What do you think?
After a bit of web searching, I have to admit to being unable to find the Vegas betting odds on outcome of the case. It has to be on the boards. A gut feeling is the odds favor Peterson, given the recorded but since repudiated Troy Vincent promises that now are alleged to have been beyond Vincent's authority as League agent to have made on behalf of the NFL.
If you cannot believe the NFL's Vice President of Active Player Development since February 2010, who can you believe.
Promises? Not a promise? A mere "representation" of a believed outcome, but always subject to Commissioner absolute discretionary power - even to be arbitrary and capricious in letting others talk and then pulling the rug out from under conversations thereby had?
It has an appearance of classic bait and switch by League management.
Offer one outcome via an agent offeror, tout its lienency in inducing reliance by the offeree, then switch after reliance on the part of the offeree happens. It's like a misrepresentation, negligently permitted to be so, if not an intentional League flim-flam fraud.
It's like advertising "never needs ironing," but then it turns out ironing's needed. That level of things.
So, Peterson/NFLPA should win, or not? We wait to find out. Since it's in court with a decision awaited we can speculate any way we like. I'd expect at least 2-to-1 odds favoring the Peterson/NFLPA contentions winning. Bet two, get one if Peterson wins; get a two for one return if you bet on the league and the league wins.
So, that's a guess while I remain curious.
What do the bookies say?
Any reader with a link on actual lawsuit outcome odds being offered the betting public is urged to offer a comment.
Monday, December 15, 2014
Having earlier challenged "Drill Here, Drill Now, Pay Less," as politician blowhard rhetoric, ...
Terry Hendriksen by email challenged me because of current pump prices for gasoline. What do you say now, was his question.
Globe and Mail has what is a representative but extended analysis of the current oil market. Here.
This rather extended mid-item excerpt may be regarded by some as relevant to Hendriksen's question:
Web search can yield comparable though shorter analyses, some better than others; e.g., somewhat randomly picked items online here, here and here. And here, suggesting stock market players should not bet against the energy sector long-term.
If you expect pump prices to remain as they are, or to fall further with the per barrel oil price continuing to drop, you may be right, you may be wrong, but the short term and long term may differ while renewable energy prices continue to drop and electric automobile expectations play out, such as witnessed by the Tesla mega-sized Lithium battery manufacturing investment as a factor that should also play into oil pricing. But as with Econ. 101 supply/demand blackboard sketching and accompanying dogma, it is the higher cost new entrants attracted by inflated prices making them profitable, and they are the same to exit a market when prices drop below their break-even point. And that seems to be the fracking truth or more importantly the fracking expectation in what is playing out these days from wellhead to gas pump.
Adjustments likely will be made. "Recalibrate" is the one single word one might focus upon, if having to choose but one in the above excerpt. Like the GPS unit, "Recalculating, ...".
UPDATE: This online report, with interesting chart accompanying commentary.
Globe and Mail has what is a representative but extended analysis of the current oil market. Here.
This rather extended mid-item excerpt may be regarded by some as relevant to Hendriksen's question:
It’s too early to call “mission accomplished” for the Saudis. The OPEC leader is playing a long game in order to preserve its oil market share by making life difficult for the high-cost oil producers, and its strategy is showing early signs of success.
The quick reaction time by some of the high-cost producers, notably the American shale oil drillers, is why one of the world’s foremost oilmen, Sadad Al-Husseini, the former executive vice-president of Saudi Aramco, the world’s biggest oil and gas company, is becoming bullish on oil even as Brent prices sink to the low $60s.
“If you go down low enough, as we are now, you’ll get to the point where there is little investment, which is what we’re going through,” he said in an interview in Al Khobar, the Saudi city filled with Aramco employees in the country’s oil-rich Eastern Province. “You will force the excess out of the market and demand will take you back up. That is what is about to happen.”
‘Strength of the profit motive’
Mr. Al-Husseini, 67, worked at Aramco until his retirement in 2004 and was a member of its board and its management committee. During his Aramco career, he was instrumental in making 20 discoveries, including vast gas fields and the central Arabian and Red Sea oil fields. He is now president of Husseini Energy, an oil consultancy based in Bahrain that advises financial institutions and the oil services industry.
He admits he underestimated the “strength of the profit motive” that turned the United States into a shale oil powerhouse. Since 2010, U.S. shale oil production is up by three million barrels a day. But he feels confident that waning investment is already hitting production growth and that prices won’t fall much farther as the supply-demand balance tightens up.
“When prices come down 40 per cent, you’re not going to keep spending like there is no change,” he said. “My guess is that by the end of second quarter of 2015, there will be a returning confidence in oil. Does that mean it will go to $115? No, that was never a sustainable number. Could it go as high as $80, maybe $90? Sure.”
Unlike some of their more vulnerable OPEC partners like Venezuela and Nigeria, the Saudis can afford to be patient and wait for the market to recalibrate. But it too faces fiscal pressure as it spends heavily to diversify its economy and provide social benefits to a young population. The International Monetary Fund estimated early this year that Saudi Arabia needed an oil price of $89 (U.S.) a barrel to keep its budget out of the red, up from $80 in 2012.
U.S. shale oil is generally far more expensive to produce than Saudi oil, which has the lowest pumping costs in the world. Shale oil wells deplete rapidly, meaning a lot of them have to be drilled constantly to keep production intact.
The upshot? Shale oil output is much more sensitive to falling prices than Saudi oil, and the market is beginning to work its magic. Although the U.S. rig count remains well above the level of a year ago, it saw its biggest drop in two years this week and has declined in six of the past nine weeks. And it’s expected to drop sharply next year.
Estimates of break-even costs for new production in the three key shale basins – the Bakken, Eagle Ford and Permian – range from $60 to $70 a barrel. But there is wide discrepancy in the actual break-even costs for each well, and companies will focus spending on their best prospects.
“Balance sheets are going to force discipline,” said David Pursell, an analyst at Tudor Pickering & Holt Co. in Houston. “When we look at basin economics, there’s just a handful of core areas that make economic sense to continue to drill at even $70 crude. ... Companies will drop rig count very quick to stay within cash flow so they don’t see their balance sheets unravel. And they can unravel very quickly if they maintain the current activity level into 2015 at a much lower oil price.”
Most vulnerable are the smaller exploration and production (E&P) companies that have taken on debt as their spending outpaced their cash flow, and Mr. Pursell said the high-yield debt market on which they rely is already showing signs of nervousness. Companies like Range Resources Corp. and SandRidge Energy fall into that category.
The Tudor analyst sees the rig count dropping by nearly a third from the recent 1,600, but said it will still take several quarters before production growth slows. He predicts U.S. production will rise by 592,000 barrels a day next year and 226,000 in 2016, after growing by nearly one million barrels a day this year.
In a release Friday, the U.S. Energy Information Administration also indicated it will take time for the impact of lower prices to be felt in the supply picture. The EIA forecast that U.S. production will average 9.3 million barrels a day in 2015 – up from 8.6 million in 2014 and closing in on Saudi’s estimated 9.60 million daily output.
Mr. AL-Husseini is no fan of the theories that the decision by OPEC (read: Saudi Arabia) not to trim the cartel’s 30-million– barrel-a-day production quota at its November meeting in Vienna was a political act of war aimed at punishing Russia and Iran for their support of the al-Assad regime in Syria or aimed solely at choking off U.S. shale production.
He said it was a market decision designed to trim high-cost production wherever it lies, including Brazil’s offshore fields and Canada’s oil sands, to end the oil glut. An OPEC production cut would have only propped up prices, he noted, “subsidizing the high-cost oil at the expense of low-cost oil,” the latter being Saudi Arabia and Gulf allies such as Qatar.
Among the high-cost producers, there is no doubt that U.S. shale oil would be quickest to trim investment and thus output. Mr. Al-Husseini said that, even if oil prices were to remain fairly strong, the shale industry’s ability to deliver ever-higher production would not be assured. That’s because shale wells are short-lived creatures. His research says that shale oil (and natural gas) wells decline at a rate of 50 to 70 per cent a year, “requiring intense capacity replacement drilling.”
That means shale fields require more and more drilling to maintain production and that gets expensive. At the huge Eagle Ford shale field in southern Texas, some 4,500 new wells will have been drilled in 2014, of which 3,800 are required just to maintain production.
Web search can yield comparable though shorter analyses, some better than others; e.g., somewhat randomly picked items online here, here and here. And here, suggesting stock market players should not bet against the energy sector long-term.
Birinyi said the stock market will steady once it's gets more information on where oil is going. "It's going to be another one of those adjustments the market is going to make," he said.
Since oil began falling, the S&P energy sector has lost 24.3 percent, while the next worst market sector, telecom, was down just 6.2 percent. In the same period, health-care stocks have risen 14.4 percent and tech has risen 9.2 percent.
"This will encourage people who are less than enamored with the stock market. They will use this as a reason to hesitate," Birinyi said.
If you expect pump prices to remain as they are, or to fall further with the per barrel oil price continuing to drop, you may be right, you may be wrong, but the short term and long term may differ while renewable energy prices continue to drop and electric automobile expectations play out, such as witnessed by the Tesla mega-sized Lithium battery manufacturing investment as a factor that should also play into oil pricing. But as with Econ. 101 supply/demand blackboard sketching and accompanying dogma, it is the higher cost new entrants attracted by inflated prices making them profitable, and they are the same to exit a market when prices drop below their break-even point. And that seems to be the fracking truth or more importantly the fracking expectation in what is playing out these days from wellhead to gas pump.
Adjustments likely will be made. "Recalibrate" is the one single word one might focus upon, if having to choose but one in the above excerpt. Like the GPS unit, "Recalculating, ...".
UPDATE: This online report, with interesting chart accompanying commentary.
Saturday, December 13, 2014
"So the question arises, is the muck on the boots, or in them?"
The headline is from Steve Timmer/LeftMN, online here, see also the parallel post at Bluestem Prairie, here. The opening image of beautiful downtown Elk River in Sherburne County [Mary Kiffmeyer land] is from the Bluestem Prairie item.
Each of the two linked items speaks for itself, and goes without quote or comment here.
One good thing to be said of Elk River is they have an excellent bakery housed beneath a fine pizza outlet; all independent of the Kiffmeyer spouses but there nonetheless.
Readers are encouraged to comment as to whether there is anything else good to say about Sherburne County and its current and former politicos such as GOP bible-throwing wife-beater Mark Olson. There and Otsego, where the dream began.
The Adrian Peterson saga, making labor understand management is held to different standards because labor/management relations cannot be allowed to get out of their proper God-given balance within their proper Ptolemaic sphere, in harmony as it is, has been, and forever shall be.
 |
| A Strib poll result, and you can vote here to add your belief. |
Vikings all-star running back Adrian Peterson used a tree switch to discipline his 4-year-old child, leaving welts and lacerations. He entered a nolo plea to a misdemeanor child endangerment charge in Houston, Texas.
Zygi and Mark Wilf were found in court to have defrauded business partners of millions of dollars and in the course of doing so also to have violated the civil RICO statute in New Jersey. Reportedly to the tune of $85 million dollars.
Peterson got a year's hiatus from his job. A big time pay hit. The Wilfs got a highly subsidized stadium built for them which immensely upgraded the value of their NFL franchise.
The Peterson suspension is all about league image? Do you believe Goodell and the Wilfs could care about how Peterson relates to his family, aside from its impact upon image, (and hence upon league and team revenues)?
You decide that one. Decide in terms of the NFL mandated penalty [none] imposed upon the Wilfs for a multimillion dollar fraud upon partners to whom they owed a fiduciary duty of honesty in dealings - a duty of utmost serious scope and impact. They ran things, and the silent partners were disadvantaged greatly by the ethics of how the Wilfs used their holding the reins of power in running a real estate development adventure and accounting for profits thereby made - and Roger Goodell did not even say boo. League image took a hit, but it was not Roger's business.
Now, your decision ...
But there is more. Reusse in an online Strib sports editorial sub-headlined, "His son would be better off with his dad back at work," makes the case that Roger Goodell's actions are more about league image maintenance than player-family substantial best interests; yet, not surprisingly, he declines to juxtapose a Wilf [management] years-long ongoing civil RICO level of misdeed with the Peterson [labor] misdeed because he understands labor/management relations, (possibly as being beholden for his Strib paycheck); or also plausible, he chose not to see any scale of things or any cause to juxtapose Wilf conduct against NFL honesty "standards" with that being a judgment call he made wholly independent of any aspect of his regular paycheck.
Can you say, "Double Standard"?
Sure you can. As many ways as you care to. You can express any opinion you want as long as your facts are correct. Peterson, Wilfs, NFL, Goodell, Reusse all did as they did, and it is opinion how those things square up, and what conclusions or opinions can be drawn from the totality of the factual picture. So, read this, and ask yourself, not me, whether a pack of hypocrites are afoot.
By the way, Developers ARE Crabgrass. A related question worth thought is whether the Wilf developers' conduct left a greater stain and tarnish upon the NFL's precious pure gold image than either the Peterson or Ray Rice off-field conduct. Sure fans don't pay to see the owners own, they pay to see the players play; but nobody has ever questioned the quality of Peterson's or Rice's capability, skill, and dedication on the field.
__________UPDATE__________
Don't take off your thinking hats. Here's another one for you. Read this, the [according to the Peterson decision rationale a] not-new policy of personal conduct already in existence but now only fleshed out in detail; one relating to and governing all, ostensibly for the good of all:
This Personal Conduct Policy is issued pursuant to the Commissioner’s authority under the [NFL] Constitution and Bylaws to address and sanction conduct detrimental to the league and professional football.
This policy applies to the Commissioner; all owners; all employees of the NFL, NFL clubs, and all NFL-related entities, including players under contract, coaches, game officials; all rookie players selected in the NFL college draft and all undrafted rookie players, [...]
It is not enough simply to avoid being found guilty of a crime. We are all held to a higher standard and must conduct ourselves in a way that is responsible, promotes the values of the NFL, and is lawful.
If you are convicted of a crime or subject to a disposition of a criminal proceeding (as defined in this Policy), you are subject to discipline. But even if your conduct does not result in a criminal conviction, if the league finds that you have engaged in any of the following conduct, you will be subject to discipline.
Prohibited conduct includes but is not limited to the following:
- Actual or threatened physical violence against another person, including dating violence, domestic violence, child abuse, and other forms of family violence;
- Assault and/or battery, including sexual assault or other sex offenses;
- Violent or threatening behavior toward another employee or a third party in any
workplace setting;
- Stalking, harassment, or similar forms of intimidation;
- Illegal possession of a gun or other weapon (such as explosives, toxic substances, and the like), or possession of a gun or other weapon in any workplace setting;
- Illegal possession, use, or distribution of alcohol or drugs;
- Possession, use, or distribution of steroids or other performance enhancing substances;
- Crimes involving cruelty to animals as defined by state or federal law;
- Crimes of dishonesty such as blackmail, extortion, fraud, money laundering, or racketeering;
- Theft-related crimes such as burglary, robbery, or larceny;
- Disorderly conduct;
- Crimes against law enforcement, such as obstruction, resisting arrest, or harming a police officer or other law enforcement officer;
- Conduct that poses a genuine danger to the safety and well-being of another person; and
- Conduct that undermines or puts at risk the integrity of the NFL, NFL clubs, or NFL personnel.
[italics added] It seems to be saying that a civil court record suggesting extended, intentional dishonesty, even short of a criminal conviction for dishonesty, is prohibited and sanctionable conduct. Does this suggest that the Players Union should be looking at that document and demanding the Wilfs be sanctioned in due proportion to their violation of its express wording [which ostensibly is only fleshing out existing policy]; i.e., sanctioned per the New Jersey court's civil RICO decision making given that "racketeering" expressly is a prohibited action not needing a criminal conviction to be sanctioned as detrimental to the NFL? A Civil judgment of civil RICO breaching conduct surely is "disorderly" conduct in the sense of whether it "undermines or puts at risk the integrity of the NFL." Said another way, defrauding of minority silent partners is surely not an orderly way of business, even for developers, despite whatever is its actual frequency of occurrence.
Or not?
Sauce for the goose IS sauce for the gander, or not? The document does say what it does, and the Peterson decision clearly shows the document was/is intended to have retroactive reach among all of the NFL family members. Wilfs too? Feet to the fire?
Or is the Players Association better off in simply saying "End the Bullshit?"
That's, again, a matter of opinion.
And if a Michael Vick animal cruelty plank is expressly stated, why not also red flag the Paul Hornung - Alex Karras betting on NFL game-outcomes situation? Hornung and Karras were white, like the Wilfs, while Vick is black like Peterson and Rice, but the policy is racially neutral or at least postured that way. Sure the generic rubric of "detrimental to the enterprise" can be invoked, but why do they not say betting on games is Verboten? Do owners from time to time bet, is that a factor? Has an owner ever been sanctioned for anything by the NFL? (The NBA sanctioned Sterling, allowing a fast-track no questions asked sale of the Clippers to Steve Ballmer for two billion, so you tell me, does that count for much an anything per labor/management standard setting?)
__________FURTHER UPDATE__________
Is this the NFL ownership/management theme song (on YouTube) - its view of God's proper and established labor/management relationship? One that Peterson's stand-up-for-your-rights intransigence in dealings breached? And is it the intransigence and not the misdemeanor that actually resulted in the severity of the imposed penalty? Despite what the sanction appeal decision of Goodell's appointee wrote? There's a ton of circumstantial evidence that's been reported, and much the public does not yet know.
FURTHER: We do know that contemporaneous August 2013 from-the-courtroom-scene reporting was:
The Wilfs’ business partners claimed family members systematically cheated them out of their fair share of revenues from Rachel Gardens, a 764-unit apartment complex in Montville, by running what amounted to “organized-crime-type activities” in their bookkeeping practices that gave the Wilfs a disproportionate share of the income.
Wilson found that Zygmunt Wilf, along with his brother, Mark, and their cousin, Leonard, committed fraud, breach of contract and breach of fiduciary duty and also violated the state’s civil racketeering statute, or RICO.
The partners, Ada Reichmann of Toronto and her brother, Josef Halpern of Brooklyn, the longtime former on-site manager at Rachel Gardens, are entitled to compensatory damages, punitive damages, triple damages under the RICO statute, a redistribution of revenues dating to 1992 and reimbursement for their attorneys’ fees, Wilson said.
“The bad faith and evil motive were demonstrated in the testimony of Zygi Wilf himself,” Wilson said.
Wilf’s “candid and credible” testimony detailed how he felt Reichmann got “too good a deal,” and he “reneged” on the arrangement initiated by his uncle, Harry Wilf, back in the 1980s, when construction began on Rachel Gardens, Wilson said.
It is hard to imagine that the Wilf stuff described in the report is orderly conduct, or conduct enhancing the reputation and public goodwill of the League (even among other apartment developer owner-operators). The judge's language was explicit and excoriating. Did Adrian Peterson do worse? Is the Peterson punishment disproportionate in light of the blind eye Goodell turns toward same-team ownership mischief? (Is the Pope Catholic?)
Friday, December 12, 2014
Micro Center has some low priced small tablet products, "WinBook" brand.
This page. In owning and using the 7-inch and 10-inch tablets (with keyboard/cover added for the latter), I am satisfied with product quality and capability - although every electronic item should be fully checked out for functionality or defects within the vendor's free-return period (be sure to ask about that before buying anything).
On the 7-inch WinBook I have set it for ongoing maximum screen brightness, and still get around 3 - 4 hours of battery life per charge. Keeping it near a charger is always wise, as with any portable electronics. Long term durability is presently an unknown. And whether next year there will be obsolescence worry, the market always moves toward encouraging further purchases. (Look at Apple and its messaging to its cult following, that way.)
If you key into brand names, Microsoft has an HP 7-inch tablet model for sale that is also available at Office Depot [i.e., also OfficeMax, after the merger]; currently priced at each outlet for $100. Note, however, the WinBook products each have a standard USB outlet, and in reading specs the HP unit has the charging port doing double duty as a micro-USB connection, so if you use an adjunct item, e.g., external storage, you cannot keep the item tethered to a charging unit and have to rely on battery life.
The WinBook 7-inch item I have has been run through several charge/discharge use cycles, it has done Bluetooth handshaking with headphones, and I equipped it with a 64 gB Samsung EVO microcard for extra local storage. There is the cloud, with Microsoft using initial device use to channel people to its OneDrive (previously "SkyDrive" but rebranded), and it offers several gB of free storage for users before monthly surcharges are imposed for usage of greater amounts of cloud storage.
The high resolution display on the WinBook tablets is great, and there is a magnifier utility you can toggle via the "Ease of Access Center" choice off of the Control Panel; and if you like using the magnifier regularly you can easily pin it to the taskbar for ready access. Touchscreen usage is okay, but if you run regular desktop items such as the Firefox or Comodo Dragon browsers, you need good eyes for menu and submenu choices, and either a special touch or a stylus to avoid repeated wrong option selections. A 7-in diagonal screen is small, but if you have an iPhone and either a special touch or use a stylus, you are already there. If all you intend is use of Windows Store apps, resolution and detailed touch-menu choices will not be a factor. The Win-8.1 OS for the tablet comes with a range of preloaded apps for basic use functionality, and there is much user configuration flexibility via the Control Panel main menu.
If you were taken in on the Windows XP end of lifecycle support via the end of monthly update availability for XP imposed by Microsoft earlier this year, be aware that the Windows 8 lifecycle end is set for Jan. 2018, presently.
("Windows 10" apparently will be the next release and it is unclear whether initial purchase of it will include monthly updates, or whether a monthly service charge might be imposed for updating, now that Microsoft has made top management changes while it, like any firm, is looking anew for ways to monetize whatever it can. But that is a separate story. If you want freedom from that, consider Linux.)
Interested readers can do a "Windows With Bing" and/or a "WIMBoot" web search to see how Microsoft and its OEMs can cram a trimmed down Windows 8.1 OS into a quick booting unit with only 1 gB of working memory, with space left for apps and such.
There's an online fatwallet thread about the Micro Center WinBook offering. If you are looking for a convenient web browsing portable tablet (and YouTube player), that has connectivity that an iPad may lack, and at below iPad pricing, it is good to know that the holiday marketplace has a bottom feeder offering range besides Chromebooks running Google's ChromeOS.
LAST: If you do any shopping at Micro Center at its Saint Louis Park location, please join me in a nagging campaign to encourage them to consider opening a north-end outlet at the vacated K-Mart site on Hwy 10 in Anoka. It is unlikely, they seem to be a single outlet per city-metro regional retailer, but nag them anyway.
On the 7-inch WinBook I have set it for ongoing maximum screen brightness, and still get around 3 - 4 hours of battery life per charge. Keeping it near a charger is always wise, as with any portable electronics. Long term durability is presently an unknown. And whether next year there will be obsolescence worry, the market always moves toward encouraging further purchases. (Look at Apple and its messaging to its cult following, that way.)
If you key into brand names, Microsoft has an HP 7-inch tablet model for sale that is also available at Office Depot [i.e., also OfficeMax, after the merger]; currently priced at each outlet for $100. Note, however, the WinBook products each have a standard USB outlet, and in reading specs the HP unit has the charging port doing double duty as a micro-USB connection, so if you use an adjunct item, e.g., external storage, you cannot keep the item tethered to a charging unit and have to rely on battery life.
The WinBook 7-inch item I have has been run through several charge/discharge use cycles, it has done Bluetooth handshaking with headphones, and I equipped it with a 64 gB Samsung EVO microcard for extra local storage. There is the cloud, with Microsoft using initial device use to channel people to its OneDrive (previously "SkyDrive" but rebranded), and it offers several gB of free storage for users before monthly surcharges are imposed for usage of greater amounts of cloud storage.
The high resolution display on the WinBook tablets is great, and there is a magnifier utility you can toggle via the "Ease of Access Center" choice off of the Control Panel; and if you like using the magnifier regularly you can easily pin it to the taskbar for ready access. Touchscreen usage is okay, but if you run regular desktop items such as the Firefox or Comodo Dragon browsers, you need good eyes for menu and submenu choices, and either a special touch or a stylus to avoid repeated wrong option selections. A 7-in diagonal screen is small, but if you have an iPhone and either a special touch or use a stylus, you are already there. If all you intend is use of Windows Store apps, resolution and detailed touch-menu choices will not be a factor. The Win-8.1 OS for the tablet comes with a range of preloaded apps for basic use functionality, and there is much user configuration flexibility via the Control Panel main menu.
If you were taken in on the Windows XP end of lifecycle support via the end of monthly update availability for XP imposed by Microsoft earlier this year, be aware that the Windows 8 lifecycle end is set for Jan. 2018, presently.
("Windows 10" apparently will be the next release and it is unclear whether initial purchase of it will include monthly updates, or whether a monthly service charge might be imposed for updating, now that Microsoft has made top management changes while it, like any firm, is looking anew for ways to monetize whatever it can. But that is a separate story. If you want freedom from that, consider Linux.)
Interested readers can do a "Windows With Bing" and/or a "WIMBoot" web search to see how Microsoft and its OEMs can cram a trimmed down Windows 8.1 OS into a quick booting unit with only 1 gB of working memory, with space left for apps and such.
There's an online fatwallet thread about the Micro Center WinBook offering. If you are looking for a convenient web browsing portable tablet (and YouTube player), that has connectivity that an iPad may lack, and at below iPad pricing, it is good to know that the holiday marketplace has a bottom feeder offering range besides Chromebooks running Google's ChromeOS.
LAST: If you do any shopping at Micro Center at its Saint Louis Park location, please join me in a nagging campaign to encourage them to consider opening a north-end outlet at the vacated K-Mart site on Hwy 10 in Anoka. It is unlikely, they seem to be a single outlet per city-metro regional retailer, but nag them anyway.
Municipal Broadband coverage at Ars Technica website; an update.
Recent coverage on the issue of municipal ownership/operation of a broadband utility; here and here. Earlier content, here. Click the opening "Ars/UNITE ... [COUNTDOWN]" image, here; or use this link to submit a comment to Ars.
Local public officials in particular are urged to submit comments.
Seize the moment. Towns not part of the future will be passed by, or given inadequate overpriced underpowered service by commercial provider/operator/franchisees and then passed by.
Local public officials in particular are urged to submit comments.
Seize the moment. Towns not part of the future will be passed by, or given inadequate overpriced underpowered service by commercial provider/operator/franchisees and then passed by.
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