The fact this blew up in 1986 and it's still being sorted in 2012 tells you how dangerous it is. -
Wrong - all it tells you is how incompetent the original Soviet government was. If it had been dealt with from the beginning correctly it never would have happened (multiple safety features were disabled that would have prevented it to begin with).
More to the point if they had correctly cleaned it up to begin with they wouldn't have this mess today. The Soviet Union and their vassal states had a deplorable environmental record. Leaving the environment trashed was status quo for them far more than it ever was for the West. A quick google search will find many, many examples of this that have nothing to do with nuclear. The only reason you ever heard about this instead of all of the others is because of the nuclear element.
My experience is indeed relatively out of date. I was working with these systems between 2005 to 2007. I worked extensively with a very large trading company that had servers worldwide. I later worked for about six months or so down at the CBOT with a different company. I had some intermittent consulting work with secondary companies as well.
As for the delays am not talking about trades, I am talking about services that run on the servers. I didn't work with the trading algorithms, I worked with the servers and trading floor machines.
A/lot/ of servers that are used by trading companies that connect to exchanges are placed as physically close to the exchange as possible. The exchanges themselves have servers and fail over data centers in multiple locations. However the primary locations are surrounded by office towers that are chock full of servers from the trading companies. These servers were likely the majority of the ones that got hosed by Sandy.
I did a bunch of work several years back with a number of exchanges and my budget was allocated in watts of power consumed instead of dollars. The buildings near the exchanges typically can't handle any more air conditioning and they will use power to ration how many system get installed into racks. Instead of working with rack density, cost or other factors, it was all based on watts. Location really was everything as delays were considered far more expensive than hardware.
They do this for high frequency trading of course, as they felt it was always against their favor when their was a delay on a trade. Delays were measured in the milliseconds and a delay of even a 200 ms was enough to make the IT floor start to get animated. Once delays hit 300 ms the rooms was a screaming fury until the issues were fixed. Floor plans were open without offices to allow for workers to talk without walking. I set up a bunch of monitoring software and automated response systems that would help respond to certain events (for the servers themselves). Pretty neat stuff really, very interesting to work with.
A great number of people rather explicitly don't want the apple experience and prefer to build and upgrade our own computers. Loss of modularity is a really big deal for any number of reasons. I'll start with the simple fact that it's a/large/ part of what built the computer business to begin with. Go back far enough and I recall when a board could use either an AMD or Intel CPU.
/Why yes, I distinctly recall buying a separate coprocessor and cache memory in years gone by.
He's got a spotted history of being right with previous work whilst rallying haters like no other tech journalist I've ever read. To the best of my knowledge he's never been sued successfully and he's pissed off some of the biggest names in the business. Here's hoping he's got this wrong or it's bad news for all of us....
Interesting example you cite with Rodney King. What wasn't mentioned until well after the riots is that Rodney King was a known violent offender to the local police. More to the point he was a known violent offender high on drugs, with a gun - in his hand - and the cops were trying to get him to drop it instead of shooting him.
This was a direct inspiration to police departments around the country to start buying tazers which at that point were not at all widely used. I empathize with your intent, but you'll want to pick another example to make your point in the future.
Richard Nixon: Invaded Laos and Cambodia, two countries that actively were used to stage for Vietnam.
Gerald Ford: Actually made peace in Vietnam at the cost of well over a million South Vietnamese lives.
Jimmy Carter. Such a weak president that the Iran hostage crisis was undertaken. His failure to rescue them was studied by militaries for decades.
Ronald Reagan: Successfully ended the cold war without WW3.
George H.W. Bush: First Gulf War with incredible international support.
Bill Clinton: Made such a disaster of Somalia with his half ass job that it is still the text book example of an anarchy to this day./Thought I would fill in the other half of your half truths for you.
Derp is derp, and insinuating that people who don't like Obama must be racist is a mindless of a cliche of derp as derp gets. Divisive language like that used by the story submitter is a perfect example of how/not/ to bring the country back together after a nasty presidential election.
There's no point in training people in STEM jobs when as a country we're actively killing the market for STEM in the US. Students from other countries come over here for best in world education, and then leave.
The reason behind all of this is that STEM jobs are outsourced and sent overseas. Worse yet is that companies can get tax breaks for doing so!
Digital Restrictions Management has and always will fail to a determined adversary. Professional security developers with millions of dollars of support had their attempts for DRM on game consoles, satellite cards, cell phones and other hardware defeated by the home brew community. Start getting professionals with proper labs and budgets involved and DRM will always fail, it's just a matter of time. What DRM can do is buy you time, but it does at the cost of exposing whatever DRM mechanism your using at that moment.
Better to provide proper assistance to the rebels to begin with and that way you can help guide them to make sure they turn out like the Taliban. That's what happens when you take a hand's off approach. This time I say we let's the Europeans or Asians step and do the right thing with boots on the ground.
I wonder if fracking would work to open the hot springs back up? After all a hot spring is nothing more than a place where cracks in the earth allow heat from below to travel farther up than normal towards the surface. If you were to gently frack the site you could create new channels and allow the heat to once more come back up close enough to heat the water.
It would be an interesting experiment to say the least. If successful it could save the local economy.
If we're quick about it we can get the headlines to blame this on global warming! Perhaps we can blame it on Obama instead, that way we can blame both the left and the right?
Datacenters can't feed your family or heat your cold, flooded house
I would really have to argue that as data centers are often what drive the engines of commerce. The modern engines of commerce that send out deliveries of food, keep the heat running, operate the financial system that allows commerce and every other thing that our modern society depends on are completely dependent upon data centers.
The only question is whether or not the data center that needs the electricity happens to be the one that drives one of the particular above functions. Even if it isn't, you can rest assured that those functions are wholly dependent on a data center/somewhere/.
I'm surprised the judges didn't throw the book at them when they tried this bit:
Apple tried to argue that it would take at least 14 days to put a corrective statement on the site
How on earth did the person who argued that get away with not being charged with perjury? To be perfectly frank, I'm absolutely amazed that they got away with a simple reprimand. I would imagine that if Apple pulls another stunt that they will face much more than a reprimand.
First of all it wasn't even their land. Second it was farm fields away from the house. This was the equivalent of someone complaining about a lack of privacy in a shopping mall parking lot. I'm a pretty strong believer in supporting all 10 rights in the bill of rights, but this has nothing to do with that at all....
As much as we can try to legislate and wish technology into existence, you have to let things run their course. The hard politically incorrect reality is that things like battery technology and solar panel technology are years away from being production ready.
By way of point look at where they are actually being used in alternative fuel vehicles like the Fiskar Kharma. The car has a small solar panel on the roof and a battery to run the vehicle. Since it doesn't carry passengers for hire it has far lower requirements for regulatory purposes than a plane. It is made by a company that in principal is fully dedicated to having vehicles that don't run on fossil fuels. I think you can safely say they are not in on any conspiracy theories your tinfoil hatters can come up with.
The solar panel on this car is rated only for minimal charging for accessories and to help keep the battery from going completely flat (it is very expensive if this happens to your Tesla). The car still has trouble with batteries catching fire which led to a recall not that long ago. It's a beautiful car that is the bleeding edge of technology and arguably was produced before it was ready.
If they are having this level of problems with a car, just imagine the hurdles that need to be overcome with an airplane. Your weight to thrust ratio is much, much more critical on a jet or plane than a car. Your fire that burned down a garage could instead burn alive hundreds of people. You have regulations from all over the world to pass and they can take years for certification to clear.
Carbon fiber is just now hitting the market with the Boeing dreamliner, yet it's been in consumer cars for at least a decade and military jets for even longer. It will likely be decades before the technology/could/ power something like a commercial aircraft. It will then take at least another decade after that for it be proven well enough to be considered for passenger use. If you want to get real about energy usage for commercial aviation that help with finding fuels that can be used at a commercial scale (algae etc).
I have no doubt that a portion of Iranian citizens prefer a theocracy. However if you recall the crackdowns on protestors a couple years back shows that the theocracy will stop at no bound to stay in power, despite a significant part of the population that wants them out.
Iran chooses to starve and inflict economic hardship on their own people to a near crisis level. Here are several citations and sources on how the Iranian government hurts their own people. The Iranian government chooses to spend billions of dollars on nuclear weapons and supporting terrorism over feeding and providing medicine to their citizens. In my book the government is incorrigibly corrupt and evil.
The Iranian people are the ones who feel the brunt of sanctions. In the past year, the value of the rial has fallen more than 75%, and food prices have skyrocketed more than 50%.
Meanwhile, the Iranian people are starving and dying because of lack of medicine.
Despite subsidies intended to help the poor, prices for staples, such as milk, bread, rice, yogurt and vegetables, have at least doubled since the beginning of the year. Chicken has become so scarce that when scant supplies become available they prompt riots. On October 3rd police in Tehran fired tear-gas at people demonstrating over the rialâ(TM)s collapse.
That has brought inflation and unemployment; even some food riots have been reported. The effects of the sanctions have been too apparent to deny, says Vatanka of the Middle East Institute.
"There's no doubt, based on all the figures and even statements coming from Tehran, that they are suffering," he says. "We only have to take the words of the leadership in Tehran. They are saying they are hurting."
Seriously, did an Iranian government shill write this? This reads like it was written by their internal propaganda department. I kept waiting for 'death to Jews' to appear in the article.
Iran is out of control and by a very large margin the biggest impediment to peace in the mid-east. Their government is evil, support terrorism as a matter of policy and is responsibly for more instability in the middle east than any other government is a very long time.
They choose to pursue nuclear weapons at the expense of their own citizens. If your a citizen of Iran you live in a constant state of fear of running afoul of the police state. People are tortured and murdered as a matter of routine course. If you live outside of Iran you have to worry about Iranian terrorist who will kill without hesitation.
While Iran uses Israel as a convenient scapegoat, the reality is they do far more harm to the Muslim citizen. All you have to do is look at Syria to see the results of Iranian influence. Declaring war on your own people, want to slaughter your civilians without pesky influence? Don't worry, Iran will have your back!
People fail to understand the point of the Surface products, wondering why Microsoft is doing things the way they are. There are two Surface computers with a similar form factor and name, however they are aimed at different markets and are meant to do very different things for Microsoft.
The RT model is the cheaper consumer based model and it is meant to establish Microsoft as a tablet player in consumers minds.
Microsoft is hedging their bets with ARM. A lot of people don't realize that Microsoft has historically almost always supported at least two different processor architectures. Right now they are wholly dependent on Intel, and Intel is no longer reliable as they once were to do things the Microsoft way. By establishing the RT model first and selling millions of them they hope to create a market for windows apps for the ARM architecture (which does much better for power consumption).
The cheaper (but not as cheap as expected) RT model is meant as a baseline that other vendors can beat to sell their own windows based tablets at a cheaper price. Microsoft viewed that other vendors weren't stepping up to the plate and exploiting the potential of Windows based tablets. Tablet based hardware with a Microsoft OS has been around for about a decade longer than the Ipad and most people are oblivious.
Microsoft wants a Windows tablet 'ecosystem' since mobile is seen as the way of the future. This is why the tablet interface is the default interface and you can't bypass it. Microsoft wants to force everyone to start thinking of Windows as being viable for mobile computing. They are sacrificing an entire enterprise upgrade just to make this point.
The more expensive x86 model is aimed at production work for the Enterprise. This model can run legacy software and join domains, both of which are required for selling tablets to the enterprise. For all intents and purposes this is the 'Professional' model.
We're agreed that the deal was really, really bad for Nokia and their customers. I am not sure I entirely agree with your view of why the deal went through. Fundamentally, you have to think that the Nokia exec's took the deal,/because/ they didn't see a better option.
Symbian needed to die, I think you'll find most people agree with that. It was taking up a significant amount of resources for appreciable gain. Unlike Blackberry they never had the corner on a given market (unless you want claim very basic phones) with very little profit.
They should have hedge their bets by splitting their resources between Android and Windows phones. As for Microsoft, well they made one of the best deals in their corporate history. I think a fair part of the market expects Nokia to either get bought out by Microsoft as their phone division, or to go bankrupt and purchases by Microsoft for their patents. Frankly, the patents are probably worth more than the rest of the company combined.
The patent situation has gotten completely out of control. What was once the very capitalist means to inspire and reward creativity is now the very anti-capitalist means to stifle competition and commit lawfare.
The patent system need to be reformed as badly as any government run bureaucracy ever has. It's not just in the US either, these problems are epidemic on a world wide scale. When lawyers become more important in product development than engineers you know the system has reached a crisis point.
Agreed, and as you said the kids tend to inherit traits of their parents. When the parents grew up as geeks it's hard for them to see value in sports or similar activities. The result is that geeks often raise geeks and trends like bullying can continue through the generations. It's critical to disrupt the trend of a lack of social skills, and that is what I was trying to make my point on.
Put a kid in athletic activities (karate, soccer etc) from an early age, let them pick what they like and they will get athleticism simply through exposure. The hard part is getting a parent who doesn't see value in sports to be willing to put value in sports for their kids.
Excellent question, and I think you have a really good point. The best thing I can think of is to try exposing your kids to other kids early and often to things like sports and other organized activities. Like any activity, if your child practices something from a very young age social skills will become better. Remember if they are geniuses that the intelligence based attributes will come out regardless.
Slashdot Mirror
The fact this blew up in 1986 and it's still being sorted in 2012 tells you how dangerous it is. -
Wrong - all it tells you is how incompetent the original Soviet government was. If it had been dealt with from the beginning correctly it never would have happened (multiple safety features were disabled that would have prevented it to begin with).
More to the point if they had correctly cleaned it up to begin with they wouldn't have this mess today. The Soviet Union and their vassal states had a deplorable environmental record. Leaving the environment trashed was status quo for them far more than it ever was for the West. A quick google search will find many, many examples of this that have nothing to do with nuclear. The only reason you ever heard about this instead of all of the others is because of the nuclear element.
My experience is indeed relatively out of date. I was working with these systems between 2005 to 2007. I worked extensively with a very large trading company that had servers worldwide. I later worked for about six months or so down at the CBOT with a different company. I had some intermittent consulting work with secondary companies as well.
As for the delays am not talking about trades, I am talking about services that run on the servers. I didn't work with the trading algorithms, I worked with the servers and trading floor machines.
A /lot/ of servers that are used by trading companies that connect to exchanges are placed as physically close to the exchange as possible. The exchanges themselves have servers and fail over data centers in multiple locations. However the primary locations are surrounded by office towers that are chock full of servers from the trading companies. These servers were likely the majority of the ones that got hosed by Sandy.
I did a bunch of work several years back with a number of exchanges and my budget was allocated in watts of power consumed instead of dollars. The buildings near the exchanges typically can't handle any more air conditioning and they will use power to ration how many system get installed into racks. Instead of working with rack density, cost or other factors, it was all based on watts. Location really was everything as delays were considered far more expensive than hardware.
They do this for high frequency trading of course, as they felt it was always against their favor when their was a delay on a trade. Delays were measured in the milliseconds and a delay of even a 200 ms was enough to make the IT floor start to get animated. Once delays hit 300 ms the rooms was a screaming fury until the issues were fixed. Floor plans were open without offices to allow for workers to talk without walking. I set up a bunch of monitoring software and automated response systems that would help respond to certain events (for the servers themselves). Pretty neat stuff really, very interesting to work with.
A great number of people rather explicitly don't want the apple experience and prefer to build and upgrade our own computers. Loss of modularity is a really big deal for any number of reasons. I'll start with the simple fact that it's a /large/ part of what built the computer business to begin with. Go back far enough and I recall when a board could use either an AMD or Intel CPU.
He's got a spotted history of being right with previous work whilst rallying haters like no other tech journalist I've ever read. To the best of my knowledge he's never been sued successfully and he's pissed off some of the biggest names in the business. Here's hoping he's got this wrong or it's bad news for all of us....
Interesting example you cite with Rodney King. What wasn't mentioned until well after the riots is that Rodney King was a known violent offender to the local police. More to the point he was a known violent offender high on drugs, with a gun - in his hand - and the cops were trying to get him to drop it instead of shooting him.
This was a direct inspiration to police departments around the country to start buying tazers which at that point were not at all widely used. I empathize with your intent, but you'll want to pick another example to make your point in the future.
Richard Nixon: Invaded Laos and Cambodia, two countries that actively were used to stage for Vietnam.
Gerald Ford: Actually made peace in Vietnam at the cost of well over a million South Vietnamese lives.
Jimmy Carter. Such a weak president that the Iran hostage crisis was undertaken. His failure to rescue them was studied by militaries for decades.
Ronald Reagan: Successfully ended the cold war without WW3.
George H.W. Bush: First Gulf War with incredible international support.
Bill Clinton: Made such a disaster of Somalia with his half ass job that it is still the text book example of an anarchy to this day. /Thought I would fill in the other half of your half truths for you.
Derp is derp, and insinuating that people who don't like Obama must be racist is a mindless of a cliche of derp as derp gets. Divisive language like that used by the story submitter is a perfect example of how /not/ to bring the country back together after a nasty presidential election.
There's no point in training people in STEM jobs when as a country we're actively killing the market for STEM in the US. Students from other countries come over here for best in world education, and then leave.
The reason behind all of this is that STEM jobs are outsourced and sent overseas. Worse yet is that companies can get tax breaks for doing so!
Digital Restrictions Management has and always will fail to a determined adversary. Professional security developers with millions of dollars of support had their attempts for DRM on game consoles, satellite cards, cell phones and other hardware defeated by the home brew community. Start getting professionals with proper labs and budgets involved and DRM will always fail, it's just a matter of time. What DRM can do is buy you time, but it does at the cost of exposing whatever DRM mechanism your using at that moment.
Better to provide proper assistance to the rebels to begin with and that way you can help guide them to make sure they turn out like the Taliban. That's what happens when you take a hand's off approach. This time I say we let's the Europeans or Asians step and do the right thing with boots on the ground.
I wonder if fracking would work to open the hot springs back up? After all a hot spring is nothing more than a place where cracks in the earth allow heat from below to travel farther up than normal towards the surface. If you were to gently frack the site you could create new channels and allow the heat to once more come back up close enough to heat the water.
It would be an interesting experiment to say the least. If successful it could save the local economy.
If we're quick about it we can get the headlines to blame this on global warming! Perhaps we can blame it on Obama instead, that way we can blame both the left and the right?
I would really have to argue that as data centers are often what drive the engines of commerce. The modern engines of commerce that send out deliveries of food, keep the heat running, operate the financial system that allows commerce and every other thing that our modern society depends on are completely dependent upon data centers.
The only question is whether or not the data center that needs the electricity happens to be the one that drives one of the particular above functions. Even if it isn't, you can rest assured that those functions are wholly dependent on a data center /somewhere/.
I'm surprised the judges didn't throw the book at them when they tried this bit:
How on earth did the person who argued that get away with not being charged with perjury? To be perfectly frank, I'm absolutely amazed that they got away with a simple reprimand. I would imagine that if Apple pulls another stunt that they will face much more than a reprimand.
First of all it wasn't even their land. Second it was farm fields away from the house. This was the equivalent of someone complaining about a lack of privacy in a shopping mall parking lot. I'm a pretty strong believer in supporting all 10 rights in the bill of rights, but this has nothing to do with that at all....
As much as we can try to legislate and wish technology into existence, you have to let things run their course. The hard politically incorrect reality is that things like battery technology and solar panel technology are years away from being production ready.
By way of point look at where they are actually being used in alternative fuel vehicles like the Fiskar Kharma. The car has a small solar panel on the roof and a battery to run the vehicle. Since it doesn't carry passengers for hire it has far lower requirements for regulatory purposes than a plane. It is made by a company that in principal is fully dedicated to having vehicles that don't run on fossil fuels. I think you can safely say they are not in on any conspiracy theories your tinfoil hatters can come up with.
The solar panel on this car is rated only for minimal charging for accessories and to help keep the battery from going completely flat (it is very expensive if this happens to your Tesla). The car still has trouble with batteries catching fire which led to a recall not that long ago. It's a beautiful car that is the bleeding edge of technology and arguably was produced before it was ready.
If they are having this level of problems with a car, just imagine the hurdles that need to be overcome with an airplane. Your weight to thrust ratio is much, much more critical on a jet or plane than a car. Your fire that burned down a garage could instead burn alive hundreds of people. You have regulations from all over the world to pass and they can take years for certification to clear.
Carbon fiber is just now hitting the market with the Boeing dreamliner, yet it's been in consumer cars for at least a decade and military jets for even longer. It will likely be decades before the technology /could/ power something like a commercial aircraft. It will then take at least another decade after that for it be proven well enough to be considered for passenger use. If you want to get real about energy usage for commercial aviation that help with finding fuels that can be used at a commercial scale (algae etc).
I have no doubt that a portion of Iranian citizens prefer a theocracy. However if you recall the crackdowns on protestors a couple years back shows that the theocracy will stop at no bound to stay in power, despite a significant part of the population that wants them out.
Iran chooses to starve and inflict economic hardship on their own people to a near crisis level. Here are several citations and sources on how the Iranian government hurts their own people. The Iranian government chooses to spend billions of dollars on nuclear weapons and supporting terrorism over feeding and providing medicine to their citizens. In my book the government is incorrigibly corrupt and evil.
http://www.rlc.org/irans-economy-on-the-verge-of-collapse-people-suffering-due-to-sanctions-2/
The Iranian people are the ones who feel the brunt of sanctions. In the past year, the value of the rial has fallen more than 75%, and food prices have skyrocketed more than 50%.
Meanwhile, the Iranian people are starving and dying because of lack of medicine.
http://www.economist.com/node/21564229
Despite subsidies intended to help the poor, prices for staples, such as milk, bread, rice, yogurt and vegetables, have at least doubled since the beginning of the year. Chicken has become so scarce that when scant supplies become available they prompt riots. On October 3rd police in Tehran fired tear-gas at people demonstrating over the rialâ(TM)s collapse.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/aug/10/sanctions-iran-ordinary-people-target
Activists say that, unlike ordinary people, the regime can find a way out of banking difficulties with help from its proxies.
http://www.npr.org/2012/08/16/158831342/from-all-sides-iran-under-siege
That has brought inflation and unemployment; even some food riots have been reported. The effects of the sanctions have been too apparent to deny, says Vatanka of the Middle East Institute.
"There's no doubt, based on all the figures and even statements coming from Tehran, that they are suffering," he says. "We only have to take the words of the leadership in Tehran. They are saying they are hurting."
Seriously, did an Iranian government shill write this? This reads like it was written by their internal propaganda department. I kept waiting for 'death to Jews' to appear in the article.
Iran is out of control and by a very large margin the biggest impediment to peace in the mid-east. Their government is evil, support terrorism as a matter of policy and is responsibly for more instability in the middle east than any other government is a very long time.
They choose to pursue nuclear weapons at the expense of their own citizens. If your a citizen of Iran you live in a constant state of fear of running afoul of the police state. People are tortured and murdered as a matter of routine course. If you live outside of Iran you have to worry about Iranian terrorist who will kill without hesitation.
While Iran uses Israel as a convenient scapegoat, the reality is they do far more harm to the Muslim citizen. All you have to do is look at Syria to see the results of Iranian influence. Declaring war on your own people, want to slaughter your civilians without pesky influence? Don't worry, Iran will have your back!
That's the wonderful thing about science. It takes 'thought' and turns it upside down. Besides who are we puny humans to argue with a T-rex?
People fail to understand the point of the Surface products, wondering why Microsoft is doing things the way they are. There are two Surface computers with a similar form factor and name, however they are aimed at different markets and are meant to do very different things for Microsoft.
The RT model is the cheaper consumer based model and it is meant to establish Microsoft as a tablet player in consumers minds.
Microsoft is hedging their bets with ARM. A lot of people don't realize that Microsoft has historically almost always supported at least two different processor architectures. Right now they are wholly dependent on Intel, and Intel is no longer reliable as they once were to do things the Microsoft way. By establishing the RT model first and selling millions of them they hope to create a market for windows apps for the ARM architecture (which does much better for power consumption).
The cheaper (but not as cheap as expected) RT model is meant as a baseline that other vendors can beat to sell their own windows based tablets at a cheaper price. Microsoft viewed that other vendors weren't stepping up to the plate and exploiting the potential of Windows based tablets. Tablet based hardware with a Microsoft OS has been around for about a decade longer than the Ipad and most people are oblivious.
Microsoft wants a Windows tablet 'ecosystem' since mobile is seen as the way of the future. This is why the tablet interface is the default interface and you can't bypass it. Microsoft wants to force everyone to start thinking of Windows as being viable for mobile computing. They are sacrificing an entire enterprise upgrade just to make this point.
The more expensive x86 model is aimed at production work for the Enterprise. This model can run legacy software and join domains, both of which are required for selling tablets to the enterprise. For all intents and purposes this is the 'Professional' model.
That's taking belching to a very uncivilized level. Someone ought to teach that black hole some table manners.
We're agreed that the deal was really, really bad for Nokia and their customers. I am not sure I entirely agree with your view of why the deal went through. Fundamentally, you have to think that the Nokia exec's took the deal, /because/ they didn't see a better option.
Symbian needed to die, I think you'll find most people agree with that. It was taking up a significant amount of resources for appreciable gain. Unlike Blackberry they never had the corner on a given market (unless you want claim very basic phones) with very little profit.
They should have hedge their bets by splitting their resources between Android and Windows phones. As for Microsoft, well they made one of the best deals in their corporate history. I think a fair part of the market expects Nokia to either get bought out by Microsoft as their phone division, or to go bankrupt and purchases by Microsoft for their patents. Frankly, the patents are probably worth more than the rest of the company combined.
The patent situation has gotten completely out of control. What was once the very capitalist means to inspire and reward creativity is now the very anti-capitalist means to stifle competition and commit lawfare.
The patent system need to be reformed as badly as any government run bureaucracy ever has. It's not just in the US either, these problems are epidemic on a world wide scale. When lawyers become more important in product development than engineers you know the system has reached a crisis point.
Agreed, and as you said the kids tend to inherit traits of their parents. When the parents grew up as geeks it's hard for them to see value in sports or similar activities. The result is that geeks often raise geeks and trends like bullying can continue through the generations. It's critical to disrupt the trend of a lack of social skills, and that is what I was trying to make my point on.
Put a kid in athletic activities (karate, soccer etc) from an early age, let them pick what they like and they will get athleticism simply through exposure. The hard part is getting a parent who doesn't see value in sports to be willing to put value in sports for their kids.
Excellent question, and I think you have a really good point. The best thing I can think of is to try exposing your kids to other kids early and often to things like sports and other organized activities. Like any activity, if your child practices something from a very young age social skills will become better. Remember if they are geniuses that the intelligence based attributes will come out regardless.