Yes you can. If Microsoft stole an antique and shipped it to China, and then was ordered to produce it they couldn't say "well its in China so we don't have produce it".

If, however, they sold it to someone in China, that Chinese person has zero obligation to give a fuck about what the US courts want.

/ Just don't ever visit the US
// Including simply flying through
/// Including flying through one of our "lapdog" partner-states.

You are legally obligated to take positive action to comply with a subpoena. So setting up that kind of system is still obstruction of justice.

You miss the point - Let's say I work for WidgetCoUSA, a wholly-owned subsidiary of WidgetCoUK. Normally, I would have access to WidgetCo's global Exchange servers.

Warrant comes in. WidgetCoUK revokes every shred of my access to their servers.

WidgetCoUK has zero obligation to comply with US law. Their IT people who (rightly) removed my access acted legally and in the company's best interests. That unfortunately leaves me holding the pig in a poke, which a US court may or may not respect. But I have zero control of the outcome no matter my level of motivation.

That describes the real scenario we have here. Does Microsoft-USA have to comply with a US warrant? Absolutely. Does Microsoft-Ireland have the same requirement? Absolutely not. And unless MS.us can physically force MS.ie to play ball, it really doesn't matter what Judge Joe "Contempt" Sixpack has to say about the situation. Because name aside, these do not count as the same company, or the same people in charge. They may normally play well together, but don't need to when it doesn't suit their interests.

True - I honestly don't have the background to evaluate whether or not TFA has that part correct, but have to give him the benefit of the doubt. :)

Just shut the fuck up and take it

Spoken like a true AC.

Naw man, that multiverse, it go so deep, the polyverse be cryin' for mercy!

No. Time is a part of this universe. There is no "meta" time, other universes do not necessarily have time. There is no t Minus infinity. We know exactly when time started (ok, to within a few trillionths of a second).

FTA: "The most amazing thing about it, though, is that this is exactly what the Universe was doing before the Big Bang, only with a much greater energy and at a much faster rate! This was the period known as Cosmic Inflation."

Words like "before" presuppose the existence of time. If, as you postulate, time exists only as a function if this universe, then you have just established the de facto existence of "meta time" (at least if you believe TFA).

"Universe" = everything. "universe" = everything observable.

Fan of Bucky, eh? :)

I suppose you will postulate a "meta-space" that existed before the universe too. Sounds like the universe just went ahead and existed 'before' it existed.

Know how I can tell you didn't read TFA? Because he says exactly that - That inflation happened before the Big Bang, faster in fact than it did after

If it helps, you could consider the Big Bang the end of FTL inflation, though not 100% accurate (that "first 10^-32 seconds" thing assumes it lasted for a whole 10^-32 seconds, rather than starting at the rate mentioned and ending at a relative (no pun intended) snail's pace.

Emotion based outrage, increase in crime rates, riots, and eventually violent revolution are the -predictable- effects of growing relative income inequality and loss of social mobility. And, as in the past, the powerful and elite are digging in their heels -which actually makes the situation worse.

The basic finding of this analysis is that relative income mobility is approximately the same in the last 10 years as it was in the previous decade. And I would point out that that report does discus Bradbury and Katz' original claim of widening inequality, and the noise-in-the-data level of significance of their findings regarding decreasing mobility.

The idea of "decreasing mobility" counts as nothing more than Progressive FUD - Spurring those at the bottom end of the spectrum (and a bottom end will always exists, just a fact of basic statistics) toward acrimony and, I would dare say, exactly the sort of hatred and bitching you would deny exist.

OWS. SF-vs-Google. The 99% vs the 1%. Deny it all you want, but the poor don't just hate the rich, they hate everyone above them, whether by silver spoon or bootstraps or just a sore back. And as for whether or not anyone "teaches" this behavior - Did you bring enough to share with everyone?

Indoctrination works best when started young.

Well maybe your richy rich multi millionaire bulbs last a long ass time

Ever heard of "moving"? I don't own two houses, I've lived two different places in the past decade.


but the normal $2-5 per bulbs are garbage. I have to replace at least one every 6 months out of aprox 15 bulbs installed in my apt.
[...]I like the energy savings, and lower heat, but old ass bulbs are far more reliable.

FIrst, I buy the Home Depot discount bulk packs, in the 4 bulbs for $10 range. So yeah, comparing apples to apples here

Second, you have to replace ONE out of fifteen, every six months? Do you remember having incandescents at all? You have to replace all of them every six months (except maybe that one lonely attic light that you only use a total of 10 hours of per year), and the highest use ones, you could expect to replace every 2-3 months. People actually used to keep a six-pack of replacement bulbs around to deal with one or three dying at the worst possible time. Today? do people actually keep spare CFLs around? I don't, seems like a waste of space for how often I need one.

We apparently don't define "reliable" the same way.


The balast generally goes and then the bulb is toast. Sometimes they go grey first in the tube, but most are heavily yellowed from heat damage.

Ballasts go because of poor quality power, nothing more and nothing less (or putting a non-dimmable one on a dimmer circuit - same thing, just self-inflicted poor power quality). As for heat damage, Yes Virginia, some fixtures designed for burn-to-the-touch incandescents don't make suitable fixtures for CFLs. Specifically, if it has a heat shield on the base and a completely enclosing shade, yeah, you'll cook your CFLs nicely.

Here's what your future will look like if we are to have a shot at preventing devastating climate change

The West Antarctic Ice Shelf has already begun its collapse, guaranteeing us 10-12ft of sea level rise over the next 50-200 years (only the timeframe, not the result, remains in question). We have officially lost our "shot at preventing devastating climate change".

We do, however, still have a shot at preventing the necessary abandonment of every major coastal city on the planet, by avoiding another 200ft of sea level rise that would result from the rest of Antarctica melting.

At this point, we need to stop asking how we can go green, and start planning for our new seaside vacation homes in Arizona.

"The web is just an enormous stack of kluges upon hacks upon misbegotten designs. This Archaeology of Errors is no place for the application programmers of old: it takes a skilled programmer with years of experience just to build simple applications on todayâ(TM)s web. What a waste. Twenty years of expediency has led the web into a technical debt crisis."

I know, right? We had it so much easier back when we could just write our own interrupt handler (and pray we didn't step on DRAM refresh or vice-versa) to pull bytes directly off the 8250 - And once we had those bytes, mwa-hahaha! We could write our own TCP stack and get the actual data the sender intended, and then do... something... with it that fit on a 40x25 monochrome text screen (yeah, I started late in the game, those bastards working with punchcards spoiled all the really easy stuff for me!).

And now look where we've gone: Anyone using just about any major platform today can fire up a text editor and write a complete moderately sophisticated web app in under an hour. Those poor, poor bastards. I don't know how I can sleep at night, knowing what my brethren have done to the poor wannabe-coders of today. Say, do I hear violins?

Look up the term autism and understand why the author used that term.

Because it has become a meaningless buzzword used to describe every introverted snowflake on the planet?

The GP responded more-or-less appropriately to the TFA's nonsense. You have simply said "nuh-uh!". Substantiate, please.

Normal humans are effectively excluded from developing software.

I've said that for years. You, however, seem to hold that against those with the rare gift and dedication to code. Kinda missing the point, dude.


a vocation requiring rare talents, grueling training, and total dedication. The way things are today if you want to be a programmer you had best be someone like me on the autism spectrum who has spent their entire life mastering vast realms of arcane knowledge â" and enjoys it

Yes, yes, yes, kinda, yes, and yes. Again - Your point? You've described exactly why normal humans will never succeed as devs, and to a degree, why many devs tend to look down on those who can't even figure out Excel.

And you call that "injustice"? I have a rare combination of qualities that let me do seemingly amazing things with computers, and in return, I make a decent (but by no means incredible) salary. You want injustice? Some of those same morons who can't even figure out Excel (much less writing their own override CSS) make millions of dollars per year telling me they want my latest app to use a differerent font color. Another group of those morons make millions of dollars per year because they can whack a ball with a stick better than I can. Yet another group of morons make millions of dollars per year doing absolutely nothing because Granddad worked a town of white trash (sometimes literally) to death.

And yet you would call me out for busting my ass to turn my one natural skill into a modestly decent living?

Go fuck yourself, Mr. Edwards. Hard.

It is irrational to think that a light bulb should be so horribly unreliable

Agreed.

I started buying CFLs 12 years ago. I have had four fail in that time, out of 40, spread over two different physical houses. 90% lasting over a decade? I'll take those numbers over replacing every single one every 3-6 months!

That said... "It is irrational to think that a light bulb should be so horribly unreliable" that they last two months when everyone else has them lasting for several years. Someone in this discussion has stated an irrational conclusion. Me, I still have 36 out of 40 CFLs working more than a decade later, so I don't think I have the logic problem...

BTW, all those "sensitive" electronics you describe? Each and every one of them have beefy power supplies designed to deal with brief poor power conditions, whether they simply turn off or buffer a few seconds of suitable power to make it through momentary rough patches. A 3-for-$10 CFL has no giant filter caps hidden in some nearby pocket universe to help it magically weather a brownout that would cook all those devices you describe if they didn't possess exactly such safeguards.