Frequent Questions:

How do you pronounce your surname? denn-BEST-uh (Recording )

How do you spell it? "Den Beste" (Note the capitalization and the presence of the space. And just in passing, "Steven" and not "Stephen".)

How shall I address you? Please call me "Steve". (It makes me a bit nervous when people call me "Mr. Den Beste." I wonder what I've done wrong. [Guilty conscience, probably.])

I loaded your page and all the pictures were replaced by a weird image saying something about "Bandwidth theft". What happened? This page explains it.

I can't find your tip jar. I appreciate the offer, but I don't really need contributions. If you want to do me a favor, spread the word about my site. I put a lot of work into my writing, and it's always nice to have a lot of people read it.

Why "USS Clueless"? Because no one else was using it. At the time I started blogging (200103) people tended to choose whimsical or nonsensical names for their blogs, which were also often self-deprecating, such as "A whole lot of nothing", or "BluishOrange". Also at the time there was more emphasis on site design, in part as a way of making a site distinctive. I decided I wanted to use "Stardates", but not as you might think because I'm a Trekkie. I'm not, and I never was one. Rather, it was because Dexter used them in a couple of episodes of "Dexter's Lab" I was fond of. It also permitted me to use an astronomical image at the top of the page, and that led to the entire theme of a starship. Of course, it had to have a name, and after a relatively brief period in which no particularly witty name occurred to me, I decided to google for "USS Clueless". The only hit I turned up was from a guy describing a naval battle he'd wargamed, so since no one was using it for anything remotely similar to a blog, I went with it.

Why do you link to ABC so often? What I'm doing is to link to AP and Reuters articles. They're available from a number of sites on the web, but most of them have flaws. For instance, I used to use Nando but now it requires reader registration. Some sites carry Reuters but not AP, or the other way around. Some only carry a few of the articles from each. And some sites carry both whole feeds, but only hold the articles on their servers for a few weeks (which is why I don't use Yahoo; it dumps articles after four weeks, or the Reuters site where they usually are gone in three weeks.). ABC has headline pages here and here that I check a couple of times per day, and squirrel away links to articles I think I might need in future (sort of like a box full of articles clipped from the newspaper) and they leave the articles online for months and don't require registration to access them. (The Wapo has something similar here and here, but it's only the AP and getting to older articles sometimes requires registration.) I do also use the BBC and CNN and a couple of other sources on occasion, but ABC is just the most convenient place I've found to get to primary news articles from both major feeds.

What do you think of this anti-Qualcomm article I just found? It's true that I used to work for Qualcomm, but I've been out of the industry for several years now and I'm not keeping up. And though I have written about the industry recently (and had a cleaned-up version of that article published here), the point of that article was not to defend Qualcomm. I was to trying to use the experience of the cellphone industry as a case which demonstrates why I think that the direction that the EU is going (increasing reliance on centralized control of industrial policy) is a bad thing. I'm aware of the fact that The Register routinely writes articles slamming Qualcomm, but that's because The Register is trying to have an edge; it's not just reporting, it's trying to be opinionated, to be a gadfly. Qualcomm is on their shitlist right underneath Microsoft and they'll