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Comment Re:Rejected the AMZN Aquisition? (Score 4, Informative) 98

iRobot and Amazon say EU approval was the problem. Not sure if they had a specific reason to be selectively truthful and focus on only one of multiple regulatory hurdles; but they don't mention the US.

It also looks like the sale is basically formalizing their plan to gut themselves. Shockingly enough; firing everyone you can and switching to rebadging stuff from an ODM because that's cheaper puts you in "what would you say you do here?" territory pretty quickly.

Comment Save the Whales!!! (Score 1) 138

It's so weird that when I was a kid the Left had "Save the Whales!!" bumper stickers and now it's the Right-Conservationists.

They even dedicated Star Trek IV to the cause.

Maybe if the whale killers get reinstated we'll at least get case law to prohibit permitting denials for Integral Fast Reactors and that can at least clean up the Boomers' nuclear waste to protect the ecosystem long term.

Comment Re:So, like Seiko, Kodak devised their own demise (Score 1) 28

Kodak's biggest problem was not the digital camera, but their heritage in the chemical industry. Each industry moves at its own pace, and progress in chemical engineering (in which Kodak really excelled) was measured in decades and not in years or months. Then digital sensors came about, and all of a sudden they found themselves in the middle of Moore's law, which was alien to them and which they refused to acknowledge as something relevant to them.

Result: despite being the predominant maker of professional digital cameras (think DCS520/720) they completely misjudged progress in this field. They thought "digital will hit consumer space around 2010" and in the late nineties they invested in a huge coating facility. Less than 10 years later analog was mostly relegated to an artistic medium, and their brand new coating facility could have coated the whole world's annual demand in a few weeks.

Comment Re:For Firefox, community has always been at the h (Score 3, Insightful) 33

The prior non-core items were optional and relatively clearly marked; but when they decided to go 'AI' that went out the window. Being able to grub around in about:config for anything that has 'ml' in it does, depressingly, put them ahead of the options of some of the competition; but it shipped on by default and without controls in the normal-user UI. Seems like 'AI' really does something to the decision making even of people who should know better.

Comment Re:So, like Seiko, Kodak devised their own demise (Score 1) 28

Kodak's demise is a little overstated just because they have been reorganized several times; and 'Kodak' is sort of the dump entity. There are still a variety of applications for being competent at thin film chemistry, including semiconductor fabrication, just not so much making 35mm film. So Eastman Chemical got most of that. And some of their medical and otherwise higher-end optics and imaging stuff also got spun off, with the business of not terribly optically interesting cameras under heavy threat from apathy and cellphones left at Kodak proper.

They certainly didn't do desperately well; or they'd probably be somewhere more along the lines of Sony in terms of 'who builds CCDs worth disclosing the provider of?'; but the reorgs appear to have been aimed at separating the more viable business units from the liabilities. Probably so the latter could be tied to the pension plan.

Comment Financial Privacy (Score 1) 64

In my lifetime you could open a bank account with just a name, ditto for renting an apartment, and pay for everything in cash.

This guy is screwed unless he's only a guest of a patron.

Crime was lower and people were more responsible back then too.

All this control grid surveillance still hasn't caught the Building 7 people.

Maybe it's possible to decide a course of action was a bad idea and reverse it?

Comment Such a lack of commitment... (Score 2) 204

It's unsurprising; but I see that the law has several stages of dealing with foreign overcrowding if the 10 million line is breached; but nothing about how locally produced human resources will be stack ranged for headcount reduction should the population remain above the target. Surely anyone who really cares about crowding needs to have a contingency plan for endogenous losers as well?

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