than doctors having a bias against smokers, recreational drug abusers, sex addicts with lots of partners, etc? Each of these groups are doing things that is typically detrimental to one's health, so there seems to be an issue of self control there.
I suspect that the problem arises when a given bias impairs the doctor's ability to do diagnostics properly. In some cases(as long as they can avoid being overtly unprofessional about it) the effect is probably minimal: even if your emotions lead you to over-estimate the STD risk of somebody with lots of sex partners, the odds are still pretty good that, if they bother to come and see you, their problem will either be an STD, a different flavor of infection that the standard labs you'd do for a suspected STD will pick up, or something obviously unrelated. With, say, a druggie, the situation probably varies more sharply: I certainly wouldn't want a doctor trying to do pain management under the assumption that I'm "just a pillhead using him for a fix"; but outside of pain-related medicine it would probably work out.
Obesity has the inconvenient problem of being inaesthetic; but also being a potential cause of lots, and lots, and lots of various symptoms. If the doctor is working under the assumption that you just have fattieitis, almost anything you come in with, short of something that allows you to spurt blood, mucus, and/or pus on the doctor, can be dismissed as 'eh, just lose some weight and you'll feel better'. This isn't bad advice, and it's probably even the correct answer a fair portion of the time; but there are numerous conditions that overlap those symptoms that a doctor would otherwise investigate further. That's where the real trouble starts.
How does someone in 2013 miscalculate the displacement of seawater?
Probably to 15 decimal places on a workstation with more transistors than the entire world possessed in 1980, along with an entire PPT deck full of pretty renders, and a basic sanity check skipped early in the process...
I think that his point is that, with CAD, even a trained monkey can tell the software "Just iterate through all the pretty little pictures we drew, multiply their volume by their density, and then add it all up" and arrive at a final weight.
It's definitely the case that myopic-design-by-CAD allows people to fuck up in ways that the days of Heroic Engineering and designers who had to be just-that-good in order to design anything didn't; but a CAD system, unless the software is a ghastly morass of nightmarish failure, should make basic accounting-style checks comparatively simple.
You joke but just the other day on TVE (spanish tv) the news anchor mentioned that Spain was the country with the greatest "sunken patrimony" in the world. She seemed rather proud of that fact...
I wouldn't be so proud of the fact(given that most of Spain's "sunken patrimony" is just bullion that they were brutal enough to grind out of the backs of the locals in South America; but not competent enough to ship back to Europe); but it's probably true. The sheer scale of Spain's "Why don't we just ship every last troy ounce of precious metal we can get our hands on in the entire western hemisphere?" project was really pretty nuts. Unfortunately for them, of course, the kind of "wealth" that is shiny and looks good in treasure chests tends to be rather less useful than the mixture of human and technical capital that actual productive economies are built with(a comparison with what the relatively tiny Dutch were doing at the same time the Spanish Empire was considered something of a superpower is instructive)...
here in Canada we aren't in extreme debt too, not sure what Spain is doing even building these. Spain is having a rather significant financial crisis the last few years.
According to our wiki overlords this project (as is totally customary for military designs) has some tangled family history going back to the cold war, and the actual contract currently being fucked up was approved in 2003, signed in 2004, and was itself an iteration on a slightly different plan originating in the late 90s. Spain may well have been totally fucked in the early 00s; but it was still riding high on the 'nobody seems to have caught on yet' section of the bubble.
Now, in an ideal world, Spain would probably just say 'fuck it, "commie naval invasion" is so far down the list of our problems that we should just scrap the whole damn thing.'; but defense programs rarely die so easily or cleanly, regardless of their nation of origin.
Coward! Windows Movie Maker actually interprets(some) standard formats, and has an interface that feels like having a pro editing studio at your back compared to the horrors of Sony Movieshaker!(Even better, Movieshaker is exciting and mandatory if you were... questionably sensible... enough to purchase one of Sony's pricey 'MicroMV' cameras, which were vaguely DV-like, except totally incompatible.)
With jpeg(and I think at least some of the mpeg flavors), quantization matrices can be your friend.
Different hardware and software uses different matrices. This isn't a slam-dunk(if somebody just lightened the image a bit to bring out the detail, the quantization matrix would scream "Photoshop!", despite that being pretty innocuous); but it makes it rather harder for a clueless faker to simulate a 'right off the camcorder' "authentic" video if the last compression was almost certainly performed with editing software.
Depending on the details of the format, there are likely to be a variety of other things that are optional or implementation-specific(at least within certain ranges) that can be examined to try to source a given file. If implementation(or quality level/encode settings)-specific details vary between sections of the video, or between parts of individual frames, that's probably a bad sign.
If you have enough footage, and ideally access to the alleged source hardware, you can also attempt to characterize physical defects in the sensor. All digital image sensors, to one degree or another, exhibit imperfect linearity. Some pixels are 'hot', some are abnormally insensitive, this is especially visible on long exposures, or in very dark scenes, where the hot pixels tend to stand out. Onboard image processors have gotten increasingly good at squelching minor sensor noise, so this isn't easy; but a given CCD or CMOS sensor will have a noise pattern that is extremely difficult to replicate. It's just an open question whether you'll actually be able to see enough noise to identify it.
Why is it a bad decision? The more advertisers know about me, the more likely I am to see ads for things I am actually interested in.
I do hope that none of your interests would be worth more to your insurer, potential employer, or other interested parties than they would be to doubleclick...
I'd argue that the behavior described can't (without doing serious violence to the details) be usefully dismissed as 'making bad decisions'.
Yes, unfortunately, Kids Today show no more signs of being Valiant Defenders of Privacy than did people yesterday. Outside of a principled-but-largely-ineffective minority, nobody ever has. Unshockingly enough, they've largely succumbed to the nigh-inevitable when it comes to advertisers and analytics creeps watching everything they do.
On the other hand, they do appear to be taking some degree of protective action against authority figures who are overt enough to be obviously worth evading(parents, principles, coaches, etc.) and dumb enough to be evadable(If you plan on using the internet in a remotely ordinary fashion without Google, Lexis-Nexis, your friendly local telco, and possibly a three-letter-agency or two, good luck with that. If you are trying to communicate with your friends without your parents catching on to what exactly you are drinking, that's still possible).
Whether GP was joking or not, you have to wonder if the pharmas won't try something analogous to clawing public domain works back under copyright. Which, as any dipshit can tell you, should never happen. Except it does.
I'm sure that they'd love to(though TB is kind of a lousy disease as ROI potential goes. Virtually all the cases are in poor or marginal populations, so the customers tend to have only enough money to sporadically take drugs and develop resistant strains, and the first-world high rollers are negligible. Also, because the morbidity and mortality are so significant in poor countries, and the public health concern over drug resistance so great, a new TB drug would be an attractive target for generic production under the authorization of various uppity countries who don't understand that obeying American IP law is more important than their citizens' lives*shakes head*), I'm just not sure that they'd achieve much traction in a case like this. Unless therapeutic use does require some genuinely novel tweaks, the fact that synthesized vitamin C was big news in the early 1930s, and research on dietary sources was largely nailed down in the days when keeping the sailors on your man-o'-war from dying was important national security stuff, will probably mount a fairly stiff prior-art challenge.
Is there any reason to suspect that Intel is withholding any assistance that Apple is requesting?
Since they are actively working on an OSS driver, they clearly don't have some sort of 'zOMG Intellectual Secrets!!!' concern(and it's not as though Apple would be averse to signing the NDAs in any case), and Apple buys a lot of Intel chips(including a pretty good mix of the higher margin ones. They don't move Xeons for shit; but they also don't ship anything lower-end than an i5. That's not the sort of customer you play petty little games with when it comes to engineering support.
I was about to comment the same... With an "aPauling" pun.;-)
Really, this will likely be quickly quashed by the Pharmas. Or they will patent a delivery transport - with the only FDA-approved administration protocol.
Unless the delivery transport makes a clinically relevant difference(in which case it would be as deserving of a patent as any medical innovation), how would patenting a transport help them?
Vitamin C is easily available in a number of flavors, some not by prescription, some of the more injectable ones possibly prescription only, and any doctor authorized to prescribe anything can 'off label' pretty much anything that won't either have the DEA on his ass or get his malpractice insurer to cancel his policy...
It sure is a good thing that we've been focusing our efforts on defense, rather than developing sophisticated attack toolkits and releasing them into the wild where they definitely won't get reverse engineered and re-deployed...
CPUs are magnitudes faster today than they were 10 years ago. Why is it that pages still take seconds to load? Go back 10 years and they still took the same amount of time. Why?
I'd assume that web devs(and their bean-counter overlords) are calibrating to user demands, not to the absolute objective of cutting down load times.
More bandwidth? Hey, we can replace all those 256-color.gifs and solid backgrounds with non-crunchy jpegs! More still? How about some Flash videos? Ooh, faster CPU? If we just load 20kb worth of javascript we can do all kinds of things without the old forms/refresh dance by doing xmlhttprequests and twiddling the DOM...
If you were content with the web page of 10 years ago, on today's hardware, it'd likely load like a bat, with a jetpack, on amphetamines, out of hell. It would also be comparatively spartan(though, given that much of what we have today is a nearly proper superset of ten years ago, there wouldn't be much stopping you from doing 10-year-old page styles on modern browsers.)
Is "'smarter behind-the-scenes resource scheduling,'" a codeword for 'not loading huge fucking flash objects from shitty overloaded ad servers'? Because that really helps with load times...
Lawmakers have been introducing these bills since at least the mid-90s, with Judge Dredd being the first movie I'm aware of directly tied to it.
The tech was not then, and is not now, possible. They're MOVIES. That's not REALITY.
Our elected officials are dumber than you could possibly imagine.
As with any DRM technology, it reduces the reliability and desirability of the device it cripples; but what's impossible about it? Biometrics more or less work, microcontrollers aren't news, and guns with electrical steps in the firing path go back a fair way(and guns with purely mechanical mechanisms are generally a solenoid and a locking pin away from being thus capable).
It wouldn't exactly improve the product; but it'd be perfectly possible.
I'm pretty sure that SAP is named after the weapon of the same name that has a very similar stunning effect on humans, rather than enterprises. Or possibly after what you'd call somebody who would buy it...
Judging from the summary, they're looking to replace support more than production. I'm pretty sure this isn't a new idea... all you need is a cassette tape playing "Have you tried turning it off and on again" on a loop.
What seems sort of curious is that 'support' is what happens when software(sometimes hardware; but hardware at least has the decency to usually fail dramatically enough to just be swapped out, and would be hard to roboticize outside of a datacenter or something in any case) fucks up hard enough, or confuses the user hard enough, that an IT minion gets called in.
Adding a layer of 'software robotics' to second-guess the existing layer of dysfunctional software just seems like a nightmare of cascading complexity waiting to happen(especially since the software robot will need its own hooks into the system, or some impressive screen-scraping and OCR/natural language capabilities. I'm not saying that it's impossible; but it seems like money ill-spent compared to money dedicated to building more robust software that requires IT to come in and give it a shove a bit less frequently.
Please, do let me know about the part where I said it was 'okay'(or not okay, for that matter)...
My point was exclusively a hypothesis about strategies under different constraints:
When large corporations shop around projects(ie. siting a new plant, or even a new stadium, complete with six jobs selling hotdogs...) they usually try to get multiple states and municipalities competing to offer them sweeter 'incentives'. There are even consultancies, often associated with full-service corporate relocation outfits, who will assist in doing this, for a cut of the take. Under such circumstances, states generally end up paying out, often rather absurd amounts, and don't tend to fuck with the new partner. This is arguably a major market distortion for smaller competitors who don't have the same leverage; but it happens.
With a big federal 'defense' project, the siting is more likely to have been hashed out by some sort of congressional sausage-making process. This doesn't give the state unlimited leverage, moving a datacenter is expensive, but not infinitely so; but it does leave room for them to turn the screws a bit.
My understanding is that "Notes" is really just the default public face of Domino Server, which is an enterprise-grade implementation of the Turing Tarpit: Anything is possible, nothing of interest is easy, and the corpses of lots of obsolete animals can be found lurking in the depths...
While I support the spirit of the concept(it's kind of insane that software that is so commercially irrelevant that you can't even hunt somebody down and force them to take your money may still be under copyright until after most of us posting right now are dead), I suspect that such a law would, in practice, lead to a lot of 'on sale in name only' arrangements:
Using Amazon Glacier(just because they have a handy price sheet, not necessarily because they are the best), you can store seldom-accessed data for 1 cent per gigabyte, per month. Let's make the (probably pessimistic) assumption that your software product occupies an entire DVD9, so call it 10GB. For $1.20/year, you can have Amazon squirrel it away. Transfer from the glacier vault to the web is another buck-twenty per transfer.
When you want to discontinue a product, you could just jack up the list price by 10x-100x(depending on whether it was originally cheapy shrinkwrap or expensive enterprise stuff) to discourage anybody from actually trying it, and then keep it in the back of the catalog for as long as you want. Per decade doing so would cost less than a couple of decent six-packs...
That's not the point, the point is that if Google+ (or whatever they're naming their "standard") isn't open, then the cottage industry of third party IM clients (some of them are actually pretty decent) would roll over and die.
That's what puzzles me about the move: If Google said '95% of 3rd party XMPP servers are spam bots, we aren't doing federation unless you are a Google Apps customer or otherwise verifiably unlikely to do something dramatically stupid', that'd be annoying but not wildly surprising. Dropping XMPP entirely, though, both kills 3rd-party clients and suggests that they were either unable to shoehorn what they wanted into XMPP(even as a proprietary extension, with the standardized subset allowing partial compatibility), or they saw breaking compatibility as a virtue.
I suspect that federation(at least outside of paying customers, who are both more important to listen to, and less likely to be spambots), is viewed as more trouble than it's worth; but dropping XMPP entirely is an entirely different game.
The extra amusing thing about the unrelated case is that he is representing his wife. "Sorry honey, not 'attorney-client relations' today, I'm under investigation for moral turpitude unbecoming the profession..."
The power bill went up and they aren't happy about it. A private company would have almost no recourse in a similar situation.
A private company operating an enterprise of equivalent size might actually have made a few little 'community investments', possibly scored some sweet 'development incentives', maybe even a 'public/private partnership' to get some of the infrastructure built for them...
Sucks for their smaller competitors; but private enterprises shake down state and local governments all the time. If anything, this particular situation is probably coming up because the location of the NSA datacenter was decided by jockying at the federal level(rather than by the NSA shopping it around and having states beg for it), so once the location was fixed, the state has a strong incentive to soak them just hard enough that they don't actually pack up and leave.
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than doctors having a bias against smokers, recreational drug abusers, sex addicts with lots of partners, etc? Each of these groups are doing things that is typically detrimental to one's health, so there seems to be an issue of self control there.
I suspect that the problem arises when a given bias impairs the doctor's ability to do diagnostics properly. In some cases(as long as they can avoid being overtly unprofessional about it) the effect is probably minimal: even if your emotions lead you to over-estimate the STD risk of somebody with lots of sex partners, the odds are still pretty good that, if they bother to come and see you, their problem will either be an STD, a different flavor of infection that the standard labs you'd do for a suspected STD will pick up, or something obviously unrelated. With, say, a druggie, the situation probably varies more sharply: I certainly wouldn't want a doctor trying to do pain management under the assumption that I'm "just a pillhead using him for a fix"; but outside of pain-related medicine it would probably work out.
Obesity has the inconvenient problem of being inaesthetic; but also being a potential cause of lots, and lots, and lots of various symptoms. If the doctor is working under the assumption that you just have fattieitis, almost anything you come in with, short of something that allows you to spurt blood, mucus, and/or pus on the doctor, can be dismissed as 'eh, just lose some weight and you'll feel better'. This isn't bad advice, and it's probably even the correct answer a fair portion of the time; but there are numerous conditions that overlap those symptoms that a doctor would otherwise investigate further. That's where the real trouble starts.
How does someone in 2013 miscalculate the displacement of seawater?
Probably to 15 decimal places on a workstation with more transistors than the entire world possessed in 1980, along with an entire PPT deck full of pretty renders, and a basic sanity check skipped early in the process...
I think that his point is that, with CAD, even a trained monkey can tell the software "Just iterate through all the pretty little pictures we drew, multiply their volume by their density, and then add it all up" and arrive at a final weight.
It's definitely the case that myopic-design-by-CAD allows people to fuck up in ways that the days of Heroic Engineering and designers who had to be just-that-good in order to design anything didn't; but a CAD system, unless the software is a ghastly morass of nightmarish failure, should make basic accounting-style checks comparatively simple.
You joke but just the other day on TVE (spanish tv) the news anchor mentioned that Spain was the country with the greatest "sunken patrimony" in the world. She seemed rather proud of that fact...
I wouldn't be so proud of the fact(given that most of Spain's "sunken patrimony" is just bullion that they were brutal enough to grind out of the backs of the locals in South America; but not competent enough to ship back to Europe); but it's probably true. The sheer scale of Spain's "Why don't we just ship every last troy ounce of precious metal we can get our hands on in the entire western hemisphere?" project was really pretty nuts. Unfortunately for them, of course, the kind of "wealth" that is shiny and looks good in treasure chests tends to be rather less useful than the mixture of human and technical capital that actual productive economies are built with(a comparison with what the relatively tiny Dutch were doing at the same time the Spanish Empire was considered something of a superpower is instructive)...
here in Canada we aren't in extreme debt too, not sure what Spain is doing even building these. Spain is having a rather significant financial crisis the last few years.
According to our wiki overlords this project (as is totally customary for military designs) has some tangled family history going back to the cold war, and the actual contract currently being fucked up was approved in 2003, signed in 2004, and was itself an iteration on a slightly different plan originating in the late 90s. Spain may well have been totally fucked in the early 00s; but it was still riding high on the 'nobody seems to have caught on yet' section of the bubble.
Now, in an ideal world, Spain would probably just say 'fuck it, "commie naval invasion" is so far down the list of our problems that we should just scrap the whole damn thing.'; but defense programs rarely die so easily or cleanly, regardless of their nation of origin.
Coward! Windows Movie Maker actually interprets(some) standard formats, and has an interface that feels like having a pro editing studio at your back compared to the horrors of Sony Movieshaker!(Even better, Movieshaker is exciting and mandatory if you were... questionably sensible... enough to purchase one of Sony's pricey 'MicroMV' cameras, which were vaguely DV-like, except totally incompatible.)
With jpeg(and I think at least some of the mpeg flavors), quantization matrices can be your friend.
Different hardware and software uses different matrices. This isn't a slam-dunk(if somebody just lightened the image a bit to bring out the detail, the quantization matrix would scream "Photoshop!", despite that being pretty innocuous); but it makes it rather harder for a clueless faker to simulate a 'right off the camcorder' "authentic" video if the last compression was almost certainly performed with editing software.
Depending on the details of the format, there are likely to be a variety of other things that are optional or implementation-specific(at least within certain ranges) that can be examined to try to source a given file. If implementation(or quality level/encode settings)-specific details vary between sections of the video, or between parts of individual frames, that's probably a bad sign.
If you have enough footage, and ideally access to the alleged source hardware, you can also attempt to characterize physical defects in the sensor. All digital image sensors, to one degree or another, exhibit imperfect linearity. Some pixels are 'hot', some are abnormally insensitive, this is especially visible on long exposures, or in very dark scenes, where the hot pixels tend to stand out. Onboard image processors have gotten increasingly good at squelching minor sensor noise, so this isn't easy; but a given CCD or CMOS sensor will have a noise pattern that is extremely difficult to replicate. It's just an open question whether you'll actually be able to see enough noise to identify it.
Why is it a bad decision? The more advertisers know about me, the more likely I am to see ads for things I am actually interested in.
I do hope that none of your interests would be worth more to your insurer, potential employer, or other interested parties than they would be to doubleclick...
I'd argue that the behavior described can't (without doing serious violence to the details) be usefully dismissed as 'making bad decisions'.
Yes, unfortunately, Kids Today show no more signs of being Valiant Defenders of Privacy than did people yesterday. Outside of a principled-but-largely-ineffective minority, nobody ever has. Unshockingly enough, they've largely succumbed to the nigh-inevitable when it comes to advertisers and analytics creeps watching everything they do.
On the other hand, they do appear to be taking some degree of protective action against authority figures who are overt enough to be obviously worth evading(parents, principles, coaches, etc.) and dumb enough to be evadable(If you plan on using the internet in a remotely ordinary fashion without Google, Lexis-Nexis, your friendly local telco, and possibly a three-letter-agency or two, good luck with that. If you are trying to communicate with your friends without your parents catching on to what exactly you are drinking, that's still possible).
Whether GP was joking or not, you have to wonder if the pharmas won't try something analogous to clawing public domain works back under copyright. Which, as any dipshit can tell you, should never happen. Except it does.
I'm sure that they'd love to(though TB is kind of a lousy disease as ROI potential goes. Virtually all the cases are in poor or marginal populations, so the customers tend to have only enough money to sporadically take drugs and develop resistant strains, and the first-world high rollers are negligible. Also, because the morbidity and mortality are so significant in poor countries, and the public health concern over drug resistance so great, a new TB drug would be an attractive target for generic production under the authorization of various uppity countries who don't understand that obeying American IP law is more important than their citizens' lives*shakes head*), I'm just not sure that they'd achieve much traction in a case like this. Unless therapeutic use does require some genuinely novel tweaks, the fact that synthesized vitamin C was big news in the early 1930s, and research on dietary sources was largely nailed down in the days when keeping the sailors on your man-o'-war from dying was important national security stuff, will probably mount a fairly stiff prior-art challenge.
Is there any reason to suspect that Intel is withholding any assistance that Apple is requesting?
Since they are actively working on an OSS driver, they clearly don't have some sort of 'zOMG Intellectual Secrets!!!' concern(and it's not as though Apple would be averse to signing the NDAs in any case), and Apple buys a lot of Intel chips(including a pretty good mix of the higher margin ones. They don't move Xeons for shit; but they also don't ship anything lower-end than an i5. That's not the sort of customer you play petty little games with when it comes to engineering support.
I was about to comment the same... With an "aPauling" pun. ;-)
Really, this will likely be quickly quashed by the Pharmas. Or they will patent a delivery transport - with the only FDA-approved administration protocol.
Unless the delivery transport makes a clinically relevant difference(in which case it would be as deserving of a patent as any medical innovation), how would patenting a transport help them?
Vitamin C is easily available in a number of flavors, some not by prescription, some of the more injectable ones possibly prescription only, and any doctor authorized to prescribe anything can 'off label' pretty much anything that won't either have the DEA on his ass or get his malpractice insurer to cancel his policy...
It sure is a good thing that we've been focusing our efforts on defense, rather than developing sophisticated attack toolkits and releasing them into the wild where they definitely won't get reverse engineered and re-deployed...
CPUs are magnitudes faster today than they were 10 years ago. Why is it that pages still take seconds to load? Go back 10 years and they still took the same amount of time. Why?
I'd assume that web devs(and their bean-counter overlords) are calibrating to user demands, not to the absolute objective of cutting down load times.
More bandwidth? Hey, we can replace all those 256-color .gifs and solid backgrounds with non-crunchy jpegs! More still? How about some Flash videos? Ooh, faster CPU? If we just load 20kb worth of javascript we can do all kinds of things without the old forms/refresh dance by doing xmlhttprequests and twiddling the DOM...
If you were content with the web page of 10 years ago, on today's hardware, it'd likely load like a bat, with a jetpack, on amphetamines, out of hell. It would also be comparatively spartan(though, given that much of what we have today is a nearly proper superset of ten years ago, there wouldn't be much stopping you from doing 10-year-old page styles on modern browsers.)
Is "'smarter behind-the-scenes resource scheduling,'" a codeword for 'not loading huge fucking flash objects from shitty overloaded ad servers'? Because that really helps with load times...
But I hear that Gmail is trusted by the CIA at the highest levels! Who should I trust now???
Lawmakers have been introducing these bills since at least the mid-90s, with Judge Dredd being the first movie I'm aware of directly tied to it.
The tech was not then, and is not now, possible. They're MOVIES. That's not REALITY.
Our elected officials are dumber than you could possibly imagine.
As with any DRM technology, it reduces the reliability and desirability of the device it cripples; but what's impossible about it? Biometrics more or less work, microcontrollers aren't news, and guns with electrical steps in the firing path go back a fair way(and guns with purely mechanical mechanisms are generally a solenoid and a locking pin away from being thus capable).
It wouldn't exactly improve the product; but it'd be perfectly possible.
I'm pretty sure that SAP is named after the weapon of the same name that has a very similar stunning effect on humans, rather than enterprises. Or possibly after what you'd call somebody who would buy it...
Judging from the summary, they're looking to replace support more than production. I'm pretty sure this isn't a new idea... all you need is a cassette tape playing "Have you tried turning it off and on again" on a loop.
What seems sort of curious is that 'support' is what happens when software(sometimes hardware; but hardware at least has the decency to usually fail dramatically enough to just be swapped out, and would be hard to roboticize outside of a datacenter or something in any case) fucks up hard enough, or confuses the user hard enough, that an IT minion gets called in.
Adding a layer of 'software robotics' to second-guess the existing layer of dysfunctional software just seems like a nightmare of cascading complexity waiting to happen(especially since the software robot will need its own hooks into the system, or some impressive screen-scraping and OCR/natural language capabilities. I'm not saying that it's impossible; but it seems like money ill-spent compared to money dedicated to building more robust software that requires IT to come in and give it a shove a bit less frequently.
Please, do let me know about the part where I said it was 'okay'(or not okay, for that matter)...
My point was exclusively a hypothesis about strategies under different constraints:
When large corporations shop around projects(ie. siting a new plant, or even a new stadium, complete with six jobs selling hotdogs...) they usually try to get multiple states and municipalities competing to offer them sweeter 'incentives'. There are even consultancies, often associated with full-service corporate relocation outfits, who will assist in doing this, for a cut of the take. Under such circumstances, states generally end up paying out, often rather absurd amounts, and don't tend to fuck with the new partner. This is arguably a major market distortion for smaller competitors who don't have the same leverage; but it happens.
With a big federal 'defense' project, the siting is more likely to have been hashed out by some sort of congressional sausage-making process. This doesn't give the state unlimited leverage, moving a datacenter is expensive, but not infinitely so; but it does leave room for them to turn the screws a bit.
My understanding is that "Notes" is really just the default public face of Domino Server, which is an enterprise-grade implementation of the Turing Tarpit: Anything is possible, nothing of interest is easy, and the corpses of lots of obsolete animals can be found lurking in the depths...
While I support the spirit of the concept(it's kind of insane that software that is so commercially irrelevant that you can't even hunt somebody down and force them to take your money may still be under copyright until after most of us posting right now are dead), I suspect that such a law would, in practice, lead to a lot of 'on sale in name only' arrangements:
Using Amazon Glacier(just because they have a handy price sheet, not necessarily because they are the best), you can store seldom-accessed data for 1 cent per gigabyte, per month. Let's make the (probably pessimistic) assumption that your software product occupies an entire DVD9, so call it 10GB. For $1.20/year, you can have Amazon squirrel it away. Transfer from the glacier vault to the web is another buck-twenty per transfer.
When you want to discontinue a product, you could just jack up the list price by 10x-100x(depending on whether it was originally cheapy shrinkwrap or expensive enterprise stuff) to discourage anybody from actually trying it, and then keep it in the back of the catalog for as long as you want. Per decade doing so would cost less than a couple of decent six-packs...
That's not the point, the point is that if Google+ (or whatever they're naming their "standard") isn't open, then the cottage industry of third party IM clients (some of them are actually pretty decent) would roll over and die.
That's what puzzles me about the move: If Google said '95% of 3rd party XMPP servers are spam bots, we aren't doing federation unless you are a Google Apps customer or otherwise verifiably unlikely to do something dramatically stupid', that'd be annoying but not wildly surprising. Dropping XMPP entirely, though, both kills 3rd-party clients and suggests that they were either unable to shoehorn what they wanted into XMPP(even as a proprietary extension, with the standardized subset allowing partial compatibility), or they saw breaking compatibility as a virtue.
I suspect that federation(at least outside of paying customers, who are both more important to listen to, and less likely to be spambots), is viewed as more trouble than it's worth; but dropping XMPP entirely is an entirely different game.
The extra amusing thing about the unrelated case is that he is representing his wife. "Sorry honey, not 'attorney-client relations' today, I'm under investigation for moral turpitude unbecoming the profession..."
The power bill went up and they aren't happy about it. A private company would have almost no recourse in a similar situation.
A private company operating an enterprise of equivalent size might actually have made a few little 'community investments', possibly scored some sweet 'development incentives', maybe even a 'public/private partnership' to get some of the infrastructure built for them...
Sucks for their smaller competitors; but private enterprises shake down state and local governments all the time. If anything, this particular situation is probably coming up because the location of the NSA datacenter was decided by jockying at the federal level(rather than by the NSA shopping it around and having states beg for it), so once the location was fixed, the state has a strong incentive to soak them just hard enough that they don't actually pack up and leave.