This is a case of over eager executives at GT biting off more than they could chew and a bunch of over eager executives at Apple trying way too hard to maximise profits with the result that everybody ended up with egg on their face. So IMHO they are both to blame. GT had the option of not signing a deal that was "onerous and massively one-sided" and telling Apple to go jump in a lake. As regards Apple they should have known better than to offer GT that crappy deal in the first place. I mean saving costs by not to installing backup power supplies on the sapphire growth furnaces, really? Contrary to what some people in the business community seem think you CAN actually end up paying a dollar for trying to save a cent. Somebody at Apple got too greedy and they deserve being a laughing stock of the tech industry as a result.

This is one thing I have never quite understood about the USA. Even in places where hurricanes and earthquakes are common they put electric lines on wooden poles with the result that when an earthquake occurs or a hurricane blows through the streets are literally covered with downed power lines. I live in an earthquake prone region where we almost exclusively use underground wiring. We've never had an outage because of an earthquake. Come to think of it we've never had more than minor damage to buildings as result of even the biggest storms the N-Atlantic has thrown at us while the power grid didn't even notice the storms. This brings me to my curiosity over why Americans keep building houses out of wood in these regions? In California for example much of the earthquake damage seems to be wooden houses although they have noticeably strengthened building codes Californians are still stuck with a whole lot of vulnerable older houses. I was watching a documentary on the reconstruction of areas around New Orleans and along the Mississippi and I was surprised to see that these houses that had been destroyed were simply being rebuilt as they had been before without any attempt to adapt the architecture such that the habitable areas of houses are not at ground level. I have travelled in South East Asia where they have similar flooding problems as the Americans have around the Gulf Coast and the Mississippi river and most of the houses there are built on stilts with the habitable area upstairs while the area under the house is used for storage. It takes a pretty massive flood to reach the upper floors of houses that are built like that. There are companies that specialise in house liftings in the US, I'm surprised the practice is not more wides spread than it seems to be. I suppose it's just to expensive?

Why bother with the hacks then? If you want unlimited wall hacks you might as well just hold your tournament in a flat open arena with no cover anywhere and disable all the equalisation algorithms. If you want a hacking challenge try hacking some major corporate network. This also has the benefit of being followed by a stretch of vigorous physical exercise as you try to run away from the FBI SWAT team.

Because the EU added several Eastern European nations as members who were, and to some extent still are, recovering from two world wars and 50 years as vassal states of the Soviet Union. Man of these countries are suffering through the usual corruption and political instability issues that plague all young democracies. Just try to imagine that the USA admitted a few dysfunctional South American countries with broken economies and a few tens of millions of poor working class citizens as new states of your union. The per capita economic output of the USA would take a bit of a nosedive. The reason that most US-headquartered companies are recognising their revenue in Ireland is because they are dodging taxes, the EU as a whole does not benefit from that because their corporate slime balls are doing the same thing. The only ones benefitting from the now famous 'double Irish' tax dodge are corrupt Irish politicians.

But China was demanding a bit more than the EU who merely wants Google to break up it's operations in the EU into separate business units. China wanted Google to censor web searches and rat out Chinese citizens for regime critical utterances and activities. Pulling out of China in the face of those demands makes sense since Google's position as an information broker depends to a large extent on whether the public trusts them or not. If a large number of people get the notion that Google cannot be trusted, Google could easily see a collapse of it's share of the internet search market. Of course somebody will inevitably ignore this fact and go straight to pointing out that Google feeds information about it's users to the NSA as a matter of course (and as if that was a proven fact) to which I'll respond that I'm no friend of Google, I think they have become a dangerous monopolist, but I'll also consider them innocent of collaborating with the NSA until they are proven guilty.

Who ever made that claim and how is it even relevant? What matter to Google (and any other company engaging in anti capitative behaviour) is that far as anti-trust issues are concerned the EU is a single entity.

Precisely, no plan in the history of planning has survived contact with reality undamaged. He should brush up on the concept of diminishing returns which is basically what you are talking about. There are other interesting places to visit and blowing your budget on one mission is dumb.

About TRIM: I upgraded my MacBook with a 480Gb OCW SSD module myself. In the two years since I did that I have not given TRIM a second thought and I have not noticed the SSD performance taking a nosedive either. According to OCW the built in garbage collector on their drives is so efficient that there is no marked improvement in running TRIM on the drive and from what I have been able to find out this built in garbage collector actually seems to work pretty well. I suppose I lucked out when I bought that drive.

About the cost of storage: The price of preinstalled Apple SSDs is pretty outrageous although I'm not sure that your claim of equivalent PC drives costing half or less is quite accurate. Do you have any accurate information on what the spare parts prices of Apple brand SSDs are? I'd be interested to know. While I draw the line at paying for an Apple brand SSD a price that is 2-3 times that of an equivalent PC SSD like you are suggesting I'm still not going to skimp on storage. My MSc project advisor wrote a paper on the efficiency of SSD controllers and one of the things that came out of that research was that in many cases the onboard memory management system on these SSD drives is crap but generally you also get what you pay for which only confirmed what experience had taught me. Buying a budget SSD is like buying budget brake pads for your car on Alibaba, direct from China...

And that concludes my rant.

In my country gun control means you don't get to own a gun if you have a criminal record, you don't get to own a gun unless you first learned to use it properly, you don't get to own a gun unless you have demonstrated knowledge oft the relevant laws, you don't get to own a gun unless you have a certified firearms and ammo storage locker, you don't get to own an gun without registering it with the police and you don't get to sell your gun without first informing the police. However, as long as you aren't a former bank robber or something like that and you are willing to put in some time and effort to do a course in the proper use of firearms and the relevant laws, anybody can own a gun if they want. The one thing that pisses me off about gun laws in my country is how hard it is to import guns. Just the shipping charges can be higher than the value of a weapon and you get one extortionate bill for "secure transport" per weapon. Paradoxically the country that puts up the biggest barrier when it comes to importing weapons from there is the USA. It seems that if you are in the US you can buy guns by the crate off the back of a pickup on the parking lot outside of a gun show no questions asked. On the other hand if you happen to be from outside the US and to want to buy, say, a hunting rifle you can't get through a dealer in your country you have your work cut out for you due to US regulations on arms exports to foreign civilians. Many US exporters are very reluctant to fulfil orders to private individuals overseas even through an licensed overseas gun dealer. I'm told this is because they are afraid to get sued.

He did that already, the only member so far is Larry Ellison.

I did and it is interesting, especially the part where it says that Northern Europeans are more strongly related to the original European hunter gatherers who presumably were the population that absorbed the original eurasian Neandertahl and Densiovian populations. It's gotten me even more interested in getting my DNA analyzed for archaic human ancestry. It would be ever so cool to find out I'm in the high range with 4-5% or more Neanderthal DNA or perhaps even coolest of all, Neandertahl mtDNA.

They're not 'ideas', there is now actual DNA evidence for the presence of a Native Americans in Europe before Columbus. The same goes for Polynesians visiting America there is enough evidence to warrant further investigation. Polynesians found tiny little islands but missed two ginormous continents? Really? I'm no scientist but I do know enough about navigation to know that this suggestion is just plain stupid. It's a bit of a catch 22, if you are unwilling to investigate anything without evidence than you never find any evidence because you never investigate anything. People like you is the reason we need nutty scientists who go out on a limb. Sometimes they actually discover something that runs contrary to everything their more conservative colleagues held to be unchallengeable truths and often these colleagues are people who dominate a field, i.e. the 'great egos'. My favorite example of this is probably the supposed impossibility of there being Neanderthal DNA in modern humans. There were a number of great scientific egos who dominated the field of paleontology who ended up with egg all over their faces over that one, especially Ian Tattersall. Tattersall never went looking because there was no evidence, Svante Pääbo went and did something that was supposed to be impossible and then he actually went looking for something despite having no evidence and lo and behold he found found it.

You just described the rise of Christianity in the Roman empire.

Religious outrage, racist outrage, nationalist outrage. They are all equally stupid. I have had a long series of strange discussions with people of all these denominations about the building of a Mosque in my town. The argumentation goes that: "Do you know how many Churches there are in Saudi Arabia? Have you seen what they are doing to Christians in Iraq!?! We must ban mosques immediately to prevent this from happening here before the Moslems rise up and impose Sharia law on all of us!!!". Really? Says I, for one thing our moslems are a small and moderate minority; how are they supposed to impose Sharia law on us (Answer: Uhhhhhhhhmmmmm.... Uhhhh.... I just fear that they just will!). Secondly I find it interesting that you are implying that one can use the stupidity and cruelty of people in other countries to justify doing stupid and cruel things to innocent people in your own country? In that case did you notice what the Serbs did to Moslems in Bosnia? Did you notice what the white patriotic christian knights of the Ku Klux Klan did to African Americans, Latinos and other minorities in the USA? We must ban Christianity immediately!!! Remarkably enough they considered equating all moslems with ISIS and banning Islam to be a reasonable and natural thing to do (even though the local moslem community is just about the most peaceful and law abiding group of people in our country) but they went absolutely apeshit when I applied their own logic to Christianity. It got even funnier when I pointed out that both the Serbs and the Ku Klux Klan are white and perhaps we should ban white people since most of the people involved in this discussion including my self were white. I just find it endlessly fascinating how the minds of these people work. They keep citing the Constitution when it supports their point of view but then they want to ban Moslems from practicing their religion, ban immigration of non-whites or put gay people in jail for offending christian fanatics everywhere by existing the Constitution can apparently be ignored.

There is now also a YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/watch?...