Disqus - Latest Comments for paul_houle

Re: If Delta shrinks after coronavirus, what planes will it retire?

paul_houle — Fri, 10 Apr 2020 10:05:06 -0000

Get rid of the 737s. Not because the 737 is dangerous, but because it deafens passengers, pilots, and people on the ground with noise, is cramped and uncomfortable, and needs more maintenance than a modern plane like the E195.

It was such a revelation to discover I could drive to Syracuse, fly JetBlue, and never have to ride a 737.

Let Boeing shut down the 737 line, most airlines transition to newer planes, and let Southwest buy 737s from other operators as they retire them,

Re: Industry Disconnect: As Cord Cutting Grows, Live OTT Services Aren’t Seeing Big Share Gains – Does Live Matter Anymore?

paul_houle — Sat, 24 Aug 2019 14:04:35 -0000

This article says it best:

https://stopthecap.com/2019...

AT&T TV is priced on an entirely different level from Netflix and Disney+. If you think Netflix and Disney+ are fighting over the same dollar like these people do:

https://www.fiercevideo.com...

Then pay TV has to ask why their offering is that many times better than the streaming services. Pay TV will lumber on for years, if only as something we get subjected to at airports, gyms, hotel lobbies, etc.

Many older folks watch pay TV but most of them will reach a point where they are living on a fixed income and can't afford a huge cable bill but will find other alternatives.

Regal Cinemas has a $23 subscription to watch all you can eat movies, and that is a great reason to get out of the house and be in the community.

Sport and News offerings on over-the-air TV are strong; you might not watch the exact match that you want to watch, but on any given Saturday or Sunday the "big four" networks have hard-fought athletic competitions of the highest quality. More money is spend to produce 30 minutes of the Lester Holt show on NBC news than are spent to make 24 hours of CNN.

Re: HURRICANE LEAH: ‘The defenses are crumbling. Scientology in Los Angeles is dying.’

paul_houle — Mon, 11 Sep 2017 08:28:33 -0000

Angry Gay Pope has chased them out of LA!

Re: Popek-Goldberg machines considered harmful

paul_houle — Tue, 05 Sep 2017 09:21:24 -0000

That is why we have paravirtualization. Even S/370 systems in the 1980 used paravirtualization for I/O and so do modern server-based systems.

Re: Janis Grady’s new book on life in Scientology: Jon Atack’s take, and an excerpt

paul_houle — Sat, 22 Jul 2017 11:18:58 -0000

They have their TRs in.

Re: The Scientology lecture in which L. Ron Hubbard revealed the true name of our Earth society

paul_houle — Fri, 07 Jul 2017 10:35:54 -0000

Hubbard had the bad fortune to be operating in the time period in which science was progressing most rapidly in terms of creating a "cold blooded and factual account of our last 13.7 billion years." He wrote this a year before the discovery of the cosmic microwave background, key to the establishment of the Big Bang Theory. The plate tectonics theory was fully established by 1967. Edington. Chandrasekhar and Bethe put together the story of how the stars shine from 1920 to 1960, which would have been news to anyone who wasn't keeping up with Isaac Asimov.

As for the "charisma" that people observe, it is a combination of a few things: (I) his use of language patterns from Eriksonian hypnosis (L. Ron Hubbard was in Phoenix when Erikson was at the peak of his lecturing) -- for instance, L. Ron Hubbard stops what he is saying and then changes his facts all the time ("the Japanese language has 42 letters, or is it 48?", something that lecturers almost never do in real life, except for Milton Erickson. (II) the social context: the poor quality recordings, half-broken tape players, the study room where you are isolated from your fellow students, and (III) Ethics, which is part of the social context, which makes sure that you will be punished if you express any negatives about Hubbard, punished if you aren't sufficiently positive about Hubbard and Scientology, and inevitably when you start to Rock Slam.

Re: An Open Letter To Microsoft: A 64-bit OS is Better Than a 32-bit OS

paul_houle — Fri, 09 Jun 2017 16:50:54 -0000

What about machines like this:

https://www.amazon.com/Azpe...

this is a $100 tablet that runs Windows 10. It works pretty good for surfing the web, watching videos, etc. A 32 bit OS helps it make the most of its 2GB of ram.

Re: The 3 Big Reasons Hillary Clinton Lost: Bitter Bernie, Crooked Comey, and the Wounded Working Class

paul_houle — Tue, 22 Nov 2016 10:52:20 -0000

Hillary Clinton seemed to have nothing to offer except that you could feel good about yourself for electing a women. What she didn't get is that there is nothing special about being a woman -- 50% of people are women.

Re: The 3 Big Reasons Hillary Clinton Lost: Bitter Bernie, Crooked Comey, and the Wounded Working Class

paul_houle — Tue, 22 Nov 2016 10:51:34 -0000

The oligarchs children will do OK, it is the rest of our children that have something to worry about.

Re: The 3 Big Reasons Hillary Clinton Lost: Bitter Bernie, Crooked Comey, and the Wounded Working Class

paul_houle — Tue, 22 Nov 2016 10:50:40 -0000

Blaming Bernie Sanders is a new low for Clintonism. The whole reason we have a primary is so that voters have a choice. Hillary Clinton and the DNC however wanted to have a coronation instead of an election. Don Trump screwed up that plan for them. If Hillary had not had opposition in the primaries she would look less legimitate than she does. (And that's what it is, Hillary Clinton thinks she is legitimate by definition and seems to have no idea that she might have to earn it like every other politician. If you say "let them eat cake" you get a predictable reaction, but she and her supporters always seem to get blindsided. I wonder why?)

Re: Hillary Clinton Says Yeah, It Was Comey

paul_houle — Mon, 14 Nov 2016 08:16:56 -0000

You see, it's all about her, and not about the people of this nation, the issues, etc.

It is this way for her enemies, and it is this way for her supporters. It matters very little what she did or did not deserve, it matters more what we the people deserve.

Re: Hillary Clinton Says Yeah, It Was Comey

paul_houle — Sun, 13 Nov 2016 20:23:17 -0000

I didn't vote for Trump and Trump did not win my state. Don't blame me. I held my tounge during the election and did not badmouth Clinton. I do not advocate Trump in any way,

Look at Elizabeth Warren vs Clinton. Clinton worked for the Goldwater campaign in 1964 and spread the slanderous lies that Nixon was cheated in the 1960 election. Elizabeth Warren was born into a poor family, started working at the age 13, was the only faculty member at Harvard Law School who attended a public university, is one of the most cited legal scholars in the world, won an election for the Senate AGAINST AN INCUBENT!

Objectively Elizabeth Warren has accomplished a lot and if any person (or women for that matter) is competent, it is her. In the case of Hilalry Clinton it is just so hard to tell where the real acheivements start and where the real ones end.

I'm not saying Hillary Clinton is not a "decent human being", but one clear thing about her behavior in the last 8 years is that she never seemed serious about winning the presidency because if she was she would have avoided the many conflicts of interest she was involved in.

Re: Hillary Clinton Says Yeah, It Was Comey

paul_houle — Sun, 13 Nov 2016 13:11:22 -0000

It's impossible to evaluate how "qualified" or "competent" Clinton is because one of the hallmarks of the current American "meritocracy" is that it grades it's own homework. People in power have enough control of the narriative that they can take credit for what goes right and blame the failures on somebody else. For instance, Jack Welch goes and creates a "Jack Welch Leadership Institute" that he teaches at today. When working class people screw up (or more likely their superiors screw up) they become destitute or die.

I think the 70s Hillary proved to be a good lawyer and did work for social justice. She also turned out to be a pretty successful commodities trader. Once Bill was the governor of Arksansas you can;'t separate her actual accomplishments from the privilege. For instance, out of all 50 states she picked the one where it would be easiest for her to become a Senator without opposition (the elite always moves between territories to gain advantage, that's why globalization is good for the 1% percent.) She was here in New York and voted for a law that would make it a higher priority to pay your credit card bill than your child support. Maybe I can give her a pass because Wall Street is the dominant industry in NY, but really. (For that matter, wasn't she the one who advocated (as first lady) for a bill that has put millions of black men in jail, i.e. "superpredators"?)

She got the secretary of state job and can't crow about great accomplishments there. Maybe she did an OK job and it is certainly not her fault that everything went to hell in the Middle East. Unfortunately her emails, her inability to show any contrition, and then being associated with incompetent IT staff at the DNC for *more* email troubles will be the legacy of her term.

As for women, Britain had Margaret Thatcher, Germany has Angela Merkel, Isreal had Golda Meir. They did not complain about glass ceilings, they got their own their own strength. If the Democrats wanted a women they could have gotten Elizabeth Warren who really does know something about the lives of the 99% percent. You could have voted for Jill Stein who occasionally talked about issues rather than what a misogynistic pig Trump is. (It's true, but you can't eat that. It doesn't pay for your health insurance or student loans...)

If Hillary Clinton won she'd be proving that if you're born into the 1% you can be President (as does Trump) and not that 99% of the women in this country could be President. I'll give her credit for standing up to Trump in the debates but the overall picture seems to be that she did not run a particularly good campaign in 2008 and 2016.

If "the rich getting richer" meant that they drove more fancy cars, had bigger yachts, etc. that would be one thing. However, money = power and in the end there has to be some force that pushes back. Trump is not going to be that force, but Hillary isn't -- the insane hatred that Republicans cultivated for the Clintons obscured the fact that the Clinton administration was a continuation of the Reagan/Bush administration and kept you voting for them.

At the very least we won't have them to kick around any more, and better yet, thanks to their "Aprois Moi Le Deluge" attitude they haven't left any successors in place so maybe just maybe the people can take the democratic party back in 2020.

Re: Hillary Clinton Says Yeah, It Was Comey

paul_houle — Sat, 12 Nov 2016 20:33:14 -0000

The real danger of that insane hatred is that many democrats could not admit that anything she did could possibly be wrong or be construed as wrong. For instance, she goes to the most hated bank in the world to make a $250,000 speech. Why couldn't she have gone to JP Morgan or Barclays or somebody else? No, she just has to go to Goldman.

(If she'd really been creative maybe she'd have introduced the policy that we could all give speeches to Goldman Sachs and then we'd have no problem paying for health insurance premiums and high deductables, student loans, etc.)

The emails concern me because if any of her underlings did the same thing she would have them out the next day. She thinks Edward Snowden should rot in hell. It's part of a general pattern that the rules don't apply to her family.

We had a revolution so we would not be ruled by kings. It was bad enough that we got two Bushes, and at least the Republican primary voters had it together enough to put the kibosh on a third. But no, in the year we could have gotten Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren, Democratic voters (and the organization) just had to pick Marie Antoinette even though we could see the scandals coming a year ago.

I'm going to lose my health insurance because of her, and she is going to spend the rest of her life living in luxury and pass a foundation on to her daughter.

Re: Hillary Clinton Says Yeah, It Was Comey

paul_houle — Sat, 12 Nov 2016 20:24:15 -0000

Like somebody made her take donations for the Clinton Foundation when working as Secretary of State or give a talk at Goldman Sachs for $250k? (Why couldn't she have picked a bank that wasn't the most hated in the world?)

Yes, the Republicans have unfairly dragged her through the dirt, but it was predictable that this would happen. She wanted to be the first women president and she might have been able to do that if she could have resisted the impulse to line her pockets. She wanted to pass the Clinton foundation on to her daughter bankrolled with money up to the ceiling more than she wanted to win. Given what she was up against she would have to act with personal integrity of 200%.

So far as the emails go, anybody else with a security clearance would lose it and find their career ended if they did a gaffe like that. Yes, Secretaries of State have done this before, but we are in a very different age where the fear of a cyber-pearl harbor or cyber-9/11 is imminent and also where government (and other) IT failures are increasingly commonplace. (I've lost more than one job because somebody who knew nothing at all about computers was able to boss IT sataff around.)

The astonishing thing is she has no idea that anything she does could be possibly wrong or questioned by other people. When something goes wrong it is always somebody else's fault and not her.

We could have elected Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren but no, Democrats had to let Marie Antoinette hijack their party and what did they get for it? They got cucked.

Re: Atack: Scientology advocates serenity, so why are so many Scientologists angry jerks?

paul_houle — Sat, 01 Oct 2016 07:29:08 -0000

If you are tone 8 then do you have 200% free theta?

Re: In the wake of raids, Scientology’s sneaky consulting front shrinks markedly in Russia

paul_houle — Sun, 18 Sep 2016 09:31:52 -0000

Yeah you and your body thetans

Re: JohnMarshall4 - Did using Picasa for Mac just get my IP banned?

paul_houle — Mon, 12 Sep 2016 08:44:53 -0000

Yes

Re: ATSC 3.0 Physical Layer Standard Approved

paul_houle — Sat, 10 Sep 2016 18:02:51 -0000

I think the sale of TV spectrum to the cell phone companies is going to make any reasonable migration impossible.

Re: Google Fiber ‘Very Pleased’ with TV Sign-Ups

paul_houle — Sat, 10 Sep 2016 17:19:00 -0000

Did Google hire Baghdad Bob?

Google Fiber always had a strange Willy Wonka quality to it.

It never made sense to go head to head against cable companies in urban areas. At best you get half the market. Fiber is better than cable, but it is not that much better. Google Fiber just does not bend the curve.

The broadband crisis in America is in places that don't have cable. People in cable land like to complain about their cable provider, but just try getting your internet from the phone company and see what it is like. In theory the phone company can provide good service if you live close to the C.O., but those areas usually have cable.

Don't get started on how we can't afford fiber in less populated areas. I have paid upwards of $15,000 to Frontier for 1Mbps to 2Mbps DSL in the past 15 years. If Frontier was not paying dividends greater than earnings, Frontier could have built a modern network, but when it can sell expensive DSL service, why bother?

Unfortunately Google has gotten sucked into this idea that we should abandon rural areas while dogpiling people into a few urban areas. They tried that in Britain and you know what they got? Brexit. The big banks in London need access to a single European market and they lost it because they turned their back on the rest of their country.

Re: Web Based Application Development in Australia by Working Software specialising in Hosted Content Management Systems on Demand (SaaS CMS) and Web Based SMS gateway services

paul_houle — Thu, 08 Sep 2016 09:09:54 -0000

Lately I've been using JSoup to turn HTML into parse trees and then weave it back together to make documents. It takes about 0.3 milliseconds to process a document compared to 3 microseconds with FreeMarker, but users can't notice the difference and you always get valid HTML.

Re: Scientology’s secret sites: The Bunker premieres drone footage never before seen of ‘Int Base’

paul_houle — Wed, 07 Sep 2016 12:19:31 -0000

This looks like it would be a good level for Metal Gear Solid

Re: Scientology petitions California Supreme Court over disqualified judge in forced-abortion case

paul_houle — Tue, 30 Aug 2016 12:17:21 -0000

Up until a few weeks ago the plane was always a DC-9 but since they can't keep them in the air anymore it is now a "A380 Boeing" painted like a butterfly.

Re: Guest Blog: Al Jazeera America Shutdown Proves Flawed Strategy Always Undermines Even Great Execution

paul_houle — Fri, 12 Aug 2016 09:52:48 -0000

I was a regular AJA viewer while they were still on Youtube. When they went cable-exclusive they lost me because I don't get cable. (As one of those Generation X people who (i) are treated by the media as if they don't exist and (ii) have kids who never got the linear TV habit and will doom the TV industry totally)

This year is different because you can count on some outrage or blooper from the Trump campaign every few hours, but many Sundays you will see the talking heads on CNN having the same hand-wringing conversations about why their ratings are so bad.

Their ratings are bad because CNN is a bummer. Who wants to see Anderson Cooper behind a desk taking the antics of the Republicans and Democrats seriously? Who wants to hear about a missing plane for months? Why is it that CNN reporters get verbal abuse from the mayor and police chief whenever they show up for the first time in a town in a flyover state to glorify school shootings?

(As for Fox, the one thing I would say is for a long time they would have a scroller saying ALERT on the bottom of the screen whenever the camera left the studio because they find the existence of an outside world fundamentally threatening)

The magazine AJA format was a breath of fresh air in comparison. If anything, the failure of AJA appears to disprove certain theories of what is behind the decline of TV News.

Re: Whale watching update: Your 2016 mid-year guide to who’s propping up Scientology

paul_houle — Mon, 08 Aug 2016 07:38:44 -0000

What people miss is that "The Way to Happiness" is a counterpoint to "Introduction to Scientology Ethics" and was written during the "Snow White" crisis. At that point in time Scientology needed an infusion of conventional thinking about morals and ethics, or at the very least, needed the ability to pretend that it thinks conventionally.