Specialist

Please tell us that Suthep Thaugsuban was arrested and handcuffed. PLEASE!

Flash, Flash, Flash... The idiom is "I am shocked, SHOCKED to find that the red shirts brought weapons with them to protest!".

Sounds to me like somebody knew something, and they've known it for a while. Which raises nasty questions about other somebodies.

The Bangkok Post had better coverage.

This could get interesting real fast. What happens if Gen Prayuth explains to the representatives that he expects their BOSSES to show up, not his minions?

I'm not. I build systems that are required to go from cold, dead, powered-off, to fully operational in all respects (to coin a phrase) in 700 milliseconds. The contrast between current processor speeds and current boot times is outrageous.

Cav, Captain Kunze's explanation is quite reasonable. You have to teach people how to put these plans together. You start with a scenario. Almost any "realistic" scenario will raise hackles and screams of protest, depending on what group is identified as the threat. So, you make an obviously unrealistic scenario, and work through the rest of it.

Flash, perhaps you could provide us with some pointers?

Back in the 1960s, NASA JPL did a test, transmitting power by microwave between two mountains several miles apart. The idea was to see whether generating electricity in space and "beaming" it to receiving antennas on the ground was feasible. They were hoping for something like 63% conversion efficiency. They got 88%. (Translation: out of every 100W into the transmitter, 88W came out of the receiver. That ain't bad.) My source is a talk by Jerry Pournelle. He showed photos of the experimental setup.

I remember when engineers started their careers at less than $15/hour.

The problem is that I need Flash alive on SOME sites. For the vast majority of sites, it is a major resource waster, but that site is important to me and it needs Flash to work properly.

Deleted. Answer posted to wrong thread.

I have a Win XP laptop, that *WAS* my travel machine. I'm using a new Celeron-powered (translation: UNDERpowered) Windows 8.1 laptop on this trip. For basic web browsing, and the occasional PDF download, it is OK. Unfortunately, there doesn't seem to be a reliable technology for whitelisting Flash Player, and multiple Flash streams routinely bring the machine to a dead crawl. I have not tried to do serious development on it. (I did break down and load GNU Emacs, and it appears to be working at least minimally.)

"profit [sic] Suthep" - I may steal that one.

On the other hand, it is nice to have some of those shops. The Bose shop in Siam Paragon saved me a LOT of trouble last year, when I needed a replacement cable for my Bose headphones.

It seems to me to be immediately and intuitively obvious that Suthep Thaugsuban cannot be considered to be "neutral" or "non-partisan". Nor could Luang Pu Buddha Issara. Nor any PDRC core member. Nor, of course, could any Pheu Thai member be considered such. If I had to nominate someone, I would nominate Gen Prayuth. I don't think Mr Suthep or Mr Thaksin or any of their respective followers would go along with that nomination.

Ca. 1995, while I was at Texas Instruments, I talked to a guy about an internal job opening. It was a joint venture with a company in "Eastern Europe". They'd developed a new technology for a deep-search magnetometer useful for detecting submarines, and they wanted help turning it into a product. TI would have gotten the technology, for use for US military projects, and the "Eastern Europeans" would have gotten the productization. I pinned the guy down, and he admitted that the company was in Russia. I declined, politely, without giving a reason, and never heard anything more about it. The device would have been MUCH more sensitive than anything either side had at the time. It would not surprise me in the slightest to find out that this was the same company.

Yes. Usually, dialogue that results in the person being persuaded having an "I have been an IDIOT supporting these clowns" epiphany is the most effective.

Meanwhile, another outfit is reporting that they looked at what Inmarsat has published, and they can't make the Inmarsat track estimates make sense. This is getting dirtier and dirtier.

The VIetnam War was, essentially, three wars in one. First, it was the rebellion by the Viet Cong against the Thieu (I think) goverment. This rebellion was crushed at the end of the Tet Offensive in 1966, and the VC were never again a significant part of the fight. Second, it was a conventional land-grab war, that had burned hot and cold for two or three thousand years, and usually fought itself to a standstill right around the DMZ. Complicating matters, the VC had made common cause with the North Vietnamese, facilitating the land-grab war. Third, it was a critical campaign in the 70 Years War between the USA and the USSR. The Russian war in Afghanistan, some years later, was a similar campaign. The USA eventually won that war, but is now in the process of throwing that victory away.

Actually, TheCorinthian, it most certainly is possible. Reporting the facts without embellishing them with one's personal beliefs was one of the core tenets of journalism for decades. Opinions were relegated and restricted to the Editorial page, and the editors enforced that policy vigorously. At least in the United States. At one point, in elementary school, I took a summer program in journalism. "Just the facts" in a news story was one of the first things the teacher told us, and she made it absolutely clear that she was serious. Later, it was explained, in history class, that journalists were trusted to report the news ONLY because of that policy. Today, of course, journalists feel free to embellish, and they feel free to bury things that don't match the agenda. Is it any wonder nobody trusts them to tell the truth any more?

Flash, that "if" is a bit big for me.

I saw the PDRC parading down Sukhumvit Road yesterday afternoon. I always wanted to be someplace, right in the middle of the outbreak of civil war. NOT.

Governing systems that require construction of a coalition before selecting the Boss tend to have interesting things happening down at the splinter party level. Israel is the best-known example of this one. Russia is a particularly interesting case. Their new election law required a party to get at least 10% of the votes cast in order to get ANY seats in the Duma. There were a BUNCH of splinter parties. Only one party got past the 10% line, and that's how the Communist Party of the Soviet Union recaptured Russia without firing a shot.

I've had a 10,000,000 Zimbabwean dollar note on my desk at home for a few years. The note had an expiration date. It was already worthless. The postage stamp the guy used to send it to me was worth more.