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.

Smartwatch wishlist:
Shockproof
Waterproof (200 m)
Solar Powered
Flat but Sturdy - Think a combination of Casio G-Shock and Skagen
Pressure Sensor / Height Meter / Variometer
Temperature Sensor
Environment Sensor
Complete Biosensor Package
FOSS OS with every aspect configurable, especially blocking of corporate tracking (Google, Facebook, etc.)
Speed-charging mode
Assistance AI ('please' of course being optional :-) )
      --> Watch, when does the milonga in collogne start today?
      --> Watch, are the regional trains to collogne on schedule?
      --> Watch, please warn me if I cross the speed limit.
      --> Watch, please navigate me along the fastest route to school.
      --> Watch, I hear cheering from all the windows around me - who just scored a goal?
      --> Watch, guide me to the nearest DM that stocks dental care. (Watch knows that I'm on foot and guides me to the nearest Tramstation if required.)
      --> Watch, has the bike shop gotten back to us yet? (Watch checks voicebox and all message channels including mail)
      --> Watch, please tell me if todays schedule is still valid or if there are any unforseen changes.
      --> Watch, what was her name again? Just show, don't say.
      --> Watch, please record a tracklist of everything the DJ is playing tonight. Use any analytical software available, not just shazam. And establish what it would cost to buy that tracklist on the music platforms that we're registred on.
      --> Watch, please silence youself and all my devices in proximity until tomorrow 7:30 in the morning. Silence all priority notifications except the "Company Server Down" Alert. And go into "Push to show" mode for your clockface and turn of all screensavers and backlights. (Thinks to himself: I want to enjoy this evening/night with this tango-cutie here without any further disturbance. :-) ) ...

you get the picture.

Furhtermore:
Standardised wrist strap connections
Cheap and available spare wriststraps in variing colors and materials
Cheap and available spare and extra bumber cases in variing colors and materials
1st hand 3D printing files of wriststraps and variant bumper cases
Quick change from wriststrap to pocket'watch' / pocketdevice mode ...
And probably some other things I haven't thought of yet. ...Allthoug I couldn't say if such a watch would be good for me. With that type of AI my brain would probably start to rott from under-usage quite soon :-) .

My 2 cents.

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.

"A multithreaded file system is only a performance hack. When there is only one job active, the normal case on a small PC, it buys you nothing and adds complexity to the code. On machines fast enough to support multiple users, you probably have enough buffer cache to insure a hit cache hit rate, in which case multithreading also buys you nothing." - Andy Tanenbaum on the "LINUX is obsolete" Thread from 30 Jan '92

Nice to see a so called "expert" so far off. Seriously, not the first CS Professor to be completely backwards. I've met a few of those too. :-)

Just like most of the Emirates, Dubai is a Disneyland. Only bigger.

Seriously, I don't know what crack these bedus are smoking, but there are more books translated into spanish each year than into any language of the emirates in the past 100 years. These people base huge chunks of their view of the world on an ancient facist monotheistic religion, live in societies that by social structure resemble the grimmest of dark ages, sharia law and all, and all they have is truckloads of money from selling their oil and no real idea what to do with it other than squander obscene amounts of resources to build a huge disneyland out in the desert. The amounts of water wasted alone are beyond imagination.

I'd have no problem with building a high-tech nation within a few years, if I'd actually be seeing some real progress, but I don't. I'm seriously sceptical of Dubai and its likes gaining critical mass and actually building sustainable societies

The prince of Dubai would be well advised to use all that money of his of building universities, implementing basic human rights and getting a modern society going and perhaps building a modern armed force to defend it. Since it doesn't look that way, I'm not placing my bets to high on this whole Dubai thing.

I wouldn't be suprised if this all collapses within 20 years and we have a bunch of impressive ruins but nothing more.

My 2 cents.

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?