There's a shift in China. Some foreign goods/brands remain as status symbols, but some are losing their luster.

The U.S. has been acting like a bigger dick than usual lately. Chinese consumers would rather not buy American (or Japanese) brands when there's a choice. It doesn't matter that the dick's product are made in China.

That's not my opinion, so don't get mad at me. That's what I was told when I was there last month.

I was raided by the drug squad in 1980, they found nothing because I had nothing. They were surprisingly friendly and somewhat sheepish about searching after initially surrounding the house and jamming a jackboot in the doorway, maybe it was my calm (bewildered) demeanor or perhaps it was the wife and baby in the background that helped chill them out. Whatever it was they basically gave up after looking in a couple of cupboards and the greenhouse out back, when they left they said it was an "anonymous tip off" and hinted that the old woman next door didn't approve of young men with long hair.

I have no ill feeling toward the drug squad because of the raid, they behaved like people put into an awkward position by social circumstance, apologized profusely for the commando crap, and did not trash the place - but I know for a fact that it doesn't always turn out like that.

Edithvale, best beach in Melbourne. :)

....And in an emergency you can wipe your arse with a newspaper, if you try that with an iPad you should ensure you have a plumber and shower on standby.

Old fart here - I reserve a copy of the paper when I get breakfast at the cafe near work (twice a week), I come back and read it during lunch then leave it on the free magazine rack for others. If I don't reserve a copy then they are usually sold out by lunchtime. Of course the web is a much deeper and broader source of news than a city newspaper, but the morning paper and a frothy coffee is still a better way to relax.

Citation?

You really defend the Mall Cop?

Cornel is a real good human being. The other two are media clowns, promoted in the mainstream to remove black voices as a part of serious discourse. They'll never risk another Dr. King.

Now, To be an "Industrial Complex", one must already possess an elite imbalance of wealth, influence and actual power. The "Industrial Complex" tag implies a large scale, anti-republicanism that seeks cartel/conspiratorial influence over public policy, promoting the participants narrow self-interest and financial rewards - at the expense of the society's greater god. It was coined by Eisenhower about the cold-war profiteering which had it's roots as early as the Gen. Smedley Butler revelations.

http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2013/07/huma-and-the-perils-of-marrying-a-narcissist.html

Crazy to ask the question... ;-)

Racism Industrial Complex?

Man. You are out to fucking lunch, buddy.

I can see the misunderstanding. I didn't claim they were kernel - just that perceived problems with Windows were seldom actually kernel issues. At least directly.

Kernel-level drivers, with bad or non-existant threading models, mechanically executed ports from earlier Windows versions and crappy error handling. That has polluted the NTExecutive kernel - an otherwise admirable piece of software.

The modern Windows kernel is much improved from the original. Design ideas around NUMA that hearken to Cray and SGI are present, and support multi-core in remarkable ways, that differ from the old SMP problems. The support of virtualization is also an ESX rival.

These ideas were also cleverly pilfered. The most unethical sorts of things happen at MS - and I happen to know of at least two competitive marketing-funded operations, which could be called "dirty tricks" or "black bag" teams.

There have been brilliant technical leaders in this space beside Cutler - who has been at pasture for years. Bill Laing is salt-of-the-earth. I am fond to recollect the few occasions I had to meet him. Mark Russinovich is also a certifiable genius, and responsible for influencing the additional capabilities in NTExec in impressive fashion.

We have 25 years, passing from those old days. So? NT Exec was more-or-less VMS. Shall we say a strongly typed derivative? Those who say they don't see the resemblance, are like those who don't know why OS X is like BSD. ;-)

This brings up another comparison: Modern Windows is an updated, VMS legacy branch in much the way OS X is an updated, NeXTStep branch...

One line:
"It aint hisory, if they still lynch you'".