Sadly enough, the payoff doesn't even have to be as exciting as that. Journalism, especially for second-string rags or random stuff blogs and special interest publications, suffers from a more or less continual deadline crunch. In addition to the usual pressure of getting the thing together in time for the next print run, you have the fact that they are trying to make up for their shrinking margins by extracting more words words fewer people.
Under those circumstances, a vaguely neutral sounding press release(already conveniently typed up and more or less grammatically accurate!), that can just be massaged a touch and turned in is a blessing. Gotta churn out that content, make the deadline, look productive. Since the number of journalists has been slowly ebbing over time, and the number of PR flacks increasing, it only stands to reason that a greater percentage of "news" copy will be written by the latter.
Of course, for stuff that actually matters, or has a big money ad campaign behind it, or someone who controls the precious "access", you can see more overt corruption; but for petty shit deadline pressure is actually a depressingly large part of it.
As long as you stick exclusively within the email interface, things aren't so bad. It's just if you happen to venture out that life gets a bit dire.
Part of the Blackberry experience has been being honed since before blackberries were phones at all. The other part is a me-to tack-on. It isn't too hard to tell which is which...
It limits your choice of TLDs; but the safest course of action is probably to go jurisdiction shopping, rather than provider shopping. There are certainly more and less helpful providers; but nobody in the US is likely to do anything that imperils their safe-harbor status, unless you are paying them fairly extraordinary rates to be your registrar, your lawyer, and your insurance agent all in one. GoDaddy appears to have rolled over even more compliantly than strictly necessary; but it's a difference of degree rather than kind.
If you choose a registrar based in a country that doesn't care about what you are doing, all but the absolute bottom of the barrel will be fine. If you don't, you will have a very hard time finding somebody who will take on that amount of legal risk.
If the only thing you are buying is a DNS record, I'm pretty sure that 1 server to 4000 customers would be heavily over-provisioned(unless that number was, literally, only one server, rather than a pool with some redundancies that worked out to 1/4000...)
Especially with the number of DNS lookups that hit somebody else's cache, DNS is not terribly heavyweight.
This appears to have been slightly different: The site never went down(it was accessible by IP or by an alternate URL); but the registrar handling their primary domain name responded to the DMCA request by changing the DNS entry for that name to no longer point to the correct IP.
A 3rd party host is an additional point of vulnerability; but it was not the vulnerability exploited in this case.
Distributing things for free is a crime against the sellers' divinely granted right to profit in perpetuity. If any commodity's price is allowed to reach its marginal cost of production, there are precious, precious rents going unextracted!
I suspect that this was, at least in part, why they made the single player units and the multiplayer units somewhat different. Single player, aimed at casual gamers who don't want to get murdered online, gave them the option of throwing fun units into assorted setpiece battles that make use of their abilities. Multiplayer was designed so that South Korea could get its Zerg Chess fix.
There has been a fair bit of work on producing human skin tissues, mostly because of the demand from burn care and similar. My understanding is that getting the full structure right is(unsurprisingly) proving to be tricky and quite complex; but that there has been some progress in producing simpler membranes that are of use in dressing burns and protecting them while they heal.
Long term, it sure would be nice to have something better than the rather horrid scarring that is the body's present healing mechanism. A pity that getting serious regeneration powers is probably a huge cancer risk...
Essentially none exists as a liquid; but mars is suspected of harboring reasonable amounts of H2O ice in addition to the CO2 flavor. In either case, you'll need a decent supply of heat; but that is a technologically solvable problem. And, one of the (few) positive side effects of the atmosphere being hostile to humans is that running a closed-loop base will be a baseline necessity, rather than a burdensome add-on.
Actually, if you want to go for the +1 funny anticipation of the global warming troll, The argument should probably be that this is an example of What Carbon Sequestration Will Do... At the prodding of Al(ien) Gore and his envirofascist minions, the Martians turned their formerly habitable planet into a desert wasteland through reckless carbon sequestration spurred by the 'global warming' conspiracy...
Probably the easiest(in terms of being comparatively low-tech, easy to scale, and having numerous positive side effects), is a time-tested technology we call "Plants".
Given a few nutrients, a supply of CO2, and their favorite flavors of photon, those suckers are pretty efficient at turning CO2 into O2 and assorted carbon compounds, many with structural or culinary applications(and pretty easy to turn to straight carbon, if you prefer).
A hypothetical exploitation of these dry-ice deposits would presumably involve underground greenhouses(for protection from dust storms and insulation) lighted by LEDs emitting the correct bands for optimal plant growth, and provided with a moisture and CO2 rich environment by some sort of melting mechanism, probably mirrors or a radiothermal unit.
"The key to perfection lies not in never making mistakes; but in making sure nobody can see them."
If the flight data are that limited, a sim based on a good model of the aircraft's shape and systems(which presumably was created during the design phase) is going to be substantially more accurate than the experiences of all but a few people on earth.
Just on an intuitive level, I'm a touch surprised that they managed to get that much running time out of the system.
On consideration, of course, the energy required to coax aluminum out of whatever compound it has formed this time and into a bulk metallic state is pretty heroic. That does suggest that(while the aluminum oxide layer passivates it nicely under normal circumstances) bulk aluminum has some serious potential energy.
The bottom(read side) is a layer of polycarbonate, I'm pretty sure it won't even notice Ferric Chloride. The top has a protective lacquer layer over the metal surface, which should also be reasonably resistant(though it is the side far more vulnerable to mechanical damage: The bottom is a good mm of polycarbonate, and can be repaired to a degree with anything of suitably similar transparency and refractive index. Virtually any damage to the top side will destroy at least a portion of the data surface).
The mechanical vulnerability is probably among the easiest angles of attack. Your basic harbor freight belt sander should be able to reduce the data layer to a fine cloud of (probably not recommended for human breathing) fragments in under a second of contact.
And the per-disk cost, of course(both with blanks and with commercial media). DVD blanks are basically disposable, blu-ray rather less so(but still not large enough or stability-tested enough to be a viable alternative to the really pricey tape, for smaller users). Then, when you hit the store, you find that the DVD is ~50% the price of the BD, except under special circumstances.
Given that people are willing to watch streaming video in the under-5mb/s range, quite happily if the price is right, the quality bump just isn't worth the extra cost.
The one that I would like to see more of; but is basically certain to not happen outside of pirate circles, is greater adoption of the dubiously standard; but quite convenient, intermediate format of MP4 video recorded on DVDs. All the cheapness of DVD production; but better quality than MPEG-2 for the same size. Some DVD players support it, and computers have no trouble; but it is totally informal.
There are also (non quality related) advantages to DVDs, to this day:
As with USB vs. Firewire(where Firewire is absolutely better; but modestly more expensive and much less common), the Blu-ray premium isn't nearly as crushing as it was back in the bad old days(TFA mentions a $70 Blu-Ray deck, albeit probably lacking support for some of the fancy features; but a DVD player can be purchased at just about any pharmacy for about as much as dinner and a drink...); but it is still the case that DVD is absolutely ubiquitous, while Blue-ray cannot be assumed.
Want a disk that will play at your house, on your laptop(s)/desktop(s), at a friend's house during movie night, etc, etc? Blu-ray still can't promise that. DVD drives have, essentially, replaced CD drives in everything but dedicated CD players. You have to look to buy CD-ROM only devices(DVD burners aren't quite as ubiquitous; but DVD read/CD R/W is pretty much baseline). Blu-ray, by contrast, isn't wildly expensive; but you still have to ask for it, every kiddie going to college whose "TV" is a 17 inch macbook doesn't have it, most cheapy PCs don't have it.
Then there's the fact that the user experience with some Blu-ray players has been almost hilariously hostile. DVD players, with comparatively rare and usually irrelevant exceptions, don't have firmware updates. Blu-ray, not always something that can be relied on to avoid that.
I suspect that the real purpose of such a device(aside from the fact that white-collar environments, especially larger ones, often have a cultural distaste(at least during working hours) for solutions that involve just smashing stuff) is that it is probably "certified" to some or other standard, while just giving the janitor the night off and some beer money to take a sledgehammer to the junk drive box isn't, even if the degree of destruction is greater.
While smaller, more informal, shops can probably do whatever they want, I can definitely imagine some suits who could drone on about "Devices containing Secure Customer Information(SCI) were certified sanitized per industry standard practices by a monitored on-sight disposal contractor" in their sleep; but would freak out at "That IT guy with the the beard and the muttering took them to the shooting range over the weekend. Didn't you know that the FCSA annual get-together was last weekend?"
Firebrick, while not necessarily on offer at your local hardware store, is not too difficult to come by. Failing(or supplementing) that, sand exposed to thermite won't necessarily be in mint condition; but sand is extremely cheap, and there is nothing stopping you from just using a slightly thicker layer, and you can't beat the convenience of something you can get in big bags from most hardware/garden supply stores or by the ton from landscaping/construction contractor suppliers.
Just remember, though, Keep It Dry. Very little will ruin your day quite like molten iron being spattered into your delicate flesh by a steam flash..
Arguably, if you really want satisfying over-engineering, an induction furnace would be the way to go: Just drop the drive into the intimidating coil, turn on the power, and watch all the metal components glow red and then slump into a molten mess of slag. Game over man. Game Over.
Well, my original vision was more in line with link-farming as being an activity analogous to mining: every site you exploit ends up a polluted wasteland; but some percentage of them yield enough valuable minerals that you turn a profit.
Unfortunately, while link farmers deserve to spend eternity licking fiberglass from satan's lava yacht(clinging to the outside, naturally), I suspect that investing in them is actually fairly rational.
Investing in any one is likely a bad idea; but the genre as a whole seems to be able to stay at least a bit ahead of the search guys, and likely makes a profit during that time. As long as regurgitating their mass of serf and/or script generated sludge in slightly different formats is cheap enough, they are unfortunately likely to be a decent investment on average.
Man, if they are blocking androids from their network, I'd hate to be the guy who has to monitor the DHCP server and administer Voigt-Kampff tests to every device sending a request...
I'm pretty sure that that is exactly why they are tolerated(being a requirement for wally-world release is good too; but they had to get that way).
The ESRB is a creature of the publishers' trade association, not the independent product of free-floating moralists. They exist as a(comparatively) low cost combination Objective Entity/shield for the publishers. "Did little timmy see a tit? Well, that product was rated M(17+), by the ESRB, don't talk to us."
Clearly, something with the overhead of the ESRB process is not terribly helpful to the indie types(a $2k budget and a $200k budget are both in the same fee bracket, which gives one a sense of who the expected customers are); but the $4k is practically a rounding error in the production and promotion costs of the latest iteration of SOCOM: Sequel of Honor N anointed blockbuster, which is a very small price to pay for a (so far) effective show of 'self regulation' that keeps actual regulators away.
Slashdot Mirror
Sadly enough, the payoff doesn't even have to be as exciting as that. Journalism, especially for second-string rags or random stuff blogs and special interest publications, suffers from a more or less continual deadline crunch. In addition to the usual pressure of getting the thing together in time for the next print run, you have the fact that they are trying to make up for their shrinking margins by extracting more words words fewer people.
Under those circumstances, a vaguely neutral sounding press release(already conveniently typed up and more or less grammatically accurate!), that can just be massaged a touch and turned in is a blessing. Gotta churn out that content, make the deadline, look productive. Since the number of journalists has been slowly ebbing over time, and the number of PR flacks increasing, it only stands to reason that a greater percentage of "news" copy will be written by the latter.
Of course, for stuff that actually matters, or has a big money ad campaign behind it, or someone who controls the precious "access", you can see more overt corruption; but for petty shit deadline pressure is actually a depressingly large part of it.
As long as you stick exclusively within the email interface, things aren't so bad. It's just if you happen to venture out that life gets a bit dire.
Part of the Blackberry experience has been being honed since before blackberries were phones at all. The other part is a me-to tack-on. It isn't too hard to tell which is which...
It limits your choice of TLDs; but the safest course of action is probably to go jurisdiction shopping, rather than provider shopping. There are certainly more and less helpful providers; but nobody in the US is likely to do anything that imperils their safe-harbor status, unless you are paying them fairly extraordinary rates to be your registrar, your lawyer, and your insurance agent all in one. GoDaddy appears to have rolled over even more compliantly than strictly necessary; but it's a difference of degree rather than kind.
If you choose a registrar based in a country that doesn't care about what you are doing, all but the absolute bottom of the barrel will be fine. If you don't, you will have a very hard time finding somebody who will take on that amount of legal risk.
If the only thing you are buying is a DNS record, I'm pretty sure that 1 server to 4000 customers would be heavily over-provisioned(unless that number was, literally, only one server, rather than a pool with some redundancies that worked out to 1/4000...)
Especially with the number of DNS lookups that hit somebody else's cache, DNS is not terribly heavyweight.
This appears to have been slightly different: The site never went down(it was accessible by IP or by an alternate URL); but the registrar handling their primary domain name responded to the DMCA request by changing the DNS entry for that name to no longer point to the correct IP.
A 3rd party host is an additional point of vulnerability; but it was not the vulnerability exploited in this case.
Distributing things for free is a crime against the sellers' divinely granted right to profit in perpetuity. If any commodity's price is allowed to reach its marginal cost of production, there are precious, precious rents going unextracted!
I suspect that this was, at least in part, why they made the single player units and the multiplayer units somewhat different. Single player, aimed at casual gamers who don't want to get murdered online, gave them the option of throwing fun units into assorted setpiece battles that make use of their abilities. Multiplayer was designed so that South Korea could get its Zerg Chess fix.
There has been a fair bit of work on producing human skin tissues, mostly because of the demand from burn care and similar. My understanding is that getting the full structure right is(unsurprisingly) proving to be tricky and quite complex; but that there has been some progress in producing simpler membranes that are of use in dressing burns and protecting them while they heal.
Long term, it sure would be nice to have something better than the rather horrid scarring that is the body's present healing mechanism. A pity that getting serious regeneration powers is probably a huge cancer risk...
Essentially none exists as a liquid; but mars is suspected of harboring reasonable amounts of H2O ice in addition to the CO2 flavor. In either case, you'll need a decent supply of heat; but that is a technologically solvable problem. And, one of the (few) positive side effects of the atmosphere being hostile to humans is that running a closed-loop base will be a baseline necessity, rather than a burdensome add-on.
Actually, if you want to go for the +1 funny anticipation of the global warming troll, The argument should probably be that this is an example of What Carbon Sequestration Will Do... At the prodding of Al(ien) Gore and his envirofascist minions, the Martians turned their formerly habitable planet into a desert wasteland through reckless carbon sequestration spurred by the 'global warming' conspiracy...
Probably the easiest(in terms of being comparatively low-tech, easy to scale, and having numerous positive side effects), is a time-tested technology we call "Plants".
Given a few nutrients, a supply of CO2, and their favorite flavors of photon, those suckers are pretty efficient at turning CO2 into O2 and assorted carbon compounds, many with structural or culinary applications(and pretty easy to turn to straight carbon, if you prefer).
A hypothetical exploitation of these dry-ice deposits would presumably involve underground greenhouses(for protection from dust storms and insulation) lighted by LEDs emitting the correct bands for optimal plant growth, and provided with a moisture and CO2 rich environment by some sort of melting mechanism, probably mirrors or a radiothermal unit.
"The key to perfection lies not in never making mistakes; but in making sure nobody can see them."
If the flight data are that limited, a sim based on a good model of the aircraft's shape and systems(which presumably was created during the design phase) is going to be substantially more accurate than the experiences of all but a few people on earth.
Just on an intuitive level, I'm a touch surprised that they managed to get that much running time out of the system.
On consideration, of course, the energy required to coax aluminum out of whatever compound it has formed this time and into a bulk metallic state is pretty heroic. That does suggest that(while the aluminum oxide layer passivates it nicely under normal circumstances) bulk aluminum has some serious potential energy.
The bottom(read side) is a layer of polycarbonate, I'm pretty sure it won't even notice Ferric Chloride. The top has a protective lacquer layer over the metal surface, which should also be reasonably resistant(though it is the side far more vulnerable to mechanical damage: The bottom is a good mm of polycarbonate, and can be repaired to a degree with anything of suitably similar transparency and refractive index. Virtually any damage to the top side will destroy at least a portion of the data surface).
The mechanical vulnerability is probably among the easiest angles of attack. Your basic harbor freight belt sander should be able to reduce the data layer to a fine cloud of (probably not recommended for human breathing) fragments in under a second of contact.
And the per-disk cost, of course(both with blanks and with commercial media). DVD blanks are basically disposable, blu-ray rather less so(but still not large enough or stability-tested enough to be a viable alternative to the really pricey tape, for smaller users). Then, when you hit the store, you find that the DVD is ~50% the price of the BD, except under special circumstances.
Given that people are willing to watch streaming video in the under-5mb/s range, quite happily if the price is right, the quality bump just isn't worth the extra cost.
The one that I would like to see more of; but is basically certain to not happen outside of pirate circles, is greater adoption of the dubiously standard; but quite convenient, intermediate format of MP4 video recorded on DVDs. All the cheapness of DVD production; but better quality than MPEG-2 for the same size. Some DVD players support it, and computers have no trouble; but it is totally informal.
I've often had ideas involving marketing people and strategically placed electrodes; but this wasn't quite what I had in mind. Pity.
There are also (non quality related) advantages to DVDs, to this day:
As with USB vs. Firewire(where Firewire is absolutely better; but modestly more expensive and much less common), the Blu-ray premium isn't nearly as crushing as it was back in the bad old days(TFA mentions a $70 Blu-Ray deck, albeit probably lacking support for some of the fancy features; but a DVD player can be purchased at just about any pharmacy for about as much as dinner and a drink...); but it is still the case that DVD is absolutely ubiquitous, while Blue-ray cannot be assumed.
Want a disk that will play at your house, on your laptop(s)/desktop(s), at a friend's house during movie night, etc, etc? Blu-ray still can't promise that. DVD drives have, essentially, replaced CD drives in everything but dedicated CD players. You have to look to buy CD-ROM only devices(DVD burners aren't quite as ubiquitous; but DVD read/CD R/W is pretty much baseline). Blu-ray, by contrast, isn't wildly expensive; but you still have to ask for it, every kiddie going to college whose "TV" is a 17 inch macbook doesn't have it, most cheapy PCs don't have it.
Then there's the fact that the user experience with some Blu-ray players has been almost hilariously hostile. DVD players, with comparatively rare and usually irrelevant exceptions, don't have firmware updates. Blu-ray, not always something that can be relied on to avoid that.
I suspect that the real purpose of such a device(aside from the fact that white-collar environments, especially larger ones, often have a cultural distaste(at least during working hours) for solutions that involve just smashing stuff) is that it is probably "certified" to some or other standard, while just giving the janitor the night off and some beer money to take a sledgehammer to the junk drive box isn't, even if the degree of destruction is greater.
While smaller, more informal, shops can probably do whatever they want, I can definitely imagine some suits who could drone on about "Devices containing Secure Customer Information(SCI) were certified sanitized per industry standard practices by a monitored on-sight disposal contractor" in their sleep; but would freak out at "That IT guy with the the beard and the muttering took them to the shooting range over the weekend. Didn't you know that the FCSA annual get-together was last weekend?"
Firebrick, while not necessarily on offer at your local hardware store, is not too difficult to come by. Failing(or supplementing) that, sand exposed to thermite won't necessarily be in mint condition; but sand is extremely cheap, and there is nothing stopping you from just using a slightly thicker layer, and you can't beat the convenience of something you can get in big bags from most hardware/garden supply stores or by the ton from landscaping/construction contractor suppliers.
Just remember, though, Keep It Dry. Very little will ruin your day quite like molten iron being spattered into your delicate flesh by a steam flash..
Arguably, if you really want satisfying over-engineering, an induction furnace would be the way to go: Just drop the drive into the intimidating coil, turn on the power, and watch all the metal components glow red and then slump into a molten mess of slag. Game over man. Game Over.
Well, my original vision was more in line with link-farming as being an activity analogous to mining: every site you exploit ends up a polluted wasteland; but some percentage of them yield enough valuable minerals that you turn a profit.
However... your idea intrigues me.
But can Ehow tell you how babby is formed?
Unfortunately, while link farmers deserve to spend eternity licking fiberglass from satan's lava yacht(clinging to the outside, naturally), I suspect that investing in them is actually fairly rational.
Investing in any one is likely a bad idea; but the genre as a whole seems to be able to stay at least a bit ahead of the search guys, and likely makes a profit during that time. As long as regurgitating their mass of serf and/or script generated sludge in slightly different formats is cheap enough, they are unfortunately likely to be a decent investment on average.
Man, if they are blocking androids from their network, I'd hate to be the guy who has to monitor the DHCP server and administer Voigt-Kampff tests to every device sending a request...
I'm pretty sure that that is exactly why they are tolerated(being a requirement for wally-world release is good too; but they had to get that way).
The ESRB is a creature of the publishers' trade association, not the independent product of free-floating moralists. They exist as a(comparatively) low cost combination Objective Entity/shield for the publishers. "Did little timmy see a tit? Well, that product was rated M(17+), by the ESRB, don't talk to us."
Clearly, something with the overhead of the ESRB process is not terribly helpful to the indie types(a $2k budget and a $200k budget are both in the same fee bracket, which gives one a sense of who the expected customers are); but the $4k is practically a rounding error in the production and promotion costs of the latest iteration of SOCOM: Sequel of Honor N anointed blockbuster, which is a very small price to pay for a (so far) effective show of 'self regulation' that keeps actual regulators away.