Tank_Szuba’s Comments

• Jul 16th, 2010 @ 1:36pm

  Alternative Thinking

  on Journalism Neutrality Now! Why The Government Needs To Oversee The NY Times' Editorial Neutrality
  Although there is much debate surrounding this topic i think it might help to draw some other real world parallels to the debate (as Mike often does) to kind of help to put things in to perspective. IMHO (aside from the actual reasons for the NY Times to make their argument) if you want to boil down their argument to its most basic form you could say that basically they want the government (or other third part) to regulate Googles "secret sauce". Well lets put that into perspective. Googles secret sauce is what makes them stand out in the crowd of a marketplace. The same could be said of other companies secret sauce that make them stand out in the market place and the one that immediately came to mind (for whatever reason but i have a cooking background) is A1 brand Steaksauce. Now I must admit that i cannot find any specific data relating to Krafts market share with this or it's related products but i think it would be safe to assume that they are likely in a dominant position with them (as can be seen by simply going down the condiment aisle). If you note on the side of the bottle it has these specific ingredients (copied from Krafts website) TOMATO PUREE (WATER, TOMATO PASTE), DISTILLED VINEGAR, CORN SYRUP, SALT, RAISIN PASTE, CRUSHED ORANGE PUREE, SPICES AND HERBS, DRIED GARLIC AND ONION, CARAMEL COLOR, POTASSIUM SORBATE (TO PRESERVE FRESHNESS), XANTHAN GUM. Note the portion that says Spices and Herbs. it does not detail which ones. That is their secret sauce. Given the fact that you eat steak sauce and being that is specific contents are unknown, one could have a bad or fatal reaction. On the flip side though using Google if you have a bad experience you simply click away with your health intact. Why then should we regulate a the "secret sauce"? Please counter my argument or suggest better examples.
• Jul 15th, 2010 @ 1:41pm

  Re: Consumer **hardware** shouldn't have a self-destruct switch.

  on Motorola Does Openness Wrong; Bricks Your Droid X If You Tamper
  I completely agree and having thought about this all day i cannot understand from a business perspective how this could really help very much. I recently spoke to a Verizon rep who is also a "Modder" and he explained that; at the store level, a phone with a non-oem rom is impossible to detect. Only when it finally gets to Moto can they determine that. I am sure this costs Moto some money. It cannot possibly be thta much though that they would take such a departure from the previous actions regardless of their stance of ". Securing the software on our handsets, thereby preventing a non-Motorola ROM image from being loaded, has been our common practice for many years". This is not how it is supposed to be. I sort of sympathetic to them though and te real world solution should be to give store level personell the ability to detect a phone bricked either via an attempt to subvert the current ROM or from something else. I agree with most everyone else that this could make the iPhone antenna fiasco seem like a minor PR Stumble. On another note though i am curious about the actual legality of including a self destruct device in a piece of consumer electronics or anything for that matter. If you are reading this please reply with where one could research such legality/illegality.
• Jul 2nd, 2010 @ 10:03am

  Re: On the other hand...

  on Woman Sues Theater For Pressing Charges Over Filming Twilight Snippets At Birthday Party
  Please do not believe that i was in any way justifying her actions. Personally i believe that although illegal the way laws used to be written and enforced was to allow leeway for actions like this that were not in the intent of breaking the spirit of the law as opposed to the letter of the law. Yes she broke it and eventually was released because someone saw that her intent was not against the spirit of the law. That said my commentary was merely on the way things happened subsequent to her arrest and how ridiculous they were until her release.
• Jul 2nd, 2010 @ 7:47am

  MPAA - the new DA?

  on Woman Sues Theater For Pressing Charges Over Filming Twilight Snippets At Birthday Party
  Aside from all of the others issues i may take exception to in this case. The one that truly disturbing is in the post from Wired where it states near the bottom "The suit claims that, once local officers took the woman to the station, they called the MPAA for guidance. The suit says the MPAA recommended destroying the footage and releasing her" Why in the world is a police department seeking guidance from a private third party entity and NOT the local DA? I cannot fathom that. The only parties the police should have been contacting are plaintiffs, defendants, and the DA. The MPAA was none of them in this case so why?