It will certainly increase the excitement for the amateur satellite spotting hobbyists. Attempting to work out the orbital trajectory and purpose of satellites that were never launched and don't exist, but if they did would comply with all relevant US treaty obligations, must be much more interesting than pointing your telescope at satellites that NASA is more than happy to have a chance to talk about...
While there is certainly a distinction to be made in structure and style between the US and countries with partial or total state ownership of launch businesses, I have to wonder how much is mere distinction and how much is actual difference...
A company's formal level of "privateness" is defined according to its ownership; but its de facto level of "privateness" is really a function of who owns it, and who it depends on for its business, and the process by which is solicits that business. A state-owned company is obviously not private. A privately owned company whose primary, or only, customer is the state is dubiously private. If it exists in a properly competitive market, with other suppliers; but just happens to focus on state contracts, it may be considered essentially fully private. If it exists in an incestuous revolving-door relationship with the state entities whose contracts it fulfills, it is less a "private" entity and more a sort of ideologically motivated "government laundering" arrangement where(in exchange for a cut for the shareholders) the state gets to keep part of its size off the books.
Obviously, a company doesn't instantly become "state" just because it has state customers(just because the state uses some Dells, dell isn't exactly turning into The People's Patriotic Whitebox x86 Manufactury). On the other hand, some of the defense/aerospace guys, and highly-evolved Beltway symbiote/parasite entities like SAIC are, de facto, state organs with shareholders.
It seems to me that that is the real trick with space-related business. It will be comparatively easy to make space "more private" by shifting the lofting of military and state scientific payloads to private entities; but, unless there is a substantial uptick in end-to-end-commercial uses for space, such a move will be basically cosmetic. This raises the question of what sorts of activities in space can pay for themselves without military or state-funded-astronomy justifications...
Legalism is a shabby excuse for an ethical theory, even by the generally tepid standards of deontological ethics.
"Legal" implies only that some legislative body, operating according to their established procedures, has either ratified or at least failed to ban a given action; and hasn't been overturned since. That is virtually unrelated to "ethical"(one could attempt to connect the two; but only by positing the axiom that "legal" and "ethical" are identical per se, or by arguing that the legislators legislate, on average, according to some ethical standard. The latter is somewhat satisfactory, and may even be true; but then you've just moved the problem of ethics one step back, to that of discerning what ethical system the legislators are using...)
I do actually find this story rather scary; but not because of the "zOMG hackerz@!" angle. Of course there are going to be hackers sniffing around stock exchanges. Given that online attacks aimed at penny-ante shit like hotmail accounts, facebook, and WoW are economically viable, obviously there is going to be some interest in hitting the places where the actual money lives...
The scary bit is the idea that it is a generally accepted truth among the feds and similar that the ability of noise-traders to slosh imaginary money around like shit through a goose is a critical part of American infrastructure and a national security concern. As important as Power companies? Srsly? Are we really so deep in stacks of heavily leveraged electronic monopoly money that continued access to electronic exchanges is as important as continued access to electricy? If so, we really are fucked.
Do we even have anarchists anymore? Pre WWI, the term was applied to assorted groups who spent their time plotting revolution and occasionally assassinating some politician or other. They were the "terrorists" of their day, so fear of them was pretty hysterically overwrought; but they did actually manage to throw a bomb now and again(the chap who assassinated Archduke Ferdinand and, not exactly intentionally, ended up poking the house of cards that was Europe's grip on peace before WWI was by far the most dramatic...)
These days, the only "anarchists" I am familiar with inhabit internet message boards and aesthetically questionable garage-punk bands. They are like ten notches below "communists" as an actual threat to much of anything...
I suspect that that is why(in addition to the fact that there are a lot of independent porn outfits, rather than the comparatively small number of feature film publishers, with the biggest often working through the MPAA) the porn guys find the extortion notes so convenient.
All else being equal, most people would much rather go to court and create a public record of the dispute over whether or not they downloaded $OSCAR_NOMINEE than whether or not they downloaded "Weapons of Ass Destruction, Vol. 14"...
Analogous to the "tragedy of the commons", only without the tragedy: if a sufficient number of competitors are competing by releasing promotional material for free, the need to actually buy from any one of them disappears....
Coal ash is the residue from burning coal. Were coal actually just chunks of carbon, it would be largely inoffensive(and a gas). Trouble is, coal tends to contain a number of interesting trace elements, sulfur, heavy metals, and similar fun. Thus, in quantity, the stuff left over that either doesn't burn, or burns into a solid compound of some kind, can kill its way quite merrily through a watershed.
Other than posing some dust irritant/inhalation hazard when airborne, reasonably pure carbon black could be sprinkled on top of snow to accelerate its melting without serious issues...
It certainly works; but the enthalpy of fusion of water is damn high. Useful when icing drinks; but means that you'll need a great deal of energy to turn even just-below-freezing snow into just-above-freezing water.
Using jet engines mounted on vehicles as combination snow blowers/melters has been done(those crazy ruskies...); but fighter engines aren't exactly known for their fuel economy.
For the suitably well-heeled, thermostatically controlled resistive heaters, cast into concrete or buried under asphalt, are available that will keep the pavement snow and ice free; but the electricity required to manage that isn't cheap.
Given the parabolic dish, it should already be pretty well concentrated at the focal point. If you wanted to move the focal point a bit, for whatever reason, you could place an appropriately sized lens a bit before the focal point, to either move it out a bit, or move it a bit closer.
Whether or not it would melt would depend on how efficient the lens is. An ideal lens(100% transmission, no absorption, internal reflection, or other funny stuff) wouldn't even notice. A real lens, with less than 100% transmission, would end up eating some of the energy. Its behavior would depend on how good the cooling provided by its mount and the surrounding airflow is. If it reaches thermal equilibrium at a point lower than its melt point, no problem. If it doesn't, game over.
A well cleaned glass lens nicked from some fairly high power application would probably shrug(a Real Serious fused quartz lens would likely shrug under almost any circumstances). A scratched or dirty plastic lens would probably melt. A small cooling fan might well make all the difference. When doing brute-force thermal engineering, forced air can frequently be substituted for elegance.
While your strawman does look nice in tie-dye, it wholly ignores the real point:
At present, most ISPs are also historical incumbents(telco or cable) or little vassal companies that they are statutorially obliged to lease infrastructure access to. In many locations, the level of competition is also somewhere between oligopoly and monopoly.
The regulatory apparatus is a (weak) attempt to force an outcome more in line with what a hypothetical free-market equilibrium would look like(ie. not massive rent-seeking and destruction of novel competitors to protect obsolete but profitable legacy businesses) not some hippy love-fest, man.
They didn't actually want to; but what they needed from News Corp cannot be bought with mere money...
Here is what is really going on: News Corp has a problem: its congenital inability to appeal to anybody under 45 who isn't to the right of Rush Limbaugh. Apple also has a problem: its charismatic overlord is dying.
Now here is where they synergy comes in: Given the fact that Rupert Murdoch has managed to maintain an unnatural state of demi-life since approximately 1347(incidentally, the year the Black Death reached Europe. Coincidence? We report, you decide.), New Corp obviously possesses the knowledge of dark Necromacy that Apple's board needs in order to preserve their most valued corporate asset in near-perpetuity. Apple, for their part, possesses a nigh-hypnotic power over the consumer segments that News Corp cannot reach.
I don't know whether it counts, since the purpose has changed markedly; but the principles behind electronic analog computers migrated more or less wholesale into analog synthesizers. Now its all about getting outputs that sound cool, rather than outputs that model a system being computed; but a lot of the designs and operating principles are extremely similar.
The mechanical and hydraulic ones, though, I'm pretty sure are museum-only at this point...
I have a candidate for your category: shipbuilding. Now, modern techniques of fiberglass composites for the small stuff and steel for the big stuff happen to work pretty well indeed. The captain of a galleon from the age of sail would wet himself if he saw what a modern tanker or container ship can do in terms of transport. The captain of a man o' war would never even get to see his modern counterpart, since only one party can engage over the horizon...
However, the raw materials needed to replicate or improve classic wooden ship technologies are basically unavailable. We know what they are; but they are somewhere between "brutally uneconomic" and "simply not to be had". A good wooden warship could consume the better part of a forest worth of the finest old-growth oak. A wooden navy meant hundreds to thousands of tons of the finest timber. No '20-year-old-pine mixed with epoxy and sawdust' tree farm crap. Virtually all old-growth hardwoods, including parts that had to grow in the correct shape(they eventually adopted some compositing techniques out of necessity; but the really hardcore examples have things like masts and hull ribs formed from single pieces taken from trees with the correct shape and grain for the application).
I suspect that it depends on whether they are looking at the historical record left by the optimists or the pessimists...
The humor in a lot of the old quack remedies and dangerous radiation stuff and so forth is not so much in that it is badly wrong, though that is a necessary condition; but in the fact that it is so earnestly, stridently, boundlessly optimistic about how wonderful it is, while simultaneously being dangerously wrong.
As best I can tell, that sort of hucksterific techno-utopianism is now not extinct; but certainly controversial. The competing strains of "Yeah, this is hardly perfect, and I'm sure it will be replaced by something better as new research comes out; but it is the best we have now." and "This is terrible, progress is probably a carcinogen, we should be much more careful!" are much more common and visible. Those will likely be less amusing.
Somebody who is utterly wrong and wholly enthusiastic is funny. Somebody who is utterly wrong but, even at the time, openly admits that he is working from provisional data that will probably be overturned, just isn't as amusing. Pathetic, perhaps, if the error is grievous enough; but just not all that funny.
The demo is pretty; but Not Fast, even in the latest chrome on a dual-core A64. Not going to try it in FF on the netbook...
It takes me back to the old days, of my misspent youth, when we grabbed somebody's Postscript fractal generator demo, set the number of iterations to something dubiously suitable to even the desktops of the time(it worked; but took about ten minutes) and then sent it to every postscript-capable printer we could locate across our school's network...
I certainly have nothing against Intel doing the honorable thing; but, in principle, it seems like there could be an optional arrangement that could be mutually beneficial... According to reports, this bug means that ports 2-5, the four 3GB/s ones, have an unacceptable risk of death. As someone who, unluckily, just purchased a system based on this chipset, I'm not looking forward to the mobo swap.
Were intel to offer me a 4-port SATA card and a check for half of whatever they save by giving me the expansion card instead of the mobo swap, I'd happily pocket the money and save myself the hassle.
Obviously, as you say, there are a number of situations where such an offer would be either technically implausible(laptops, small form factor stuff) or unacceptable to the customer; but there are likely a lot of basic towers and/or thrifty enthusiasts who might be amenable to a (voluntary) deal.
So long as they are upfront about the specs of what they are selling, more power to them... Everyone who was sold a product with both 0-1 and 2-5 has a right to demand that Intel make it up to them; but there is nothing wrong with selling motherboards that only have two SATA ports on them.
2 SATA ports covers a decent chunk of the "value" segment(1 DVDRW, 1HDD), never mind the people who were going to fill every PCIe slot with SATA controllers anyway, and wouldn't mind a nice discount on the (seriously fast) second gen i5's motherboards...
I figured that my sarcasm was broad enough(especially since I was just elaborating the "it's a feature not a bug" stock reply); but apparently not.
Ah well. Not every day you can be accused of shilling for Bill for a comment made from Konqueror running on a remote debian host over an ssh -X tunnel...
Or this one is much more serious... The Pentium FP one was a big issue because of how cagey Intel was about it(and was a genuine problem for users who had purchased it for certain FP heavy operations); but it was a deterministic logical bug: as long as you avoided a fairly specific set of trigger conditions, it would stay safely contained(for certain customers, doing so would likely be so onerous as to qualify as unacceptable; but for everybody else not so scary).
What makes the hair on the back of my neck stand up about this one is the "may gradually degrade" stuff. That makes it sound much less like the "100% of people who do X get bitten/0% of others do" logical bugs and more like the "component degradation in the field can be unpredictable, except at a population level" type of bug that, say, happened to Nvidia not too long back...
Depends on your workload. I'm typing this on a still-just-as-adequate-as-when-I-bought-it A64, plays games and everything; but when I put on my work hat, the fact that we can get more VMs into the same physical volume and power consumption with every generation(and, for annoyingly expensive software that is licensed per-socket, get substantially improved performance for peanuts hardware money) is reason to cheer...
Obviously, silicon bugs happen, barely anything makes it out of the fab without an 'errata' list as long as your leg; but the "may gradually degrade over time" part kind of freaks me out.
If it were a "due to a design error, setting register xyz to 0xDEADBEEF causes Serious Badness, chipset drivers are being patched to Never Do That on rev.1 chipsets and future chipsets will be amended" that would be unfortunate; but so it goes. Fully deterministic errors, like the classic division bug, may be problematic; in some cases bad enough to qualify the product as just plain defective; but once known they can be mitigated by not stepping on them. Something that "sometimes" "gradually decreases" performance, on a bus with error correction, though, sounds a lot like a physical problem where some sort of silicon/electrical issue causes error rates to increase and thus retries/corrections to increase in frequency, and user-visible performance to go down. That makes me nervous. It sounds less like a deterministic error problem and more like a certain physical components are actually degrading much faster than expected problem...
Can anybody think of an explanation for how a hardware bug would cause behavior that gradually changes over time(in a manner that couldn't be dealt with with a driver update) that doesn't involve the alarming possibility of gradually increasing error rates and/or early death of onboard SATA ports?
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It will certainly increase the excitement for the amateur satellite spotting hobbyists. Attempting to work out the orbital trajectory and purpose of satellites that were never launched and don't exist, but if they did would comply with all relevant US treaty obligations, must be much more interesting than pointing your telescope at satellites that NASA is more than happy to have a chance to talk about...
While there is certainly a distinction to be made in structure and style between the US and countries with partial or total state ownership of launch businesses, I have to wonder how much is mere distinction and how much is actual difference...
A company's formal level of "privateness" is defined according to its ownership; but its de facto level of "privateness" is really a function of who owns it, and who it depends on for its business, and the process by which is solicits that business. A state-owned company is obviously not private. A privately owned company whose primary, or only, customer is the state is dubiously private. If it exists in a properly competitive market, with other suppliers; but just happens to focus on state contracts, it may be considered essentially fully private. If it exists in an incestuous revolving-door relationship with the state entities whose contracts it fulfills, it is less a "private" entity and more a sort of ideologically motivated "government laundering" arrangement where(in exchange for a cut for the shareholders) the state gets to keep part of its size off the books.
Obviously, a company doesn't instantly become "state" just because it has state customers(just because the state uses some Dells, dell isn't exactly turning into The People's Patriotic Whitebox x86 Manufactury). On the other hand, some of the defense/aerospace guys, and highly-evolved Beltway symbiote/parasite entities like SAIC are, de facto, state organs with shareholders.
It seems to me that that is the real trick with space-related business. It will be comparatively easy to make space "more private" by shifting the lofting of military and state scientific payloads to private entities; but, unless there is a substantial uptick in end-to-end-commercial uses for space, such a move will be basically cosmetic. This raises the question of what sorts of activities in space can pay for themselves without military or state-funded-astronomy justifications...
Please be advised that the Monroe Doctrine now applies to all commercially and/or militarily relevant earth orbits.
Thank you in advance for your cooperation.
Legalism is a shabby excuse for an ethical theory, even by the generally tepid standards of deontological ethics.
"Legal" implies only that some legislative body, operating according to their established procedures, has either ratified or at least failed to ban a given action; and hasn't been overturned since. That is virtually unrelated to "ethical"(one could attempt to connect the two; but only by positing the axiom that "legal" and "ethical" are identical per se, or by arguing that the legislators legislate, on average, according to some ethical standard. The latter is somewhat satisfactory, and may even be true; but then you've just moved the problem of ethics one step back, to that of discerning what ethical system the legislators are using...)
I do actually find this story rather scary; but not because of the "zOMG hackerz@!" angle. Of course there are going to be hackers sniffing around stock exchanges. Given that online attacks aimed at penny-ante shit like hotmail accounts, facebook, and WoW are economically viable, obviously there is going to be some interest in hitting the places where the actual money lives...
The scary bit is the idea that it is a generally accepted truth among the feds and similar that the ability of noise-traders to slosh imaginary money around like shit through a goose is a critical part of American infrastructure and a national security concern. As important as Power companies? Srsly? Are we really so deep in stacks of heavily leveraged electronic monopoly money that continued access to electronic exchanges is as important as continued access to electricy? If so, we really are fucked.
Do we even have anarchists anymore? Pre WWI, the term was applied to assorted groups who spent their time plotting revolution and occasionally assassinating some politician or other. They were the "terrorists" of their day, so fear of them was pretty hysterically overwrought; but they did actually manage to throw a bomb now and again(the chap who assassinated Archduke Ferdinand and, not exactly intentionally, ended up poking the house of cards that was Europe's grip on peace before WWI was by far the most dramatic...)
These days, the only "anarchists" I am familiar with inhabit internet message boards and aesthetically questionable garage-punk bands. They are like ten notches below "communists" as an actual threat to much of anything...
I suspect that that is why(in addition to the fact that there are a lot of independent porn outfits, rather than the comparatively small number of feature film publishers, with the biggest often working through the MPAA) the porn guys find the extortion notes so convenient.
All else being equal, most people would much rather go to court and create a public record of the dispute over whether or not they downloaded $OSCAR_NOMINEE than whether or not they downloaded "Weapons of Ass Destruction, Vol. 14"...
This is what "free" as in "free market" is supposed to look like, right?
Analogous to the "tragedy of the commons", only without the tragedy: if a sufficient number of competitors are competing by releasing promotional material for free, the need to actually buy from any one of them disappears....
Coal ash is the residue from burning coal. Were coal actually just chunks of carbon, it would be largely inoffensive(and a gas). Trouble is, coal tends to contain a number of interesting trace elements, sulfur, heavy metals, and similar fun. Thus, in quantity, the stuff left over that either doesn't burn, or burns into a solid compound of some kind, can kill its way quite merrily through a watershed.
Other than posing some dust irritant/inhalation hazard when airborne, reasonably pure carbon black could be sprinkled on top of snow to accelerate its melting without serious issues...
It certainly works; but the enthalpy of fusion of water is damn high. Useful when icing drinks; but means that you'll need a great deal of energy to turn even just-below-freezing snow into just-above-freezing water.
Using jet engines mounted on vehicles as combination snow blowers/melters has been done(those crazy ruskies...); but fighter engines aren't exactly known for their fuel economy.
For the suitably well-heeled, thermostatically controlled resistive heaters, cast into concrete or buried under asphalt, are available that will keep the pavement snow and ice free; but the electricity required to manage that isn't cheap.
Given the parabolic dish, it should already be pretty well concentrated at the focal point. If you wanted to move the focal point a bit, for whatever reason, you could place an appropriately sized lens a bit before the focal point, to either move it out a bit, or move it a bit closer.
Whether or not it would melt would depend on how efficient the lens is. An ideal lens(100% transmission, no absorption, internal reflection, or other funny stuff) wouldn't even notice. A real lens, with less than 100% transmission, would end up eating some of the energy. Its behavior would depend on how good the cooling provided by its mount and the surrounding airflow is. If it reaches thermal equilibrium at a point lower than its melt point, no problem. If it doesn't, game over.
A well cleaned glass lens nicked from some fairly high power application would probably shrug(a Real Serious fused quartz lens would likely shrug under almost any circumstances). A scratched or dirty plastic lens would probably melt. A small cooling fan might well make all the difference. When doing brute-force thermal engineering, forced air can frequently be substituted for elegance.
While your strawman does look nice in tie-dye, it wholly ignores the real point:
At present, most ISPs are also historical incumbents(telco or cable) or little vassal companies that they are statutorially obliged to lease infrastructure access to. In many locations, the level of competition is also somewhere between oligopoly and monopoly.
The regulatory apparatus is a (weak) attempt to force an outcome more in line with what a hypothetical free-market equilibrium would look like(ie. not massive rent-seeking and destruction of novel competitors to protect obsolete but profitable legacy businesses) not some hippy love-fest, man.
I'm fairly sure that that sort of behavior is why they call them "PowerEdge Enhanced" Raid Controllers...
They didn't actually want to; but what they needed from News Corp cannot be bought with mere money...
Here is what is really going on: News Corp has a problem: its congenital inability to appeal to anybody under 45 who isn't to the right of Rush Limbaugh. Apple also has a problem: its charismatic overlord is dying.
Now here is where they synergy comes in: Given the fact that Rupert Murdoch has managed to maintain an unnatural state of demi-life since approximately 1347(incidentally, the year the Black Death reached Europe. Coincidence? We report, you decide.), New Corp obviously possesses the knowledge of dark Necromacy that Apple's board needs in order to preserve their most valued corporate asset in near-perpetuity. Apple, for their part, possesses a nigh-hypnotic power over the consumer segments that News Corp cannot reach.
Now you see the real bargain being made here...
I don't know whether it counts, since the purpose has changed markedly; but the principles behind electronic analog computers migrated more or less wholesale into analog synthesizers. Now its all about getting outputs that sound cool, rather than outputs that model a system being computed; but a lot of the designs and operating principles are extremely similar.
The mechanical and hydraulic ones, though, I'm pretty sure are museum-only at this point...
I have a candidate for your category: shipbuilding. Now, modern techniques of fiberglass composites for the small stuff and steel for the big stuff happen to work pretty well indeed. The captain of a galleon from the age of sail would wet himself if he saw what a modern tanker or container ship can do in terms of transport. The captain of a man o' war would never even get to see his modern counterpart, since only one party can engage over the horizon...
However, the raw materials needed to replicate or improve classic wooden ship technologies are basically unavailable. We know what they are; but they are somewhere between "brutally uneconomic" and "simply not to be had". A good wooden warship could consume the better part of a forest worth of the finest old-growth oak. A wooden navy meant hundreds to thousands of tons of the finest timber. No '20-year-old-pine mixed with epoxy and sawdust' tree farm crap. Virtually all old-growth hardwoods, including parts that had to grow in the correct shape(they eventually adopted some compositing techniques out of necessity; but the really hardcore examples have things like masts and hull ribs formed from single pieces taken from trees with the correct shape and grain for the application).
I suspect that it depends on whether they are looking at the historical record left by the optimists or the pessimists...
The humor in a lot of the old quack remedies and dangerous radiation stuff and so forth is not so much in that it is badly wrong, though that is a necessary condition; but in the fact that it is so earnestly, stridently, boundlessly optimistic about how wonderful it is, while simultaneously being dangerously wrong.
As best I can tell, that sort of hucksterific techno-utopianism is now not extinct; but certainly controversial. The competing strains of "Yeah, this is hardly perfect, and I'm sure it will be replaced by something better as new research comes out; but it is the best we have now." and "This is terrible, progress is probably a carcinogen, we should be much more careful!" are much more common and visible. Those will likely be less amusing.
Somebody who is utterly wrong and wholly enthusiastic is funny. Somebody who is utterly wrong but, even at the time, openly admits that he is working from provisional data that will probably be overturned, just isn't as amusing. Pathetic, perhaps, if the error is grievous enough; but just not all that funny.
The demo is pretty; but Not Fast, even in the latest chrome on a dual-core A64. Not going to try it in FF on the netbook...
It takes me back to the old days, of my misspent youth, when we grabbed somebody's Postscript fractal generator demo, set the number of iterations to something dubiously suitable to even the desktops of the time(it worked; but took about ten minutes) and then sent it to every postscript-capable printer we could locate across our school's network...
I certainly have nothing against Intel doing the honorable thing; but, in principle, it seems like there could be an optional arrangement that could be mutually beneficial... According to reports, this bug means that ports 2-5, the four 3GB/s ones, have an unacceptable risk of death. As someone who, unluckily, just purchased a system based on this chipset, I'm not looking forward to the mobo swap.
Were intel to offer me a 4-port SATA card and a check for half of whatever they save by giving me the expansion card instead of the mobo swap, I'd happily pocket the money and save myself the hassle.
Obviously, as you say, there are a number of situations where such an offer would be either technically implausible(laptops, small form factor stuff) or unacceptable to the customer; but there are likely a lot of basic towers and/or thrifty enthusiasts who might be amenable to a (voluntary) deal.
So long as they are upfront about the specs of what they are selling, more power to them... Everyone who was sold a product with both 0-1 and 2-5 has a right to demand that Intel make it up to them; but there is nothing wrong with selling motherboards that only have two SATA ports on them.
2 SATA ports covers a decent chunk of the "value" segment(1 DVDRW, 1HDD), never mind the people who were going to fill every PCIe slot with SATA controllers anyway, and wouldn't mind a nice discount on the (seriously fast) second gen i5's motherboards...
It would sure beat having them go to the dump.
I figured that my sarcasm was broad enough(especially since I was just elaborating the "it's a feature not a bug" stock reply); but apparently not.
Ah well. Not every day you can be accused of shilling for Bill for a comment made from Konqueror running on a remote debian host over an ssh -X tunnel...
Or this one is much more serious... The Pentium FP one was a big issue because of how cagey Intel was about it(and was a genuine problem for users who had purchased it for certain FP heavy operations); but it was a deterministic logical bug: as long as you avoided a fairly specific set of trigger conditions, it would stay safely contained(for certain customers, doing so would likely be so onerous as to qualify as unacceptable; but for everybody else not so scary).
What makes the hair on the back of my neck stand up about this one is the "may gradually degrade" stuff. That makes it sound much less like the "100% of people who do X get bitten/0% of others do" logical bugs and more like the "component degradation in the field can be unpredictable, except at a population level" type of bug that, say, happened to Nvidia not too long back...
Depends on your workload. I'm typing this on a still-just-as-adequate-as-when-I-bought-it A64, plays games and everything; but when I put on my work hat, the fact that we can get more VMs into the same physical volume and power consumption with every generation(and, for annoyingly expensive software that is licensed per-socket, get substantially improved performance for peanuts hardware money) is reason to cheer...
Obviously, silicon bugs happen, barely anything makes it out of the fab without an 'errata' list as long as your leg; but the "may gradually degrade over time" part kind of freaks me out.
If it were a "due to a design error, setting register xyz to 0xDEADBEEF causes Serious Badness, chipset drivers are being patched to Never Do That on rev.1 chipsets and future chipsets will be amended" that would be unfortunate; but so it goes. Fully deterministic errors, like the classic division bug, may be problematic; in some cases bad enough to qualify the product as just plain defective; but once known they can be mitigated by not stepping on them. Something that "sometimes" "gradually decreases" performance, on a bus with error correction, though, sounds a lot like a physical problem where some sort of silicon/electrical issue causes error rates to increase and thus retries/corrections to increase in frequency, and user-visible performance to go down. That makes me nervous. It sounds less like a deterministic error problem and more like a certain physical components are actually degrading much faster than expected problem...
Can anybody think of an explanation for how a hardware bug would cause behavior that gradually changes over time(in a manner that couldn't be dealt with with a driver update) that doesn't involve the alarming possibility of gradually increasing error rates and/or early death of onboard SATA ports?