I get the Slashdot love for Tesla. Running at usable power, pushing the limits of electrochemical storage, society having to come to terms with legal and liability issues raised by an unusual business model. Good stuff.
Waze worked to get me to work this morning, just as it did before being bought. I'm not particularly familiar with the others, but it seems you're not understanding "just to shut them down".
Yes, Google buys smaller companies. Usually, though, their technology and/or data makes its way into other Google products, or the product becomes blessed with an independent project status. I don't recall any instances where Google bought a competitor for the sole purpose of eliminating them.
One of the things he's done is built a cult of followers who insist that he's leaking secrets purely for the good of the world. It's reached the point where anyone criticizing him is dismissed outright as being a brainwashed government shill, especially here on Slashdot where the hivemind reigns supreme.
However, the actual existence of a benevolent intent is what makes all the difference, factually. If Assange's claims of benevolence are honest, then he's a whistleblower who only gave information to enemies out of necessity or accident. If he really only cared about spilling secrets, then he's a spy who communicates through a very public medium, using scandalous stories as obfuscation.
We can't really "focus on what he has done", without a clear idea of exactly what that is. Is he a whistleblower or is he a spy? Only Assange knows for sure, but whatever he says is obviously biased. For anyone else interested in facts, the only materials we have to consider are articles like this - written by observers, showing only their observations of the man's behavior. Maybe they support his claims, and maybe not.
When we consider the effects of Assange's actions, we should not forget the parts that oppose our own preferred opinions. In comparison, consider that Joseph Stalin helped defeat the Nazis and establish his country as a superpower. On the other hand, he was a tyrant whose powerful nation was forged by oppressing dissent. A few generations from now, if we consider Julian Assange to be a hero, do we include the word "accidental"?
You aren't Google's product. You are the value in Google's product. It's a subtle, yet vital, distinction.
Google's products are, from a general perspective, business intelligence services. They sell search appliances to help companies manage their documents. They sell mapping and location services to help manage logistics. They also sell ad-placement services to put ads in places where they're most likely to result in a sale.
All of those products rely on understanding human behavior, to varying degrees. Of course, since humans love to lie so much, the best way to get that understanding is by direct observation. Google watches what you search for, what roads you prefer, and what your purchasing interests are. You are not the product. Google doesn't give a damn about you personally. Google only cares about your behavior patterns, at a statistical level, to improve its real products.
Personally, I prefer this to Microsoft's usual extortion tactics, and I also prefer it to the competitive ideal of many small companies, where each one provides only a small part of a viable solution. I'll start to worry when Google starts buying competitors just to shut them down, but until then I must admit I like what I see.
Wow... a 100% win rate to a 100% loss rate, eh? That's pretty extreme, and extreme claims raise a nice big red flag that you're cherry-picking examples to consider "war", and probably also "victory" and "defeat" criteria are malleable, too.
Let's look at some third-party information. Wikipedia's certainly contestable, but it's good enough for a general idea. Prior to 1950, The United States had a mix of victory and defeat, with the World Wars as clear outliers in the extreme victory area. After the 1947 founding of the CIA and the 1952 founding of the NSA, we've also have a mix of victory and defeat, just without the major outliers.
I'm terribly sorry to let facts get in the way of your rhetoric, but it seems to me that reality's just a bit more complicated than you think.
I have to admin a few as part of my job, but if they tried to make me work in powershell I would just quit.
It depends how much you need to do in PowerShell. It makes one-liners and one-off scripts simple enough, especially of the form "Take all X and do Y". On the other hand, it has a few problems.
I did my time in end-user support. I've been the one that's has to explain to Granny that she doesn't need to panic every time sees a new horror story on the news.
Reuters may not be the biggest security threat, but they're certainly one of the biggest threats to sanity.
Of course. You see, in the United States, our two main political parties have long been associated with the colors red and blue. Our current president comes from the evil blue party, so rather than worry about international relations or fixing our economy, he's mandated longer red-light times, to increase the hatred we associate with the color of his opponents' party.
When the evil red party is in power, they increase red-light times so as to increase the amount of free marketing their party's color gets.
I have a slightly lower UID, and I only manage about 25 Server 2012 instances. Not one is Core, because all of mine have to be accessed directly. Remote management is not an option.
I find that the Metro isn't really too big of a problem. Typically, I get to a server, open the consoles I need, then stay in Desktop mode for the rest of my work. The Start screen's biggest disadvantage is managing large numbers of programs, but I find I rarely have too many programs on a server, especially if I put in the time to clean up after installers that seem to think the Start menu/screen is the perfect place for all of their documentation, website links, uninstallers, and other bullshit.
As noted by others, RDP is actually where Metro gets in the way. If the super key is trapped in any way (such as by the host computer), you have to get the cursor into those few hot pixels in the corner to open the Start screen. It's not exactly convenient, so it's good to hear that an actual button has returned in R2. Shame I can't upgrade off of New Vista.
The difference is in the amount of power concentrated in a single person. There's a strong correlation between "countries we're friends with" and "widely-distributed authority". Tony Blair and Francois Hollande are limited by their various democratic councils, but Kim Jong-un is not.
1) The victim is whoever absorbed the assets of the company at its closing. They've lost the value of the tape.
2) Being a licensed rental copy, the replacement cost is in the range of a hundred dollars or more.
The basic issue is that the law doesn't get to be ignored just because the media can spin the story to sound trivial. If someone robbed a store of $100 worth of merchandise, had an arrest warrant issued at the time, then spent nine years on the run, would it still be unreasonable for them to be arrested today? At the most basic level, the purpose of law is to provide a consistent accounting of what behavior society does or does not approve of. If a magistrate chose to neglect an old outstanding arrest warrant, then there'd be something very wrong.
Ah, yes. The younger generation is so terribly lazy.
At age 25, that generation has, on the whole, just left university and has had only a few short years to pull together a career. At the same time, they're pulling together the means to start a family, while trying to start paying off student debts. In a modern world, those endeavors require cell phones, computers, and a functional car. They were luxuries back in your good ol' days, but now they're just a necessity of modern life, as essential today as a good suit was in the 1920s. Of course, someone with an established career wouldn't see that. We had to take the train or bus to work when we were their age, and we did just fine... never mind that those trains and buses have shut down now.
History has always shown a gradual move toward normalization of luxuries.Once upon a time, a filet of minced beef served with soft bread and cheese would be a feast for a king. Now McDonalds will serve it to you for a dollar. The enabling factor is the ability to pool labor and resources, on an ever-increasing scale. For the king's feast, a small team would raise the cattle, harvest the wheat, and prepare the whole meal by hand, of course. Today, the economy of scale allows workers to focus on a single minute aspect of the job, minimizing the overhead cost of production. The young generation today is doing just as much work as you did in your youth, but they're doing it faster and easier that you could imagine.
The children now love luxury; they have bad manners, contempt for authority; they show disrespect for elders and love chatter in place of exercise. Children are now tyrants, not the servants of their households. They no longer rise when elders enter the room. They contradict their parents, chatter before company, gobble up dainties at the table, cross their legs, and tyrannize their teachers.
Ok, everybody. Self-classification is gross, because misexistentialist says so.
In the interest of public decency, you are now "poor" if you're unable to afford food or clothing, and everyone else is "rich". There is to be no further differentiation, so we can forget all of that "middle class" nonsense.
It you were born within the bounds of the United States of America, you are an American. Everyone else is a foreigner, regardless of immigration, heritage, or temporary circumstances.
Whenever the ambient temperature is above 32 degrees Fahrenheit, it is "warm", and for the sake of avoiding disgusting differentiation, everyone must wear their state-issued "warm" clothes. At 32 degrees Fahrenheit and below, it is "cold", and we all must wear the appropriate "cold" clothing.
Of course, not everyone will want to follow these new rules, but we have a suitable and tasteful classification for that as well. Those who conform will be considered "comrades", and those who violate these basic rules for a civil society will be deemed "unpersons" and will no longer be welcome here.
The "Q" has been in use for a while now, representing "questioning" or "queer", and often carrying with it the literal definition of "queer": unusual. There's the usual heterosexual affiliation, and there's the common "LGBT" alternatives, but anything other than straight heterosexuality can fall under the "queer" label, so it's often used to express acceptance. As noted, it also often stands for "questioning", accepting anyone who doesn't want to fall under one of the other letters (or heterosexuality), and implying that the other letters aren't narrowly-defined.
I have a friend that is a true chimera. She has about 50% male cells and 50% female cells, and that included the cells that developed into genitalia and gonads. She has one ovary and one testicle, and a mix of hormones that wreak havoc on her.
At birth, the doctors assigned a male gender on paper, expecting that the female parts would be easier to remove later, but that hasn't been the case. At puberty her hormones changed more toward female, making a male gender probably lethal. She now considers herself female, and is just waiting to have a bit of invasive surgery.
That's about the most extreme form of ambiguous genitalia you can have, having developed from an ambiguous genome. Like most extremes, it's exceptionally rare, with only a few dozen people currently living. Less-extreme examples however, like 90%/10% splits, are relatively common, with a few hundred thousand such people worldwide. Some of those present visible symptoms, and some do not. Of course, that's only genetics. What someone associates as is another complicated issue.
As a society, we like to classify things in easy categories, like "male" or "female", but reality rarely supports such a clear distinction.
This is pretty much like leaving a stack of pamphlets on a table in a train station, then arresting those who pick one up for possession of classified material.
That's pretty much exactly how classified material works. It doesn't matter how you got the information, or even whether you should have access to it. What matters is whether you followed proper security procedure with it, including labeling.
It's strict by design. Otherwise, a spy could copy classified information, remove the labeling, and just leave the information on a table for an accomplice to pick up. That accomplice could then undertake the risky operation of transporting the documents, but with little risk of a provable criminal prosecution. After all, he has a plausible defense of pleading ignorance.
I have long used the analogy that Wikipedia is like asking experts in a particular field. For the most part, you'll get accurate information representing the current state of the art. Sometimes, you'll stumble across an expert with bad data, or a conflict of interest, or another factor leading to him giving you incorrect information. You, as the reader, should expect this and seek verification of any questionable claims, but for obtaining a general understanding of an area of study, Wikipedia is good enough.
With that analogy in mind, why shouldn't you directly ask someone about their life and their work? Of course it will be biased, but it's more obvious than the random biases you'll encounter when asking others.
That's only useful in a specific case, though, where one piece of legislation is the sole authorization for a government action. That's pretty rare (to the point where I doubt this is even such a case).
For everything else, having an expiration date means that the actual state of the law would change even more than it does now, so everybody has to spend more money and work even harder just to make sure that they're still in compliance with the newly-revised rules that are subtly different that the previous rules, because the politicians wanted to look like they were actively improving things.
Similarly, the increased volatility of the law means that legal precedent is also more volatile, so the cost of a court case gets worse as there's more room to argue about how a rule's expiration affects previous judgments. While a criminal case is waiting for the court to settle, the legality of the alleged crime could even change, especially if it's politically beneficial for the legislators to override the judicial branch.
Mandatory expiration dates for legislation fall into the large category of "ideas that cause more problems than they solve".
I never said it wouldn't burn. In fact I said it'd burn quickly, which is precisely because it includes its own oxygen. The reaction isn't self-regulating as it is when environmental oxygen is required. My point is that thermite, being so heavy and so fast-burning, would remain in one small area and fall down quickly. It'd be unlikely to cause widespread data loss, though anything in one small area would indeed be thoroughly destroyed. This is a common trait across most military incendiaries. Anything small is typically designed for reliability, rather than area of effect. If the military wants to burn a whole building, they'll just drop a bomb from an airplane.
Personally, I haven't been in any Iron Mountain facilities. I've been in a facility for one of their competitors, though, and noted that archived items were stored in large fireproof boxes, in addition to having a building-wide suppression system. Anything that breached one box would be unlikely to spread to other boxes nearby. From a quick look online, it doesn't look like that's Iron Mountain's method. Given that Iron Mountain has had several incidents of arson in the past few years, perhaps they should invest in some new techniques?
The problem with thermite for arson is that it's rather heavy, being essentially metal powder. It's difficult to get more than a few pounds of it into any particular location. Once burning it releases a lot of heat, but in doing so, consumes its fuel quickly. After the reaction stops you just have a pool of molten metal that water can easily keep under control.
On the other hand, non-military incendiaries are more difficult to control. Molotov cocktails throw burning fuel when they shatter, which is a good way to light unprotected papers on fire.
If I had to guess, I'd put my money on incompetence on behalf of Iron Mountain. Apparently the building was equipped with fire-detection and sprinkler systems, but from the details currently available, it doesn't look like the building's contents were sufficiently (individually) protected.
Slashdot Mirror
I get the Slashdot love for Tesla. Running at usable power, pushing the limits of electrochemical storage, society having to come to terms with legal and liability issues raised by an unusual business model. Good stuff.
Waze worked to get me to work this morning, just as it did before being bought. I'm not particularly familiar with the others, but it seems you're not understanding "just to shut them down".
Yes, Google buys smaller companies. Usually, though, their technology and/or data makes its way into other Google products, or the product becomes blessed with an independent project status. I don't recall any instances where Google bought a competitor for the sole purpose of eliminating them.
...instead of focussing on what he has done.
One of the things he's done is built a cult of followers who insist that he's leaking secrets purely for the good of the world. It's reached the point where anyone criticizing him is dismissed outright as being a brainwashed government shill, especially here on Slashdot where the hivemind reigns supreme.
However, the actual existence of a benevolent intent is what makes all the difference, factually. If Assange's claims of benevolence are honest, then he's a whistleblower who only gave information to enemies out of necessity or accident. If he really only cared about spilling secrets, then he's a spy who communicates through a very public medium, using scandalous stories as obfuscation.
We can't really "focus on what he has done", without a clear idea of exactly what that is. Is he a whistleblower or is he a spy? Only Assange knows for sure, but whatever he says is obviously biased. For anyone else interested in facts, the only materials we have to consider are articles like this - written by observers, showing only their observations of the man's behavior. Maybe they support his claims, and maybe not.
When we consider the effects of Assange's actions, we should not forget the parts that oppose our own preferred opinions. In comparison, consider that Joseph Stalin helped defeat the Nazis and establish his country as a superpower. On the other hand, he was a tyrant whose powerful nation was forged by oppressing dissent. A few generations from now, if we consider Julian Assange to be a hero, do we include the word "accidental"?
You aren't Google's product. You are the value in Google's product. It's a subtle, yet vital, distinction.
Google's products are, from a general perspective, business intelligence services. They sell search appliances to help companies manage their documents. They sell mapping and location services to help manage logistics. They also sell ad-placement services to put ads in places where they're most likely to result in a sale.
All of those products rely on understanding human behavior, to varying degrees. Of course, since humans love to lie so much, the best way to get that understanding is by direct observation. Google watches what you search for, what roads you prefer, and what your purchasing interests are. You are not the product. Google doesn't give a damn about you personally. Google only cares about your behavior patterns, at a statistical level, to improve its real products.
Personally, I prefer this to Microsoft's usual extortion tactics, and I also prefer it to the competitive ideal of many small companies, where each one provides only a small part of a viable solution. I'll start to worry when Google starts buying competitors just to shut them down, but until then I must admit I like what I see.
Wow... a 100% win rate to a 100% loss rate, eh? That's pretty extreme, and extreme claims raise a nice big red flag that you're cherry-picking examples to consider "war", and probably also "victory" and "defeat" criteria are malleable, too.
Let's look at some third-party information. Wikipedia's certainly contestable, but it's good enough for a general idea. Prior to 1950, The United States had a mix of victory and defeat, with the World Wars as clear outliers in the extreme victory area. After the 1947 founding of the CIA and the 1952 founding of the NSA, we've also have a mix of victory and defeat, just without the major outliers.
I'm terribly sorry to let facts get in the way of your rhetoric, but it seems to me that reality's just a bit more complicated than you think.
I have to admin a few as part of my job, but if they tried to make me work in powershell I would just quit.
It depends how much you need to do in PowerShell. It makes one-liners and one-off scripts simple enough, especially of the form "Take all X and do Y". On the other hand, it has a few problems.
I did my time in end-user support. I've been the one that's has to explain to Granny that she doesn't need to panic every time sees a new horror story on the news.
Reuters may not be the biggest security threat, but they're certainly one of the biggest threats to sanity.
Of course. You see, in the United States, our two main political parties have long been associated with the colors red and blue. Our current president comes from the evil blue party, so rather than worry about international relations or fixing our economy, he's mandated longer red-light times, to increase the hatred we associate with the color of his opponents' party.
When the evil red party is in power, they increase red-light times so as to increase the amount of free marketing their party's color gets.
I have a slightly lower UID, and I only manage about 25 Server 2012 instances. Not one is Core, because all of mine have to be accessed directly. Remote management is not an option.
I find that the Metro isn't really too big of a problem. Typically, I get to a server, open the consoles I need, then stay in Desktop mode for the rest of my work. The Start screen's biggest disadvantage is managing large numbers of programs, but I find I rarely have too many programs on a server, especially if I put in the time to clean up after installers that seem to think the Start menu/screen is the perfect place for all of their documentation, website links, uninstallers, and other bullshit.
As noted by others, RDP is actually where Metro gets in the way. If the super key is trapped in any way (such as by the host computer), you have to get the cursor into those few hot pixels in the corner to open the Start screen. It's not exactly convenient, so it's good to hear that an actual button has returned in R2. Shame I can't upgrade off of New Vista.
The difference is in the amount of power concentrated in a single person. There's a strong correlation between "countries we're friends with" and "widely-distributed authority". Tony Blair and Francois Hollande are limited by their various democratic councils, but Kim Jong-un is not.
1) The victim is whoever absorbed the assets of the company at its closing. They've lost the value of the tape.
2) Being a licensed rental copy, the replacement cost is in the range of a hundred dollars or more.
The basic issue is that the law doesn't get to be ignored just because the media can spin the story to sound trivial. If someone robbed a store of $100 worth of merchandise, had an arrest warrant issued at the time, then spent nine years on the run, would it still be unreasonable for them to be arrested today? At the most basic level, the purpose of law is to provide a consistent accounting of what behavior society does or does not approve of. If a magistrate chose to neglect an old outstanding arrest warrant, then there'd be something very wrong.
Ah, yes. The younger generation is so terribly lazy.
At age 25, that generation has, on the whole, just left university and has had only a few short years to pull together a career. At the same time, they're pulling together the means to start a family, while trying to start paying off student debts. In a modern world, those endeavors require cell phones, computers, and a functional car. They were luxuries back in your good ol' days, but now they're just a necessity of modern life, as essential today as a good suit was in the 1920s. Of course, someone with an established career wouldn't see that. We had to take the train or bus to work when we were their age, and we did just fine... never mind that those trains and buses have shut down now.
History has always shown a gradual move toward normalization of luxuries.Once upon a time, a filet of minced beef served with soft bread and cheese would be a feast for a king. Now McDonalds will serve it to you for a dollar. The enabling factor is the ability to pool labor and resources, on an ever-increasing scale. For the king's feast, a small team would raise the cattle, harvest the wheat, and prepare the whole meal by hand, of course. Today, the economy of scale allows workers to focus on a single minute aspect of the job, minimizing the overhead cost of production. The young generation today is doing just as much work as you did in your youth, but they're doing it faster and easier that you could imagine.
The children now love luxury; they have bad manners, contempt for authority; they show disrespect for elders and love chatter in place of exercise. Children are now tyrants, not the servants of their households. They no longer rise when elders enter the room. They contradict their parents, chatter before company, gobble up dainties at the table, cross their legs, and tyrannize their teachers.
-not Socrates
Probably not. If fertile gametes can even be produced, the subsequent hormonal mayhem will almost certainly disrupt development.
Ok, everybody. Self-classification is gross, because misexistentialist says so.
In the interest of public decency, you are now "poor" if you're unable to afford food or clothing, and everyone else is "rich". There is to be no further differentiation, so we can forget all of that "middle class" nonsense.
It you were born within the bounds of the United States of America, you are an American. Everyone else is a foreigner, regardless of immigration, heritage, or temporary circumstances.
Whenever the ambient temperature is above 32 degrees Fahrenheit, it is "warm", and for the sake of avoiding disgusting differentiation, everyone must wear their state-issued "warm" clothes. At 32 degrees Fahrenheit and below, it is "cold", and we all must wear the appropriate "cold" clothing.
Of course, not everyone will want to follow these new rules, but we have a suitable and tasteful classification for that as well. Those who conform will be considered "comrades", and those who violate these basic rules for a civil society will be deemed "unpersons" and will no longer be welcome here.
The "Q" has been in use for a while now, representing "questioning" or "queer", and often carrying with it the literal definition of "queer": unusual. There's the usual heterosexual affiliation, and there's the common "LGBT" alternatives, but anything other than straight heterosexuality can fall under the "queer" label, so it's often used to express acceptance. As noted, it also often stands for "questioning", accepting anyone who doesn't want to fall under one of the other letters (or heterosexuality), and implying that the other letters aren't narrowly-defined.
the more you try to granularize it, the more trouble you're going to run into defining them
And similarly, the more trouble you're going to have defining the people by their gender... I'm okay with that.
I have a friend that is a true chimera. She has about 50% male cells and 50% female cells, and that included the cells that developed into genitalia and gonads. She has one ovary and one testicle, and a mix of hormones that wreak havoc on her.
At birth, the doctors assigned a male gender on paper, expecting that the female parts would be easier to remove later, but that hasn't been the case. At puberty her hormones changed more toward female, making a male gender probably lethal. She now considers herself female, and is just waiting to have a bit of invasive surgery.
That's about the most extreme form of ambiguous genitalia you can have, having developed from an ambiguous genome. Like most extremes, it's exceptionally rare, with only a few dozen people currently living. Less-extreme examples however, like 90%/10% splits, are relatively common, with a few hundred thousand such people worldwide. Some of those present visible symptoms, and some do not. Of course, that's only genetics. What someone associates as is another complicated issue.
As a society, we like to classify things in easy categories, like "male" or "female", but reality rarely supports such a clear distinction.
Maxim 1
Subtle. I like it.
Chapter I of the French Intellectual Property Code, apparently. From a Google translation, it seems to state explicitly that the mere act of creation invokes copyright protection.
This is pretty much like leaving a stack of pamphlets on a table in a train station, then arresting those who pick one up for possession of classified material.
That's pretty much exactly how classified material works. It doesn't matter how you got the information, or even whether you should have access to it. What matters is whether you followed proper security procedure with it, including labeling.
It's strict by design. Otherwise, a spy could copy classified information, remove the labeling, and just leave the information on a table for an accomplice to pick up. That accomplice could then undertake the risky operation of transporting the documents, but with little risk of a provable criminal prosecution. After all, he has a plausible defense of pleading ignorance.
I have long used the analogy that Wikipedia is like asking experts in a particular field. For the most part, you'll get accurate information representing the current state of the art. Sometimes, you'll stumble across an expert with bad data, or a conflict of interest, or another factor leading to him giving you incorrect information. You, as the reader, should expect this and seek verification of any questionable claims, but for obtaining a general understanding of an area of study, Wikipedia is good enough.
With that analogy in mind, why shouldn't you directly ask someone about their life and their work? Of course it will be biased, but it's more obvious than the random biases you'll encounter when asking others.
That's only useful in a specific case, though, where one piece of legislation is the sole authorization for a government action. That's pretty rare (to the point where I doubt this is even such a case).
For everything else, having an expiration date means that the actual state of the law would change even more than it does now, so everybody has to spend more money and work even harder just to make sure that they're still in compliance with the newly-revised rules that are subtly different that the previous rules, because the politicians wanted to look like they were actively improving things.
Similarly, the increased volatility of the law means that legal precedent is also more volatile, so the cost of a court case gets worse as there's more room to argue about how a rule's expiration affects previous judgments. While a criminal case is waiting for the court to settle, the legality of the alleged crime could even change, especially if it's politically beneficial for the legislators to override the judicial branch.
Mandatory expiration dates for legislation fall into the large category of "ideas that cause more problems than they solve".
I never said it wouldn't burn. In fact I said it'd burn quickly, which is precisely because it includes its own oxygen. The reaction isn't self-regulating as it is when environmental oxygen is required. My point is that thermite, being so heavy and so fast-burning, would remain in one small area and fall down quickly. It'd be unlikely to cause widespread data loss, though anything in one small area would indeed be thoroughly destroyed. This is a common trait across most military incendiaries. Anything small is typically designed for reliability, rather than area of effect. If the military wants to burn a whole building, they'll just drop a bomb from an airplane.
Personally, I haven't been in any Iron Mountain facilities. I've been in a facility for one of their competitors, though, and noted that archived items were stored in large fireproof boxes, in addition to having a building-wide suppression system. Anything that breached one box would be unlikely to spread to other boxes nearby. From a quick look online, it doesn't look like that's Iron Mountain's method. Given that Iron Mountain has had several incidents of arson in the past few years, perhaps they should invest in some new techniques?
The problem with thermite for arson is that it's rather heavy, being essentially metal powder. It's difficult to get more than a few pounds of it into any particular location. Once burning it releases a lot of heat, but in doing so, consumes its fuel quickly. After the reaction stops you just have a pool of molten metal that water can easily keep under control.
On the other hand, non-military incendiaries are more difficult to control. Molotov cocktails throw burning fuel when they shatter, which is a good way to light unprotected papers on fire.
If I had to guess, I'd put my money on incompetence on behalf of Iron Mountain. Apparently the building was equipped with fire-detection and sprinkler systems, but from the details currently available, it doesn't look like the building's contents were sufficiently (individually) protected.