Implementation makes a difference. Early versions of NT were quite good, but unpopular because you needed 16MB of RAM (if I recall correctly) to run them in an era when a high end personal computer shipped with 4MB of RAM. Over the years they tried to hold the line, at one point getting the minimum down to 12MB of RAM, but perhaps not coincidentally stability got really bad.

With slave labor, no less.

Yes people are limited by their culture and time, but not *that* limited. Braun deserves condemnation for using slave labor in WW2.

All the arguments based on classical economic theory only work if the assumptions of classical economics hold, particularly the assumption that there is a free market.

Amazon is arguing for its freedom to set prices it charges in its ebook store; that would be no concern of the publishers if we lived in a world where ebook users could simply buy books in non-proprietary formats from any Internet storefront they wanted. But we don't live in such a world. We live in a world where most ebook readers are controlled by Amazon and inextricably linked to its store. It wouldn't have been hard for Amazon to build the Kindle that way. Define some public book trading protocols, bootstrap the standard by building those protocols into the Kindle and Amazon's online store, and instantly the world is a better place for everyone except printers and bricks-and-mortar bookstores with no Internet presence. But Amazon didn't do that, because the Kindle is designed to tie the user to Amazon, the way the iPad is designed to tie the user to Apple.

So what we're looking at is a maneuver by Amazon to corner the market on books *in general* by killing off the traditional paper book trade. Preserving the ability to buy most books from someone other than Amazon seems like a legitimate reason to me.

Nobody's book is so incredible that people would buy them no matter what the price. If my only way to get Shakespeare was to pay a ten thousand dollar license fee I'd find a way to do without.

You really shouldn't assume that anyone who disagrees with you does so because they're stupid. Publishers know their marginal and fixed costs and certainly have a pretty good idea of the price elasticity of their books. The situation is more complicated than you know.

You can't compare Hachette to Valve, because Valve owns the whole Steam ecosystem, and delivers its services to users' commodity PC hardware with no intermediaries (other than Internet service). In the case of Hachette v. Amazon, we're looking at a situation where Amazon owns the point of sale, and has more control over the users' devices than the user himself has. And yes, you can read ebooks on a PC but few people will want to do that. And yes you can download ebooks in non-proprietary formats like epub from sources other than Amazon, convert the format to .mobi, and use file transfer to move the converted file onto the kindle; but that's a significant barrier for most people.

So what we're looking at is a move by Amazon to take control of the book market in a way it cannot as long as paperback and hardback sales remain strong. Amazon *looks* like a friend of the consumer because they're calling for lower prices. If they get what they want, then ebooks may well make a significant market share headway against paper books.

You might think that's fine, but it's not *generic* formats and *commodity* hardware we're talking about. It's formats and hardware controlled by an inextricably linked to *one* company. And that may mean lower prices today, but what will it mean ten years down the pike when Amazon corners the market on books?

I'd be interested in your source for this particular tidbit, particularly how it shows blacks are any worse than whites in this regard.

I went to high school with a lot of tough white guys from South Boston and Charlestown in Boston, back when Whitey Bulger was still a big deal in Southie. Let me tell you most of them didn't see intellect as their path into the middle class. A few did, but not many. I've also worked with PhD scientists who were black and came from urban black neighborhoods. You get a mix of attitudes everywhere, whether it's in a black ghetto or white ghetto or a middle-class white neighborhood, but usually being academically advanced doesn't make you popular unless you live in town with a big Jewish population.

Speaking of Whitey, his people used to spread the myth that he kept drugs off the street in Southie. In fact he was kicking the Italian mob out of Southie so he could have the drug trade all to himself. Whitey wasn't a hero, he was a parasite. So why did people believe the lie? Wishful thinking. The people who got education and became professionals moved out of the neighborhood, so the one example of guys who rose in life that you saw every day were the mob. And you had to hope they were good lads at heart, because they had the neighborhood by the balls.

There's often a "we're all in this together" thing going on in poor, downtrodden neighborhoods. Part of that is a resentment of anyone who acts like their above the rest, and that includes people who flaunt their education or sophistication. But that's because intellectual accomplishments don't seem to be within the reach of everybody. You don't get that attitude in cultures which believe in self-improvement.

So let's *not* talk race. Let's talk education and economic opportunity. If people have a way up, see that way, and believe they can do it, they will rise.

Of course. But putting your servers behind a separate firewall isn't the same as putting them on the same network as the clients with *no* firewall.

In any case, we're talking about an in-store POS system with TWO clients. We're not talking about an Internet facing server that has to handle thousands of connections per hour. Even if the server had FIFTY client terminals the impact on performance would be nil.

Well, I think the first two films are a mixed bag. I rather liked getting meet Radagast, and to see what Gandalf was up to in Dol Guldur.

A screenplay adapted from a book has to stand on its own as well as live up to the book. Where the movies have fallen down is living up to the book. The consensus of my writer friends is that the screenwriting team (Walsh, Boyes, Jackson and del Tormo) doesn't trust Bilbo to carry the story, which deeply undercuts the themes of THE HOBBIT. Lack of respect for THE HOBBIT novel is pretty common among LotR fans. They often dismiss it as "just" a fairy-tale -- an attitude which would have disgusted Tolkien himself. It would have been better if writing this screenplay had been entrusted to someone who loved THE HOBBIT for itself, and understood it better.

Surprisingly, I thought the non-canonical character Tauriel was one of the best parts of the movies. Yes, she was there to give the story a so-called "strong female character", but that's a silly objection. Writers always put characters in stories for some reason; the question is whether they fit in and come to life. I think adding a strong non-canonical character is better than giving so much screentime to a weak but canonical one: Legolas. No disrespect to Orlando Bloom, but the writers dont' give him much to work with. The part could have been played by the CGI model they used in the action scenes.

One of the reasons I'm accepting of the whole Tauriel subplot is that it carries a deeply Tolkienian theme: the love between mortal and elvenkind. That was a profound part of Tolkien's personal mythology. On the gravestone he shares with his wife Edith, he added "Luthien" to her name and "Beren" to his. So I don't view weaving that theme into a dramatic treatment of the HOBBIT story as disrespectful to the author at all.

Here's the interesting thing, though. Let's agree that bottom-feeding is the natural ground state of a corporation; what that means is that nearly everybody is doing it, which means bottom-feeders on average don't make any more profit than you'd get investing in a mutual fund, but involve a lot more risk.

If you want to make *more* profit, you have to be about something *in addition to* profit. A great company has an identity which has value. This, by the way, is how Carly Fiorina ruined HP. She re-imagined HP as something more generic.

Air gapping the sensitive information is one of those things that looks easy on paper but runs afoul of the fact that people don't like to work that way. It's inefficient. It's not like people have *two* jobs, one sensitive the other not. They have one job in which sensitive bits are intertwined with regular bits, so in practiced people tend to cheat and do *some* sensitive work on the non-sensitive network.

Even if the users are unrealistically conscientious about never doing anything sensitive on their non-secure PCs, this intertwining of sensitive with ordinary information means that you can probably deduce a lot from apparently innocuous data. Imagine you discover the following information from poking around on an engineer's "non-sensitive" computer:

(1) He is exchanging email with certain university researchers setting up face to face meetings.
(2) He has downloaded datasheets for several families of exotic electronic components.
(3) He has telephone appointments in his calendar with salesmen from Unobtanium Corp.
(4) His browsing history shows he's been reading up on certain mathematical topics on Wolfram Alpha.

Now put this all together and another expert in his field might be able to deduce a lot more than you'd expect than if you looked at any one of these factors. The interconnected nature of an engineer's work means that if you remove all the sensitive bits it leaves a hole of a characteristic shape.

Until someone install something else on the network segment. Like a wireless access point. Or until malware takes over one of the trusted hosts.

Security vulnerabilities always involve violations of some assumptions you make, e.g. that anything coming from a certain set of hosts is benign, or that if a process on a server opens up an IP port it's *supposed* to do that. You want the security of a system to depend on as few assumptions as possible. If it does no harm in day to day operations and offers protection when your assumptions fail, why *not* run a software firewall?

It doesn't have to be linear to be useful. It simply has to be able to sort a set of choices into order -- like movie reviews. Nobody thinks a four star movie is "twice as good" as a two star movie, but people generally find the rank ordering of movies by stars useful provided they don't read to much into the rating. In fact the ordering needn't be unique; there can be other equally useful metrics which order the choices in a slightly different way. *Over certain domains of values* minor differences in orderings may not matter very much, especially as your understanding of your future requirements is always somewhat fuzzy (e.g. the future cost of bandwidth or computing power).

The problem with any metric occurs outside those domains; some parameters may have discontinuities in their marginal utility. A parameter's value may be good enough and further improvements yield no benefit; or the parmater's value may be poor enough to disqualify a choice altogether. In such cases such a metric based on continuous functions will objectively misorder choices.

For example Suppose A is fast enough but has poor compression ratios; B is not quite fast enough but has excellent compression ratios. There's really only one viable choice: A; but the metric may order the choices B,A.

On the other hand suppose A has better compression ratios than B; B is faster than A, but A is already so fast that it makes no practical difference. The rational ordering of choices is A,B but the metric might order them B,A.

This kind of thing is always a problem with boiling choices down to a single composite number. You have to understand what goes into that number and how those things relate to your needs. You have to avoid making your decisions on one number alone. But some people *will* fasten on a single number because it makes the job of choosing seem easier than it does. Just don't be one of those people.

Well, if you put yourself in his shoes you might well play hardball with other games in the hobby.

D&D as a system wasn't really all special; there were competing systems back in the days he was at TSR which were every bit as enjoyable and arguably easier to play. But D&D had two big things going for it. First, when the three basic manuals for AD&D were published it had by far the best organized and written materials. The Monster Manual was particularly useful. Second it had the network effect: it was the best system to learn to play because everyone else knew how to play it. You could start a campaign at a drop of a hat -- no need to bring everyone up to speed on yet another set of rules.

So put yourself in his position. The future success of D&D is contingent on no other game reaching critical mass. You're completely dependent on D&D, you have no other marketable skills or assets. You have a company with over a hundred employees (which is surely a mistake on your part), and that company has nothing else bringing in cash *but* D&D products. You've made D&D your life work. It's not a situation to bring out the best in people.

Different requirements drive different designs. Before WW2 seaplanes were common because of the lack of runways. After WW2 airports proliferated, and seaplanes couldn't keep up with technical advances due to the compromises involved in allowing them to land and take off from water. But that doesn't mean there aren't applications for aircraft with a flying boat's capabilities, it just means there isn't enough of a market in places like the US to support an industry. Even so, here in North America there are some 70 year-old WW2 Catalinas being used in aerial firefighting. China is a vast country which is prone to many kinds of natural disasters that could make airlifting in supplies difficult, so they may see potential applications we don't.

It's also interesting to note that seaplanes were highly useful in the pacific theater of WW2, and there hasn't been a protracted struggle for sea control *since* WW2. Also, China is a country with no operational aircraft carriers; aside from its training ship the Liaoning, it has a handful of amphibious assault ships that can carry a few helicopters. The US by contrast has ten supercarriers and nine amphibious assault ships that dwarf the aircraft carriers of WW2. The technology and expertise to run a carrier fleet like America's would take many years for China to develop. It's conceivable that the manufacturers imagine a military market for aircraft like this in the interim.

...or if he's using shell style wildcards, he could mean "pure and utter sherbet."

Reports of trains *not* running on time certainly decreased, but that's not quite the same thing...