let me know.

I guess you have not yet realized that all the people with the genetic makeup to make something of themselves left the Fatherland in the political unrest of the late 19th century. (For us, 1848) Most went to the US.

This means that what was left in Europe is all the adolescent attitude and garbage. The US is, in fact, the proper maturation of Western thought after Europe went to nothing in the course of it's wars.

In fact, the longest peace Europe has known (1945-now) exists because it is occupied by these people you call children. Before 1946, the history of Europe is of some tribes of barbarians wandering in and spending the next 1500 years fighting amongst themselves.

You do speak properly when you refer to yourself as an adolescent, though. This sort of arrogant, self-righteous attitude is seen primarily in adolescents and in Europeans. We Germans are particularly bad about it. Perhaps if we could even decide amongst ourselves if Greece is worth saving, we could tell the Americans how to use their power. We have forgotten how to be the European Gleichgewicht.

Thankfully the US has taken up the cause. And for this, you call them Empire. You don't know what Empire is.

Have you ever checked out a Zune HD?

I mean, really - there isn't any such concept there.

It's possible, but prejudices like this make the pitch hard.

Disclaimer: I am a developer in one of America's largest banks.
Of course, I do not speak for them - just for me.

That said, think about what the OP is asking.

He wants unfettered access to funds transfer information.

Just to keep righteous with the Feds, we'd have to forcibly limit his access to accounts only his business has - it's not like we could open the tap and just let him run BAI queries on any account he can think of, the way our own internal users can.

But a web portal with customer-keyed access is already present, and isn't good enough for Mr. LookAtMeI'mABigBadCoder.

So we'd have to build him a distinct data transfer channel, test the hell out of it to make sure he can't break it and look at someone else's stuff or - God forbid - foul up our nightly batch cycle with stupid data requests outside of standard Banking hours. Then we'd have to test it with him involved to make sure it returns the data he wants.

All that is probably a several hundred hour project. Per customer. For something no one ever wants but this yahoo.
Of course, several hundred hours assumes the full banking software is Bank-owned. Most folks outsource this stuff, so we'd have to test cross-vendors with him, too, generating costs for us.....

You want it for free?

You're fucking clueless.

I remember back during the megahertz wars how Adobe came out telling its customers that, based on benchmarks, they could no longer recommend Apple products. (This was back in early 2003)

Of course, that was when Adobe was pretty much the killer app that kept Apple breathing. If Apple lost Adobe during late OS9/early OS X, they lost everything. Furthermore, if the G5 flopped (which has been argued both ways), Apple would have to do something drastic. I believe the move to Intel is their response, and Adobe was very likely the catalyst.

So Steve Jobs, having a good memory and being somewhat egotistical, seems to me to be getting some revenge here by taking on one of Adobe's flagship product, now that Apple doesn't need Adobe anymore. It's hard to say that Adobe's creative suite is the bedrock of Apple profits these days, so there's not much to lose from his perspective.

The Germans are arming robots!

Someone warn Poland and start a watch on the Sudetenland!

How is ordering RFID-backed ID card blanks putting federal cash to work on "shovel-ready" projects?

Let me guess....campus maintenance staff would've been fired over the summer if they didn't need to set up card readers at the door to a few classrooms? Does anybody believe this stuff anymore?

The perp here is the son of Mike Kernell, a long-serving Democrat in the Tennessee state legislature.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mike_Kernell

Young David wasn't just looking around for any old account to break into, he was actively working on the account of a political opponent of his father's.

This also implies that David, despite claims that it was for "lulz", was almost certainly conducting a targeted search of her email. There would be no other reason for the son of a prominent Democrat to do what he did.

This is Watergate. The only difference is the desire of the American media to tar and feather those involved.

The Hubble telescope runs off Intel 486 chips.

I remember reading somewhere that NASA scours resale shops for electronics to keep the shuttle flying.

You never know, hoarding could mean you have the "Right Stuff" for space exploration.

Prevalence of cell phone ownership.
Understanding of property ownership.
Unlisted numbers.
Non-automated nature of phone records.
Limited name information in phone records. (A B Smith? Really?)

Getting government, online records faces none of these data quality issues.

When open records laws were first conceived, it mostly applied to such records as people would have legal concerns about - birth/death, who owns a piece of property, etc.

Here's the thing.

All those records were primarily local, and were kept as paper - there were no computers. So if you wanted a record, you had to go to the place it was kept, wait in a line, and pay a document fee so a government clerk could go make you an Official Copy of whatever record you wanted. The fee covered the cost of the clerk's time and supplies, which, considering how manual this task is, was appropriate.

So if you wanted to know any of this "open" information, it amounted to a fair amount of trouble and expense. But if you had a good reason to need/want to know, you could know, and it wasn't a problem.

But today, with computers and intarwebs and such things, these records are free and pretty broadly available. So someone who, say, wants to letter bomb the residents and owners of every apartment in a tri-county area, can do it with virtually no effort or expense.

This is not good.

Privacy was maintained not by legislation, but by the simple difficulty of getting things done.

Now that these things are easy, we need a higher standard to limit access, not a lower one.

Keep vital records offline, please.

The government in the UK is running out of public camera bandwidth. There are a lot of those cameras around, you know!

How can you keep an electronic eye on everyone if public bandwidth is clogged by bothersome subjects pirating American mass media?
A massive roll-out of British Broadband means Her Majesty's Peepers (aka HeMP) will be able to see all, and know all.

HeMP for all Britain!

When the decisions were made about what government-owned information should be publically available, even telephones didn't exist.

This meant that, if you wanted local information on who ownes what plot of land, what leinholder holds interest in it, and what the tax rate is, it wasn't all that easy to get. You had to travel to the town, pay a clerk a document fee, and wait while they go find the record and copy it for you. This was very time- and effort-intensive, as well as somewhat expensive if you want more than a few records.

Now that everything's online, shady mortgage brokers can find out the assessed value of your house, as well as the fact that you own it. People can (unless you're the president) look up your birth certificate and find out where and when you were born. All of this and more is available online, to automated bulk requests.

Privacy is suffering in a way never intended. The information is supposed to be available, but not simple to access.

There are 2 core problems with translating:
1. Language requires a cultural frame of reference.
You can see this in understanding humor in different societies. For example Monty Python is a product of a British perspective. The English language, as spoken in England, only works when you understand the culture behind it. For example, "daily bread" only works in western languages because of the shared Christian influence. In Japanese, for example, "daily rice" might bring up a similar understanding that "daily bread" doesn't carry.

2. Language is a moving target.
References keep changing, and a computer (or even a foreign-based translator) has a hard time keeping up. Think about what Tea Party meant just 5 years ago, as opposed to today.

All this means that you're going to get a really good computer translator about the time you get a really good computer painter. Even the best of the given translations in the responses to this story aren't anything someone would want to publish as an example of good English usage - the only benefit is a moderate ability to get the point of the subject.

Or to drive the point home, try passing Goethe through the translator and see if the English is as good as the German.
That's the true test of a translator - can it retain excellence, beyond base meaning?

example:
Wenn ein Edler gegen dich fehlt, so tu als hättest dus nicht gezählt! ..... Er wird es in sein Schuldbuch schreiben und dir nicht lange im Gebet bleiben.

becomes
When the gentleman wanting against you, then do as you would not have counted's! ..... He will write it in his book of guilt and you do not stay long in prayer.

Sure you get the idea, but the artistry is pure fail.