It wasn't that long ago that Fry's wasn't so-so, they had shopping basket computer specials "This whole cart for $xxx" to build your own system. Some stores are better than others but they've gone downhill. It seems like every time I've tried to return something at Best Buy it's always been a real PITA, so I stopped shopping there entirely. I did recently try to replace an H100 CPU cooler that had gone Tango Uniform on a Sunday, Best Buy was still open so I went online and checked, yup, one H100 in stock at the local store, so I go there and they were having a special customer sales event, so first they wanted to know if I was invited. I then told them that I'd checked online yada yada, so they finally let me in. The sales associate was friendly but when I told him I was looking for a Corsair H100 CPU cooler, he showed me laptop coolers. Then I had to explain to him what it was I was looking for. While he went to get another sales associate I found them, but no H100. The reply "We sold the last one about two weeks ago." So much for their online accuracy on inventories. Sorry Best Buy, you lose and I found an H110 at Fry's the next day, opened box of course but it's working fine now, I'm still waiting for my RMA H100 to come back from Corsair...

Geebus, the factual errors on these summaries are becoming eye-watering!

The Guardian destroyed the laptop and the hard drive rather than turn them over. Shit, the title of the article has that in it:

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/aug/20/nsa-snowden-files-drives-destroyed-london

I consider it a brave act of defiance on the part of the Guardian, good for them. It won't affect the fact that there's probably stashed copies of this stuff everywhere but the British Authorities wanted the actual hardware, so rather than give it to them they used an angle grinder themselves.

Yeah political influence has done Assange well in his little room at the Ecuadorian Embassy. I can see them trying anything to get political influence anywhere, so this doesn't surprise me one bit.

At one time I had a Linkedin account, then I got rid of it. I still periodically look out there at people I've worked with. Let's see there was the Director in the Architecture Group at one organization that labelled his time as Director of Architecture. Of course there's the CIO that was CIO for three months then was fired but his Linkedin profile says he was CIO for two years at that organization. Some old habits die hard I guess, it's just now billions of people can see it.

Then there's the incessant asks from people that I've worked with to recommend them on Linkedin, which is now the substitute for what we call references. Sorry Joe, I can't recommend you because while we worked at the same place we never really worked on any projects together and from what I recall you were always late to meetings and people called you stinky behind your back when you weren't looking.

Sorry Linkedin, you like other Social Media sites are off of my list for good, you don't help me get my gigs and you certainly don't help me keep my confidential information confidential. That's not what they're about, I get it, but no, I'm not turning my CV over to your organization, not today not tomorrow, not ever.

The Amazon story of delivery of books/electronics and even adult products is showing how big they've grown. That coupled with a no hassle return policy makes them more compelling than Best Buy for example that rakes you over the coals if you return something. When I go to my local Fry's electronics for example, I look at it and say that it's becoming more of an everything store mimicking Amazon but even Fry's is now getting to be a so-so retailer and most likely I'll look at Amazon first before considering buying at Fry's. That's a sad statement of how good Amazon has become and how poor local retailers are becoming which just throws more competitive advantage Amazon's way.

Now Amazon is branching into Food delivery, which awhile back there was the Pea Pod delivery service, which largely failed along the lines of what folks discussed here: Quality of what was delivered. If Amazon can tackle the quality issue and I'm sure they will I think a lot of mom and pop grocery stores in large cities in this country should worry. Like Walmart that came in a crushed small town retailing Amazon will be in a position to threaten Walmart and other large chain stores, Target, Sears, KMart, JCPenny. Walmart suddenly woke up last year and stopped selling Amazon goods in their stores because they saw the threat.

That's what the appeals process is for so lawyers on both sides can argue what's right or wrong with the ruling. Amicus briefs can be filed by knowledgeable and respected organizations or individuals on both sides of the arguments as well to point out specific flaws or finer points that weren't exposed in the original trial. These briefs or amici curiae are most often used in appeals. So the EFF or the FSF could file a brief in the appeal on this case based on the legal and technical problems for society that it creates.

That doesn't solve the problem of a bad law, like the CFAA which is rotten to the core. In this case it sounds like 3Taps was told to stop particular activity, scraping servers, by Craigslist and when they didn't stop Craigslist pursued the matter in court. 3Taps also appears to have used masking techniques to try to hide their activities which also forced Craigslist to seek a judicial ruling. In this case the C&D didn't work, which is more friendly, 3Taps said screw that and then went after using proxy servers which Craigslist detected and somehow tracked back to 3Taps so in this case you have somebody you've told to stop accessing your website against your ToS and the CFAA applies there. Not that I agree with all of the CFAA but certainly telling somebody to stop breaking into your house, time and time again, is more than reasonable and when they won't stop you can seek legal means to make them stop. Craigslist has also shut down other apps that scraped their servers as well. Even though their UI sucks and it seems their legal team doesn't. Good for them.

A bunch of Walt Disney wannabes. It still amazes me that people actually believe that this kind of technology holds any promise unless your trying to create zombie armies of the undead.

RIM isn't an Threat to Google, maybe an acquisition target now that Blackberry is on the market

I've been looking and I don't see that referred to. Do you have a specific section that says it has to be HTML5?

I'm paying for college for two of my kids now and a third will be starting in a year. Trust me it makes no sense in terms of the increases and fees that colleges and universities charge. My latest annoyance with all of this are the techniques that the book publishers and the colleges are using to keep you going into the bookstore: One time use access cards for accessing online tests or other material, effectively negating the value of a used book.

True, they don't have a monopoly on streaming but they come pretty damn close.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K6JshvblIcM take a look at starting at 7:25. They stream an hour of video for every person on the planet in their own words. 25% of all downstream traffic in Europe.

Look up restraint of trade..

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_antitrust_law#Restrictive_practices

http://www.wisegeek.com/what-does-restraint-of-trade-mean.htm#didyouknowout

Microsoft has been picking on this one particular area of Google as well and has been critical of the FTC agreement earlier this year. Could they be picking a fight? Yes but Google playing hide and go seek with their APIs, as Microsoft is alleging, is an example of anti-competitive practice. A lot of this is obvious posturing but they wouldn't be doing it if they didn't feel that what Google was doing was in violation of the law. Microsoft is playing an interesting game with this, obviously but so is Google.

Well let's see what other folks have done under similar circumstances. By and large people don't lie under oath but sometimes...

Marion Jones http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marion_Jones Star Olympic Athlete

Here's a Police Seargent from Baltimore.

Mark Fuhrman (OJ Simpson Trial 1 fame)

Two police officers there and there's more, but they're sworn to uphold the law.

I'm not saying this guy lied but without corroborating statements from other witnesses or physical evidence it's his word against Ballmer's and I'll bet every other CEO has probably gritted their teeth at their competition as well and probably wished they were out of the way.

Live by the sword, die by the sword... ;-)

I did at one time too. It was the only way I could get Project Managers to stop adding new feature requests during code freezes. Does that make me Steve Ballmer?

You bring up a story that has no corroboration from anybody else. Does MSFT hate Google? Absolutely does Google hate MSFT? Absolutely. There's no love lost from between any of these companies but what you fail to acknowledge is that there are certain laws about non-competitive behavior including blocking your competitors from accessing things that you yourself make freely available in implementations that you provide especially since Google is in a dominant position in this area with YouTube, in a sense they have a monopoly which could be argued under the Sherman Act because if it was proven that they were putting up barriers to allow use, whether free or licensed, that would be a violation of the act. So let's watch and see. I do think it's funny that Microsoft, who Judge Penfield Jackson ruled should be broken up but was later removed from the case is now crying foul but if you live by the sword, you die by it as well.

From the same citation.

Let's see you have a guy trying probably trying to get out of his non-compete and an interesting story. While Ballmer is a bit out there I hardly think he's Bobby Knight material. There was also nobody else present so while interesting I don't think it means much other than the fact that Google and Microsoft are competitors. This was back in 2005, and as I can see he didn't hang around Google for that long either. In 2009 he joined VMware.

While I won't discount the guys background and his contributions to Microsoft it doesn't sound like he was exactly the brains behind Windows NT..

So he was a release manager. I doubt Ballmer would have thrown a chair over those kinds of skills.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Lucovsky