"The FBI" is not a monolithic thing.

He didn't take it to an FBI technician-- if he did, it'd probably have been cleaned up tight and fast. He took it into his office, where TFA says *they don't have cyber guys*. I.e., he's in some dingy little office without a cyber crimes unit. This doesn't sound implausible at all, the guy's in an FBI office across the Pacific in a US territory, not in Los Angeles.

Then he took it in to a local computer repair shop, and it doesn't at all sound implausible to me that they might have fibbed on just what they did. Instead of re-imagining it, they may have just done a quick scrub of the user settings.

"The FBI" didn't go through a two step process. A guy who is also an FBI agent went through a two step process. Not everything an FBI agent does is with the full force and resources of The FBI.

Not all FBI agents are computer wizzes. TFA said that the office he was in had no computer crimes unit which is where the computer wizzes congregate.

And it surprises you that a computer repair shop might not actually do what they say they are going to? Really?

Read TFA -- the Judge made a note of this. The initial report that he got was just him as a father: after that what he was doing was basically being an FBI agent. *However* even though he was, the fact that the computer was essentially stolen meant the guy had no expectation of privacy for it. anyways.

That's what I thought at first, having lived through Andrew in Florida -- I was all, "psh, its only a category 1". However, thi sisn't a Yankees media situation. Sandy was significantly more powerful then the category would imply.

For one thing, by the time it hit NYC, it was no longer a hurricane -- it had merged with one or two cold storm systems that were coming in from the other direction. This changed the dynamic of the storm significantly: whereas hurricanes gain their energy from the warm ocean waters, this type of storm gained its energy from the difference between the cold and hot storm systems merging together. Or something. (The precise details are not clear to me: I'm not a meteorologist)

Sandy was also *huge* -- measuring the total energy in the storm, it was bigger then Katrina. Hurricanes can get intense but the brunt of their power is focused. They may have a lot of wind speed, and strictly by that measure Sandy wasn't very impressive... but when you have a cat 1 spread out as far as Sandy was, its pulling in a HUGE amount of water.

It wasn't the wind that was so destructive here: it was the storm surge that the huge storm system brought with it.

More sciency stuff at http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/capital-weather-gang/post/sandy-packed-more-total-energy-than-katrina-at-landfall/2012/11/02/baa4e3c4-24f4-11e2-ac85-e669876c6a24_blog.html (Warning: yankee media)

But, really. Its not just rhetoric of omg the Yanks are finally getting hit that made this seem bad. It really was a very, very, very bad storm and the hurricane classification only makes it seem small.

My paraphrasing may have made it sound like that routine because I've seen it so it may have lingered in the back of my mind: but that is just the paraphrasing. The tweets were much worse and personal. It was along the lines of saying he has his theoretical black "friends" and he's fine with them, but those unknown-blacks that voted for Obama are niggers. To me the "tone" (insofar as texts have tones) was nothing like Chris Rock's thing.

Then again, I'm not sure a white dude saying "nigger" and a black dude saying "nigger" can ever really be compared fairly. :)

In this case, its pretty easy.

If you say he's a bad President with bad policy decisions and poor judgement, that's the content of his character (or actions). If you say he's a (sand) nigger or muslim or mention slavery or his non-whiteness, as many of those posts in the blog did, its racist. If you talk about the preferred method of assassination being lynching as MANY of these did, its *really* racist (also stupid as shit).

Those were *really* blatant. "I'm not racist!" one said, "I like plenty of black people, I just hate niggers" (paraphrased by me, site's down now). Its hard to read that as anything but, "I like the black people who know their place, i.e., subservient to my white ass." And that'd be one of the nicer ones.

Things get fuzzier when you have someone talking about the loss or waning of "Traditional America", which is IMO racist -- but which is trying very hard to cover it.

When you talk about the only reason he won is because the "new" America is getting "gifts" from Santa, you're bemoaning the decline of the white male bloc and rather offensively deciding no one but that white male bloc can make an intelligent decision on its merits -- that's just generally insulting, but arguably not quite racist. But is it *damn* close to both racism and male chauvinism (since this new America also happens to include whores and sluts: i.e., single women who are thinking only of sex sex sex sex sex sex and all the sex they can have for free now, and not about the future as a responsible wife and mother would).

Sure there are plenty of people who are Obama critics who are not racists. However, a LOT are -- and a LOT of what's going around is very thinly veiled racism. This blog was posting up stuff which didn't even try to veil said racism, though. :)

When a frankly moderate (at best: we progressives did /not/ get the far-left guy we thought we wanted) President's every action is treated as some sort of alien insurrection that is utterly incomprehensible to the people -- there's something more then just policy disagreement going on. It's so far beyond partisan or political policy.

Isn't that typical only when taking cases on contingency? In this case, they're billing Apple their hourly rate. (Probably a very high one: don't get me wrong, the lawyers are making plenty of money off of Apple here -- but I don't believe its a percentage of the awarded damages)

IIUC, and I didn't even think I understood it at all before this well-written article, you're confusing the Higgs Boson and the Higgs Field.

The *particle* -- the boson -- does not give anything mass, the *field* does. Particles interact with the field, and have inertial mass as a result. But we can't detect the field. However, since particles and fields are the same thing, we /can/ in theory detect occasional blips in the field, when the energy of the field materializes as the particle. (E=mc2) That's very rare, and those don't last very long, which is why its elusive.

But those particles aren't what's important. They don't give everything mass, they aren't everywhere: they may have been around at the start of the universe when everything was all bursting with energy and such, but they quickly decayed; the field persisted though, and that underlining /field/ of the same name, is everywhere.

I think.

JD sells more then booze. A lot more.

They sell books, too, among other things. The core business of JD is booze, but their brand is much bigger then that.

Some of it is just merchandise for the fans. Others are things like cookbooks who have licensed JD's trademark.

Trademarks do not leave open the option of just letting it go; they /have/ to be enforced, or the claim weakens and sooner or later the company gets into court on a real, *major* violation and the mark is ruled abandoned.

JD makes more then just whiskey. They make all kinds of merchandise that is related to their core business, all under the same brand umbrella, all under the same image. No one would confuse his book for a bottle of whiskey, but they may confuse it for some official JD-endorsed publication. Is that very likely? Hard to say.

However, JD is _required_ to enforce their trademark or they *lose* it.

There's nothing wrong about it. Trademarks require enforcement or you lose them. They aren't copyright, "fair use" as copyright defines does not apply.

A few more dollars, so like, $40? Okay, I'd do $40 for a more powerful CPU and more RAM. Maybe $50? Sure, I have the cash. I mean, it goes against the goal and purpose of the Raspberry Pi, so it might not make the target audience happy, but sure.

Except, just some minor googling seems to put the items you're listening at $90 to $150. That's not a few more dollars. That's two to four times the cost.

Because they voluntarily joined the WTO, because they *chose* to submit to certain trade agreements. Because they get lots of benefits by being in the WTO, and are expected to comply with their obligations.

Among those is that if they are selling this mineral to a Chinese company for X, then an American company has to be able to buy it for X, too. The market value of the mineral is X, period. Thus, Chinese and American companies are in competition for the mineral on an even footing. That's what the WTO membership requires.

In this case, more importantly, if they are allowing Chinese companies to buy as much of the mineral as they'd like, but limiting export, then they're unfairly advantaging their companies in a way that is specifically not allowed by the WTO rules they agreed to when they joined. Now, there are some reasons to limit exports, and its up to the US/EU and others to prove it to the WTO. Submitting to WTO judgement on such matters is also something China agreed to.

But this isn't some kind of unilateral international pressure or something. This is about China *volunteering* to join an organization knowing full well that doing so was agreeing to abide by certain regulations, in return for getting access to markets and trade benefits.

Lawyers are not free. Being sued is a royal pain in the ass. Having to deal with it may not be worth the trouble to him, even if it would turn out he'd surely win.

I'm sure Apple would love nothing more then to go SIMless: the idea of completely eliminating a component would thrill them. Think of what they could put in its place!

But, the carriers rejected that idea hard, years ago. So Apple is doing the next best thing: trying to make the damn things as small as possible so they can recover the space for other things.

The manufacturers only have so much power-- even Apple, whose influence over carriers is unparalleled and unprecedented, has limits to what it can twist their arm into doing. Unfortunately.