Right, because he was already waving a gun around when they showed up.

Microsoft needs to grow a pair and lay down the law to any company that wants to be an OEM for their products. Apple wouldn't let the carriers pull this stunt on their phones.

I think Apple prohibiting carriers from doing this sort of stuff is more about keeping competitors under their thumb, not about protecting users. They're not above pulling this crap themselves at their users' expense. They surreptitiously slurped up users' location and wifi SSID data to build their own wifi map (the following year, they dumped the company they'd been paying to lease such a map). You know, the same thing Google got in trouble for because they went to the trouble to try to do it the right way, and had their own employees drive around doing the data gathering (not their Android users), then found out later they'd recorded a lot more than SSID.

Ah, a fellow rationalist. Wanna know a little secret? There's this whole big secret world out there not governed by strict and unbreakable laws like science. It's based on ephemeral qualities like popularity, beauty, fashion, trendiness, gossip, hearsay, social status, and celebrity. It leads to irrational things like printed cardboard skyrocketing in value because they include the magic word "Pokemon" (and actual laws being passed to prevent anyone other than the "owner" of that word from printing it on other cardboard), or shoes selling for $150 more because they're named after a famous basketball player, or a product selling out because a certain popular TV show host says she likes it, or a semi-popular cartoonist getting lots of people to pay in advance for a game they've never heard of before which doesn't sound all that fun to play. I hear this stuff can even influence whether or not you can land a job, or get a date, if you can believe that!

If you have your own currency you can print money. That gives you liquidity, at the cost of massive currency devaluation.

Oh dear. First, Greece is on the Euro - they can't print more money.

Second, money is just a representation of value/wealth. It is not value/wealth in and of itself. The true value is productivity. Anything you do to alter the money supply changes nothing if productivity is not altered. All that happens is you just add or subtract a zero to every number used in the accounting books. If your paycheck increases by 10x, but prices also increase by 10x, then nothing has changed. The economy gains no liquidity from printing money.

The one thing printing more currency does is shift wealth away from people who have been saving up (i.e. your savings account at the bank) to the entity printing the money. This is why investors flee to gold in bad economic times - the government cannot print more gold, so its value cannot decline due to this type of wrong-headed fiscal policy. (Note: It could actually be the proper course of action if huge amounts of the country's wealth is being held by a small group of extremely wealthy individuals. But I don't believe that's the case in Greece.)

Same thing happens with debts (which are just a form of deferred savings). Debt repayments don't scale with currency fluctuations, so if you print enough money that your need 10x as much currency to do the same thing as before, then suddenly your debt is 1/10th what it was before in terms of real productivity.

But that's exactly the same thing as defaulting on your debt. Except instead of defaulting on 100% of it, you've defaulted on 90% of it. And that loss of economic credibility (i.e. credit) will make it that much harder for you to convince someone to lend you money in the future, worsening your liquidity crisis.

A surplus built on the back of borrowed money is not a surplus if you decide not to pay that money back. There's a reason accountants use amortization schedules and depreciate long-term assets. If you want to artificially restrict your analysis to just what the government spends (minus debt repayments) and collects, then you also need to subtract any economic activity generated by purchases made with that money which led to the debt.

In other words, you cannot buy a car with a car loan, get a job which requires the use of the car, then claim you shouldn't have to pay back the loan because you'd be making money if it weren't for those pesky car loan payments. Eliminating the car loan from your calculation also necessitates eliminating the car.

this type of nearly parasitic marketplace is the direct result of 40 years of unsuccessful economic sanctions and trade embargoes by the west.

This is the same bullshit spouted by the Castro government in Cuba. You do not have an inherent right to force other people to trade with you. If they don't want to trade with you, it is their right not to trade with you. If your socio-economic system is robust, it will continue along just fine. Perhaps not as well as if you had had more trade opportunities, but it will continue to function and grow. Just like in old days when transportation was by ox and cart so your selection of trade partners was extremely limited - the economy still grew back then. If your economy doesn't, then the problem is your socio-economic system, not foreign trade sanctions. And the line you give is being trotted out by the people in power in your country to deflect criticism away from themselves (who are the ones truly responsible).

When Iran says, for example, its nuclear program is peaceful its quite easy to see why: imports of X-Ray and medical isotopes from nato countries are severely restricted if not outright banned. Iran is entirely dependent upon Russia for the nuclear material they receive

A nuclear program can be both peaceful and military. Proving that it has peaceful uses does not prove that it doesn't have military uses.

And actually, if you project Iran's population and energy consumption out into the future, sometime around 2030 they cease being a net energy exporter and become a net energy importer. i.e. The oil they produce domestically will not be enough to supply their domestic energy needs, though they may be able to stave that off for a decade or two by increasing oil production. I dropped my opposition to their nuclear program when I figured that out.

On a meta level, due to the inexorable march of technological progress, it is inevitable that rogue nations and eventually terrorist organizations will get nukes. We've been trying to keep the genie in the bottle all this time - that's what all these sanctions and inspections of the nuclear plants in Iran and North Korea are about. But eventually it's going to get out. We need to come up with plans for how to deal with that genie once it gets out of the bottle if we want to survive as a species. Otherwise every petty disagreement we have is going to escalate into a city being nuked.

It's a spec. Designed by intel's marketing group. Which is constantly in flux. Their long term goal is to push affordable yet quality laptop design, but at the same time I wouldn't all $700 "palatable" for an Ultrabook. $570-$640 is palatable for an ultrabook. $700 is just a regular laptop price.

Intel came up with the Ultrabook marketing campaign to convince manufacturers to make more expensive laptops with better features (higher resolution, SSD storage, better battery life, thinner, lighter). It makes no sense to expect Ultrabooks to be cheaper than regular laptops.

Intel didn't start the Ultrabook campaign because they were fed up like those of us who want better-than-low-end specs on our laptops. Intel was in very real danger of being priced out of the market. Netbooks died because the low-end of the regular laptop market dipped below the $400 mark, and in some cases even the $300 mark about 3 years ago. It's extraordinarily difficult to sell a $150 CPU for $299 laptop. Intel needed to raise the average laptop price, or cede increasing market share to cheaper CPUs by AMD and ARM. And the Ultrabook campaign was how they chose to do it.

I've been buying notebooks for over 2 decades now, with a bias towards lightweight models (I've owned a Thinkpad 701c, Thinkpad 560E, Portege 3440CT, Sony Z122). Prices on ultraportables have steadily dropped from over $3000 (the 701C retailed for nearly $4000), to $1800 by the time I got the Sony Z1 in 2010. Ultrabooks were well over $1000 when they first debuted a few years ago. $700 is more than palatable for an ultrabook - it's fantastic. I've been helping several friends buy laptops since this past November, and aside from some brief sales which ended literally within hours, the cheapest 1080p laptop (non-refurb) has been about $600. For $100 more you get 8GB of RAM and a SSD (and a 256GB one at that, not a lame 128GB one). It'd be a fantastic price even if it weren't ultralight and thin like an ultrabook.

Which has what to do with Islamist groups that seek out and destroy schools and educators because they are schools and educators? If your point is that they can't help themselves because they are ignorant, then you're indirectly also saying that they must be forced to overcome that ignorance (since they act, aggressively, to destroy the institutions that would gladly educate them if they showed up wanting an education). And forcing them to be educated means ... using force. It means physically protecting schools, teachers, and students with rough men willing to use violence to beat back the school destroying people and organizations.

In the meantime, other cultures seem to have nicely figured out how to avoid embracing medieval sensibilities. They used to be anti-education theocracies, too. But they're not, now. What changed? Why can't these Islamist groups and their millions of Muslim apologists and funding sources do the same?

I thought it was Maxtor which kicked off the "1 MB = 1 million bytes" thing? I vaguely recall Seagate being one of the stubborn holdouts for 1 MB = 2^20 bytes. I do know IBM was the last one to switch. (Seagate bought Maxtor in 2006, so it's somewhat a moot point.)

Its been proven time and time again that red light cameras do more harm than good.

And the opposite has also been proven:

If you do nothing but add red light cameras, the intersection tends to become safer.

But inevitably, the government agency which authorized the cameras suddenly realizes it's getting more revenue from traffic violations. And it starts shortening the duration of the yellow lights at the intersections to artificially increase the number of violations, and thus increase its revenue even more. This makes the intersection more dangerous, moreso than the cameras initially made them safer.

I've thought about these types of situations a bit. The best idea I could come up with is that fines for breaking the law should not go to the government. They should go into an escrow account held by the government, which gets equally redistributed to taxpayers when they get their tax refund (or converted to a tax credit if the person owes taxes). The idea behind these fines is that the offender needs to be penalized for the bad behavior. As the public was the party which was harmed by the behavior, and ostensibly the government is acting on behalf of the public, the fine goes to the government. But that leads to a conflict of interest on the part of the government in situations like this. So the best solution is to remove the conflict of interest - if the government makes no money from traffic violations, then its only motive for enacting traffic control is to improve traffic flow and safety.

Yeah, he conned a bunch of uneducated, down-on-their-luck grunts into abandoning their personal sense of decency and agreeing to kill thousands of people - not because their religious convictions told them it was the right thing to do, but because ... they just couldn't find work?

That must have been the case with "grunts" like Mohamed Atta, right? Totally uneducated. Well, except for going to college to study architecture, and spending time at the Technical University of Hamburg. You know where he met with other poor grunts who could only afford to do things like fly back and forth between Germany and various middle eastern destinations, spend time training in Afghanistan, and so on. He traveled to Spain for some meetings, then - the poor, uneducated, desperate guy! - flew to Maryland, where he met up with fellow grunt Hani Hanjour, then off to other destinations where the fellow grunts were living in various states of perfectly comfortable. They didn't just round up some scruffy guys from some poverty-stricken village in the desert and talk them into this because they had no options. These were people who were dedicated to the world view preached by Bin Laden and their intellectual fellows in the Taliban. Focusing on the leaders IS important, because it's what they say and stand for that thousands and thousands of their compatriots - including those living comfortably in western nations, where they've been educated and employed - find agreeable enough to follow.

This whole notion that the guys running, say, the media production facilities, newsletter operations, and logistics for groups like ISIS as they line up insufficiently hardline Muslims and of course western hostages out of whom they can't squeeze enough cash, and lop off their heads or burn them alive ... that the guys doing that are doing so because they're not happy with the local employment prospects ... that would be really funny if it weren't so dark and just plain evil. Not enough schools? Of course not! These are the people who are dragging the teachers out into the street and shooting them in the head before they burn down the schools. The problem isn't lack of foreign investment, it's cultural rot in the form of their local religion crashing headlong into the rest of the world's more contemporary ways of life. These guys don't want modern jobs, they want medieval jobs.

This may have been true at one time, but I don't think it is the case any longer. I think that the ubiquity of cheap components and the falling price of Windows for OEMs, the profit margins have been steadily increasing over the years.

You haven't been buying laptops for very long, have you? I've bought:

A Thinkpad 700 (monochrome, not color) in 1994 for about $2100.
A Thinkpad 701c in 1996 for about $2800 (original retail in 1995 was about $3800)
A Thinkpad 560E in 1999 (2 years after release) on sale for about $2600 (nearly $4000 in 1997)
A Toshiba Portege 3440CT in 2001 on a killer sale for $1750 (was $2500 when new)
A Thinkpad T40 in 2004 for $1800
A Sony S360 in 2006 for $600 in a killer sale (original retail approx 2x).
A Sony Z122 - their top of the line model - in 2010 for $800 in a killer sale (original retail approx 2x).

The ubiquity of cheap components has been translating into much cheaper laptops over time. If you look at the profit margins of these companies, they've been pretty stable at 5%-10%. Apple is the only one who's figured out a way to sell cheap components at a huge markup.

If this were late December, this would be an article about the physics of Santa Claus having to travel to so many households per second that he'd be essentially a ball of flaming plasma. Which is to say, a singularly pointless thought experiment. But apparently it's not singular. We've gone past the pointlessness singularity. Paging Mr. Kurzweil!

This is for a head mounted apparatus that a separate display inserts into.

Unless you're somehow manufacturing the head mount and display together, every display used in a head mounted apparatus was initially separate, and was inserted into it. What exactly is the invention here? The idea of assembling pieces together?

Yeah, I have to give the lawyer who dreamed this one up some kudos for creativity and the audacity to actually file it. (Blame for actually granting it goes to the USPTO as usual.) First we had "on a" troll patents, where you patented something that already existed but was now being done on a different platform. e.g. A shopping cart on a website. Email on a cellular network.

Now with this patent they've created a new "with a" class of troll patent. VR headsets and smartphones already existed long before 2008. What they've patented is a VR headset with a phone as the screen. Now we're going to get all sorts of stupid patents for things like a projector with a white wall as a screen, a table leveler with a folded up piece of paper to prop up the short leg.