Getting "gobs" of RD-RAM involved fat modules.

Aside from muck-raking HP, The Register also did a lot to raise public awareness of problems with Intel in the P4 era.

Caminogate failure finally explained

RD-RAM was supposed to support three slots, but they couldn't make it work. It was one fiasco after another.

Mercifully, we got AMD64 out of the deal and a healthy competitor until Intel's Israeli team kicked out the CoreDuo.

Intel subsequently played the UEFI card, but it's a dim echo of their original agenda.

I've had something like this happen twice. The first time a company shipped me something I ordered, and then a few days later something I didn't. I let them know, and they sent me a prepaid return sticker, and scheduled for UPS to come pick it up, they told me to just leave it on my porch.

No problem there, I was happy to get them their stuff back because it wasn't any issue for me. I didn't have to expend any real time and effort fixing their mistake. A quick e-mail to them, and then slap a label on it (they actually mailed me one) and drop the box on my porch.

Another time an eBay seller fucked up an order bad. They shipped some fairly cheap headphones I had purchased to a guy, and instead shipped me two McIntosh monoblock tube amplifiers worth about $10,000 each that he had purchased. I was a little perplexed by these massive 100 pound each boxes when I expected headphones

Well they were annoyed at me that I didn't refuse the delivery "like I should have" (I wasn't there, the apartment manager accepted packages for us) and wanted me to take them to UPS and ship them to the other buyer. They said they'd refund the shipping charge when he got the amps. I told them to fuck off, they could send me shipping labels and have them picked up, or go away. The were butthurt about that, but finally agreed.

So depends on how the company has acted. If they truly are making it no hassle on the part of the customer: As in willing to send them a shipping label (and if necessary a box) and schedule a pickup, then ok. However if they expect the customer to go out of their way to fix the fuckup, then no. Sometimes what they mean by "no inconvenience" is really "We want you to deal with the hassle of a return, then we'll refund you the money for shipping later, maybe."

When they are the ones that fuck up, it is their duty to make it right, with as little impact on you as possible.

What's really interesting, however, is that the postal carrier's union was a strong proporent of that 75-year prefunding law.

True Libertarians don't think the government should be able to regulate the frequency spectrum either, and that anyone who wants to should be able to broadcast anything they want, on any frequency they want, using any encoding they want, even if it's incompatible with everything else or even jams someone else's broadcast.

Anybody else remember the commercials they ran when that law was passed? i remember an Eskimo getting a fan in the mail and was like "Gee...thanks".

As for TFA surely the EU has a similar law, otherwise what would keep the bogus sales scams from picking on the old folks over there?

That's totally impossible to do in reality. Making it so the media companies can't own the DVR companies would require non-corrupt government regulation, which is impossible in the USA. That's like asking for financial regulation that doesn't reward big finance companies for failure, and prevents them from gambling banking deposits on housing.

The fixation on "best" accepted theory is more about hubris than insight.

The Kolmogorov/Chaitin view is that you should believe every statement about the universe that you can't formally disprove—all at the same time— using an exponentially weighted average based on the minimum description length of each viable description (baroque theories with billions of epicycles are down-weighted by k^-1e9, where k is the mean entropy of your typical epicycle). I don't really know the math, so take that with a grain of salt, but it's at least the general idea.

The standard model is extremely cogent and concise. It will exponentially outweigh practically everything else.

The only reason this isn't used is that we pretty much never know the minimum description length for anything (there's a result where something akin to minimum description is length is formally proven to be the hardest computation definable), and we can't take the exponentially-weighted integral of all as-yet undisproven theories by any convenient method.

Any undisproven theory that comes along with the potential to be formulated as cogently (or nearly so) as the standard model should be regarded as valid until proven otherwise (either false, or irredeemably baroque).

There's no sane reason to impose incumbency politics on theory. Theory is not a vote.

Crop growers need bees. Beekeepers supply bees. When bees die, beekeepers make more. Maybe crop growers pay more and prices increase a little.

If pesticides on crops are killing bees, crop growers might have to decide whether they want the benefit of the pesticide at the cost of paying more for bees. It's probably not a hard calculation for them.

This is only "alarming" for drama people.

You'd be the first asshole to call the cops if I played a loud radio in front of your house.

I have arthritis. I can walk 4 blocks to the supermarket and back, but by the time I get home it's painful. But what am I going to do? I want my independence.

My post office stopped delivering packages, and I have to pick them up at the local post office. Every time I see a slip in my mailbox for a package, it means another painful trip to the post office.

You cannot expect sound judgement from a population that averages a 5th grade reading comprehension and nearly 7% believe that lizard people secretly control the government... or aren't sure. I'm all for democracy -- when the general population is educated. California is one of the most populated states in the country, and also one of the least-educated overall. The results are, well... exactly as described.

The people are morons. Why do you think the electoral college was created to begin with? Direct democracy is usually a disaster and which is precisely why it's been so rarely used by governments past and present. These initiatives were also sponsored by the same people who put a lot of money into the campaign funds of the lawmakers they allegedly were over-ruling. So no, this isn't about your ad hominid that *I* am disagreeing... it's quite plain that California is off the rails. If you want to point fingers at why, be my guest... but the majority of the rest of the country wishes it would hurry up and slide off into the ocean. We even tried giving California back to Mexico over a hundred years ago... they wouldn't take it.

Please stop. I've now cited an official government source, and a reputable international source. Both of these analysis were done by a team of economists, nuclear engineers, and accounted for as many factors as reasonably can be taken into consideration. You have cited... absolutely nothing.

Redhat and Canonical aren't even in the same league. Redhat is managing major projects like KVM. Canonical spends its energies on pointless projects that no one wants. I don't want to lionize Redhat in any way, but if Canonical fell into a hole in the Earth tomorrow, Linux was go merrily along, but if Redhat died, it would have a pretty serious and negative effect on a number of key projects.

I have never followed the flock.

But there are benefits to cooperation (as any evolutionary biologist will tell you). It's necessary to get the job done. It's necessary to get ahead. If you try to get ahead by screwing everybody else, you may find out that it comes back to bite you.

But it's all moot. You're not in the U.S., and you may never get here. You can't make up for bad grades by working cheaper. If you're willing to work for less in a free market, that means you're worth less.

Ayn Rand died alone, without friends, attended by a paid nurse. That's where the virtue of selfishness gets you.

That does look cool, but why on earth did they base it on Ubuntu, instead of Debian? Looks like they want to do things their own way, but they've huddled up under Ubuntu's umbrella, where it's the "Ubuntu way, or the highway!" As a straight Debian derivative, they would have far more room to maneuver, which ever direction they decided to maneuver in.