These are our choices: stick with a variety of crappy ISPs, or consolidate on one that's pretty decent, but whose business model consists of stripping us of our privacy and funneling our Internet experience through its pipes.
This is not the 21st century I was told to expect.
If you think that you are getting privacy from your other ISPs, I have a bridge to sell you. At best, the incumbents might be sufficiently lazy and incompetent that their ability to violate your privacy is limited by sheer inertia; but I wouldn't bet on it, and I certainly wouldn't bet on anything better than that...
...by an order of magnitude, once they realized the buyer was a science-hating scammer. Crick would be pissed.
Don't you think that Crick would have been amused to see a quack shell out good money for a little chunk of metal that(outside of its honorary context) isn't worth nearly what he paid?
"What Should happen to your data after you die?" is a question so vague as to be vacuuous.
Fairly obviously, just like any other flavor of cruft you accumulate during your time as a successful combatant against entropy, different flavors of data are best disposed of in different ways. We've only had more-or-less-all-of-recorded-human-civilization to work on this problem...
The new issue on the plate isn't so much 'OMG! 'Data' is a mysterious and fundamentally novel category!!!' but "Shit, huge swaths of 'my data' are locked in various 3rd party locations, and often very, very, poorly segregated by category." By way of analogy, if my bank safe deposit box was where I stored family heirlooms; but was also the location where I received reams of junk mail, recordings of a substantial percentage of casual conversations, and my collection of hideous donkey/tentacle hentai, writing my will would get a trifle more complex.
We may have had it easier historically because preserving the ephemera wasn't even an option, without substantial effort; but the major issue is really with the fact that everybody hates sorting shit, and various 'service providers' seem to adore tying as much data as possible to a single account, with efficient segregation of different flavors of data anywhere between 'a hassle' and 'overly contrary to the TOS'.
Given the...how to put this politely... 'strongly habituated'... cellphone-checking among a large number of people, I'd say that the closest analogy would probably be selling infusion pumps to heroin junkies.
By making 'pulling out your phone and compulsively checking it all the goddamn time, even when in company' entirely seamless and automatic, Glass allows you to indulge your vices even further, while exhibiting the formerly required movements much less often...
I thought Sergei's(deeply weird) comments about being 'emasculated' by his phone were actually sort of telling with regards to the strange contradiction underlying the 'Glass' concept.
So, Sergei comes to the realization that damn do I spend a lot of my life, even when I'm ostensibly doing other things, basically poking at the little colored lights that live inside my cellphone, what am I doing? However, instead of adopting the "Hmm, maybe I should try doing less of that" approach, he goes for the "I know, I'll build a system where I no longer find myself clutching my cellphone alarmingly frequently; because it's hovering in front of my eye all the time!".
Is this just a huckster trying to make a few bucks off nationalist suckers by offering to draw a map with a few contentious names and borders modified(the sort of thing that a script kiddie could do by hacking together a KML layer for google earth in about 10 minutes; but I digress...) or is there some sort of 'Islamic geography' that has serious issues with basic tenents of what we know about our dear home geoid?
I'm honestly curious... It certainly isn't uncommon to have mere nationalist spats over mapping; but that's just standard political bluster.
Religious convictions that are seriously opposed to empirically demonstrable facts about the world, though, tend to be fairly amusing and sometimes quirky. You've got your flat earthers, your YECs, your geocentericists(does the Tychonic system get any love anymore?), your 'baraminologists', faith healers of a zillion different flavors, people who are pretty sure that Jesus and/or the 'lost tribes of Israel' ended up in North America, you name it, we've got it...
Is this just the tedious nationalism, or does folk islam have some weird bug up its ass about the-world-as-observed-from-orbit?
Oh look, it says "George Town, Cayman Islands" beneath the name on the ship... and the brochure says "NOT FOR SALE OR CHARTER TO U.S. RESIDENTS WHILE IN U.S. WATERS."
Taxes are such a bitch, aren't they Eric?
Given the way that various large economies have been starting to lean on dinky tax havens about the details of what they do lately, I'm a little surprised that the Coast Guard hasn't been flirting with a "Oh, no support contract? I hope you like either per-incident support fees or very long distance swims..." policy for ships registered in places with that flavor.
Certainly, for very low power processors, PoP makes sense(at least until you hit the ceiling on how much RAM you can actually fit on top of a very low power processor, the 8GB SODIMMs in these little HP boxes generally have 16 little BGAs, all not significantly smaller than the CPU itself, on the card). My question is whether, given how easy it is to slice a larger CPU into smaller virtual CPUs, the 'lots and lots of teeny CPUs' architectural strategy is actually a good one, or just a good one until it finally scares Intel into not overpricing Xeons, especially the ULV ones.
Does used commodity x86 server gear(with hot serial numbers, no less) actually have enough resale value somewhere that it would be reasonable to imagine that the thieves might actually have been after the hardware, or would they have had to have other motives(whether data access, or something else they thought was in the building) to make taking the risk worth it?
I can see the case for smash-n-grabs on consumer gear, especially laptops and iDevices and such, where gullible and/or morally flexible people do seem willing to buy dubiously sourced goods for a chance at cheap consumer electronics; but the phrase 'used hard drives from ebay' is the sort of thing that I'd only ever use in a server context if I were sneaking up behind an admin and trying to make him jump and turn a curious shade of purple...
Is the used market more robust than I give it credit for(or the scrap value higher)? Or would grabbing the hard drives be a fairly clear sign that you are after what is on them?
Why would you expect a national rollout ever? Do you think anybody wants to end up on the 'universal service' hook(unless they get to tack on some serious slush-fund fees on everybody else, of course, just to 'cover expenses') and required to run new lines to the ass end of nowhere?
At least we might be able to get some of the US' major cities up to developed-world levels of connectivity by 2030 or so...
Both are true. The digital transition's trimming of the TV spectrum was a step in the right direction(except for the omnipresent 'any and all spectrum must be allocated to cellphones because the Exaflood or something!' nonsense). Any devices that take advantage of TV channels would still have to exercise caution to avoid stepping on ones that are still alive. My point was merely that anywhere a TV station is shut down, 'whitespace' communication enjoys considerably greater usable spectrum within the former coverage area of the station. Doesn't apply uniformly nationwide, so the proposed cautionary mechanisms would still have to be in place; but the more areas with dead channels, and the more dead channels, the better it would work.
Well, given that they just finished losing a lawsuit denying exactly that, they apparently do quibble with that part, they just didn't get their way...
And, of course, by "may go subscription" you really mean "are spouting entirely hollow threats because everyone knows they're not going to throw away their broadcast money just to spite one company."
Not that this would ever happen, of course; but if somebody at the FCC had actual nerve they'd do a little perspective inversion at this point:
"Oh, so you now think that the economics of your use of some prime RF spectrum allocations are unsustainable? Good to know, we've got people who are substantially more optimistic about their ideas and would love to have access to it(any of the 'whitespace' networking technologies, for instance, would work substantially better, and be much easier to set up, if there were some dead channels that assured the existence of whitespace...)"
Broadcast TV sits right in the middle of some pretty nice spectrum. Any broadcaster who doesn't like the economics of broadcasting is more than welcome to step aside and let us find some more productive use of that spectrum. Not that I think Fox is serious; but I'd be delighted if they were.
Monopolies are inherently ineffecient by their nature. There is no incentive to be innovative or productive in a monopoly situation. Standard Oil should be grateful that the government won its case.
Standard Oil, perhaps; but probably not Standard Oil's stakeholders of the day. Monopolies might lead to rot in the long run; but in the long run we are all dead, and those of us who held monopoly power were able to extract substantial rents in the short and medium term...
Corporations may be immortal; but the people looking to profit from them definitely aren't, and their net present value calculations reflect that.
Google's nefarious release of Android-related material under the 'Google Public License'(which allows you to use the code; but requires that all web activity be logged and sent to Google) was truly a masterstroke for market dominance.
Oh, wait, you mean that Android is a mixture of Apache and GPL components, and Google has had somewhat indifferent luck with preventing other vendors(Amazon, Samsung, etc.) from quite successfully using it for their own purposes while cutting them out of the picture entirely? Oh, um, never mind then...
The one potential spoiler for SoCs is virtualization.
Sure, the motherboard of your generic dual xeon/opteron box looks a bit untidy(and I suspect that we'll see further integration here, and already have seen some, goodbye discrete northbridge...); but if you divide the number of wasteful little discrete packages across the number of VMs the machine is running, it starts to look a whole lot better.
This isn't a 'bah, integration, it'll never happen!', it has been happening fairly steadily in PCs more or less since IBM defined them and Compaq produced a non-copyright-infringing competitor. Discrete option cards gradually get eaten by motherboards, and once it's an expected motherboard feature, the Northbridge or Southbridge usually engulfs it. More recently, most of the northbridge has been eaten by the CPU. Full SoC-level integration seems unlikely for the moment because PoP RAM severely limits CPU thermal envelope and total system RAM, and because certain specs still vary enough by use case that it isn't economic to go one-size-fits all; but integration proceeds apace elsewhere.
What I find curious about HP's design is how half-hearted it is about being a heavily-integrated blade box:
For 60k, you'd expect the chassis to handle more than just power and cooling(and it does apparently handle networking between the server modules and between the server modules and the switch modules, and I assume that HP's chassis management software is baked in in various places); but every single node still has its own dinky little hard drive, just waiting to die, and RAM is also per-node and cannot be reallocated.
Among the biggest advantages of the generic 'relatively beefy two-socket with lots of RAM' configuration is that, with (increasingly cheap) VM software, you can slice it up however you like. Allocate more or less RAM, more or less CPU time, give each system whatever slice of your available storage it requires, often even take advantage of 'bursty' demands on different systems to do a little overprovisioning...
HP's arrangement seems to go out of its way to rub how non-virtual it all is in your face, even though it's 100% HP gear sitting inside HP's fancy cabinet with some sort of fast interconnect tying it together.
It wasn't a 'first' then either(If we really want to go way back, the SAGE guys were pen-computing during the cold war, and getting 99% uptime on vacuum tubes; more recent examples were things like the GRiDpad in 1989, and Go's PenPoint OS); but MS has been dabbling in tablet-like things since "Windows for Pen Computing" was released for Win3.1. They've just been not-succeeding at it for that long.
would you like to give an example of something that is actually completely original in the tech industry. Cause the kinect is the best i can come up with, an even that is just a super charged wii (which is just an air mouse).
As alen notes, 'kinect' was licensed from a 3rd party outfit(though it cost a hell of a lot more before MS started stamping units out, that's for sure...). Architecturally, though, it is totally different from the wiimote(which, itself, was the combination of not-novel parts from two main suppliers, the accelerometers and the IR sensor module; but it also had the virtue of bringing those parts into the range of affordable).
This was just a terrifically bad idea on Shaw's part. Desperately pleading that you did something first so you should get some attention is never going to win you sales or good PR. That said, it doesn't seem like Microsoft really has any other strategy (except perhaps for their video game market, where they bought their relevance.)
It seems doubly foolish because Facebook appears to be aiming 'Home' at terribly unexciting Android handsets, including some already in the field that may be upgrade-able(if you can call it that). Is 'the competitor's product that will soon be on sale for peanuts-after-contract, or even downloadable for free, is totally just like ours!!!' really the message you want out there?
Indeed. This seems more like a battle for a hill so small neither can stand on it.
Worse than that. Facebook puked up yet-another-UI-twist on top of their giant dataset that keeps people coming back through all the UI twists and Microsoft attempted to take credit for the design.
When was the last time somebody said something nice about Facebook's UI/UX? They're like the Ebay of social networking: network effects are very strongly in their favor; but everyone spends all their time loathing them for everything else. Why would Microsoft do anything but distance themselves from that?
"Blinding as an incidental or collateral effect of the legitimate military employment of laser systems, including laser systems used against optical equipment, is not covered by the prohibition of this Protocol."
Looks like a loophole large enough to fire a multi-kilowatt IR laser through...
The ocean is big, and pirates are very small. Hard to spot. Sort of like muggers; not many, but they pop up anywhere. Also, Somali businessmen are financing theses operations for profit - ransom is lucrative. This isn't about kids on a boat. This is big business (while it lasts).
It doesn't help that the initial international response, because of what was in the reasonably-long-duration-at-sea inventory of the various navies, was a fairly small number of hilariously overqualified ships, rather than a large number of smaller coast guard types that might actually have a chance of being where they are needed when they are needed.
Given how thin the reflective layer on a mirror is, I suspect the less-than-100% reflectivity would translate into minimal protection in very short order. On the other hand, given the relatively low rate of energy delivery(this isn't a sci-fi laser that just slices effortlessly through stuff, it needs to be focused for several seconds), I wouldn't be entirely surprised if some pretty dodgy water-cooling arrangements would (between direct cooling, and generating a cloud of vapor and droplets that would scatter and attenuate the incoming beam before it strikes the target surface) work embarrassingly well at protecting something like an outboard motor: An outer covering of multiple layers of sackcloth or the like, with a little pump dumping water on top such that it flows more or less evenly over the surface. With water's rather high specific heat, and adequate enthalpy of vaporization, a pretty weedy pump with access to seawater could neutralize a nontrivial amount of surface heating.
Aircraft, of course, would have to use a different strategy, since water would be excessively heavy; but they have the advantage of both moving faster, and of opting for a trajectory where losing power means gliding/falling onto their assailant...
Slashdot Mirror
These are our choices: stick with a variety of crappy ISPs, or consolidate on one that's pretty decent, but whose business model consists of stripping us of our privacy and funneling our Internet experience through its pipes.
This is not the 21st century I was told to expect.
If you think that you are getting privacy from your other ISPs, I have a bridge to sell you. At best, the incumbents might be sufficiently lazy and incompetent that their ability to violate your privacy is limited by sheer inertia; but I wouldn't bet on it, and I certainly wouldn't bet on anything better than that...
...by an order of magnitude, once they realized the buyer was a science-hating scammer. Crick would be pissed.
Don't you think that Crick would have been amused to see a quack shell out good money for a little chunk of metal that(outside of its honorary context) isn't worth nearly what he paid?
"What Should happen to your data after you die?" is a question so vague as to be vacuuous.
Fairly obviously, just like any other flavor of cruft you accumulate during your time as a successful combatant against entropy, different flavors of data are best disposed of in different ways. We've only had more-or-less-all-of-recorded-human-civilization to work on this problem...
The new issue on the plate isn't so much 'OMG! 'Data' is a mysterious and fundamentally novel category!!!' but "Shit, huge swaths of 'my data' are locked in various 3rd party locations, and often very, very, poorly segregated by category." By way of analogy, if my bank safe deposit box was where I stored family heirlooms; but was also the location where I received reams of junk mail, recordings of a substantial percentage of casual conversations, and my collection of hideous donkey/tentacle hentai, writing my will would get a trifle more complex.
We may have had it easier historically because preserving the ephemera wasn't even an option, without substantial effort; but the major issue is really with the fact that everybody hates sorting shit, and various 'service providers' seem to adore tying as much data as possible to a single account, with efficient segregation of different flavors of data anywhere between 'a hassle' and 'overly contrary to the TOS'.
Given the...how to put this politely... 'strongly habituated'... cellphone-checking among a large number of people, I'd say that the closest analogy would probably be selling infusion pumps to heroin junkies.
By making 'pulling out your phone and compulsively checking it all the goddamn time, even when in company' entirely seamless and automatic, Glass allows you to indulge your vices even further, while exhibiting the formerly required movements much less often...
I thought Sergei's(deeply weird) comments about being 'emasculated' by his phone were actually sort of telling with regards to the strange contradiction underlying the 'Glass' concept.
So, Sergei comes to the realization that damn do I spend a lot of my life, even when I'm ostensibly doing other things, basically poking at the little colored lights that live inside my cellphone, what am I doing? However, instead of adopting the "Hmm, maybe I should try doing less of that" approach, he goes for the "I know, I'll build a system where I no longer find myself clutching my cellphone alarmingly frequently; because it's hovering in front of my eye all the time!".
Is this just a huckster trying to make a few bucks off nationalist suckers by offering to draw a map with a few contentious names and borders modified(the sort of thing that a script kiddie could do by hacking together a KML layer for google earth in about 10 minutes; but I digress...) or is there some sort of 'Islamic geography' that has serious issues with basic tenents of what we know about our dear home geoid?
I'm honestly curious... It certainly isn't uncommon to have mere nationalist spats over mapping; but that's just standard political bluster.
Religious convictions that are seriously opposed to empirically demonstrable facts about the world, though, tend to be fairly amusing and sometimes quirky. You've got your flat earthers, your YECs, your geocentericists(does the Tychonic system get any love anymore?), your 'baraminologists', faith healers of a zillion different flavors, people who are pretty sure that Jesus and/or the 'lost tribes of Israel' ended up in North America, you name it, we've got it...
Is this just the tedious nationalism, or does folk islam have some weird bug up its ass about the-world-as-observed-from-orbit?
Oh look, it says "George Town, Cayman Islands" beneath the name on the ship ... and the brochure says "NOT FOR SALE OR CHARTER TO U.S.
RESIDENTS WHILE IN U.S. WATERS."
Taxes are such a bitch, aren't they Eric?
Given the way that various large economies have been starting to lean on dinky tax havens about the details of what they do lately, I'm a little surprised that the Coast Guard hasn't been flirting with a "Oh, no support contract? I hope you like either per-incident support fees or very long distance swims..." policy for ships registered in places with that flavor.
A dump truck would actually offer a lot of room to work with...
Ugly, sure; but you'd have a passenger compartment larger than some New York apartments to add ostentatious touches to.
Certainly, for very low power processors, PoP makes sense(at least until you hit the ceiling on how much RAM you can actually fit on top of a very low power processor, the 8GB SODIMMs in these little HP boxes generally have 16 little BGAs, all not significantly smaller than the CPU itself, on the card). My question is whether, given how easy it is to slice a larger CPU into smaller virtual CPUs, the 'lots and lots of teeny CPUs' architectural strategy is actually a good one, or just a good one until it finally scares Intel into not overpricing Xeons, especially the ULV ones.
Does used commodity x86 server gear(with hot serial numbers, no less) actually have enough resale value somewhere that it would be reasonable to imagine that the thieves might actually have been after the hardware, or would they have had to have other motives(whether data access, or something else they thought was in the building) to make taking the risk worth it?
I can see the case for smash-n-grabs on consumer gear, especially laptops and iDevices and such, where gullible and/or morally flexible people do seem willing to buy dubiously sourced goods for a chance at cheap consumer electronics; but the phrase 'used hard drives from ebay' is the sort of thing that I'd only ever use in a server context if I were sneaking up behind an admin and trying to make him jump and turn a curious shade of purple...
Is the used market more robust than I give it credit for(or the scrap value higher)? Or would grabbing the hard drives be a fairly clear sign that you are after what is on them?
at the rate they are going
Why would you expect a national rollout ever? Do you think anybody wants to end up on the 'universal service' hook(unless they get to tack on some serious slush-fund fees on everybody else, of course, just to 'cover expenses') and required to run new lines to the ass end of nowhere?
At least we might be able to get some of the US' major cities up to developed-world levels of connectivity by 2030 or so...
Both are true. The digital transition's trimming of the TV spectrum was a step in the right direction(except for the omnipresent 'any and all spectrum must be allocated to cellphones because the Exaflood or something!' nonsense). Any devices that take advantage of TV channels would still have to exercise caution to avoid stepping on ones that are still alive. My point was merely that anywhere a TV station is shut down, 'whitespace' communication enjoys considerably greater usable spectrum within the former coverage area of the station. Doesn't apply uniformly nationwide, so the proposed cautionary mechanisms would still have to be in place; but the more areas with dead channels, and the more dead channels, the better it would work.
Well, given that they just finished losing a lawsuit denying exactly that, they apparently do quibble with that part, they just didn't get their way...
And, of course, by "may go subscription" you really mean "are spouting entirely hollow threats because everyone knows they're not going to throw away their broadcast money just to spite one company."
Not that this would ever happen, of course; but if somebody at the FCC had actual nerve they'd do a little perspective inversion at this point:
"Oh, so you now think that the economics of your use of some prime RF spectrum allocations are unsustainable? Good to know, we've got people who are substantially more optimistic about their ideas and would love to have access to it(any of the 'whitespace' networking technologies, for instance, would work substantially better, and be much easier to set up, if there were some dead channels that assured the existence of whitespace...)"
Broadcast TV sits right in the middle of some pretty nice spectrum. Any broadcaster who doesn't like the economics of broadcasting is more than welcome to step aside and let us find some more productive use of that spectrum. Not that I think Fox is serious; but I'd be delighted if they were.
Monopolies are inherently ineffecient by their nature. There is no incentive to be innovative or productive in a monopoly situation. Standard Oil should be grateful that the government won its case.
Standard Oil, perhaps; but probably not Standard Oil's stakeholders of the day. Monopolies might lead to rot in the long run; but in the long run we are all dead, and those of us who held monopoly power were able to extract substantial rents in the short and medium term...
Corporations may be immortal; but the people looking to profit from them definitely aren't, and their net present value calculations reflect that.
Google's nefarious release of Android-related material under the 'Google Public License'(which allows you to use the code; but requires that all web activity be logged and sent to Google) was truly a masterstroke for market dominance.
Oh, wait, you mean that Android is a mixture of Apache and GPL components, and Google has had somewhat indifferent luck with preventing other vendors(Amazon, Samsung, etc.) from quite successfully using it for their own purposes while cutting them out of the picture entirely? Oh, um, never mind then...
The one potential spoiler for SoCs is virtualization.
Sure, the motherboard of your generic dual xeon/opteron box looks a bit untidy(and I suspect that we'll see further integration here, and already have seen some, goodbye discrete northbridge...); but if you divide the number of wasteful little discrete packages across the number of VMs the machine is running, it starts to look a whole lot better.
This isn't a 'bah, integration, it'll never happen!', it has been happening fairly steadily in PCs more or less since IBM defined them and Compaq produced a non-copyright-infringing competitor. Discrete option cards gradually get eaten by motherboards, and once it's an expected motherboard feature, the Northbridge or Southbridge usually engulfs it. More recently, most of the northbridge has been eaten by the CPU. Full SoC-level integration seems unlikely for the moment because PoP RAM severely limits CPU thermal envelope and total system RAM, and because certain specs still vary enough by use case that it isn't economic to go one-size-fits all; but integration proceeds apace elsewhere.
What I find curious about HP's design is how half-hearted it is about being a heavily-integrated blade box:
For 60k, you'd expect the chassis to handle more than just power and cooling(and it does apparently handle networking between the server modules and between the server modules and the switch modules, and I assume that HP's chassis management software is baked in in various places); but every single node still has its own dinky little hard drive, just waiting to die, and RAM is also per-node and cannot be reallocated.
Among the biggest advantages of the generic 'relatively beefy two-socket with lots of RAM' configuration is that, with (increasingly cheap) VM software, you can slice it up however you like. Allocate more or less RAM, more or less CPU time, give each system whatever slice of your available storage it requires, often even take advantage of 'bursty' demands on different systems to do a little overprovisioning...
HP's arrangement seems to go out of its way to rub how non-virtual it all is in your face, even though it's 100% HP gear sitting inside HP's fancy cabinet with some sort of fast interconnect tying it together.
It wasn't a 'first' then either(If we really want to go way back, the SAGE guys were pen-computing during the cold war, and getting 99% uptime on vacuum tubes; more recent examples were things like the GRiDpad in 1989, and Go's PenPoint OS); but MS has been dabbling in tablet-like things since "Windows for Pen Computing" was released for Win3.1. They've just been not-succeeding at it for that long.
would you like to give an example of something that is actually completely original in the tech industry. Cause the kinect is the best i can come up with, an even that is just a super charged wii (which is just an air mouse).
As alen notes, 'kinect' was licensed from a 3rd party outfit(though it cost a hell of a lot more before MS started stamping units out, that's for sure...). Architecturally, though, it is totally different from the wiimote(which, itself, was the combination of not-novel parts from two main suppliers, the accelerometers and the IR sensor module; but it also had the virtue of bringing those parts into the range of affordable).
This was just a terrifically bad idea on Shaw's part. Desperately pleading that you did something first so you should get some attention is never going to win you sales or good PR. That said, it doesn't seem like Microsoft really has any other strategy (except perhaps for their video game market, where they bought their relevance.)
It seems doubly foolish because Facebook appears to be aiming 'Home' at terribly unexciting Android handsets, including some already in the field that may be upgrade-able(if you can call it that). Is 'the competitor's product that will soon be on sale for peanuts-after-contract, or even downloadable for free, is totally just like ours!!!' really the message you want out there?
Indeed. This seems more like a battle for a hill so small neither can stand on it.
Worse than that. Facebook puked up yet-another-UI-twist on top of their giant dataset that keeps people coming back through all the UI twists and Microsoft attempted to take credit for the design.
When was the last time somebody said something nice about Facebook's UI/UX? They're like the Ebay of social networking: network effects are very strongly in their favor; but everyone spends all their time loathing them for everything else. Why would Microsoft do anything but distance themselves from that?
Protocol IV, Article 3:
"Blinding as an incidental or collateral effect of the legitimate military employment of laser systems, including laser systems used against optical equipment, is not covered by the prohibition of this Protocol."
Looks like a loophole large enough to fire a multi-kilowatt IR laser through...
The ocean is big, and pirates are very small. Hard to spot. Sort of like muggers; not many, but they pop up anywhere. Also, Somali businessmen are financing theses operations for profit - ransom is lucrative. This isn't about kids on a boat. This is big business (while it lasts).
It doesn't help that the initial international response, because of what was in the reasonably-long-duration-at-sea inventory of the various navies, was a fairly small number of hilariously overqualified ships, rather than a large number of smaller coast guard types that might actually have a chance of being where they are needed when they are needed.
Given how thin the reflective layer on a mirror is, I suspect the less-than-100% reflectivity would translate into minimal protection in very short order. On the other hand, given the relatively low rate of energy delivery(this isn't a sci-fi laser that just slices effortlessly through stuff, it needs to be focused for several seconds), I wouldn't be entirely surprised if some pretty dodgy water-cooling arrangements would (between direct cooling, and generating a cloud of vapor and droplets that would scatter and attenuate the incoming beam before it strikes the target surface) work embarrassingly well at protecting something like an outboard motor: An outer covering of multiple layers of sackcloth or the like, with a little pump dumping water on top such that it flows more or less evenly over the surface. With water's rather high specific heat, and adequate enthalpy of vaporization, a pretty weedy pump with access to seawater could neutralize a nontrivial amount of surface heating.
Aircraft, of course, would have to use a different strategy, since water would be excessively heavy; but they have the advantage of both moving faster, and of opting for a trajectory where losing power means gliding/falling onto their assailant...