I am neither a lawyer nor your lawyer; but I suspect that once the boys in blue are knocking on or down your door, you have a problem. It is unlikely that you'll manage to convince them to take your word for how your network is set up and just seize part of the potential evidence. Even if you do strike it lucky and get a techie with a gun and badge, rather than a cop who can pretty much handle dealing with physical evidence, why would he trust you, or do the fiddly forensics on site instead of just hauling it all off and doing the work back at the office?
You might have better luck with the seedy-but-legalish-if-often-a-cover-for-dodgy-activities techniques adopted by besuited scammers and corporations with creative accountants. A shell company, incorporated in one of the states with virtually bulletproof corporate veils and lax reporting requirements(scenic Nevada, for instance) with a vaguely telcomm-related name and no assets aside from a cheap hosted server somewhere, is no more immune to a raid than you are; but might encourage the investigators to finish picking over the raid evidence before deciding whether or not to try to hunt up the corporate officers/owners...
'Mere' investigation can be made rather unpleasant, depending on the crime in question, the enthusiasm of the cops running after it, and your access to legal representation...
There are the practical difficulties: Having everything vaguely resembling a computer siezed and held for who-knows-how-long, potentially quite signifcant legal costs, etc.
And there are the ones arising from the common, but troublesome, opinion that investigation is a sort of lesser degree of guilt. The taint by mere association is worst with kiddie-porn related matters; but the touchier types seem to consider "Police Record: Checked, found absolutely nothing." to simply be a subspecies of "Police Record" and act accordingly. Fan-tastic.
I'm assuming that those occasionally killed in mudslides(though the last properly dramatic one was in '85, so it's been a little while) would beg to differ; but are unlikely to be able to...
It sounds like the companies need to have "Farm brands" in the same way that sports teams have "Farm Teams" where potential talent can practice and be evaluated.
Either by creating one de novo, or by using an aquisition's brand(the way HP uses 'Compaq' as a codeword for 'cheap consumer shit', while the decent stuff is "HP" or "HP-Compaq", depending on the product's history), products could be tried and eventually absorbed into the mothership if sufficiently successful, kept under the "farm brand" if unexciting but not money-losing, and cut loose to die if they can't hack it.
Arguably, the degree of goodness or badness really depends on how 'tightly-coupled' a product is:
By 'tightly-coupled' I mean an(admittedly rough) measure of how tightly integrated the product is to ancillary products, services, drivers, support, etc.
Something like, say, the Dell "Inspiron 15 (N5040)" would be 'loosely-coupled'. Other than BIOS updates, which can only be Dell-provided, virtually all related software and likely services would be unaffected by its discontinuation: You can still trivially buy/download an OS to run on it, if you decide to upgrade, drivers are available for the various parts from their respective OEMs/in kernel, all the software you are likely to use is still available from 3rd parties, it isn't tied to a specific ISP, there is no "Dell App Store" that you lose access to, and so forth. A 'loosely-coupled' product can die without a ripple(for anybody except the company who failed to produce a product that made them the money they wanted it to.) Even current owners are only slightly harmed(incrementally harder to get parts for devices with shorter production runs).
A "tightly-coupled" device would be something like an iPhone. Not that Apple would cancel it; but you would be pretty much SOL if they were to: It is cryptographically locked to a specific software source, the system is designed to defeat 3rd-party OS modifications(and no 3rd party OSes exist in any but the most vestigal state for the embedded platform...). Were Apple to pull the plug on the ecosystem, only the most enthusiastic jailbreaker crews would be able to continue.
Something like an xbox or PS3 is mostly tightly-coupled: it is locked to a specific online service, cryptographically dependent on a single vendor for updates and downloadable games; but its use of physical media for most major commercial titles means that it would be degraded but not rendered useless by a vendor pulling the plug.
In general, I'd argue that the churn among 'loosely-coupled' products, while it may be wasteful, shortsighted, MBA/shareholder-whining driven bullshit, is mostly harmful to the companies that engage in it. It means that SKUs change a lot; but it doesn't really do too much harm to product-holders. Churn among 'tightly-coupled' products, though, particularly ones that involve esoteric and/or cryptographically locked embedded systems, or systems that are wholly dependent on some online component, produces a lot of bricks, and directly harms consumers(it also, most likely, has the perverse effect of harming the companies that do it: If consumers know that many new products get shitcanned and bricked, why would they take a risk on your bold new innovation? You are probably just going to kill it...)
While this is less of an issue at the consumer level, more of an enterprise/SMB problem, tight-coupling among software products can cause similar issues: if interfaces between the various horrid bug-nests that keep your company running are relatively sane and clean, getting EOLed by the vendor merely sucks. If they aren't...
While grandparent's note that 'the real party is quite a mix of interests' is true and important to keep in mind, the curious dissonance that always strikes me is how often "right" means "I wouldn't trust the government to run a school; but I wholeheartedly support their running a penal system, an army, and a variety of clandestine agencies..."
The fascists, on the one side of "right" and the libertarian anarchists on the other are at least ideologically consistent and the 'I have strong concerns about state power and central-planning's often tepid results; but protective use of force is unfortunately an area of market failure' group has pragmatism in their favor; but the people who, simultaneously, assert that the state ruins everything it touches and regard as practically treasonous anybody who does not give their fervent support to any element of the security apparatus just absolutely baffle me. I don't understand how those two ideas coexist inside a single chunk of brain meat.
I'm not sure that NASA is taking the most efficient path here: If you want to discover cold, distant objects, any marriage counselor who is a bit flexible about confidentiality should be able to provide you with dozens of them, without any of the trouble of sophisticated infrared astronomy...
I have no problem with people enjoying spectator sports, if that is their fancy. I simply find it hugely annoying that people somehow think that the physicality of sports bleeds over into the spectators and confers some sort of virtue on them.
There are valid reasons for arguing that(in moderation, pro athletes get ground down like livestock and then put out to pasture pretty fast) playing sports is better for you than playing video games; but watching people do either is functionally indistinguishable.
Luckily, finely honed reflexes and well developed fine-motor skills are not forms of physical prowess... so the status of Real Sports is safe.
C'mon: Obviously, for the basic reason that our metabolisms sure as hell didn't evolve for sitting on the couch and letting our fingers do the work, getting actual exercise is healthy and useful(some people are even into it for its own sake, I'm told).
Plunking your ass on the couch and cheering as your tribe fights the away tribe, though, bears basically the same relationship to real physical activity that plunking your ass on the couch and cheering as your RTS-er of choice drops some stimpacked marines on the opposition's mining outpost. That is, None At All.
Spectating isn't a sport, no matter what you are staring at.
That isn't quite true, if you trawl the, er, value-priced, toy stores, flea markets, and shady ebay auctions for models that lego never created you can find a number of "interoperable" plastic construction block toys of varying degrees of interoperability(in the very cheap seats, interoperability with bricks that came in the same bag is a problem, with the incrementally nicer ones interoperability with lego is rather dodgy) for rather small sums of money. All of that is injection moulded, though. Extrusion deposited lego-esque bricks wouldn't be worth the material you melted to make them.
Certainly, it is quite tough(vaguely biomimetic 'web-of-threads/beams' structures can actually be fairly seriously load bearing...)
I was thinking more in terms of dimensional tolerances, homogenous density, surface finish, and the like. Anything where the bulk properties of ABS will do you can get away with extrusion printing(possibly with some clean-up work/drilling/etc. on critical surfaces); but most of what makes something like lego work depends on factors that extruders can't touch.
Symantec's Advanced Pre-emptive Defense technology is some of the industry's finest. It is really very lax of you to be so flippant about these matters.
As computer scientists and security researchers have proven(with big scary math!), virtually all malware requires CPU cycles and memory in order to harm your system. By starving everything that might be a virus of these precious resources, Symantec keeps you safe from the malware scourge.
While that project is indeed extremely cool, and the fact that it is a DIY extremely impressive, I suspect that the $200/liter feedstock material has something to do with it...
With the hobbyist printing systems, once you get too far up in price, you start to bump uncomfortably close to the services that rent out time on big serious pro gear, with the advanced capabilities that offers, on a per-piece basis.
The extruders are substantially limited; but they can also knock out comparatively high-volume parts for peanuts.
Not inexpensive; but you pretty much upload mesh+money and get fedexed an object...
Cheaper and better for a number of applications; but somewhat less versatile, are the online machine shop services, which use conventional feedstock materials and machining techniques. You can't do some of the really fancy geometry; but paying $10/cc to have a part laser-sintered when it could be milled, tapped, and finished to your spec in the same time and probably for less money doesn't make a whole lot of sense...
Lego will actually do OK(as some of their imitators have demonstrated over the years, sub-mm tolerances make all the difference in the world between lego that works and 'construction brick toys' that can barely support themselves; but there are going to be some Very Litigious Sad Pandas in looser-tolerance industries.
ABS, while a fine plastic, does depend a bit on how it is formed: Injection molding into a tight-tolerance mold, as with lego, is going to produce better results than thread deposition, though the latter is hardly useless...
I'm assuming that, unless they've quietly reverted to savagery behind the factory gates, GM is continuing their interest in developing more versatile assembly line robots.
Vehicle assembly lines have long been pretty robot friendly(lots of fixed-and-predictably sized parts, some of them too heavy for humans to handle effectively for more than a short time, that need to be moved on well defined paths between various, not infrequently dangerous, bits of machinery and then spot welded together...) There are, though, areas that have continued to be too fiddly, space constrained, or otherwise tricky for your basic "Big hydraulic arm on a stalk" style assembly robots(which shrug at holding steel structural elements in place while spot welding them; but aren't so hot at threading wiring harnesses through little crannies and such). Presumably, something a bit smaller and more humanoid is intended to start eliminating the remaining humans from those positions, after some initial R&D shared with NASA...
According to the probably-not-exactly-an-arm-of-teacher's-union-socialism "Council for American Private Education the lowest average private tuition was $4,944 for a Catholic elementary program(direct costs only, any cash or service subsidies from the church organization not included). All secondary and K-12 programs averaged higher.
While bemoaning the state of American education is fun, and often justified, it really makes more sense to do a more granular comparison.
The state-by-state comparisons of educational outcomes are... quite dramatic. They don't totally salvage the situation(MA, the best performing, still comes in below some but not all of the usual suspects in Asia); but there are parts of the US that do considerably better than "American students" and other parts that, well, do their bit to ensure that the first group doesn't skew the average too much...
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I am neither a lawyer nor your lawyer; but I suspect that once the boys in blue are knocking on or down your door, you have a problem. It is unlikely that you'll manage to convince them to take your word for how your network is set up and just seize part of the potential evidence. Even if you do strike it lucky and get a techie with a gun and badge, rather than a cop who can pretty much handle dealing with physical evidence, why would he trust you, or do the fiddly forensics on site instead of just hauling it all off and doing the work back at the office?
You might have better luck with the seedy-but-legalish-if-often-a-cover-for-dodgy-activities techniques adopted by besuited scammers and corporations with creative accountants. A shell company, incorporated in one of the states with virtually bulletproof corporate veils and lax reporting requirements(scenic Nevada, for instance) with a vaguely telcomm-related name and no assets aside from a cheap hosted server somewhere, is no more immune to a raid than you are; but might encourage the investigators to finish picking over the raid evidence before deciding whether or not to try to hunt up the corporate officers/owners...
'Mere' investigation can be made rather unpleasant, depending on the crime in question, the enthusiasm of the cops running after it, and your access to legal representation...
There are the practical difficulties: Having everything vaguely resembling a computer siezed and held for who-knows-how-long, potentially quite signifcant legal costs, etc.
And there are the ones arising from the common, but troublesome, opinion that investigation is a sort of lesser degree of guilt. The taint by mere association is worst with kiddie-porn related matters; but the touchier types seem to consider "Police Record: Checked, found absolutely nothing." to simply be a subspecies of "Police Record" and act accordingly. Fan-tastic.
I'm assuming that those occasionally killed in mudslides(though the last properly dramatic one was in '85, so it's been a little while) would beg to differ; but are unlikely to be able to...
It sounds like the companies need to have "Farm brands" in the same way that sports teams have "Farm Teams" where potential talent can practice and be evaluated.
Either by creating one de novo, or by using an aquisition's brand(the way HP uses 'Compaq' as a codeword for 'cheap consumer shit', while the decent stuff is "HP" or "HP-Compaq", depending on the product's history), products could be tried and eventually absorbed into the mothership if sufficiently successful, kept under the "farm brand" if unexciting but not money-losing, and cut loose to die if they can't hack it.
Arguably, the degree of goodness or badness really depends on how 'tightly-coupled' a product is:
By 'tightly-coupled' I mean an(admittedly rough) measure of how tightly integrated the product is to ancillary products, services, drivers, support, etc.
Something like, say, the Dell "Inspiron 15 (N5040)" would be 'loosely-coupled'. Other than BIOS updates, which can only be Dell-provided, virtually all related software and likely services would be unaffected by its discontinuation: You can still trivially buy/download an OS to run on it, if you decide to upgrade, drivers are available for the various parts from their respective OEMs/in kernel, all the software you are likely to use is still available from 3rd parties, it isn't tied to a specific ISP, there is no "Dell App Store" that you lose access to, and so forth. A 'loosely-coupled' product can die without a ripple(for anybody except the company who failed to produce a product that made them the money they wanted it to.) Even current owners are only slightly harmed(incrementally harder to get parts for devices with shorter production runs).
A "tightly-coupled" device would be something like an iPhone. Not that Apple would cancel it; but you would be pretty much SOL if they were to: It is cryptographically locked to a specific software source, the system is designed to defeat 3rd-party OS modifications(and no 3rd party OSes exist in any but the most vestigal state for the embedded platform...). Were Apple to pull the plug on the ecosystem, only the most enthusiastic jailbreaker crews would be able to continue.
Something like an xbox or PS3 is mostly tightly-coupled: it is locked to a specific online service, cryptographically dependent on a single vendor for updates and downloadable games; but its use of physical media for most major commercial titles means that it would be degraded but not rendered useless by a vendor pulling the plug.
In general, I'd argue that the churn among 'loosely-coupled' products, while it may be wasteful, shortsighted, MBA/shareholder-whining driven bullshit, is mostly harmful to the companies that engage in it. It means that SKUs change a lot; but it doesn't really do too much harm to product-holders. Churn among 'tightly-coupled' products, though, particularly ones that involve esoteric and/or cryptographically locked embedded systems, or systems that are wholly dependent on some online component, produces a lot of bricks, and directly harms consumers(it also, most likely, has the perverse effect of harming the companies that do it: If consumers know that many new products get shitcanned and bricked, why would they take a risk on your bold new innovation? You are probably just going to kill it...)
While this is less of an issue at the consumer level, more of an enterprise/SMB problem, tight-coupling among software products can cause similar issues: if interfaces between the various horrid bug-nests that keep your company running are relatively sane and clean, getting EOLed by the vendor merely sucks. If they aren't...
While grandparent's note that 'the real party is quite a mix of interests' is true and important to keep in mind, the curious dissonance that always strikes me is how often "right" means "I wouldn't trust the government to run a school; but I wholeheartedly support their running a penal system, an army, and a variety of clandestine agencies..."
The fascists, on the one side of "right" and the libertarian anarchists on the other are at least ideologically consistent and the 'I have strong concerns about state power and central-planning's often tepid results; but protective use of force is unfortunately an area of market failure' group has pragmatism in their favor; but the people who, simultaneously, assert that the state ruins everything it touches and regard as practically treasonous anybody who does not give their fervent support to any element of the security apparatus just absolutely baffle me. I don't understand how those two ideas coexist inside a single chunk of brain meat.
What sane, right-thinking, person would fail to try at least one upon learning that "YeastMaster's Exalted Potion of Courage" was on tap?
I've never been married, I was just going for the stock joke. I have observed some reasonably ugly marital decay processes, though...
I'm not sure that NASA is taking the most efficient path here: If you want to discover cold, distant objects, any marriage counselor who is a bit flexible about confidentiality should be able to provide you with dozens of them, without any of the trouble of sophisticated infrared astronomy...
I have no problem with people enjoying spectator sports, if that is their fancy. I simply find it hugely annoying that people somehow think that the physicality of sports bleeds over into the spectators and confers some sort of virtue on them.
There are valid reasons for arguing that(in moderation, pro athletes get ground down like livestock and then put out to pasture pretty fast) playing sports is better for you than playing video games; but watching people do either is functionally indistinguishable.
You just aren't selling it right:
It isn't a shot, it's a potion of +1STR, +1CON(Side effects may include; but are not limited to, -1DEX, +1d6 illusory CHA, -1d6WIS).
Luckily, finely honed reflexes and well developed fine-motor skills are not forms of physical prowess... so the status of Real Sports is safe.
C'mon: Obviously, for the basic reason that our metabolisms sure as hell didn't evolve for sitting on the couch and letting our fingers do the work, getting actual exercise is healthy and useful(some people are even into it for its own sake, I'm told).
Plunking your ass on the couch and cheering as your tribe fights the away tribe, though, bears basically the same relationship to real physical activity that plunking your ass on the couch and cheering as your RTS-er of choice drops some stimpacked marines on the opposition's mining outpost. That is, None At All.
Spectating isn't a sport, no matter what you are staring at.
That isn't quite true, if you trawl the, er, value-priced, toy stores, flea markets, and shady ebay auctions for models that lego never created you can find a number of "interoperable" plastic construction block toys of varying degrees of interoperability(in the very cheap seats, interoperability with bricks that came in the same bag is a problem, with the incrementally nicer ones interoperability with lego is rather dodgy) for rather small sums of money. All of that is injection moulded, though. Extrusion deposited lego-esque bricks wouldn't be worth the material you melted to make them.
Certainly, it is quite tough(vaguely biomimetic 'web-of-threads/beams' structures can actually be fairly seriously load bearing...)
I was thinking more in terms of dimensional tolerances, homogenous density, surface finish, and the like. Anything where the bulk properties of ABS will do you can get away with extrusion printing(possibly with some clean-up work/drilling/etc. on critical surfaces); but most of what makes something like lego work depends on factors that extruders can't touch.
Symantec's Advanced Pre-emptive Defense technology is some of the industry's finest. It is really very lax of you to be so flippant about these matters.
As computer scientists and security researchers have proven(with big scary math!), virtually all malware requires CPU cycles and memory in order to harm your system. By starving everything that might be a virus of these precious resources, Symantec keeps you safe from the malware scourge.
Obligatory image...
While that project is indeed extremely cool, and the fact that it is a DIY extremely impressive, I suspect that the $200/liter feedstock material has something to do with it...
With the hobbyist printing systems, once you get too far up in price, you start to bump uncomfortably close to the services that rent out time on big serious pro gear, with the advanced capabilities that offers, on a per-piece basis.
The extruders are substantially limited; but they can also knock out comparatively high-volume parts for peanuts.
The intertubes, at your service!
Not inexpensive; but you pretty much upload mesh+money and get fedexed an object...
Cheaper and better for a number of applications; but somewhat less versatile, are the online machine shop services, which use conventional feedstock materials and machining techniques. You can't do some of the really fancy geometry; but paying $10/cc to have a part laser-sintered when it could be milled, tapped, and finished to your spec in the same time and probably for less money doesn't make a whole lot of sense...
Lego will actually do OK(as some of their imitators have demonstrated over the years, sub-mm tolerances make all the difference in the world between lego that works and 'construction brick toys' that can barely support themselves; but there are going to be some Very Litigious Sad Pandas in looser-tolerance industries.
ABS, while a fine plastic, does depend a bit on how it is formed: Injection molding into a tight-tolerance mold, as with lego, is going to produce better results than thread deposition, though the latter is hardly useless...
Those aren't gold bars! They're Gold-Pressed Latinum! You can't print that...
I'm assuming that, unless they've quietly reverted to savagery behind the factory gates, GM is continuing their interest in developing more versatile assembly line robots.
Vehicle assembly lines have long been pretty robot friendly(lots of fixed-and-predictably sized parts, some of them too heavy for humans to handle effectively for more than a short time, that need to be moved on well defined paths between various, not infrequently dangerous, bits of machinery and then spot welded together...) There are, though, areas that have continued to be too fiddly, space constrained, or otherwise tricky for your basic "Big hydraulic arm on a stalk" style assembly robots(which shrug at holding steel structural elements in place while spot welding them; but aren't so hot at threading wiring harnesses through little crannies and such). Presumably, something a bit smaller and more humanoid is intended to start eliminating the remaining humans from those positions, after some initial R&D shared with NASA...
Average? What color is the sky on your planet?
According to the probably-not-exactly-an-arm-of-teacher's-union-socialism "Council for American Private Education the lowest average private tuition was $4,944 for a Catholic elementary program(direct costs only, any cash or service subsidies from the church organization not included). All secondary and K-12 programs averaged higher.
If puberty is the problem, Science Has the Answer!
While bemoaning the state of American education is fun, and often justified, it really makes more sense to do a more granular comparison.
The state-by-state comparisons of educational outcomes are... quite dramatic. They don't totally salvage the situation(MA, the best performing, still comes in below some but not all of the usual suspects in Asia); but there are parts of the US that do considerably better than "American students" and other parts that, well, do their bit to ensure that the first group doesn't skew the average too much...