On a side note, while even in light of this fiasco I still think nuclear is safer than say, offshore drilling or coal mining, why do we continue to bother with anything besides renewables?
Because they are unreliable, un-economical and lead to starvation. They are unreliable in that in many parts of the country, you can't have solar because it is often cloudy, or you can't have wind because it isn't windy enough. And even in parts of the country where it is sunny or windy 80% of the time, what about the other days when it isn't? You have to have enough traditional power plants to fully cover your electrical needs on days like that, unless you have want to have a blackout.
And that of course leads to the fact that they are uneconomical. Besides the fact that you need to build all these extra traditional plants as backups, they just cost more for the amount of electricity they generate. We would not have wind or solar at all were it not for massive government subsidies. No one can produce large scale power profitably using those technologies.
And lastly, in the case of some renewables (ethanol), they cause people to starve, destroy the environment and waste more energy. Corn ethanol is generally found to be an energy negative in most studies, meaning it takes more fossil fuel energy to make than it gives us. If that weren't bad enough, diverting absolutely massive amounts of midwest farmland to fueling cars instead of people is driving up food prices and causing starvation in poorer countries. And also, because of the demand for corn, farmers are now planting it every year instead of doing traditional crop rotation, which is really bad for the land and environment. Corn is one of the hardest plants on the soil in terms of its nutrient demands, and it badly needs to be swapped out with soybeans every other year to replenish the soil. But now many farmers aren't doing that, and are dumping huge amounts of ammonia on the ground as fertilizer, which gets into the water (my aquarium test kits have found elevated levels in my tap water) and into everything else. Corn based ethanol is one of the WORST ideas around, bar none. And yet the government massively subsidies it to keep the bad idea going, because they are scared to death to say no to farmer special interests.
So that's why we don't just use renewable fuels. Given the current state of technology, what we should do is drill for a lot more oil to drive the cost down, use coal (with standards to scrub the pollutants out of the exhaust), and best yet, build a bunch more nuclear. But the key with nuclear is to use the newest containment vessels (not the flawed Mark 1 like Fukishima), do not build on sites likely to have huge natural disasters (ie - let most of the country use nuclear, but let earthquake prone San Francisco and Hurricane prone Miami use oil), and build only 1-2 reactors per site, rather than six like Fukishima. That's one of the untold stories here: anti-nuclear sentiment in Japan made it hard to find new sites to build on, so they kept building reactors at the same sites, and then if you have a catastrophe likely all will be affected, and it will be that much harder to get things under control when you are trying to fix six reactors at once instead of being able to focus on one or two.
Visual Studio,.Net, IIS (which has become better than Apache after years of being worse), X Box, Office, SQL Server, Exchange, and probably many more. I should also like to point out that their keyboards and mice are some of the best around, especially the Microsoft Natural 4000. Is that as exciting as an iPhone? Maybe not, but I get more use out of it than my smartphone, and it is an excellent product.
Dumbphones will go the way of word processing machines and PDAs. There just won't be a reason to make them, even if many people are satisfied by them, because the smartphone can serve both markets.
I would wholeheartedly agree with you, except for one thing: battery life. Unless that gets fixed, dumb phones will never go away. Most dumb phone users like the fact that their batteries last a week, and smartphones cannot fill that void at this time, nor do they appear likely to any time in the next few years. I'm betting that dumb phones, albeit with more features and possibly even running a bare bones version of Android under the hood, will continue for the next few years.
RIM holds the business market, iOS has Apple's cult following, Android is a bit jack-of-all-trades and WP7 is... nowhere in particular.
I have to disagree with that assessment.
RIM does NOT hold the business market. RIM is very rapidly losing market share. In the first half of this decade, anybody who was somebody had a Blackberry (at least that was the perception, because Blackberry's were cool). Now, I see few people at work with a Blackberry, and the few that are left are just waiting for their two year contracts to be up. The same goes for most Win5.x or 6.x users, the other huge corporate player of yesteryear.
Apple has more than a cult sized following in the phone market, although the rabidness of some fanboys does turn people off.
Android is succeeding for a few reasons: a) free OS to vendors, b) being the latest, coolest thing, c) people are turned off by Apple fanboys, but perhaps most importantly, d) price and features. Android has some innovative ideas (swipe keyboard anyone), excellent voice recognition (thanks to GOOG411), and can be purchased on phones with bigger screens than iPhones, or lower priced devices than iPhones, etc.
Microsoft may manage to succeed despite the odds against it. You say it is nowhere in particular, but I can think of a few advantages: who better to integrate the phone with entertainment devices than Microsoft, considering they already have XBoxes all over the place? I could see the phone being an XBox remote control, input device, or who knows what else. Also, who better to integrate with the enterprise than Microsoft, which has their software everywhere? Every time an Android update comes out I have to re-setup my corporate email because some security policy or something messes it up, but I bet Microsoft would not have that problem. And Microsoft ALSO has the best software development platform by far, which would encourage a lot of app writing if it can just gain some market share to go with it. So I think Microsoft has a real shot at this, as long as they get their butt in gear and make the most of their advantages.
* Goes off running to go show this to his creationist "friends"...*
And your creationist friends, if they are well informed, will laugh at both you and the poster for your lack of scientific knowledge. Miller's experiment was flawed. It was designed to shoot electricity through an atmosphere like the one on primitive Earth to see if life (or at least building blocks of it) might result. The atmosphere he chose was a hydrogen rich mixture of methane, ammonia, and water vapor. This was consistent with what scientists in the 50's thought the early atmosphere was like, and he relied heavily on the atmospheric theories of his doctoral advisor, Nobel laureate Harold Urey, when he designed his experiment.
The problem is, he picked the wrong atmosphere. There's no evidence that the atmosphere he picked resembled a primitive Earth atmosphere. By the 1970s the Miller-Urey atmosphere model was being declared dead by scientists like Belgian biochemist Marcel Florkin and others.Science magazine in 1995 said that experts now dismiss Miller's experiment because 'the early atmosphere looked nothing like the Miller-Urey simulation.' According to Dr. Jonathan Wells, 'the best scientific hypothesis now is that there was very little hydrogen in the atmosphere because it would have escaped into space. Instead, the atmosphere probably consisted of carbon dioxide, nitrogen, and water vapor.' And if you replay the experiment using this atmosphere instead of the Miller-Urey model, you get no amino acids. Instead, you get things like formaldehyde and cyanide... and those are NOT conducive to life.
Some of our textbooks may still be perpetuating this debunked theory (mine in high school did), but no modern scientists believe this experiment has any relationship to reality at all. And whatever sludge they have in those jars are equally useless, because it resulted from a flawed model. So don't run off and tell your creationist friends about your new "evidence", because if they've been following any research, they'll just laugh at you.
There is no law prohibiting doing engineer quality work unless you try to do it for money or pass it off as the work of an engineer.
It also depends on the field. As a computer engineer, I can do engineering level work in my field without a stupid PE. And the world is a better place because of it.
I can see why a license might be required for the actual constructiong ofa building that could fall on someone's head or other physical objects that have a high likelihood of killing people if not designed correctly, so I agree with the parent in that respect. But I think things covered under that clause should be kept to a minimum. Can you imagine of a PE was required for computer engineering? Sorry Woz, Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerburg. You guys are too young to have the years of experiece required for a PE, so you can't build your product.
Everywhere. Pretty much all good routers are IPv6 capable, just not out of the box (unfortunately). You have to do things like put the DD-WRT open source firmware on them. On the plus side though, if you do that you don't just get IPv6, you additionally pretty much turn your home router into an enterprise router.
Note that some companies like Buffalo are starting to ship their routers with DD-WRT on them by default, so we are starting to see IPv6 enabled routers out of the box. As for the other companies, they are probably holding off in the hopes that people are forced to buy more routers from them in the future, rather than running what they currently have. Once the public becomes aware that IPv6 is a desirable feature, then they will start selling them.
Apple devices are dirt cheap, these days the only people who don't have an iphone are those who don't want one. The ipad isn't exactly the highest priced tablet either, it's a pretty cheap device.
Dirt cheap? It costs 700 dollars to get one that only has a 64 GB hard drive. You could get a full blown Windows 7 convertible laptop/tablet for that price! And it would run far more advanced applications, be more versatile (full sized keyboard anyone?), handle any peripheral under the sun and do just about any task you want it to. And it would probably have a bigger screen as well.
The iPad is good for playing scrabble, angry birds and doing light web browsing, but seriously, given that it costs 700 dollars for that, how can you possibly claim it is dirt cheap?
They are apparently a "struggling mobile firm", while at the same time it "retains solid market share" and sales of units are "still growing well".
That doesn't mean they aren't in trouble. A few years ago Windows Mobile had a huge installed base, but that doesn't mean the handwriting wasn't on the wall. There used to be a lot more Blackberry users as well. Nokia needs to be careful.
Hey, if Android could overtake Apple like that, I'm not going to bet against Microsoft... historically, they tend to always be behind Apple getting to the marketplace, but still somehow end up at the front of the line.
That's definitely a problem, but it's not so much that the router doesn't support it, it's that the firmware doesn't support it. DDWRT or new manufacturer firmware can correct this issue. And since many modems/routers are rented from ISPs, ISPs could push updates out that would fix a good chunk of the infrastructure.
Could be intentional-- could just be the way the cycles work.
Ordinarilly I would say this is silly, as market forces don't plan anything. But in this case, we have a cartel rather than a truly free market, so it's possible. And then you have all competitors to the cartel (such as the US) purposely removing themselves from competition and giving the cartel a monopoly, so yeah, maybe King Saud is intentionally killing off competing technologies.
Some guys below were working out energy acre, and solar gave much more energy per year than these bacteria.
Yes, but these bacteria produce a chemical fuel that can be transported and used at filling stations, where cars can fill up in just a couple of minutes. Electric vehicles do not recharge quickly at this point, so even if solar were better as an energy source, solar + electric cars fails on usability (Which is why people won't buy them without huge subsidies from the govt).
But besides that, solar sucks. It's not as good an energy source as nuclear, coal, or oil, because it's unreliable (cloudly days), more fragile (panels can easilly get damaged, covered with dirt, etc), and it's more expensive. If you want no CO2, then go nuclear. Unless you want to fill the landscape with large, ugly, innefficient solar panels and windmills, and raise the cost of electricity for everyone, solar and wind are bad ideas.
That's much less true these days. Buffalo routers ship with DDWRT as the factory installed firmware, and that means they all support IPv6. I'm sure they aren't the only ones that do this. And at any rate, if ISPs would start renting out Buffalo routers to customers they would soon have IPv6 capable equipment on a lot of their networks.
And the better home routers already have IPv6 support, especially those that can run DDWRT, so those users that bought expensive dual band n routers probably wouldn't have to upgrade at all.
And just to pre-empt anyone who argues it is too difficult for a non-geek to flash DDWRT onto a home router, remember that all Buffalo routers come with DDWRT as the factory default firmware, so actually you don't have to flash anything to get a home router with DDWRT and IPv6.
It's not like the ISPs are doing it just to piss you off.
No, they aren't doing it just to make us mad, but they could be doing a whole lot more. ISPs are probably the biggest end buyers of consumer level wireless routers. Maybe I'm wrong about that, but they have to be a big chunk because so many consumers don't know how to set them up and therefore rent modems and wireless routers from the ISP. They have to be a relatively big bulk buyer. They could insist that no one gets the contract for new purchases unless they provide IPv6 capability on the home devices. That way the ISPs could upgrade all their renters, and they could tell everyone else that come such and such a date, they won't support non-IPv6 devices. And the ISPs could also negotiate a contract for massive bulk discounts on one or two varieties of home routers and sell them to consumers at cost, which would get the rest of their clients to upgrade. I mean, most people aren't going to completely panic over a one time cost of 30 bucks to replace their home router. It wouldn't be fun, but if you sell them on the idea with some good marketing about how it benfits them (like DTV did), you could probably get them on board.
And the better home routers already have IPv6 support, especially those that can run DDWRT, so those users that bought expensive dual band n routers probably wouldn't have to upgrade at all.
Well, XP did come out over 9 years ago. It's not that surprising it didn't have good support (not much back then did). And by the time the core infrastructure is ready for IPv6, everyone will for the most part have switched to Windows 7, or at the least Vista. So I don't think XP is the core issue holding up the migration.
So if a botnet gets on with 10,000 users, then everyone on the Internet will believe it's therefore a legitimate file? Or if something new comes out and two people have it, so no one else downloads it, how can it become big enough to appear "legit"? There's no good way to solve these issues, so you are pretty much guaranted that there will be a flood of malware. Not that I care. I hate piracy. But the point stands.
You guys could probably hire some more full time employees if you'd just fire some of the worthless ones. But I'm sure government unions prevent any of that from taking place. That and the fact that government never goes through a recession with the rest of the country, so you don't have to make the really deep cuts that would force you to be more efficient. Even a 1 billion dollar cut is nothing compared to the proportional cuts and restructiong going on in much of the private sector these last few years.
Sorry to be so cynical, but I hate big government. Not government, and not necessarilly every function that the government does, but I definitely hate big government, and most of all big government unions. All I ever seem to do is pay them to set my tax dollars ablaze.
6. Somewhere, somehow, you may have used eight pounds of unsustainable palm oil from a palm oil farm in Indonesia in your food products, and should therefore be shot.
Well, even if that was good for the company financially, it's hard to believe any company would have a manager so loyal they would be willing to risk certain hard prison time just to help their company get ahead. Even most CEOs who could benefit the most from that wouldn't do it, especially since targetting a US agency would be way worse than most other illegal business things you could do (in terms of the consequences). Depending on which agency it was and what you got into, you could be charged with espionage, or worse, treason, which can get you the death penalty. Plus the company probably loses more than it gains due to fines and litigation. And just because agriculture is a hundred billion dollar a year industry doesn't mean you get enough out of USDA data to justify the risk. Just knowing USDA data doesn't divert that money from John Deere straight to your pocket.
I'm agreeing with the grandparent... I find it unlikely that any manager will look at the cost/benefit of illegally accessing that information and come away thinking "go for it."
If you are a Windows admin then I welcome you to the new world where Microsoft is not only your software provider, it is also your chief competitor.
I'm already in that world... I work in the web hosting team for a Fortune 500 company (we host over 1000 websites for our corporation), and we've already got developers spouting off about how they want to use Windows Azure and move everything to the cloud. Why they want that, or what they truly think they are going to gain, I don't know. I think it's just excitement to be part of the latest buzzword trend, and they don't realize that what they already have now is essentially a "private cloud".
It's actually going to be funny if they do get to move to the cloud, because right now whenever things go wrong they blame us, and each time we dig into the issue and point out which part of their code caused the problem. We dig in to the point of doing analysis of memory dumps, often dropping everything to hunt for the problem if it is a critical issue on a big site. Good luck getting that kind of service when your code hosted on Windows Azure breaks.
We see that there is matter, obviously, but common sense (assuming the big bang is accurate, and it has held up pretty well over the years) says their shouldn't be.
Not to be a nit-pick, but in order for common sense to say there shouldn't be matter, you have to rely on both big bang theory AND dark matter theory. The fact that there is matter may not speak to big bang theory at all... it may speak to primarilly dark matter theory and the validity of that. There are other theories explaining gravitational discrepencies that don't rely on dark matter, and it could be that one of them is correct. In which case you could still have the bing bang theory be valid and have the existence of matter, with no issues.
I know a lot of scientists really believe the dark matter theory to be correct, but we are starting to get to the point (IMO) where the rubber needs to meet the road. We've had dozens of tests designed to detect dark matter, and every one of them has failed. At some point, maybe we need to take a step back and ask whether the problems were really with the tests, or the validity of the theory itself. I'm starting to think dark matter theory has something in common with ether.
We could just ban the use of Windows in critical IT infrastructure.
Brilliant! That would make critical IT infrastructure less diverse, and make it even more likely everything could be taken out with a single zero day attack.
contrast the ASP.Net platform that is was discovered to be *very* badly remotely exploitable in the last few days so much that Microsoft had to issue an emergency out-of-band patch
Let's clear up a misconception. Java generally runs as a client side app running on a PC. It is NOT a web rendering engine, as is ASP.Net, so the possibility of remote exploit is much lower. ASP.Net is by definition always available to remote machines, where Java is not. Even an internal facing ASP.Net website is available to remote internal machines. Most Java apps are not. So the comparison is not really valid. And also, as someone who works on a web hosting team and has some familiarity with the vulnerability, let me just add that it was EXTREMELY obscure, not like the run of the mill buffer overflow exploits we used to get from Microsoft in years past. While dangerous, I still have to say if these are the kinds of bugs hackers have to find now, Microsoft has definitely removed the low hanging fruit and is improving its security profile.
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Because they are unreliable, un-economical and lead to starvation. They are unreliable in that in many parts of the country, you can't have solar because it is often cloudy, or you can't have wind because it isn't windy enough. And even in parts of the country where it is sunny or windy 80% of the time, what about the other days when it isn't? You have to have enough traditional power plants to fully cover your electrical needs on days like that, unless you have want to have a blackout.
And that of course leads to the fact that they are uneconomical. Besides the fact that you need to build all these extra traditional plants as backups, they just cost more for the amount of electricity they generate. We would not have wind or solar at all were it not for massive government subsidies. No one can produce large scale power profitably using those technologies.
And lastly, in the case of some renewables (ethanol), they cause people to starve, destroy the environment and waste more energy. Corn ethanol is generally found to be an energy negative in most studies, meaning it takes more fossil fuel energy to make than it gives us. If that weren't bad enough, diverting absolutely massive amounts of midwest farmland to fueling cars instead of people is driving up food prices and causing starvation in poorer countries. And also, because of the demand for corn, farmers are now planting it every year instead of doing traditional crop rotation, which is really bad for the land and environment. Corn is one of the hardest plants on the soil in terms of its nutrient demands, and it badly needs to be swapped out with soybeans every other year to replenish the soil. But now many farmers aren't doing that, and are dumping huge amounts of ammonia on the ground as fertilizer, which gets into the water (my aquarium test kits have found elevated levels in my tap water) and into everything else. Corn based ethanol is one of the WORST ideas around, bar none. And yet the government massively subsidies it to keep the bad idea going, because they are scared to death to say no to farmer special interests.
So that's why we don't just use renewable fuels. Given the current state of technology, what we should do is drill for a lot more oil to drive the cost down, use coal (with standards to scrub the pollutants out of the exhaust), and best yet, build a bunch more nuclear. But the key with nuclear is to use the newest containment vessels (not the flawed Mark 1 like Fukishima), do not build on sites likely to have huge natural disasters (ie - let most of the country use nuclear, but let earthquake prone San Francisco and Hurricane prone Miami use oil), and build only 1-2 reactors per site, rather than six like Fukishima. That's one of the untold stories here: anti-nuclear sentiment in Japan made it hard to find new sites to build on, so they kept building reactors at the same sites, and then if you have a catastrophe likely all will be affected, and it will be that much harder to get things under control when you are trying to fix six reactors at once instead of being able to focus on one or two.
Visual Studio, .Net, IIS (which has become better than Apache after years of being worse), X Box, Office, SQL Server, Exchange, and probably many more. I should also like to point out that their keyboards and mice are some of the best around, especially the Microsoft Natural 4000. Is that as exciting as an iPhone? Maybe not, but I get more use out of it than my smartphone, and it is an excellent product.
I would wholeheartedly agree with you, except for one thing: battery life. Unless that gets fixed, dumb phones will never go away. Most dumb phone users like the fact that their batteries last a week, and smartphones cannot fill that void at this time, nor do they appear likely to any time in the next few years. I'm betting that dumb phones, albeit with more features and possibly even running a bare bones version of Android under the hood, will continue for the next few years.
I have to disagree with that assessment.
And your creationist friends, if they are well informed, will laugh at both you and the poster for your lack of scientific knowledge. Miller's experiment was flawed. It was designed to shoot electricity through an atmosphere like the one on primitive Earth to see if life (or at least building blocks of it) might result. The atmosphere he chose was a hydrogen rich mixture of methane, ammonia, and water vapor. This was consistent with what scientists in the 50's thought the early atmosphere was like, and he relied heavily on the atmospheric theories of his doctoral advisor, Nobel laureate Harold Urey, when he designed his experiment.
The problem is, he picked the wrong atmosphere. There's no evidence that the atmosphere he picked resembled a primitive Earth atmosphere. By the 1970s the Miller-Urey atmosphere model was being declared dead by scientists like Belgian biochemist Marcel Florkin and others.Science magazine in 1995 said that experts now dismiss Miller's experiment because 'the early atmosphere looked nothing like the Miller-Urey simulation.' According to Dr. Jonathan Wells, 'the best scientific hypothesis now is that there was very little hydrogen in the atmosphere because it would have escaped into space. Instead, the atmosphere probably consisted of carbon dioxide, nitrogen, and water vapor.' And if you replay the experiment using this atmosphere instead of the Miller-Urey model, you get no amino acids. Instead, you get things like formaldehyde and cyanide... and those are NOT conducive to life.
Some of our textbooks may still be perpetuating this debunked theory (mine in high school did), but no modern scientists believe this experiment has any relationship to reality at all. And whatever sludge they have in those jars are equally useless, because it resulted from a flawed model. So don't run off and tell your creationist friends about your new "evidence", because if they've been following any research, they'll just laugh at you.
It also depends on the field. As a computer engineer, I can do engineering level work in my field without a stupid PE. And the world is a better place because of it.
I can see why a license might be required for the actual constructiong ofa building that could fall on someone's head or other physical objects that have a high likelihood of killing people if not designed correctly, so I agree with the parent in that respect. But I think things covered under that clause should be kept to a minimum. Can you imagine of a PE was required for computer engineering? Sorry Woz, Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerburg. You guys are too young to have the years of experiece required for a PE, so you can't build your product.
Everywhere. Pretty much all good routers are IPv6 capable, just not out of the box (unfortunately). You have to do things like put the DD-WRT open source firmware on them. On the plus side though, if you do that you don't just get IPv6, you additionally pretty much turn your home router into an enterprise router.
Note that some companies like Buffalo are starting to ship their routers with DD-WRT on them by default, so we are starting to see IPv6 enabled routers out of the box. As for the other companies, they are probably holding off in the hopes that people are forced to buy more routers from them in the future, rather than running what they currently have. Once the public becomes aware that IPv6 is a desirable feature, then they will start selling them.
Dirt cheap? It costs 700 dollars to get one that only has a 64 GB hard drive. You could get a full blown Windows 7 convertible laptop/tablet for that price! And it would run far more advanced applications, be more versatile (full sized keyboard anyone?), handle any peripheral under the sun and do just about any task you want it to. And it would probably have a bigger screen as well.
The iPad is good for playing scrabble, angry birds and doing light web browsing, but seriously, given that it costs 700 dollars for that, how can you possibly claim it is dirt cheap?
That doesn't mean they aren't in trouble. A few years ago Windows Mobile had a huge installed base, but that doesn't mean the handwriting wasn't on the wall. There used to be a lot more Blackberry users as well. Nokia needs to be careful.
Hey, if Android could overtake Apple like that, I'm not going to bet against Microsoft... historically, they tend to always be behind Apple getting to the marketplace, but still somehow end up at the front of the line.
That's definitely a problem, but it's not so much that the router doesn't support it, it's that the firmware doesn't support it. DDWRT or new manufacturer firmware can correct this issue. And since many modems/routers are rented from ISPs, ISPs could push updates out that would fix a good chunk of the infrastructure.
Ordinarilly I would say this is silly, as market forces don't plan anything. But in this case, we have a cartel rather than a truly free market, so it's possible. And then you have all competitors to the cartel (such as the US) purposely removing themselves from competition and giving the cartel a monopoly, so yeah, maybe King Saud is intentionally killing off competing technologies.
Yes, but these bacteria produce a chemical fuel that can be transported and used at filling stations, where cars can fill up in just a couple of minutes. Electric vehicles do not recharge quickly at this point, so even if solar were better as an energy source, solar + electric cars fails on usability (Which is why people won't buy them without huge subsidies from the govt).
But besides that, solar sucks. It's not as good an energy source as nuclear, coal, or oil, because it's unreliable (cloudly days), more fragile (panels can easilly get damaged, covered with dirt, etc), and it's more expensive. If you want no CO2, then go nuclear. Unless you want to fill the landscape with large, ugly, innefficient solar panels and windmills, and raise the cost of electricity for everyone, solar and wind are bad ideas.
That's much less true these days. Buffalo routers ship with DDWRT as the factory installed firmware, and that means they all support IPv6. I'm sure they aren't the only ones that do this. And at any rate, if ISPs would start renting out Buffalo routers to customers they would soon have IPv6 capable equipment on a lot of their networks.
And just to pre-empt anyone who argues it is too difficult for a non-geek to flash DDWRT onto a home router, remember that all Buffalo routers come with DDWRT as the factory default firmware, so actually you don't have to flash anything to get a home router with DDWRT and IPv6.
No, they aren't doing it just to make us mad, but they could be doing a whole lot more. ISPs are probably the biggest end buyers of consumer level wireless routers. Maybe I'm wrong about that, but they have to be a big chunk because so many consumers don't know how to set them up and therefore rent modems and wireless routers from the ISP. They have to be a relatively big bulk buyer. They could insist that no one gets the contract for new purchases unless they provide IPv6 capability on the home devices. That way the ISPs could upgrade all their renters, and they could tell everyone else that come such and such a date, they won't support non-IPv6 devices. And the ISPs could also negotiate a contract for massive bulk discounts on one or two varieties of home routers and sell them to consumers at cost, which would get the rest of their clients to upgrade. I mean, most people aren't going to completely panic over a one time cost of 30 bucks to replace their home router. It wouldn't be fun, but if you sell them on the idea with some good marketing about how it benfits them (like DTV did), you could probably get them on board.
And the better home routers already have IPv6 support, especially those that can run DDWRT, so those users that bought expensive dual band n routers probably wouldn't have to upgrade at all.
Well, XP did come out over 9 years ago. It's not that surprising it didn't have good support (not much back then did). And by the time the core infrastructure is ready for IPv6, everyone will for the most part have switched to Windows 7, or at the least Vista. So I don't think XP is the core issue holding up the migration.
So if a botnet gets on with 10,000 users, then everyone on the Internet will believe it's therefore a legitimate file? Or if something new comes out and two people have it, so no one else downloads it, how can it become big enough to appear "legit"? There's no good way to solve these issues, so you are pretty much guaranted that there will be a flood of malware. Not that I care. I hate piracy. But the point stands.
You guys could probably hire some more full time employees if you'd just fire some of the worthless ones. But I'm sure government unions prevent any of that from taking place. That and the fact that government never goes through a recession with the rest of the country, so you don't have to make the really deep cuts that would force you to be more efficient. Even a 1 billion dollar cut is nothing compared to the proportional cuts and restructiong going on in much of the private sector these last few years.
Sorry to be so cynical, but I hate big government. Not government, and not necessarilly every function that the government does, but I definitely hate big government, and most of all big government unions. All I ever seem to do is pay them to set my tax dollars ablaze.
6. Somewhere, somehow, you may have used eight pounds of unsustainable palm oil from a palm oil farm in Indonesia in your food products, and should therefore be shot.
Well, even if that was good for the company financially, it's hard to believe any company would have a manager so loyal they would be willing to risk certain hard prison time just to help their company get ahead. Even most CEOs who could benefit the most from that wouldn't do it, especially since targetting a US agency would be way worse than most other illegal business things you could do (in terms of the consequences). Depending on which agency it was and what you got into, you could be charged with espionage, or worse, treason, which can get you the death penalty. Plus the company probably loses more than it gains due to fines and litigation. And just because agriculture is a hundred billion dollar a year industry doesn't mean you get enough out of USDA data to justify the risk. Just knowing USDA data doesn't divert that money from John Deere straight to your pocket. I'm agreeing with the grandparent... I find it unlikely that any manager will look at the cost/benefit of illegally accessing that information and come away thinking "go for it."
I'm already in that world... I work in the web hosting team for a Fortune 500 company (we host over 1000 websites for our corporation), and we've already got developers spouting off about how they want to use Windows Azure and move everything to the cloud. Why they want that, or what they truly think they are going to gain, I don't know. I think it's just excitement to be part of the latest buzzword trend, and they don't realize that what they already have now is essentially a "private cloud".
It's actually going to be funny if they do get to move to the cloud, because right now whenever things go wrong they blame us, and each time we dig into the issue and point out which part of their code caused the problem. We dig in to the point of doing analysis of memory dumps, often dropping everything to hunt for the problem if it is a critical issue on a big site. Good luck getting that kind of service when your code hosted on Windows Azure breaks.
Not to be a nit-pick, but in order for common sense to say there shouldn't be matter, you have to rely on both big bang theory AND dark matter theory. The fact that there is matter may not speak to big bang theory at all... it may speak to primarilly dark matter theory and the validity of that. There are other theories explaining gravitational discrepencies that don't rely on dark matter, and it could be that one of them is correct. In which case you could still have the bing bang theory be valid and have the existence of matter, with no issues.
I know a lot of scientists really believe the dark matter theory to be correct, but we are starting to get to the point (IMO) where the rubber needs to meet the road. We've had dozens of tests designed to detect dark matter, and every one of them has failed. At some point, maybe we need to take a step back and ask whether the problems were really with the tests, or the validity of the theory itself. I'm starting to think dark matter theory has something in common with ether.
Brilliant! That would make critical IT infrastructure less diverse, and make it even more likely everything could be taken out with a single zero day attack.
Let's clear up a misconception. Java generally runs as a client side app running on a PC. It is NOT a web rendering engine, as is ASP .Net, so the possibility of remote exploit is much lower. ASP .Net is by definition always available to remote machines, where Java is not. Even an internal facing ASP .Net website is available to remote internal machines. Most Java apps are not. So the comparison is not really valid. And also, as someone who works on a web hosting team and has some familiarity with the vulnerability, let me just add that it was EXTREMELY obscure, not like the run of the mill buffer overflow exploits we used to get from Microsoft in years past. While dangerous, I still have to say if these are the kinds of bugs hackers have to find now, Microsoft has definitely removed the low hanging fruit and is improving its security profile.