mabhatter

the problem now is that "merely profitable" companies need to be viciously attacked by companies like Google and Amazon that have flying STOCKS but post no PROFITS. Just "doing their job" and having happy customers isn't good enough if a Wall Street giant needs your business added to it's marketshare so they can avoid some taxes next year.

the military CAN get things working when they can't write checks. They have a system that works for THAT function and has for 50 years. So it's a matter of LEVERAGE to get compliance.

The problem with Oracle and SAP is that they aren't "home builders" they are parts and tools salesmen. They don't know ANYTHING about BUILDING HOUSES... they just sell the tools. even their own businesses aren't actually GOOD businesses with huge amounts of nepotism and politics. The first thing when you sign up with them (or any of the big named software vendors) is that you have to find yourself a "contractor" just like building a house. The "big famous software company" disavow any actual results, your mileage may vary, etc.... They're like the "Music Man" selling boy's bands.

If you want to audit the military, that's where North Korea has the correct idea. Generals don't "retire" until the leader says they do. Start enforcing Sun Tzu style discipline to get this done... knock off a few 5 star general's heads. That'll get things done. At a minimum, strip them of private residences, and put them in boot camp barracks (complete with scrubbing their own floors) till they get this thing done.

no, the problem is "encouragement".

When they passed Sarbane-Oxley they gave corporate executives just a few years to implement it. Don't implement it and we DELIST your stock. Implement it WRONG and go to jail. Needless to say, public traded companies worked VERY QUICKLY to get it done and fired people at will if they were in the way.

when the military needed to PAY people.... they got the job done well. that system celebrated 50 years of service getting checks out. So it's just a matter of getting all those disparate systems in line with the check writing system. Just nobody has the political will to accomplish it.

This is where the commander in chief not being able to summarily execute people in the military has it's drawbacks.. cause that's how Sun Tzu got the palace maids to properly military drill... do it right or get killed. Oldie but goodie.

As President he's "supposed" to fight for this, even if it's crap. That's how our "adversarial" government works. That's why it's CHECKS... As in gloves off, missing teeth, hockey checks.

It's up to the other TWO BRANCHES to get off their lazy asses and knock the Executive branch down a peg or two. They liked blaming the President but they gotta do the WORK to take things back. Shut up and FIGHT!

what a coincidence, government agencies hacking private citizens is also a "widespread problem".

If so many "forget the name" agencies weren't really covers for tingly super secret spy stuffs, then maybe more people would give up and go away from the truly boring ones???

I get so sick of this. Monopoly economics is based on statistics of a random buyer wanting to buy stuff from a random seller. With NO INTERFERENCE. Statistitions consider 25% chance to be "unlikely", and 75% chance to be "very likely". So a 90% chance of doing business with ONE company is as Statistically close to 100% that it might as well BE 100% for economic purposes.

Once a company hits 75% or so they have no "economic need" to write restrictive exclusive contracts as they basically control the market. Remember, the RULES OF FREE MARKETS assume there are ALWAYS enough buyers and sellers that NEITHER side has a group large enough to independently affect the market prices. As soon as a buyer or seller hits about 25% they aren't following the rules of the "Free Market system" they are Capitalists attempting to REMOVE the RIGHTS of the Free Market system from others using aggregation of capital resources.

Or maybe we're all STILL PAYING OFF our 2008 debts... You know 35% effective APR and our houses all having negative equity 5 years latter will do that.

The people writing this stuff live in a fantasy land where the rich took a 25% fall one year,but jumped right back on 10% gains the very next year... so why isn't EVERYBODY making plenty of money? They have absolutely no clue that WE took a 25% hit..but regular folk are lucky to have an aggressive 401k hit 7% in a year...

Not to mention that the rich just RAISED THE PRICE of everything to get their money back faster.

This is the core of our immigrant problem with Mexico. If they get momma over the border to have her baby she's set... Because the baby is a US citizen so his/her parent gets a pass to be In the country.

Gates has for sure been propping up Ballmer for far too long. That has kept the status quo going long past effectiveness. The whole industry pulled one over on Microsoft cause Gates and Ballmer defended their monopoly from the DOJ long past when it became irrelevant... Which was exactly when The iPhone was released. The whole industry ceded "desktops" and invented new cheese Microsoft entirely failed to chase.

The Win 7 and Win 8 rollouts were the biggest problem. Elop ANNOUNCED shutting down Nokia's OS units with their Flagship N9 in the wings to be sold. Strike one for slashing YOUR OWN SALES. Then they announced the shift to Win 7, which they had to WAIT on Microsoft to make ready... Strike Two, what the hell were they supposed to SELL for almost 18 months. Finally they had to wait again for Win 8 that was incompatible with their "bet the company" Win 7 hardware... Strike three... Screw the few customers trying to save you.

Finally Strike Four is that they bet the company on Microsoft delivering products in a timely fashion and maybe letting them be first. Except what is MICROSOFT's incentive to DELIVER a compelling product when they really want your price to fall so you are cheap to buy.

Look at Microsoft's history in mobile: Orange? Danger Sidekick? Kin? and several others... Microsoft kills its partners. Was the Nokia board so foolish to think it wouldn't happen to them. This is as entertaining as Taylor Swift dating John Mayer and watching everybody cry from"broken hearts" when the cheating starts... It's not like you knew who you were getting in bed with.

government always prefers "shoot the messenger" to actual security. There should be literally be nothing illegal about what he did in that case. he didn't "hack" anything except HIS computer to pretend to be an iPad. And that would be the point of identifying it as a security concern. After all, if he had figured it out, surely the Russians and Chinese figured it out between when he did it and they prosecuted him... it doesn't make the hole go away!!!

What he did is like sticking a GM car key into a Toyota. Generally that doesn't work, it shouldn't work... but what if it does anyway? shouldn't the company that makes the cars fix that?

If they are only hitting a port 22 a few times, who's wasting the ISP's time with abuse requests... I suppose its probably those guys with Class-A blocks and too much time on their hands.

Except manufacturing and cost considerations go exactly the other way. An iPhone 5S entire electronics that make it go is slightly smaller an an average stick of gum.... That's all the "modules" except screen and battery. It's made in one shot my high-speed machines that took about 30 seconds from bare board to operating phone parts.. Parts are so small you'd need a magnifying glass to handle them by hand.

The current situatuion is about as good as it gets. There are enough iPhones sold third parties can copy parts or simply canibalize broken ones for repairs. Apple only updates models once a year, so that means there is lots of effort by third parties because their efforts pay off a whole 3 years of repairs. Fixing individual boards takes $1000+ of lab equipment and 2x what the part is worth for labor.

Even Apple's MacBooks only have one main board that's small as possible. That's why Apple started using REAL glass screens, and metal bodies that can be pealed down for their bare scrap costs. To get the ELECTRONICS metals back is going to require some kind of furnace that can contain toxic fumes and perform exotic metals separation. Even then 3/4 of electronic waste is pastic and F4 circuit board material which is utterly useless except to burn off. That leaves 2/3 of at waste as dirt cheap tin-lead solder and a small bit of super fancy alloys.

The biggest difference is that boys are about DOING and girls are about TALKING. That's not about just schools, but the last 400 years of men's and women's role on society.

Boys don't typically learn by talking, they learn by pulling things apart and doing skills. In addition, because of all the push to "score" children, we've taken away the basic "boy" traits almost entirely.

When I was in elementary school it went form 9am to 3pm with sn hour of recess AND half hour of lunch. There was plenty of time for boys to wiggle and make noise and stuff. My kids current schools were from 8am to 3:30pm with about 45 minutes between one recess and lunch/recess. That's more "chair time" than most office workers are expected in a workday. All the "hands on" things have been removed for cost... Art, music, shop, gym are all drastically scaled back to maybe one of each one time a week if at all. School is strictly "listen and repeat" and MOST boys in history don't learn that way. As modern skills like computers, machining, manufacturing,etc require equipment folks just don't have at home, most boys never have a shot at the typical "boy jobs" until they are 16 and go to a career center or go to college or start working.

That's where we have a bit of a double standard of expectations. We expect a girl to go to college ZPRIMARILY to get an MRS. Degree, preferably ABOVE her social standing. When guys go to school we expect WORK first, Mrs. Second. You end up with this situation where women should compete with men fairly, all the time... Except when they want to stop competing and get married. Even then, men are competing for FOOD ON THE TABLE, every day, the next 40 years. Women don't have the same "skin in the game" because Daddy pays for school until hubby marries them.

The problem with Pen computing is that it's too close to Mouse and Keyboard, so NEW user paradigms aren't developed or encouraged.... In short the entire story of MS Office on tablets.

Steve understood with the first iPhone WAY BACK that Touch was the way to go and people needed to be "reprogrammed" how to use it. Remember iPhone was only "Steve's way" for the first 18 months before only a few developers were invited to play too in a proto-App store. The whole path from iPhone to iPad was carefully mapped out with the next piece coming only when enough people agreed with "Steve's way". People still want iPad to be "just a pen based Mac" shows a large number of very important people don't get the subtle chane in HUMAN BEHAVIOR required to take the next step.

Except PROGRAMMERS don't generally deal in anything remotely resembling proper grammar that real Font Designers train for. Real fonts are designed to minimize punctuation especially repeated punctuation and programming languages all use special characters nearly as much as alphanumerics.

It doesn't look terrible, is have to try it out on a computer to see if its useful.

yeah, they just proved Maslow's hierarchy of needs from another angle.

you know, you could grow a whole baby chicken from one of those!

what has Bill Gates DONE in the TECH industry that deserves sitting in the big chair of the most influential tech company?

Steve Jobs had a comeback Jesus would be jealous of, but he also founded/built up TWO rockstar level companies Pixar and Next Computing in the ten years being kicked out of Apple. Bill Gates is just doing charity work... he's out of the game.

The biggest problem with the story is the INSTITUTIONALIZED FEAR. From the account, you could tell just about every agent after the first was wondering who was wasting their time. That's why they kept going back to the test that failed (he didn't leave the room, so why would they get a different result... Institutional insanity)

Ts not enough for the agent to recognize his time was clearly wasted.. There it 0.0001% this guy might really be a terrorist because somebody else said so. They kept pouring resources into trying to prove him "wrong" rather than verifying a threat existed or not.

It's Kaffkaesque at its best... I'm scared of you because of my training, so it's your fault what you did to me that makes me scared. If it wasn't FOR REAL, it's so absurd to be a comedy skit.

If you changed the story to be a known drug dealers wife, it isn't that out of line. Can Miranda clearly say he has NEVER TRANSPORTED leaked documents or known where his partner keeps them? Really? Even more so, can he prove his partner has never tried to use him as a mule to pass confidential information across international borders?

This was just like grabbing a drug dealers wife hoping the drug dealer was just a little too greedy and his stuff in her packages.

Settle down little froggie. Look at the pretty bubbles!

I would put money that PJ was hacked illegally by large corporations long before the NSA took an interest in her. And that the government knew all about it. She mentions her apartment being broken into... That was almost certainly the work of powers she irked.

In fact PJ is probably the ONE person they have investigated and CHOSE not to bother. She probably had several illegal taps on her stuff way back when she started...this has been gearing up almost as long as Groklaw has been in business and we all "knew" about it, just didn't believe it. The only thing worse than speaking out against the government is speaking out against companies... And she's been doing that for years.

Black and white letter of the law, he should not have sent the modified Open Source programs home. The modifications really would be the employers property and the employer has all the power to release them. That said, he had been sending the files home to work on all along (before changing jobs) and never was EXPRESSLY TOLD to stop. That is why the original case would have been tossed as there was noillegal access" going on.

The second case for sending secrets is closer to legit. But only because if you send secrets out at all, if you didn't have permission, it could be illegal.

The REAL issue is font work for asshats that don't play nice. Alternately, accept that as a programmer mixing hobby Open Source projects with your Employment projects is a recipe for trouble.. Take their money and be a sucky leacher.. Or post your fixes to maintainers from home, reengineered solely at home with no files from work.

As somebody who does admin work, its a great excuse just to not take work home at all unless its on my company laptop.

The little guy is an actual Aluminum Extrusion company, with actual people making an actual product. Jacking up prices of raw material even 1% is taking profit out of his pocket because he certainly cannot pass that cost on. (I used to work for a small company in that business)

He is hurt because he is small and barely getting any discount at all. So all these imagined charges hit HIS pocket for 5% or more "off the top" because he can't avoid buying from the warehouses.

Magic:the Gathering is a freak of nature. It was a clever game that was brought to a niche company of RPG geeks who's day jobs were managing aerospace projects. In short a bunch of well-to-do hobby publishers with day jobs saw the product and "bet the farm" on making it work out when lightening struck.

From that point on, its been an anomaly in the gaming market, often imitated, never duplicated the exact mix that sparked it. WoTC has learned the limits of where their formula works as well, even THEY can't copy Magic.

Plenty of people still brag about buying $2 chargers... It's good to remind them WHY one doesn't do that without homework first.

85% of what people do is habit. So when they have a large set like this "habit" starts excluding people very quickly as they are just driving to common places. So if you are tracking somebody you dont know fleeing, they stick out in the numbers quickly... If you are tracking somebody you do know you can guess where they might be. Kidnappers and bank robbers aren't that smart when looking for hiding places, and you probably already have them tracked going there.

To a certain extent, all it really does is SUGGEST you belong or don't belong in any given location. There might be a murder in an alley, but data shows you go to a comic book store blocks away every week so you probably aren't involved. Generally the data is going to clear more people than it makes guilty.

Of course I'm a huge fan of Numb3rs and Criminal Minds that show this kind of stuff being used properly by honest people... Emphasis on HONEST people.

Real MILITARY soldiers are subject to the Uniform Code of Military Justice... Which is somewhat stricter and includes a lot of rules that are unconstitutional for crvilians. They also don't get to form unions, they get a chin of command and that's it. They break ORDERS and they get Courtmartialed.

Our militarized police like to call the rest of us "civilians" but they run straight to their Union when any superior calls them out, and they hide behind the same lawyers as the rest of us and ask for favors from the prosecutor and court.

We need to keep the teacher unions and break the police unions up, then subject them to higher standards of conduct, and LOWER standards of defense and evidence... We have allowed them to become a wild pack of dogs and they need caged up, put back on the leash, or put down.