Depends on how you paid for it. Any US financial institution, credit card issuer, paypal, or equivalent would roll over, wag their tail, and corroborate your order in short order. If it were unsolicited, or paid for by some suitably byzantine money trail, they might try to treat it as probable cause for some sort of further investigation, if the goods were sufficiently juicy. If not, it'd probably sit around waiting for you to pick it up, then eventually get shredded.
If i want it, i will get it. Do you think i care about authorization?
You do realize that this...er...'argument' can also be used by nation states, with a few modest differences in how much force they can put to the task of getting it?
What is absolutely adorable is the (perennial, for some reason) crop of people who are attracted to bitcoins' interesting mathematical properties; but assume that these properties somehow magically transfer to mere paper that is merely denominated in bitcoins rather than in USD, bushels of wheat, Euros, or whatever.
You put a bitcoin in an account at one of these 'exchanges'? Well kid, I'm afraid I have some bad news: from the perspective of the bitcoin system, the exchange now owns the bitcoin. You just gave it to them. You now own some flavor of promissory note that's probably roughly on par with really shit commercial paper, except that it probably doesn't even offer interest to compensate you for the risk and time value. Good work on that.
If you want to enjoy the properties of bitcoins, You. Must. Hold. Bitcoins. IOUs, however you dress them up, do not have the properties of the currency or commodity in which they are denominated. If you want to bank, try a bank. Yes, they are abhuman scumweasels that enjoy massive regulatory capture in most markets; but unfortunately you don't really have better options.
True, though you'll note that many of the changes in the linked document refer to loosening after encryption systems were removed from 'munitions' classification and assorted expansions of 'self-report', new categories with reduced reporting requirements, and so on.
I have no doubt that the amount of paperwork require to fully comply with the law in exporting something every war3z kiddie in Iran already has is still silly, and I don't doubt that there's a cube somewhere in Intel Inc. whose salary is justified by filling it out; but this isn't the big flap over PGP era. I'm not sure that the regulations will ever die off entirely, especially the stuff governing large outfits, since the marginal cost of one extra form is so low; but as a matter of strategy direct attacks on cryptographic systems have substantially faded (since you can't keep software away from criminals, and you can't bank safely with stuff law enforcement can easily brute force) in favor of RIPA/CALEA style legislative compromises.
"Because the Red Pill VM-detection routine [28] only works reliably on single-CPU
computers, we also collected information on the number of CPUs. Using Red Pill, we
detected the presence of a VM on a single participant’s machine. Examining each partic-
ipants’ process lists, we were able to confirm that this participant was running VMware.
Additionally, we detected VMware Tools running on an additional fifteen machines
(sixteen in total), and Parallels Tools running on a single machine. Thus, we can con-
firm that at least seventeen participants (1.8% of 965) took the precaution of using a
VM to execute our code. Eleven of these participants were in the $1.00 condition, five
were in the $0.50 condition, and one was in the $0.01 condition. The information we
collected on participants’ motherboards was not useful in determining VM usage."
Apparently you weren't the only one who thought so; but the numbers were small. 16 VMware VMs, 1 Parallels (which, since the study required windows to participate, may have been a security measure or may have been a mac user willing to hose his 'everything I need windows for' machine...)
No word, obviously, on anybody who is a bit more subtle about their VM usage; but I'd be shocked if that number is high.
Given that Intel added AES-NI without a ripple several years ago, and somewhat similar crypto acceleration functions were available on Geode LXes and some fairly antique VIA x86 cores(and very likely a lot of embedded stuff that was too feeble for much software crypto, albeit probably not exposed to anybody who hadn't sold their soul to qualcomm for BREW elite developer status or something), probably not many beyond whatever ones apply by default to all kinds of things.
As a matter of policy, the feds of the world appear to have largely recognized that the cat is out of the bag on strong crypto, algorithms and software move too easily, and doing it in software is too fast (for common purposes, obviously terminating a massive number of TLS connections or something isn't for the faint of heart).
They've not been shy about mandating 'lawful intercept' features, cultivating access to trusted links in the system, and ensuring that the overall level of security remains low; but the "Put your head in the sand and pretend that keys longer than 56 bits don't exist!" theory of regulation is largely a relic.
My guess would be that the real perk is bandwidth and latency. Unless Intel really phones it in on integration, the FPGA should have about the fastest, lowest-latency, link to the CPU, possibly even some of the cache, especially if they throw in a big chunk of eDRAM, as they have for 'Iris Pro' parts, that money can buy.
Less of a "Hey, let's do this instead of GPU compute!" and more of a "It sucks that our weirdo application-specific operation is probably never going to be one of Intel or AMD's extensions to x86; but this is the closest we can get to having it added" thing.
Can't we just be all HTML5 about it and replace framebuffers with Canvas elements?
Those are pretty much pathologically inefficient framebuffers with a few convenience drawing primitives thrown in already, so just think of how accessible the venerable PC platform would become for today's web developers if all GPUs had JS interpreters and exposed a Canvas element for each monitor!
Network transparency is a very nice feature; but it's debatable how 'transparent' X still is once you try anything remotely fancy or modern.
OpenGL, in particular, wasn't really part of the plan. It's been hacking in (in a number of different ways); but it's still pretty easy to trip on a mine: If the program is running on the remote host; but using your GPU, GLX indirect rendering should work, as long as you don't hit any OpenGL extensions that expect direct hardware access; but if your application likes to throw big textures around as though it were developed for computers where the 3d card is separated from the CPU by 16 PCIe lanes, rather than a LAN(or, god help you, WAN), you'll notice.
If you want the server to do the work, so that you can use an actually-thin thin client, you end up with something like VirtualGL, which uses X11 on both ends; but actually handles slinging the image data with VNC...
It would appear that the intended meaning is 'impractical'. The code is available, and the original project declared itself dead, so forking is totally possible; but the author believes that it would probably be a better use of time to use the existing project as a reference for building a new one, rather than get sufficiently familiar with the old one that you can (safely) start modifying it.
I don't know if it's true or not; but it's a much less radical assertion.
I'm just baffled as to how IT managed to avoid being lynched by the cube drones if their standards for data retention and redundancy are in fact that low.
People hate losing data, and storing it the employee's HDD (except as an expendable cache purely for speed and bandwidth purposes) is roughly equivalent, once you have a decent number of people in the office, to just randomly deleting some sucker's email every week or two. Even in complete absence of any legal requirements, the users would either switch to unofficially using some shit webmail service or rise up with pitchforks in short order.
I am less than convinced by the alleged nonprofit status of some of the poor, wounded, groups whining about their treatment by the IRS; but the IRS sure is doing an excellent job of looking guilty as hell right about now.
There seems to be some sort of cultural tipping point, among those at the important levers of a given nation's economy, between wanting to be captains of industry in a first world nation and being more than happy to help build a third world one, so long as they get to be members of the oligarchy in it.
It's not as though our industrial titans were actually nicer in the past; but they didn't seem to have the same spirit of "Well, the bean counters say that just doing bare minimum upkeep and making oligopoly margins has a better ROI than actually building anything, so fuck trying and let's see about a bonus." Back in the day, when you rolled up your sleeves and got ready for a hard day of ruthless exploitation and wanton destruction, it's because you had some sort of grand plan in mind.
Oh, I don't (at least not yet) have any reason to suspect malice, rather than novelty, as the reason for the scarcity of external expertise; I don't think that Tesla has done anything malicious so far, so once the novelty wears off a bit it's entirely possible that the situation will change. My point was just that, at present, having an independent mechanic do a great many things (with third party parts, even) is totally doable with many cars; but the Tesla is not one of them.
We'll see, in time, if this is because they like it that way, or because it just isn't logistically possible for much of an aftermarket to exist at this point.
If anything, given the rather limited distribution of spare parts, maintenance expertise, and the like, Tesla is actually the outfit where the 'dealer' would largely be the holder of the secret knowledge. They've just made the decision that the 'dealer' is always going to be a direct extension of their customer service apparatus, rather than an independent operator.
From my (admittedly quick and unscientific) sampling of the owner forums, stories involving technical trouble almost always end with some Tesla minions whisking the vehicle away, working some cryptic mechanical magic, and updating the firmware. By comparison, all but the most esoteric internal combustion units are a mere commonplace for the local independent mechanics, with much of the push for dealer-provided service being sustained by assorted fairly heavy handed artificial lock in, and still only moderately effective.
Now, given the sometimes perverse incentives of the middlemen, Tesla may be wise to have decided that sales and maintenance are too important to be left to car dealers; but they are about as far in the 'secret knowledge' direction as anybody in the business, they just don't let a third party in on the interaction.
While possibly true, it's complete speculation to tie this to Tesla.
But hey, Tesla gets page views.
Not really. Tesla doesn't really have the volume (or the low end offerings) to eat the dealerships' bread and butter(except possibly some relatively niche outfits who used to sell a lot more ~100k ICE vehicles to techies made good); but they have been extremely aggressive about 100% company-owned and operated sales locations, and have skirted the laws in various ways ("Information centers" that look sort of like a dealership except that the staff are forbidden to sell you anything, just show you stuff and you can go use that computer over there to buy online if you want...) in states where the dealerships have purchased protective legislation.
Barring a radical overthrow of the automotive order, Tesla isn't personally going to terminate dealerships; but if their model holds up, persuades lawmakers, survives in court in more hostile states, etc. it can be copied pretty much verbatim by any manufacturer that cares to.
And the NADA can't exactly be ignorant of how...beloved...a traditional industry it is that they represent. Merely seriously proposing that we could eliminate car dealers, in our time!, probably excites more people than fancy electric cars do. This isn't one of those "Upstart company disrupts traditional business right in the face, laughs" situations where hand-wringing moralists write books about the moral decline and inevitable decadence of our civilization occasioned by the hardships of the traditional business.
The question: is it enough to save BlackBerry in the consumer market, or is it too little, too late?
How long has it been since BlackBerry has had more than a negligible share of the consumer market? These days, they seem to be almost exclusively enterprise. Seriously, the last time I can think of that anybody I know who bought their own BlackBerry was like 7 years ago. Who is using BlackBerry for personal use?
There was a period, before Android phones not worth owning got dirt cheap; but after MS pretty much screwed up what was left of Danger/Sidekick, where blackberries were the go-to featurephone for text-crazed teens. None of the fancy enterprise stuff turned on, just BIS and BBM; but with Sidekicks mostly out of the way, they were the only game in that area, briefly. Didn't last, of course, since the carriers could get anybody to puke up a more or less functional android thing practically at cost.
I doubt that the "Well, we picked bad contractors/suppliers" argument actually goes very far with consumer products. They don't care how you did it, so long as it gets done, and they'll never know what OEMs use your flash, so even if you do burn them it probably won't affect your OEM business much.
However, if the flash manufacturer also has an SSD operation, it becomes increasingly unclear how a 3rd party without flash manufacturing (like Kingston, in this case) is supposed to make money without either some sort of genius controller design/firmware, or scoring good deals from a constantly shifting lineup of actual flash makers looking to offload almost-good-enough flash modules. It's just much less obvious what value they bring to the table to help keep the lights on. That's why it isn't at all surprising to hear that Kingston has been swapping NAND types around: In the market for flash based goods, they supply a variety of logistical services; but only through taking what they can get can they possibly match the nominal price that a flash manufacturer 'charges' it SSD arm for internally produced packages.
Kingston may be in a better position than most, since it's been navigating these hostile waters in DRAM and flash for years; but now that controllers are ironed out considerably compared to the bad old days, it's likely to be a bit of a bloodbath among companies that dabbled in making SSDs but bring nothing to the table except the ability to put chips on boards and stickers on packages.
It's surprising. Kingston? I thought they were a good brand.
Kingston is a fairly serious company; but it's unfortunately not too surprising to see them involved in this story(and, specifically, with a NAND downgrade, rather than a controller swap). The company has its fingers in just about every step of the flash and DRAM supply chain, except actually fabbing the stuff(they do testing, they do IC packaging, they assemble DIMMs and the various USB, SSD, SD, CF, etc. flavors that people want flash in, they do support and logistics for PC outfits that want memory to shove into their products, and so on).
Unfortunately for them, the companies that do fab flash tend to have SSD interests of their own at this point. This puts Kingston in a slightly tricky position: too much on the line to just go full OCZ; but always having to scrape around to get flash at prices that they can still make a living on.
There's a very neat piece about the...interesting issues... that this causes with some of their SD products.
Oh, I wasn't even considering the pedo-priest stuff. I was just considering the curious practice of using a relatively elderly, celibate, man, with his advisory force of somewhat less elderly celibate men, as an authority on such matters.
Assorted abuses of authority don't help; but even if everyone were acting as the rules allege they should, it'd still be kind of weird. (Just as the "Bill Gates says don't just focus on profit" thing sounds a bit off whether or not you think that Microsoft's business practices during his tenure were actively illegal or just pushy.)
To give credit where it is due, Bill Gates providing advice on avoiding greed is no more insane than the pope providing advice on morally acceptable sexual conduct, and popes have been getting away with that for centuries.
There's also mortality salience: bottomless pockets certainly buy better medical outcomes than penury does; but until somebody comes up with a way of shoving the EOL numbers for humans, rather than merely curing more of the causes of premature death, no amount of money keeps you from feeling your body's gradual decline and the gnawing proximity of incipient death.
For now, there are some things money can't buy. Inconveniently for those who have it, they include the stuff of some of humanity's oldest and darkest fears.
Slashdot Mirror
Depends on how you paid for it. Any US financial institution, credit card issuer, paypal, or equivalent would roll over, wag their tail, and corroborate your order in short order. If it were unsolicited, or paid for by some suitably byzantine money trail, they might try to treat it as probable cause for some sort of further investigation, if the goods were sufficiently juicy. If not, it'd probably sit around waiting for you to pick it up, then eventually get shredded.
If i want it, i will get it. Do you think i care about authorization?
You do realize that this...er...'argument' can also be used by nation states, with a few modest differences in how much force they can put to the task of getting it?
What is absolutely adorable is the (perennial, for some reason) crop of people who are attracted to bitcoins' interesting mathematical properties; but assume that these properties somehow magically transfer to mere paper that is merely denominated in bitcoins rather than in USD, bushels of wheat, Euros, or whatever.
You put a bitcoin in an account at one of these 'exchanges'? Well kid, I'm afraid I have some bad news: from the perspective of the bitcoin system, the exchange now owns the bitcoin. You just gave it to them. You now own some flavor of promissory note that's probably roughly on par with really shit commercial paper, except that it probably doesn't even offer interest to compensate you for the risk and time value. Good work on that.
If you want to enjoy the properties of bitcoins, You. Must. Hold. Bitcoins. IOUs, however you dress them up, do not have the properties of the currency or commodity in which they are denominated. If you want to bank, try a bank. Yes, they are abhuman scumweasels that enjoy massive regulatory capture in most markets; but unfortunately you don't really have better options.
The sweet, sweet, smell of somebody who thought he had it all figured out learning what 'counterparty risk' is...
True, though you'll note that many of the changes in the linked document refer to loosening after encryption systems were removed from 'munitions' classification and assorted expansions of 'self-report', new categories with reduced reporting requirements, and so on.
I have no doubt that the amount of paperwork require to fully comply with the law in exporting something every war3z kiddie in Iran already has is still silly, and I don't doubt that there's a cube somewhere in Intel Inc. whose salary is justified by filling it out; but this isn't the big flap over PGP era. I'm not sure that the regulations will ever die off entirely, especially the stuff governing large outfits, since the marginal cost of one extra form is so low; but as a matter of strategy direct attacks on cryptographic systems have substantially faded (since you can't keep software away from criminals, and you can't bank safely with stuff law enforcement can easily brute force) in favor of RIPA/CALEA style legislative compromises.
"Because the Red Pill VM-detection routine [28] only works reliably on single-CPU computers, we also collected information on the number of CPUs. Using Red Pill, we detected the presence of a VM on a single participant’s machine. Examining each partic- ipants’ process lists, we were able to confirm that this participant was running VMware. Additionally, we detected VMware Tools running on an additional fifteen machines (sixteen in total), and Parallels Tools running on a single machine. Thus, we can con- firm that at least seventeen participants (1.8% of 965) took the precaution of using a VM to execute our code. Eleven of these participants were in the $1.00 condition, five were in the $0.50 condition, and one was in the $0.01 condition. The information we collected on participants’ motherboards was not useful in determining VM usage."
Apparently you weren't the only one who thought so; but the numbers were small. 16 VMware VMs, 1 Parallels (which, since the study required windows to participate, may have been a security measure or may have been a mac user willing to hose his 'everything I need windows for' machine...)
No word, obviously, on anybody who is a bit more subtle about their VM usage; but I'd be shocked if that number is high.
Given that Intel added AES-NI without a ripple several years ago, and somewhat similar crypto acceleration functions were available on Geode LXes and some fairly antique VIA x86 cores(and very likely a lot of embedded stuff that was too feeble for much software crypto, albeit probably not exposed to anybody who hadn't sold their soul to qualcomm for BREW elite developer status or something), probably not many beyond whatever ones apply by default to all kinds of things.
As a matter of policy, the feds of the world appear to have largely recognized that the cat is out of the bag on strong crypto, algorithms and software move too easily, and doing it in software is too fast (for common purposes, obviously terminating a massive number of TLS connections or something isn't for the faint of heart).
They've not been shy about mandating 'lawful intercept' features, cultivating access to trusted links in the system, and ensuring that the overall level of security remains low; but the "Put your head in the sand and pretend that keys longer than 56 bits don't exist!" theory of regulation is largely a relic.
My guess would be that the real perk is bandwidth and latency. Unless Intel really phones it in on integration, the FPGA should have about the fastest, lowest-latency, link to the CPU, possibly even some of the cache, especially if they throw in a big chunk of eDRAM, as they have for 'Iris Pro' parts, that money can buy.
Less of a "Hey, let's do this instead of GPU compute!" and more of a "It sucks that our weirdo application-specific operation is probably never going to be one of Intel or AMD's extensions to x86; but this is the closest we can get to having it added" thing.
Does the warranty on a Bloomberg terminal cover...'fluid damage'?
Can't we just be all HTML5 about it and replace framebuffers with Canvas elements?
Those are pretty much pathologically inefficient framebuffers with a few convenience drawing primitives thrown in already, so just think of how accessible the venerable PC platform would become for today's web developers if all GPUs had JS interpreters and exposed a Canvas element for each monitor!
Network transparency is a very nice feature; but it's debatable how 'transparent' X still is once you try anything remotely fancy or modern.
OpenGL, in particular, wasn't really part of the plan. It's been hacking in (in a number of different ways); but it's still pretty easy to trip on a mine: If the program is running on the remote host; but using your GPU, GLX indirect rendering should work, as long as you don't hit any OpenGL extensions that expect direct hardware access; but if your application likes to throw big textures around as though it were developed for computers where the 3d card is separated from the CPU by 16 PCIe lanes, rather than a LAN(or, god help you, WAN), you'll notice.
If you want the server to do the work, so that you can use an actually-thin thin client, you end up with something like VirtualGL, which uses X11 on both ends; but actually handles slinging the image data with VNC...
It would appear that the intended meaning is 'impractical'. The code is available, and the original project declared itself dead, so forking is totally possible; but the author believes that it would probably be a better use of time to use the existing project as a reference for building a new one, rather than get sufficiently familiar with the old one that you can (safely) start modifying it.
I don't know if it's true or not; but it's a much less radical assertion.
That doesn't seem Social enough. Can we integrate microblogging so that all windows can tweet whenever they are repainted?
I'm just baffled as to how IT managed to avoid being lynched by the cube drones if their standards for data retention and redundancy are in fact that low.
People hate losing data, and storing it the employee's HDD (except as an expendable cache purely for speed and bandwidth purposes) is roughly equivalent, once you have a decent number of people in the office, to just randomly deleting some sucker's email every week or two. Even in complete absence of any legal requirements, the users would either switch to unofficially using some shit webmail service or rise up with pitchforks in short order.
I am less than convinced by the alleged nonprofit status of some of the poor, wounded, groups whining about their treatment by the IRS; but the IRS sure is doing an excellent job of looking guilty as hell right about now.
There seems to be some sort of cultural tipping point, among those at the important levers of a given nation's economy, between wanting to be captains of industry in a first world nation and being more than happy to help build a third world one, so long as they get to be members of the oligarchy in it.
It's not as though our industrial titans were actually nicer in the past; but they didn't seem to have the same spirit of "Well, the bean counters say that just doing bare minimum upkeep and making oligopoly margins has a better ROI than actually building anything, so fuck trying and let's see about a bonus." Back in the day, when you rolled up your sleeves and got ready for a hard day of ruthless exploitation and wanton destruction, it's because you had some sort of grand plan in mind.
Oh, I don't (at least not yet) have any reason to suspect malice, rather than novelty, as the reason for the scarcity of external expertise; I don't think that Tesla has done anything malicious so far, so once the novelty wears off a bit it's entirely possible that the situation will change. My point was just that, at present, having an independent mechanic do a great many things (with third party parts, even) is totally doable with many cars; but the Tesla is not one of them.
We'll see, in time, if this is because they like it that way, or because it just isn't logistically possible for much of an aftermarket to exist at this point.
If anything, given the rather limited distribution of spare parts, maintenance expertise, and the like, Tesla is actually the outfit where the 'dealer' would largely be the holder of the secret knowledge. They've just made the decision that the 'dealer' is always going to be a direct extension of their customer service apparatus, rather than an independent operator.
From my (admittedly quick and unscientific) sampling of the owner forums, stories involving technical trouble almost always end with some Tesla minions whisking the vehicle away, working some cryptic mechanical magic, and updating the firmware. By comparison, all but the most esoteric internal combustion units are a mere commonplace for the local independent mechanics, with much of the push for dealer-provided service being sustained by assorted fairly heavy handed artificial lock in, and still only moderately effective.
Now, given the sometimes perverse incentives of the middlemen, Tesla may be wise to have decided that sales and maintenance are too important to be left to car dealers; but they are about as far in the 'secret knowledge' direction as anybody in the business, they just don't let a third party in on the interaction.
While possibly true, it's complete speculation to tie this to Tesla.
But hey, Tesla gets page views.
Not really. Tesla doesn't really have the volume (or the low end offerings) to eat the dealerships' bread and butter(except possibly some relatively niche outfits who used to sell a lot more ~100k ICE vehicles to techies made good); but they have been extremely aggressive about 100% company-owned and operated sales locations, and have skirted the laws in various ways ("Information centers" that look sort of like a dealership except that the staff are forbidden to sell you anything, just show you stuff and you can go use that computer over there to buy online if you want...) in states where the dealerships have purchased protective legislation.
Barring a radical overthrow of the automotive order, Tesla isn't personally going to terminate dealerships; but if their model holds up, persuades lawmakers, survives in court in more hostile states, etc. it can be copied pretty much verbatim by any manufacturer that cares to.
And the NADA can't exactly be ignorant of how...beloved...a traditional industry it is that they represent. Merely seriously proposing that we could eliminate car dealers, in our time!, probably excites more people than fancy electric cars do. This isn't one of those "Upstart company disrupts traditional business right in the face, laughs" situations where hand-wringing moralists write books about the moral decline and inevitable decadence of our civilization occasioned by the hardships of the traditional business.
Why is this even a question? The PC version included the "Uplay" launcher/malware/crash utility.
How long has it been since BlackBerry has had more than a negligible share of the consumer market? These days, they seem to be almost exclusively enterprise. Seriously, the last time I can think of that anybody I know who bought their own BlackBerry was like 7 years ago. Who is using BlackBerry for personal use?
There was a period, before Android phones not worth owning got dirt cheap; but after MS pretty much screwed up what was left of Danger/Sidekick, where blackberries were the go-to featurephone for text-crazed teens. None of the fancy enterprise stuff turned on, just BIS and BBM; but with Sidekicks mostly out of the way, they were the only game in that area, briefly. Didn't last, of course, since the carriers could get anybody to puke up a more or less functional android thing practically at cost.
I doubt that the "Well, we picked bad contractors/suppliers" argument actually goes very far with consumer products. They don't care how you did it, so long as it gets done, and they'll never know what OEMs use your flash, so even if you do burn them it probably won't affect your OEM business much.
However, if the flash manufacturer also has an SSD operation, it becomes increasingly unclear how a 3rd party without flash manufacturing (like Kingston, in this case) is supposed to make money without either some sort of genius controller design/firmware, or scoring good deals from a constantly shifting lineup of actual flash makers looking to offload almost-good-enough flash modules. It's just much less obvious what value they bring to the table to help keep the lights on. That's why it isn't at all surprising to hear that Kingston has been swapping NAND types around: In the market for flash based goods, they supply a variety of logistical services; but only through taking what they can get can they possibly match the nominal price that a flash manufacturer 'charges' it SSD arm for internally produced packages.
Kingston may be in a better position than most, since it's been navigating these hostile waters in DRAM and flash for years; but now that controllers are ironed out considerably compared to the bad old days, it's likely to be a bit of a bloodbath among companies that dabbled in making SSDs but bring nothing to the table except the ability to put chips on boards and stickers on packages.
It's surprising. Kingston? I thought they were a good brand.
Kingston is a fairly serious company; but it's unfortunately not too surprising to see them involved in this story(and, specifically, with a NAND downgrade, rather than a controller swap). The company has its fingers in just about every step of the flash and DRAM supply chain, except actually fabbing the stuff(they do testing, they do IC packaging, they assemble DIMMs and the various USB, SSD, SD, CF, etc. flavors that people want flash in, they do support and logistics for PC outfits that want memory to shove into their products, and so on).
Unfortunately for them, the companies that do fab flash tend to have SSD interests of their own at this point. This puts Kingston in a slightly tricky position: too much on the line to just go full OCZ; but always having to scrape around to get flash at prices that they can still make a living on.
There's a very neat piece about the...interesting issues... that this causes with some of their SD products.
Oh, I wasn't even considering the pedo-priest stuff. I was just considering the curious practice of using a relatively elderly, celibate, man, with his advisory force of somewhat less elderly celibate men, as an authority on such matters.
Assorted abuses of authority don't help; but even if everyone were acting as the rules allege they should, it'd still be kind of weird. (Just as the "Bill Gates says don't just focus on profit" thing sounds a bit off whether or not you think that Microsoft's business practices during his tenure were actively illegal or just pushy.)
To give credit where it is due, Bill Gates providing advice on avoiding greed is no more insane than the pope providing advice on morally acceptable sexual conduct, and popes have been getting away with that for centuries.
There's also mortality salience: bottomless pockets certainly buy better medical outcomes than penury does; but until somebody comes up with a way of shoving the EOL numbers for humans, rather than merely curing more of the causes of premature death, no amount of money keeps you from feeling your body's gradual decline and the gnawing proximity of incipient death.
For now, there are some things money can't buy. Inconveniently for those who have it, they include the stuff of some of humanity's oldest and darkest fears.