Cute, but they aren't really buying them right now. It's agreeing to buy from one of the tranches in future.

The issue is whether or not they were going to (re)open the bidding process and under what terms. We could buy aircraft right now if we wanted to buy used, or we could buy Eurofighters or modernized F18's reasonably quickly. F18's and F35's would come with industrial guarantees (we buy x billion in aircraft we get some fraction of x in guaranteed production of boeing or F35 parts in canada). Or a couple of other options that have various features (the rafaeles from France or the Gripen from Saab or F16's etc.).

But of course we already agreed to be part of the R&D for the F35 and the point of that was to be in on the programme from the beginning and to buy aircraft, so we could withdraw but that would likely make more than a few people angry, and all of the other options entail different risks. I'm not sure in the end that it makes a great deal of difference, countries fly all of the potential aircraft on the list, and the F35 is slated for significant production, and really any of them would mix some sort of industrial, combat capabilities and strategic interests in a reasonable way.

iPhones are good for people who aren't ever going to be able to understand their phone, will use it for important things, have money, and want something that will just be updated. Android and the lack of software updates is a serious mess, and hardware is only useful if you can understand how to use it.

Apple doesn't offer a product in the garbage range.

If you go into a store today you can probably still find devices for sale running android 2.x. Expensive high end devices too, but if you buy a cheap droid you're in for a bad time. In the same way you can buy 7 and 8 year old blackberries too. I wouldn't recommend most of the really cheap droid products to anyone.

Being a professor is not a low paying job.

Being an adjunct professor is usually unpaid - but it's because you're a professor (or otherwise employed) elsewhere, and sessional instructors are paid a pittance because they're supposed to have other jobs, including grad students.

But I just started as an L5 (which is the same pay band as a starting assistant professor) where I am - I'll slide over to assistant professor when I am actually granted the PhD, and that's a starting salary of 82k, 6 weeks vacation and a pension and benefits plan at a university you've never heard of with at total of 4 full time CS faculty equivalent. Admittedly, I have undergraduate students from where I am finishing my doctorate who are going to microsoft and google for ~70-80k, but they don't get 6 weeks paid vacation and they work at companies you've heard of in cities you know exist.

According to my contract assuming I stick around for 30 years for retirement and bump up one step per year along the grid I'll retire at 157k/year (in today's money) used to calculate my pension, assuming I do no teaching overloading, no senate, deans office or chairmanship work. And I can consult on the side as much as I want, just not on university equipment, as long as all of my courses get taught acceptably and the total of 4 grad students a year (2 part time 2 full time typically) that the department has are supervised.

So thats for a bottom tier university, with virtually no research expectations and basically focused on undergraduate teaching, and I'm being paid the same way as every other prof in all the other faculty. Big places - the nearest big well regarded school to us is University of Toronto, and they pay better, and not to much farther along is waterloo, who are more or less the same pay band as we are.

That's not great certainly - I know a few people from my doctoral programme who are starting around 130-140 in the valley, and about 90-100 in places with sensible housing prices. You can certainly clear 250, 300 if you consult, and I can do that, but having a professorship with a pension plan is a good place to be.

Far reaching in the sense that anyone who wants to do business in germany has to figure out how to comply with the rules, which may be distinct from the rules where they are based.

Lets say the german photographer backed up his images to a google drive account. What (if any) responsibility does google have in enforcing a ruling like this?

What if the couple lived in Germany when they took the photos, but one party moved to another EU country? What about a non EU country? What about photographs taken while on holiday in france but brought back to germany (and variants) etc.?

Are there other things potentially on conditional contracts like this?

my GF and I regularly exceeded 300GB a month as of a couple of years ago.

Lots of video games are going to be >50 GB for 'next gen' and 20 or 30 is going to be the norm for anything from a major publisher. 4k resolution displays and streaming for multiple users and 300 GB doesn't go very far.

Because 90% of all of the other users use office still too, and it gets the job done and they know how to use it. That doesn't make it good, but usually it makes it the best tool for the job.

I have a a seiki 39inch 4k monitor, it works, (albeit only at 30FPS due to HDMI 1.4 being rather limited), and it was under 500 dollars delivered, so... the colour etc. aren't as good as monitors 6-10x the price. But it works.

But it's not mainstream, and for that price point the quality is mediocre at best, and most people aren't going to blow 3 or 4k on a monitor. You could do 4 1080p monitors and have a similar to 4k experience today (or even more monitors I think eyefinity will handle 6 with a decent setup fairly easily). But as a practical matter the vast majority of end users aren't ready for 4k displays, the hardware and software to support it exist, but are not quite ready for primetime. GPU's don't have enough memory, lots of applications don't play nice high density displays or just with ultra high pixel counts.

Considering they're ~1000 bucks a pop that's not as great volume wise as it could be.

But still, the only way you make a better product is make the best product you can, find out what works and what doesn't and make it better.

(Full disclosure, Surface 2 owner, and while I'm reasonably happy with the hardware, Windows 8 is terrible, but at least I can do all of my computing on a single device on the road).

There's a fair point that grad students are probably on average a bit underpaid for the work they perform (research+ marking etc.) even if the hourly rate is good, the limited official hours etc. are not all that great.

But ya, if you can't live on what you're going to get paid as a grad student and don't have other means, don't go. Pick a degree where you can get money for grad school and can get a job on the side or go back to school when you have the financial means to support it.

In this case this is *after* the estate was settled, but it was settled wrongly. You can't just have the executor of the estate neglect to consider outstanding debts and act as though nothing happened.

The heirs are responsible for debts that weren't properly dealt with.

And perhaps a better question might be why a country with 5 million people trying to revolt against their legal government should, 240 years later, dictate how a country of ~315 million spanning a great deal more territory and with a great deal more international recognition should be behaving.

The constitution was never intended to be immutable at the best of times, and one can reasonably see how technology and the strategic situation of the US have changed over the years. What might have been reasonably self evident to people looking at the world in 1776 doesn't mean it makes sense today.

Presumably it is the estate they are going after, and as beneficiaries of the estate they are responsible for the debts of the estate.

Of course this many years later it is impossible to try and defend yourself, particularly as the law *was* that 10 year old debts disappeared, so you could destroy any paperwork from the estate from before 2003 or 2004, and now have no paperwork trail to try and defend yourself with (assuming you had one to begin with, given that inheriting an estate comes with inheriting whatever recording keeping was done, which may have been terrible).

It boggles the mind why Microsoft put shitty laptop CPU ram in a gaming device.

The devs are trying to find a balance point between visual quality (memory taken) and performance (memory bandwidth) but the 68GB/s memory bandwidth on the XB3 is way too low. IMO the 175 ish on the PS4 is too low too. For 30 FPS remember that only means you can have 2GB of stuff on screen at a time, for 60... well, 1 GB of stuff. (That's not counting AI and Audio).

Yes, sure, the dev's need to make a game for it, but that's really hard to do when basically it's going to be like running the game on very low on the XB2, low on the XB3 and very high on even a mid range PC with a dedicated GPU that isn't terrible.

If you look at the Mantle benchmarks for various games it's pretty clear that it doesn't get you much on half decent systems, and on high end systems you're looking a negligible effect. I would think the same is true of DX12, which does the same basic thing.

For all the complaining about the Xb3 it's not terrible hardware, it's some odd choices compared to the PS4 and it's slow compared to a high end PC. But it's not in an absolute sense bad hardware.