yokohama11

Old laptop = Driver problems, and laptops tend to have a lot of them It's not necessarily something MS can do much about because a lot of those drivers are model-specific and if the OEM doesn't feel like updating it, you're SOL.

There's a huge difference between being considered a "serious" TV personality and an "unserious" one, and what your public image is.

And even then, it depends on audience. FOX News personalities express far worse sentiments daily and mean them than Clarkson ever has. Their audience is fine with that.

Paula Deen was supposed to be a nice upstanding older woman showing people cooking. Even the claim that she might have used a racial slur in the past torpedoed her career.

Clarkson's public image, and one that he intentionally curates, is one of being bombastic and politically incorrect. He can crack whatever jokes he wants without it going to hurt his career in the US. In some respects, Howard Stern might be a good comparison of someone with a fairly similar type of image.

He makes fun of himself, his co-presenters and basically everything about the UK and British people constantly (especially when it comes to manufacturing).

For that matter, they've done entire episodes about how terrible the UK is at things, like the British Leyland cheap car challenge.

If he made those comments about anything else, someone would call them offensive. I find that double standard and the concept that you can't make jokes about anything far more concerning than the content of his "controversies" aside from the punching.

He makes comments about every group, I've seen no persistent bias against any group (aside from politicians who make it less fun to drive).

And he certainly doesn't exclude himself/his own type, as there's something negative about the UK practically 30 seconds.

As for "it's just a joke", yes, it is. Pretty much every successful comedian uses ethnicity/race sometimes. Bad ones rely on it entirely (Ex: Carlos Mencia). But as something that should be off limits for humor? No.

If he wasn't on BBC (which as a state broadcaster has far more political sensitivity) it probably wouldn't have been so much of an issue in the UK.

Most of his "controversies" would not even be news in the US. A person on a humorous show cracking a racial/ethnic joke is on TV every night.

We have nothing like OFCOM where you could actually get in trouble with the government for being highly offensive either.

And celebrities behaving badly is typical, so assaulting someone probably wouldn't lead to any major public outcry for his firing. It's not as though Sean Penn has trouble finding work.

It's an official press release from Intel and Micron and the release says that they've begun production, not that they just got it working in a lab.

Performance questions are more valid.

I think the better statement would be that it was a panic, but one with very different and more practical goals.

The US government was primarily trying to keep some big companies and banks that were caught in a liquidity crunch from going bankrupt, because them all going under would likely be a spiraling problem. The crisis solution was also rather simple in aggregate...loan them a bunch of money temporarily until they could free up the assets to repay it.

China is currently trying to prop up a stock market that is STILL (even with today's decline), up 50% in a year for no reason. And most trading in the market is done by very jittery small investors (who are also overleveraged and now desperate to get out) rather than big firms and funds. Said small investors are unlikely to be reassured by anything the Chinese government can possibly do. I don't see great chances for the government to be able to stop this from returning to a more realistic valuation.

That report is a decade old. While I'm not going to hold up Amazon as the ideal e-commerce design, the site has been drastically altered since 2005 and many of those complaints are invalid now.

Not even just possible, but the default of operation in the industry. Most don't turn an underwriting profit with any consistency and make all their money on their investments from that float.

There's not really any market justification for running it in the first place (aside from what value it has for scenic purposes), nor is there ever likely to be.

A flight from Denver to San Francisco is $150-200 roundtrip and takes about 2 hours. A train from Denver to Emeryville (the train doesn't even go into the city) takes about 33 hours and costs $220 and hemorrhages money so badly that each passenger is a loss of $150+ even with that price.

You could dump 100 billion into it, making it true HSR and not having any intermediate stops, and it still won't be time competitive, and obviously won't be cost competitive. The distances are too large.

I support the HSR corridors, and more commuter services in the urban/semi-urban areas. But with the long distances and zero population density of most of the American West, the cross-country routes often make little sense beyond basically being a long scenic railway.

The abandonment side doesn't really make a whole lot of sense.

There's plenty of train lines in the US that are kept on the books/maintained, yet don't see any regular service. Some brush cutting, an inspection train once a year, and that's about it.

There's also plenty which are entirely abandoned and overgrown in practice, yet are still kept on the books, which means the train company retains the right of way and can resume service at any time it wants even though a train hasn't run on it in at all in 30 years and it currently looks like a forest.

Training for emergency detours makes some sense, although unless the line is long you don't really need all that many people trained to be prepared for that. You can have a few people qualified and they can just get on/off the train (riding back and forth) in the section the normal engineers aren't qualified for. And if it's once a decade or longer planned work, it's going to be cheaper to qualify the workforce right before it rather than have to keep them all up to date all the time. (I'm also sure that not all of these lines are worthwhile detours)

It seems like it's a direct IT support position. Meaning that someone is supposed to be there ready to answer calls/problems from 9AM to whenever. Clients, whether internal or external do not want to call in at 9:15 and hear that they can't be helped because XXX hasn't come to work yet, especially when they've got an agreement from you that you will be open at 9AM every day.

If you are in support like that, you generally do need to be at work exactly on time. Same as being a cashier, factory worker, etc.

It's not like being a programmer, sysadmin, etc where exact hours typically don't matter much as long as you're available for meetings and the work gets done.

"In fact, when we funded Airbnb, we thought it was too crazy. We couldn't believe large numbers of people would want to stay in other people's places"

I don't understand why anyone would have thought this at that time unless they did zero research.

VRBO had been effectively doing that for 13 years by the time Airbnb came along, and was (and is) widely used. Yes, Airbnb's focus is a bit different of a market segment, but clearly their success indicated that large numbers of people were willing to rent someone else's place directly from them in spite of the potential concerns.

Most large companies do/have done exactly that. Arguably 9/11 was the big catalyst for DR planning.

There were Wall St firms that literally had to get the military to escort them into Lower Manhattan in the days after to rescue servers, tapes, etc and cobble something together in a satellite office.

No one wants a repeat of that, and you'll notice subsequent disasters like Sandy have barely been a blip for most as a result of policy changes.

At this point basically any major company will/should have procedures in place for "perfect" DR, the ability for everyone to work from home indefinitely (and alternate offices/infrastructure waiting for the few people who need something special, like the special needs of a trading desk), as well as obviously having back up data centers with full replication.

It's kind of important to realize that those same users were angry at her for getting rid of a different woman. That was the trigger, being upset about a well-liked woman being fired with no warning.

That kind of destroys your premise, IMO.

The vitriol is terrible, but that's more a function of people being angry on the anonymous internet and saying whatever inflammatory things they can come up with to express that.