Where is this $1 billion price tag coming from? I've seen facotries go up twice that size for under $20 million, so unless the thing is filled with solid gold doorknobs I'm doubting that pricetag. Also, all these "sources" are random apple fanboi tech sites. It's apple rather well known for spawning their own viral mysteries to help build up suspense for their next big thing? To me that looks like your standard manufacturing plant, look at the water towers... why would you need those in a data center? Maybe they're sick of the bad press from china and might start offering an american made version of some of their hardware? It's clear their customers don't care about price.
A definition written by someone that, again, doesn't know what it is. And no, I'm not describing hard SciFi. I read hard SciFi, and to my knowledge, there has never been a Hard Scifi movie (someone suggest some if you think you know of one) If you want hard Scifi read some of this guys stuff: http://www.amazon.com/Alastair-Reynolds/e/B000APTREU/ref=ntt_aut_sim_1_1
There are many other authors.
Science Fiction is a Fictitious story based on known Scientific Principles at the time it is published. A Scifi story is allowed 2 major breaches (warp drive, teleporters) of the know laws of science as long as at least one of them has some sort of sketchy device that supposedly mitigates the law (heisenberg compensators.)
Hard SciFi has the following difference: The only breaches of Scientific law allowed are ones that are thoroughly explained in such a way that even a physicist would say "Well... ok, maybe..." Warpdrive is definitely out of the picture unless the story takes place in another physical universe.
Tron has nothing more to do with Science than Indiana Jones did. Wait, Indiana Jones was a professor wasn't he? Ok, Indiana Jones was more SciFi than tron was.
But this would be more like if she hid the mail in a safe and then stored the combination on a post-it note next to the safe... oh wait, that wouldn't be illegal either.
Tron is no more Scifi than Starwars was. Just because there's space or computers involved in the plot does not make it Scifi. I'm not saying either were bad movies, but really, if every single aspect of the movie is scientifically impossible it's FANTASY not science fiction. Look at this garbage: http://www.imdb.com/chart/scifi WALL-E is Scifi? The Thing? Back to the Future? The Iron giant?
The fact of the matter is, most people don't know enough about science to know this stuff isn't possible. But today most people DO know enough about computers to know that Tron isn't possible. Now if we could figure out how to make relativity required for facebook updates we might get somewhere.
Can someone finally get fired? How god damned hard is it to xerox Israels security system and be done with it? If Muslim terrorist want to crash a plane, it's certainly going to be one filled with Israelis. There are clearly not any Jews falling from the skys of the middle east so can we just assume they must be doing something right?
um... the engines already hot... since it's been running... so, unless your at the stoplight for 30min and it's 30 bellow out, I don't see it being a problem. Also, it would be pretty easy for them to include a thermostat in the system that re-heats the engine when it drops too low.
Your points aren't really relevant. The US is once again producing something and selling it to another country. That's a good thing and lowers our trade deficit. While we'd all love for all the materials to be mined here, and all the equipment made here that goes into our military equipment... the fact of the matter is, the loop that goes: Mined in the US, made in Japan, assembled in the US is a heck of a lot better than: Mined in China, Made in China, Assembled in the US.
As far as the pollution goes, simply forcing the industry into a country that has no environmental regulations at all isn't solving the problem. We all share the globe. Even if MolyCorp only cleans up half what they should, that's still 50% better than what they are doing in China.
It's already come crashing down, it's just that most of the country doesn't realize it and out News Orgs and political leaders are too cowardly to tell them.
http://grandfather-economic-report.com/debt-gdp-1916-2008.jpg...and if you're wondering what that first peak is in 1933, that would be the great depression.
Actually no, if the spammers ever did that, they'd lose customers. It would be insanely stupid of them. This was just a rummor drummed up by people that were trying to get the people that buy gold to stop. The fact of the matter is, the gold vendors that exist today have been around for almost a decade in most cases. They live and die off their reputation. The truth is, if they misused their customers credit card info even just a few times Visa and MasterCard would drop their contract and cut them off in a matter of minutes. On top of that, most people that buy and sell gold are very paranoid about the whole deal and usually use a service like paypal.
Illegal? That's a bit extreme. Are we going to have internet police to enforce it? There are rather simple ways Blizzard could stop spammers but they've chosen not to. If you want the spammers to go away, vote with your wallet. If you see spammers in a game, it's most likely because it's more profitable for the developer to let them stay. A good example was EQ2 back in the day... the spammers would buy a box for $30 and get banned within a few hours. 1 box per server x 20 (or so) servers x $30 x 3-4 days a week = a lot of reason not to do anything that would really stop the spamming all together.
Yea, I'm really surprised at the speed and range of that thing. I used to work on models and I've never seen a model that fast before. Of course, my time was 20 years ago. Was the thing a friggen jet or something?
Given the fact that every time their Liabilities exceed their Assets the Federal Reserve steps in and either buys up their assets at higher than market value or allows them to forgo the mark to market rules, I don't think this will be a problem for them. They essentially have an unlimited cash supply.
All the major telcos have switched or are switching to "Soft Switches" meaning they are doing away with their old EWSD, DMS100 etc... hardware based switches and converting all their customers to Voip, then trunking it back to their headquarters where they have a software based switch. This saves them a lot of money but also centralizes the switching system and can lead to huge outages. I've seen them happen, so large than nearly the entire customer base of a company is out of service. But Customers are used to rare outages and if all the phones in town go out once or twice a year people chalk it up as "normal." What they don't realize is that it wasn't just their town, it was hundreds of citys all over the country. Even regulatory authorities treat each city outage separately so there's no real record of just how big the outages are.
If there was choice... if ISPs weren't government sanctioned monopolies, then maybe. But the majority of Americans have only one choice for their ISP. That ISP can do ANYTHING they want and there is nothing their customers can do about it. I live in a major metropolitan area and even here I only have 2 choices for internet service, a single DSL provider or a single Cable company... and the Cable service is so incredibly bad that it's not even an option. In a situation like this either the ISP needs to be heavily regulated or the government simply needs to run the utility. Simple as that. Maybe if mobile broadband comes down to a reasonable pricing structure then maybe that would be an option... but theres rather obvious price fixing going on in that industry so we're unlikely to see lower prices until, you guessed it, they get more regulation.
"Well, not any PFC would have done this, because thousands of "lowly" enlisted personnel before and during Manning's service managed to have access to this information without burning it to CD-RW's while lip syncing to Lady Gaga songs."
You're incorrectly assuming that if they did this they'd A. Get caught. B. Get publicly arrested.
Given the almost keystone kops level of security reveled here, it is quite likely that there are quite a few people with less noble goals... You could make quite a bit of coin selling such information to the right people.
My tax records on my home network are more secure than these documents were.
Besides scorn and ridicule? Not much... They could have called it "operation Double Rainbow" and have been laughed at less. At least it would appear they were intentionally trying to be funny rather than completely misunderstanding the very subject matter they were trying to investigate.
If you aren't selling it, you can't patent it. Again, the purpose of the patent is to ensure the inventor can make a profit off of his invention. If you invent a drain stopper, and invent a sink, but only sell them as a single unit then no, you can't patent the drain stopper. Someone else is free to copy your stopper design and use it in their patentable product. Don't like it? Too bad. We can't blanket the globe in patents and expect society to continue to be inventive.
If the group can't even decode the Acronym WTF, I have serious reservations about their ability to counter the efforts of the global geek community out to get them.
"Ok 4chan, we were going to use 256-bit AES to transmit our instructions but it has recently come to our attention that if we simply use an encrytion schema called "Leetspeak" the CIA will be completely mystified and far less likely to crack the code."
***3 months later***
President Obama: "Our Military leaders and Intelligence officials have asked that I request help from the American people in our time of need. We are in desperate need of translators. Specifically in the Swedish ethic language of "LeetSpeak." The also asked me to say 'U will pwn n00b haxors" and said you'd know what that means."
The only organization that aided Bradley Manning in obtaining classified documents was U.S. army intelligence. He was sitting in Bagdad browsing diplomatic cables from every embassy in the world, none of which had anything to do with the type of intelligence he was supposed to be gathering. There was no hacking involved.
Bradley Manning: “I would come in with music on a CD-RW labeled with something like ‘Lady Gaga,’ erase the music then write a compressed split file,” he wrote. “No one suspected a thing and, odds are, they never will.” “I listened and lip-synced to Lady Gaga’s ‘Telephone’ while exfiltrating possibly the largest data spillage in American history,” he added later. ”Weak servers, weak logging, weak physical security, weak counter-intelligence, inattentive signal analysis … a perfect storm.”
The US military basically left a $100 bill laying on the bar while they went to the bathroom and some lowly PFC found it and did what anyone would have in his situation. Now they are trying to pretend like this worldwide network of thieves dropped in like ninjas and snatched it from their 3ft thick titanium safe.
Think for a second on what Mr. Mannings goal was... informing the public. Now think of how easily it would be for a foreign security agency or even a terrorist sympathizer to achieve the same level of clearance. Their goals would be far less noble, and far less public. They'd most likely never get caught. Bradley Manning has probably done more to help secure the US Militarys network than any idiot at the CIA that doesn't even know what the acronym WTF stands for.
My highschool math teacher was a retired NASA programmer. According to her, teaching Mathamatics was about leaching logic and problem solving. If you forgot all the formulas taught in her class, she said, it wouldn't matter. The real skill learned was how to deal with an entirely new mathematical problem. WHY is area "height x width"? How to build your own sort of equations. Sure enough, decades later I have forgotten every single equation I had been taught there, but when faced with a logic problem I'm still able to work it out.
Slashdot Mirror
I think you underestimate the amount and value of the equipment carried by your average US soldier.
People still use iTunes?
Where is this $1 billion price tag coming from? I've seen facotries go up twice that size for under $20 million, so unless the thing is filled with solid gold doorknobs I'm doubting that pricetag. Also, all these "sources" are random apple fanboi tech sites. It's apple rather well known for spawning their own viral mysteries to help build up suspense for their next big thing? To me that looks like your standard manufacturing plant, look at the water towers... why would you need those in a data center? Maybe they're sick of the bad press from china and might start offering an american made version of some of their hardware? It's clear their customers don't care about price.
Knowing 4chan, they're prolly doing it themselves.
A definition written by someone that, again, doesn't know what it is. And no, I'm not describing hard SciFi. I read hard SciFi, and to my knowledge, there has never been a Hard Scifi movie (someone suggest some if you think you know of one) If you want hard Scifi read some of this guys stuff: http://www.amazon.com/Alastair-Reynolds/e/B000APTREU/ref=ntt_aut_sim_1_1
There are many other authors.
Science Fiction is a Fictitious story based on known Scientific Principles at the time it is published. A Scifi story is allowed 2 major breaches (warp drive, teleporters) of the know laws of science as long as at least one of them has some sort of sketchy device that supposedly mitigates the law (heisenberg compensators.)
Hard SciFi has the following difference: The only breaches of Scientific law allowed are ones that are thoroughly explained in such a way that even a physicist would say "Well... ok, maybe..." Warpdrive is definitely out of the picture unless the story takes place in another physical universe.
Tron has nothing more to do with Science than Indiana Jones did. Wait, Indiana Jones was a professor wasn't he? Ok, Indiana Jones was more SciFi than tron was.
But this would be more like if she hid the mail in a safe and then stored the combination on a post-it note next to the safe... oh wait, that wouldn't be illegal either.
Tron is no more Scifi than Starwars was. Just because there's space or computers involved in the plot does not make it Scifi. I'm not saying either were bad movies, but really, if every single aspect of the movie is scientifically impossible it's FANTASY not science fiction.
Look at this garbage: http://www.imdb.com/chart/scifi
WALL-E is Scifi?
The Thing?
Back to the Future?
The Iron giant?
The fact of the matter is, most people don't know enough about science to know this stuff isn't possible. But today most people DO know enough about computers to know that Tron isn't possible. Now if we could figure out how to make relativity required for facebook updates we might get somewhere.
Can someone finally get fired? How god damned hard is it to xerox Israels security system and be done with it? If Muslim terrorist want to crash a plane, it's certainly going to be one filled with Israelis. There are clearly not any Jews falling from the skys of the middle east so can we just assume they must be doing something right?
um... the engines already hot... since it's been running... so, unless your at the stoplight for 30min and it's 30 bellow out, I don't see it being a problem. Also, it would be pretty easy for them to include a thermostat in the system that re-heats the engine when it drops too low.
Your points aren't really relevant. The US is once again producing something and selling it to another country. That's a good thing and lowers our trade deficit. While we'd all love for all the materials to be mined here, and all the equipment made here that goes into our military equipment... the fact of the matter is, the loop that goes: Mined in the US, made in Japan, assembled in the US is a heck of a lot better than: Mined in China, Made in China, Assembled in the US.
As far as the pollution goes, simply forcing the industry into a country that has no environmental regulations at all isn't solving the problem. We all share the globe. Even if MolyCorp only cleans up half what they should, that's still 50% better than what they are doing in China.
Worse yet, people will start buying the cards en-mass, bios modding them and then selling them on ebay.
It's already come crashing down, it's just that most of the country doesn't realize it and out News Orgs and political leaders are too cowardly to tell them.
...and if you're wondering what that first peak is in 1933, that would be the great depression.
http://grandfather-economic-report.com/debt-gdp-1916-2008.jpg
Actually no, if the spammers ever did that, they'd lose customers. It would be insanely stupid of them. This was just a rummor drummed up by people that were trying to get the people that buy gold to stop. The fact of the matter is, the gold vendors that exist today have been around for almost a decade in most cases. They live and die off their reputation. The truth is, if they misused their customers credit card info even just a few times Visa and MasterCard would drop their contract and cut them off in a matter of minutes. On top of that, most people that buy and sell gold are very paranoid about the whole deal and usually use a service like paypal.
Illegal? That's a bit extreme. Are we going to have internet police to enforce it? There are rather simple ways Blizzard could stop spammers but they've chosen not to. If you want the spammers to go away, vote with your wallet. If you see spammers in a game, it's most likely because it's more profitable for the developer to let them stay. A good example was EQ2 back in the day... the spammers would buy a box for $30 and get banned within a few hours. 1 box per server x 20 (or so) servers x $30 x 3-4 days a week = a lot of reason not to do anything that would really stop the spamming all together.
Yea, I'm really surprised at the speed and range of that thing. I used to work on models and I've never seen a model that fast before. Of course, my time was 20 years ago. Was the thing a friggen jet or something?
You mean, your surprised CNN/FOX/MSNBC didn't exaggerate/misrepresent the situation and concoct a panic to increase ratings.
Given the fact that every time their Liabilities exceed their Assets the Federal Reserve steps in and either buys up their assets at higher than market value or allows them to forgo the mark to market rules, I don't think this will be a problem for them. They essentially have an unlimited cash supply.
All the major telcos have switched or are switching to "Soft Switches" meaning they are doing away with their old EWSD, DMS100 etc... hardware based switches and converting all their customers to Voip, then trunking it back to their headquarters where they have a software based switch. This saves them a lot of money but also centralizes the switching system and can lead to huge outages. I've seen them happen, so large than nearly the entire customer base of a company is out of service. But Customers are used to rare outages and if all the phones in town go out once or twice a year people chalk it up as "normal." What they don't realize is that it wasn't just their town, it was hundreds of citys all over the country. Even regulatory authorities treat each city outage separately so there's no real record of just how big the outages are.
If there was choice... if ISPs weren't government sanctioned monopolies, then maybe. But the majority of Americans have only one choice for their ISP. That ISP can do ANYTHING they want and there is nothing their customers can do about it. I live in a major metropolitan area and even here I only have 2 choices for internet service, a single DSL provider or a single Cable company... and the Cable service is so incredibly bad that it's not even an option. In a situation like this either the ISP needs to be heavily regulated or the government simply needs to run the utility. Simple as that. Maybe if mobile broadband comes down to a reasonable pricing structure then maybe that would be an option... but theres rather obvious price fixing going on in that industry so we're unlikely to see lower prices until, you guessed it, they get more regulation.
"Well, not any PFC would have done this, because thousands of "lowly" enlisted personnel before and during Manning's service managed to have access to this information without burning it to CD-RW's while lip syncing to Lady Gaga songs."
You're incorrectly assuming that if they did this they'd
A. Get caught.
B. Get publicly arrested.
Given the almost keystone kops level of security reveled here, it is quite likely that there are quite a few people with less noble goals... You could make quite a bit of coin selling such information to the right people.
My tax records on my home network are more secure than these documents were.
Besides scorn and ridicule? Not much... They could have called it "operation Double Rainbow" and have been laughed at less. At least it would appear they were intentionally trying to be funny rather than completely misunderstanding the very subject matter they were trying to investigate.
If you aren't selling it, you can't patent it. Again, the purpose of the patent is to ensure the inventor can make a profit off of his invention. If you invent a drain stopper, and invent a sink, but only sell them as a single unit then no, you can't patent the drain stopper. Someone else is free to copy your stopper design and use it in their patentable product. Don't like it? Too bad. We can't blanket the globe in patents and expect society to continue to be inventive.
If the group can't even decode the Acronym WTF, I have serious reservations about their ability to counter the efforts of the global geek community out to get them.
"Ok 4chan, we were going to use 256-bit AES to transmit our instructions but it has recently come to our attention that if we simply use an encrytion schema called "Leetspeak" the CIA will be completely mystified and far less likely to crack the code."
***3 months later***
President Obama: "Our Military leaders and Intelligence officials have asked that I request help from the American people in our time of need. We are in desperate need of translators. Specifically in the Swedish ethic language of "LeetSpeak." The also asked me to say 'U will pwn n00b haxors" and said you'd know what that means."
The only organization that aided Bradley Manning in obtaining classified documents was U.S. army intelligence. He was sitting in Bagdad browsing diplomatic cables from every embassy in the world, none of which had anything to do with the type of intelligence he was supposed to be gathering. There was no hacking involved.
Bradley Manning:
“I would come in with music on a CD-RW labeled with something like ‘Lady Gaga,’ erase the music then write a compressed split file,” he wrote. “No one suspected a thing and, odds are, they never will.” “I listened and lip-synced to Lady Gaga’s ‘Telephone’ while exfiltrating possibly the largest data spillage in American history,” he added later. ”Weak servers, weak logging, weak physical security, weak counter-intelligence, inattentive signal analysis … a perfect storm.”
The US military basically left a $100 bill laying on the bar while they went to the bathroom and some lowly PFC found it and did what anyone would have in his situation. Now they are trying to pretend like this worldwide network of thieves dropped in like ninjas and snatched it from their 3ft thick titanium safe.
Think for a second on what Mr. Mannings goal was... informing the public. Now think of how easily it would be for a foreign security agency or even a terrorist sympathizer to achieve the same level of clearance. Their goals would be far less noble, and far less public. They'd most likely never get caught. Bradley Manning has probably done more to help secure the US Militarys network than any idiot at the CIA that doesn't even know what the acronym WTF stands for.
My highschool math teacher was a retired NASA programmer. According to her, teaching Mathamatics was about leaching logic and problem solving. If you forgot all the formulas taught in her class, she said, it wouldn't matter. The real skill learned was how to deal with an entirely new mathematical problem. WHY is area "height x width"? How to build your own sort of equations. Sure enough, decades later I have forgotten every single equation I had been taught there, but when faced with a logic problem I'm still able to work it out.