Posts by Paul Campbell
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exactly - looks like they will be releasing it all eventually
My guess is that the cops crossed some (still secret) line in their evidence gathering - there was a lot of cellphone and texting intercepts going on here, maybe someone didn't get the required warrants? will there be repercussions
quick thought - maybe the terrorism act they were originally charged under allows warrant-less wiretaps, but the rest of our laws don't, and when the terrorist charges fell apart the rest of the evidence turned into a house of cards - that kind of makes the terror law a bit silly you can't use it to investigate things unless you already have evidence of terrorism and in that case you don't need the act to gather more evidence
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Anyone want to explain what just happened here - secret Supreme Court rulings?
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Chris: Sure way after the fact - just post 9/11 though there was all that talk about 'weapons of mass destruction', fake yellowcake, etc etc the Bush administration had much of the US populace was convinced that Saddam was behind it, lots are still convinced
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Prior to 9/11 the US media was full of how the Bush administration (Cheney and Rumsfield in particular) considered Iraq as unfinished business - we were obviously being set up for something - no one was surprised when they started to blame Iraq with absolutely no evidence - much less the 3/4 of a million people I marched with against the Iraq invasion
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I was still living in California - I was woken up by my wife taking the kids to school ... I normally left late to avoid the Bay Area traffic "have you seen what's on the news" and stayed riveted to the TV until the last one came down - then I went to work, down into Silicon Valley, across the Dumbarton bridge - by then the freeways were eerily quiet - I was sent home - at that point they were talking about closing all the bridges, they might be a target - there were cops everywhere.
Work stopped for 3 days even though we were in deadline mode - the world stopped .... it was a lot like after the '96 earthquake when the bridge and freeway came down, or the Oakland hills fire (we lived right there, were ready to evacuate if it came down out of the hills) .... except it was the whole country stopped ..... then people got over their shock, went back to work, but everything had changed .... someone had given the keys to do anything to a child-president who until that moment no one really took seriously
Two weeks later planes started flying again, I went to Denver on a biz trip the next day - the nascent that would grow into the TSA was already in force - my backpack set off the freshly installed chemical detector on the way home, I wasn't about to tell the guy I play with rockets for fun .... there was a Sikh guy traveling that day, he was wearing a US-style farmer's cap rather than a turban, with his hair piled into it, he looked uncomfortable and out of place - Sikhs had been killed a state south of there the week before, out of cultural ignorance, just because they wore turbans
We moved back home to NZ in 2004 at least partly worried our then 14yr old might be in line for a draft - saw Bush being reelected on an all-night CNN-fest in a hotel in Madurai, India on the way - American Idiot was the sound track for our move back to NZ
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hmm - thinking about it more it was end of '76 - it was definitely over the summer holidays though - because somehow it's embedded in my brain with that particular job - and I did work it those two years
I also remember the punks railing more at orchestral rock rather than disco (maybe dealing to disco was more of an in-the-trenches-thing rather than the grand vision)
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I lived through this - I remember the summer I left high school - working on that first shit summer job before starting Uni - there was a (probably 3 minute) piece on the TV (black and white, we only had the one channel) news talking about this new 'punk' thing that was happening in London, piercing with safety pins, short hair, and they were all going to kill themselves before they were 21 (ha!) - seemed all so wrong at the time, it would never fly .... must have been '75?
It probably didn't help that 'punk' was such an american word (at the time)
Rather than disco we were all into the NZ hippie 70s thing and the hard, negative, noisy punk thing seemed so jarring in (our) context
Everything in its cultural context of the time of course
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Here I get to point out that Apple didn't initially choose the ARM for the Newton, they had their own internal CPU project (a CRISP variant) for the Newton that was canned at the last minute - leaving, as always, a whole lot of pissed off engineers who'd just spent a few years of their lives on it
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As I said elsewhere their margin is what the whole rest of the world is envious of - I think it's a difficult place to be - everyone wants to be the high margin leader in a market - but that costs in R&D, and potentially large failures and depends on you continually being one step ahead of the pack, and never making a misstep - the jump into smart phones was brilliant timing, and they pulled it off - now thanks to Android it's all becoming commodity, tablets are moving that way even faster, that high gross margin will be being sucked away even as we speak,right now there will be people at Apple casting around for that next big thing .... the patent fights you see growing up around android as just the last gasp of that high margin - as is trying to lock people into their cloud
Google's an interesting competitor for them - they're doing what the linux crowd do, giving it away, at least the stuff that Apple competes against, because they make their money elsewhere - it's hard to compete against something that costs nothing and does most of what your product does - the cheap Chinese tablets are still perceived as 'cheap' but they'll get better fast, they can move even faster than Apple can
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partly this is because that they are larger than mostly any individual PC platform manufacturer - even though they look (or have looked) like a small player they can do economies of scale that others can't - they're also not afraid to pioneer new hardware where their competitors in the PC space are hamstrung with compatibility with Microsoft and each other - the amount of historical legacy cruft in a modern PC is mind boggling (says he who once spent 3 years cloning an x86) - have you any idea how many gates go into your intel CPU to support dos? or your video card, in just the wrong place? or all those security holes M$ has had to patch due to dos or Win3 compatability?
Apple on the other hand have discarded their base hardware design twice and their OS once (twice if you count iOS I guess) in that time discarding their own cruft ruthlessly so they can sell a simpler (and in the end cheaper to manufacture) product