I don't see how this is much better than the IRDA infrared that used to be built into laptops, printers, mice, etc. It got replaced by radio technology several generations ago.
There were, very briefly, vaguely wifi-esque IR "access points" designed for using IRDA connections in entire rooms(as opposed to the usual point-to-point between adjacent devices case). Some even supported multiple devices. I think the amount of IR you needed to pump out to get a reliable link without forcing the user to manually handle line-of-sight pretty much killed that one, though. I think these "access points" and contentional device-device IRDA were supposed to coexist in much the way wifi and bluetooth do today; but both were horribly murdered when RF silicon got cheap.
You can't do much about the past; but it should become less valuable as it gets staler(exception, future candidates for political office), and deleted profiles, while visible to Facebook and any of their good buddies, are substantially less likely to show up when joe public goes looking.
Did you sleep through the part of EC101 where they talk about "externalities"? Or were you attending the "You can't make an omelette without killing some people" school of progress, where they skip that part entirely?
I don't think that I'd actually want to find out the hard way; but it would actually be quite interesting to know how absolute a banhammer the Chinese government could wield...
Over the mines themselves, a fairly limited number of sites, the state could probably just use the PLA if it came to that(and hope that half the officer corps isn't supplementing their pensions by doing a little smuggling on the side)...
Unless they felt like shutting down domestic manufacturing of a huge number of products, though, which would run counter to their current 'aggressive-industrialization-with-mercantilist-tendencies' policies, they would have to permit rare-earth movement to domestic manufacturers all over the place. From there, either they would have to grow a big pile of domestic demand, or continue to permit export of finished products (at least to friendly client states, if not to specific rivals). Some of their friendly client states are a bit... porous... so re-export from there would seem likely.
Prices would, obviously, be higher than under a like-shit-through-a-goose export policy; but it would be pretty hard to wall of supplies entirely without crashing domestic manufacturers in a number of sectors, risking substantial labor unrest, etc...
I suspect that the problem is, depending on the sense in which you consider it, both better and worse than your analogy suggests:
On the one hand, hardening specific systems against electronic infiltration is probably(especially if you are willing to put up with hassles) easier and cheaper than burying them in sealed bunkers under entire mountains and other nuclear defense stuff.
On the other, it is overwhelmingly easier for just about anybody to launch petty, nibbling attacks against soft targets with minimal fear of reprisal, or even identification. A lot of such attacks even pay for themselves. The industry of nigerian scammers, spammers, PIN skimmers, etc. launches millions of such a year, some percentage of which net serious rewards, and only a trickle ever get caught. And that is largely a non-ideological private sector game. Once state actors, or ideologically driven non-state actors step up to the table, and start hitting similarly soft, but not necessarily profitable, targets, you have problems...
Seems pretty logical to me. Assuming that the US, or an ally close enough for them to know about it, was behind the work, the success of the attack presumably served as an oh-shit moment for anybody who wasn't a complete moron and hadn't previously had one on the topic of computer security. Plus, projecting your activities onto others seems to be a fairly common human trait. Not only would watching a successful attack team awaken them to the possibilities, it would likely increase their perception that others were likely up to similar things.
By all accounts, stuxnet caused considerable trouble and delay for Iranian enrichment efforts and(at least in public) the closest anybody has gotten to figuring out who did it has basically been pointing fingers at the intersection of "people who don't like Iran" and "people who are good at computers and stuff". A reasonable strategy, to be sure; but not one that suggests they have the slightest in hard evidence to go on. Unless it was unbelievably costly to develop, that is a pretty clear win for whoever was behind it.
I'm sure US military and industrial types could think of a few (thousand) things that they really would not want that happening to, never mind the continual, low-level; but costly, stream of financial scamming and fraud, much of which is electronic and much of which is a net flow from the US to assorted offshore gangs.
I imagine that A)IBM sees a future with more servers, ideally bearing their logo and B)you use the heat from the servers that you would need anyway, and then use whatever you were using before to make up the difference.
Electrical heating for its own sake doesn't make a huge amount of sense(outside of the extreme convenience of just being able to plug a big resistor into the wall wherever you need the heat) and servers make fairly expensive electric heaters unless you happen to need them for some other purpose. If they are already paying for themselves by doing server stuff, anything you can squeeze out of their waste heat is just gravy.
I'd be surprised to see it happen on a significant scale, because of the legal, cultural, and infrastructure hurdles in many areas; but "cities heated by servers" is actually a perfectly cogent idea.
On many large institutional campuses(academic and corporate), and (if memory serves) a few closely built cities, there is a single "steam plant" that heats the whole place. A single large generator of heat, with that heat piped around the campus in underground steam lines.
In principle, a city or institutional campus with one or more very large datacenters could adopt a similar scheme using the waste heat from those facilities. Depending on distances, logistics, and a bunch of fiddly engineering considerations, this could either mean just directly pumping hot-aisle air out of the datacenter and into other buildings, mixing it with ambient air at the concentration required to provide the requested temperature, or it could mean using the hot-side output of the chillers to pre-heat water going into a conventional steam plant, to reduce the deltaT that needs to be provided by other fuel sources, or some other such arrangement.
Now, outside of greenfield or total-conversion deployments in campuses owned by a single entity, there would be a lot of legal and cultural hashing-out to be done, about billing, running heat lines, etc. but as an engineering exercise it is cogent enough. (Of course, legal and cultural and to some degree economic stuff tends to be where "futurists" and sci-fi writers are at their absolute weakest. How many sci-fi stories feature superhuman strong AI in a technological environment where every other computer system is a 70's dumb terminal, rather than our present situation, where AI is still at the '20 years off' phase; but malnourished 3rd worlders have cellphones? Never mind the hoary 'ship crews calculating the trajectory for their faster-than-light drive with slide rules and tables of logarithms' stuff. Or the venerable flying car: guess what, kids, the future where the middle class can afford helicopters and will be allowed by the feds to operate them is further off now than it was when that stuff was written...)
The senators representing America's corn-belt states are actually a pretty even split between republicans and democrats, hence "R/D". Is that illogical? While their positions on god, guns, and gays may differ along party lines, their positions on corn ethanol tend to be homogeneous across them(the cynic might remark that, on that issue, those senators can basically be treated as "Senator Cornfed, ConAgra/ADM"...)
I hope your little ignorant ass is replaced by an agricultural robot.
Almost: In American political discourse, only unpopular subsidies, especially those that present some risk of giving money to poor people(some of the brown persuasion, even!), are referred to as "welfare".
The correct terms for subsidies given to favored corporations, Real Americans($100,000/year+ preferred), professional sports teams in need of new stadiums, or politically vital constituencies, are (depending on the exact structure of the subsidy) "Price Supports", "Providing Market Stability", "Job Creation", or simply polite silence backed by an impenetrable wall of densely legal technicalities.
You would have to run a fair few numbers to know for sure(once you get into total energy cost of manufacture, and similar considerations, things get kind of hairy...); but vehicle electrification might actually reduce pollution, even if fossil fuels are still being used to generate the power.
The efficiency of a heat engine depends on your engineering skill and care(precise machining, close tolerances, minimal friction, etc.); but the theoretical maximum efficiency depends in large part on the delta between the temperature of the hot side and the temperature of the cold side. In practice, small, light, engines are usually limited to a pretty modest thermal delta, because they can't pack much insulation, have to be safe enough for passenger vehicles, must be capable of thousands or 10s of thousands of hours of operation with little or no skilled oversight/maintenance, etc. The relatively titanic ones in large power plants, on the other hand, can do considerably better. On the other hand, they suffer electrical conversion losses, and grid losses.
As you say, more aluminum/polymer 2 seaters and fewer chrome-plated luxury tanks and masculinity-supplementing pickup trucks whose contractor grade diesel powertrains and reinforced suspensions will never face anything scarier than a trip to Best Buy will certainly reduce energy consumption considerably. However, electrification does give one the flexibility to use larger heat engines and/or wind/water/nuclear and other technologies that are seriously impractical for vehicles.
Corn-derived ethanol has always been either of culinary/recreational interest(which is a fine and salubrious use of corn...) or an artefact of the fact that you will run into serious issues getting anything done in the senate without throwing Senator Cornfed, R/D, Flyover Country a bone... The fact that there are some relatively early presidential primaries in corn country doesn't help either.
I'm fairly sure that we are talking about it. I was expressing my position that, if anything, the capacity of a fairly small slice of the male population for high order logical function(while undeniable) seems unlikely to be linked in any but the most cryptic ways to adaptations useful for physical violence and intra or inter group competitive behavior.
It does appear that there is something going on, and it may not be all social; but appeals to adapted aggression seem more useful in explaining prison sex ratios than chessmaster ones...
While the sex breakdown of high level chess players is interesting, the idea that the sort of adaptations that suit a primate for small-group physical violence are good for a board game seems risible at best.
If anything, I'd ask the question "How is it that some males manage to overcome adaptations suited to physical violence and sit still, for long periods of time, performing abstract mental operations as dispassionately as possible?(and, particularly at the middle and high school levels, many don't, which is why they are out on the playground punching each other and being diagnosed with ADD rather than in class...)"
It is never a good sign for a theory when it can be turned into a persuasive sounding "just-so story" for either possible outcome: Since the leaderboard is full of men, you get "zOMG, chess is a wargame!". Were it full of women, you'd get "zOMG, chess is dispassionate and does not reward aggression!"(or, the other possibility, the evolutionary psychology brigade would march in to inform us that chess' brand of cerebral competition is well matched to women's well-known propensity for sophisticated verbal and interpersonal competition and alliance formation and poorly suited to men's more straightforward brand of violence).
There is obviously something going on; but I'd suspect that it is much more closely connected to whatever it is, social or biological, that drives the sex breakdown of high level mathematics departments; not whatever it is that drives the sex breakdown of combat units.
I realize that and fully expected them to take any actual products and either OSS them(if that served a strategic goal in terms of driving WebM adoption) or put them on life support, with essentially no further development and only bare-minimum sales and support.
I'm just a bit surprised that there were products that didn't fall into either of those camps. Google has considerable expertise in low-cost file distribution and sells a few other pieces of software, so I would have expected the marginal cost of adding one more "We don't know why you would want to; but sure, we'll sell you a copy" product to the list would be vanishingly small. Given that, actually going and killing the software was an unexpected move.
Sales must have been really unexciting for them to do that.
It would be totally unsurprising(and seems to be standard industry practice in general) to put any products that you've acquired but have no strategic in more or less on ice, cutting engineering down to bare minimum critical bug fixes and selling on a more or less "only if you ask" basis, rather than actually marketing.
Actually killing a product, though, when all you need to do to keep selling it is maintain some minimal licensing and payment processing system, is pretty dramatic.
Oh, I don't have the slightest optimism about American's capacity for any sort of organized or value-rational "revenge"(heck, we can barely keep ourselves from handing over giant piles of our own money between cries of "thank you sir, may I have another?").
At a population level, though, it would be foolish to dismiss the American capacity for occasional acts of somewhat nihilistic and unhinged lashing out at targets of opportunity. Beyond our small, but genuinely violent, lunatic fringe, which is probably 50% FBI infiltrators and largely harmless; is the pool of otherwise unthreatening people who just crack one day. They tend to be weak on planning or strategy; but even a dumbass can kill 5 or 6 before offing themselves or coming up against cops with expertise in something other than ticket writing.
I love the warm, comforting smell of a "national security problem" that can be solved by giving IBM some of my money, rather than one of those genuinely difficult ones like flushing the peasants with small arms out of some sandbox hellhole or doing something that actually improves airline security, rather than harassing pilots who point out problems...
BOA is a bunch of angels compared to the rest of the financial community, they should probably be investing in security rather than PR...
There is a steady stream of "$PERSON$ loses job/house, kills family, self, occasionally neighbors and/or a cop or two" stories in the US. Given the number of dodgy forclosures BOA is believed to be involved in, including some cases where they didn't even own the loan, or where there was no loan, I could easily imagine some of their more visible people becoming part of dissatisfied customers' blood drenched exits.
The really high level guys probably already take precautions; but a bank the size of BOA probably has a lot of fat around the middle...
There is a special place in hell for vendors who sell bulk licenses(50+ seats) for software whose DRM prevents automated installation, and requires that the IT office's picker of the short straw go around and type in a gigantic license key on all machines.
If a hole has to be punched in the firewall for the online activation/authentication step; because they were just too damn special to use SSL on a standard port like everybody else, that special place in hell is filled with screwworms.
If there is a hardware dongle component(that looks exactly like a USB flash drive, and thus wanders accidentally if not carefully hidden) and requires a new purchase order and a nasty pile of cash to replace, that special place in hell automatically inserts bullet ants into the scrotum of anybody placed there.
MPEG-LA explicitly claims to protect you only from its members. As far as I know, they mostly deliver on that. Now, exactly how forthright their salesweasels are about the fact that the MPEG-LA patent pool is not as exhaustive as commonly believed I don't know....
The concept has been advanced; but my understanding is that(beyond the capital costs of building a gigantic magnetic accelerator) there are issues, for most payloads because of the incredible acceleration needed.
A rocket enjoys continuous thrust, so it can be relatively leisurely about reaching escape velocity. A magnetically accelerated pod has only the length of its accelerator track(and, unless you want that track to be very short or very expensive, you are likely launching at an angle other than vertical, thus travelling through more atmosphere to reach orbit). This means that your accelerator pod ends up pulling some hundreds of Gs for a few seconds, which cuts down on the sort of payloads you can launch. Water? sure. Food? some forms. Crew? only if you like meat paste...
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I don't see how this is much better than the IRDA infrared that used to be built into laptops, printers, mice, etc. It got replaced by radio technology several generations ago.
There were, very briefly, vaguely wifi-esque IR "access points" designed for using IRDA connections in entire rooms(as opposed to the usual point-to-point between adjacent devices case). Some even supported multiple devices. I think the amount of IR you needed to pump out to get a reliable link without forcing the user to manually handle line-of-sight pretty much killed that one, though. I think these "access points" and contentional device-device IRDA were supposed to coexist in much the way wifi and bluetooth do today; but both were horribly murdered when RF silicon got cheap.
You can't do much about the past; but it should become less valuable as it gets staler(exception, future candidates for political office), and deleted profiles, while visible to Facebook and any of their good buddies, are substantially less likely to show up when joe public goes looking.
"If you're protective of your privacy, it might be a good idea to delete your profile."
Fixed that for you. No need to thank me.
Luckily, when you spill thorium-laced water over a large area of desert, it never gradually turns into wind-borne radioactive dust...
Did you sleep through the part of EC101 where they talk about "externalities"? Or were you attending the "You can't make an omelette without killing some people" school of progress, where they skip that part entirely?
I don't think that I'd actually want to find out the hard way; but it would actually be quite interesting to know how absolute a banhammer the Chinese government could wield...
Over the mines themselves, a fairly limited number of sites, the state could probably just use the PLA if it came to that(and hope that half the officer corps isn't supplementing their pensions by doing a little smuggling on the side)...
Unless they felt like shutting down domestic manufacturing of a huge number of products, though, which would run counter to their current 'aggressive-industrialization-with-mercantilist-tendencies' policies, they would have to permit rare-earth movement to domestic manufacturers all over the place. From there, either they would have to grow a big pile of domestic demand, or continue to permit export of finished products (at least to friendly client states, if not to specific rivals). Some of their friendly client states are a bit... porous... so re-export from there would seem likely.
Prices would, obviously, be higher than under a like-shit-through-a-goose export policy; but it would be pretty hard to wall of supplies entirely without crashing domestic manufacturers in a number of sectors, risking substantial labor unrest, etc...
I suspect that the problem is, depending on the sense in which you consider it, both better and worse than your analogy suggests:
On the one hand, hardening specific systems against electronic infiltration is probably(especially if you are willing to put up with hassles) easier and cheaper than burying them in sealed bunkers under entire mountains and other nuclear defense stuff.
On the other, it is overwhelmingly easier for just about anybody to launch petty, nibbling attacks against soft targets with minimal fear of reprisal, or even identification. A lot of such attacks even pay for themselves. The industry of nigerian scammers, spammers, PIN skimmers, etc. launches millions of such a year, some percentage of which net serious rewards, and only a trickle ever get caught. And that is largely a non-ideological private sector game. Once state actors, or ideologically driven non-state actors step up to the table, and start hitting similarly soft, but not necessarily profitable, targets, you have problems...
Seems pretty logical to me. Assuming that the US, or an ally close enough for them to know about it, was behind the work, the success of the attack presumably served as an oh-shit moment for anybody who wasn't a complete moron and hadn't previously had one on the topic of computer security. Plus, projecting your activities onto others seems to be a fairly common human trait. Not only would watching a successful attack team awaken them to the possibilities, it would likely increase their perception that others were likely up to similar things.
By all accounts, stuxnet caused considerable trouble and delay for Iranian enrichment efforts and(at least in public) the closest anybody has gotten to figuring out who did it has basically been pointing fingers at the intersection of "people who don't like Iran" and "people who are good at computers and stuff". A reasonable strategy, to be sure; but not one that suggests they have the slightest in hard evidence to go on. Unless it was unbelievably costly to develop, that is a pretty clear win for whoever was behind it.
I'm sure US military and industrial types could think of a few (thousand) things that they really would not want that happening to, never mind the continual, low-level; but costly, stream of financial scamming and fraud, much of which is electronic and much of which is a net flow from the US to assorted offshore gangs.
I imagine that A)IBM sees a future with more servers, ideally bearing their logo and B)you use the heat from the servers that you would need anyway, and then use whatever you were using before to make up the difference.
Electrical heating for its own sake doesn't make a huge amount of sense(outside of the extreme convenience of just being able to plug a big resistor into the wall wherever you need the heat) and servers make fairly expensive electric heaters unless you happen to need them for some other purpose. If they are already paying for themselves by doing server stuff, anything you can squeeze out of their waste heat is just gravy.
Given what places like the City of London are already doing, I'm not sure that "advanced traffic monitoring" counts as a "projection"...
I'd be surprised to see it happen on a significant scale, because of the legal, cultural, and infrastructure hurdles in many areas; but "cities heated by servers" is actually a perfectly cogent idea.
On many large institutional campuses(academic and corporate), and (if memory serves) a few closely built cities, there is a single "steam plant" that heats the whole place. A single large generator of heat, with that heat piped around the campus in underground steam lines.
In principle, a city or institutional campus with one or more very large datacenters could adopt a similar scheme using the waste heat from those facilities. Depending on distances, logistics, and a bunch of fiddly engineering considerations, this could either mean just directly pumping hot-aisle air out of the datacenter and into other buildings, mixing it with ambient air at the concentration required to provide the requested temperature, or it could mean using the hot-side output of the chillers to pre-heat water going into a conventional steam plant, to reduce the deltaT that needs to be provided by other fuel sources, or some other such arrangement.
Now, outside of greenfield or total-conversion deployments in campuses owned by a single entity, there would be a lot of legal and cultural hashing-out to be done, about billing, running heat lines, etc. but as an engineering exercise it is cogent enough. (Of course, legal and cultural and to some degree economic stuff tends to be where "futurists" and sci-fi writers are at their absolute weakest. How many sci-fi stories feature superhuman strong AI in a technological environment where every other computer system is a 70's dumb terminal, rather than our present situation, where AI is still at the '20 years off' phase; but malnourished 3rd worlders have cellphones? Never mind the hoary 'ship crews calculating the trajectory for their faster-than-light drive with slide rules and tables of logarithms' stuff. Or the venerable flying car: guess what, kids, the future where the middle class can afford helicopters and will be allowed by the feds to operate them is further off now than it was when that stuff was written...)
The senators representing America's corn-belt states are actually a pretty even split between republicans and democrats, hence "R/D". Is that illogical? While their positions on god, guns, and gays may differ along party lines, their positions on corn ethanol tend to be homogeneous across them(the cynic might remark that, on that issue, those senators can basically be treated as "Senator Cornfed, ConAgra/ADM"...)
I hope your little ignorant ass is replaced by an agricultural robot.
Almost: In American political discourse, only unpopular subsidies, especially those that present some risk of giving money to poor people(some of the brown persuasion, even!), are referred to as "welfare".
The correct terms for subsidies given to favored corporations, Real Americans($100,000/year+ preferred), professional sports teams in need of new stadiums, or politically vital constituencies, are (depending on the exact structure of the subsidy) "Price Supports", "Providing Market Stability", "Job Creation", or simply polite silence backed by an impenetrable wall of densely legal technicalities.
You would have to run a fair few numbers to know for sure(once you get into total energy cost of manufacture, and similar considerations, things get kind of hairy...); but vehicle electrification might actually reduce pollution, even if fossil fuels are still being used to generate the power.
The efficiency of a heat engine depends on your engineering skill and care(precise machining, close tolerances, minimal friction, etc.); but the theoretical maximum efficiency depends in large part on the delta between the temperature of the hot side and the temperature of the cold side. In practice, small, light, engines are usually limited to a pretty modest thermal delta, because they can't pack much insulation, have to be safe enough for passenger vehicles, must be capable of thousands or 10s of thousands of hours of operation with little or no skilled oversight/maintenance, etc. The relatively titanic ones in large power plants, on the other hand, can do considerably better. On the other hand, they suffer electrical conversion losses, and grid losses.
As you say, more aluminum/polymer 2 seaters and fewer chrome-plated luxury tanks and masculinity-supplementing pickup trucks whose contractor grade diesel powertrains and reinforced suspensions will never face anything scarier than a trip to Best Buy will certainly reduce energy consumption considerably. However, electrification does give one the flexibility to use larger heat engines and/or wind/water/nuclear and other technologies that are seriously impractical for vehicles.
Corn-derived ethanol has always been either of culinary/recreational interest(which is a fine and salubrious use of corn...) or an artefact of the fact that you will run into serious issues getting anything done in the senate without throwing Senator Cornfed, R/D, Flyover Country a bone... The fact that there are some relatively early presidential primaries in corn country doesn't help either.
I'm fairly sure that we are talking about it. I was expressing my position that, if anything, the capacity of a fairly small slice of the male population for high order logical function(while undeniable) seems unlikely to be linked in any but the most cryptic ways to adaptations useful for physical violence and intra or inter group competitive behavior.
It does appear that there is something going on, and it may not be all social; but appeals to adapted aggression seem more useful in explaining prison sex ratios than chessmaster ones...
While the sex breakdown of high level chess players is interesting, the idea that the sort of adaptations that suit a primate for small-group physical violence are good for a board game seems risible at best. If anything, I'd ask the question "How is it that some males manage to overcome adaptations suited to physical violence and sit still, for long periods of time, performing abstract mental operations as dispassionately as possible?(and, particularly at the middle and high school levels, many don't, which is why they are out on the playground punching each other and being diagnosed with ADD rather than in class...)"
It is never a good sign for a theory when it can be turned into a persuasive sounding "just-so story" for either possible outcome: Since the leaderboard is full of men, you get "zOMG, chess is a wargame!". Were it full of women, you'd get "zOMG, chess is dispassionate and does not reward aggression!"(or, the other possibility, the evolutionary psychology brigade would march in to inform us that chess' brand of cerebral competition is well matched to women's well-known propensity for sophisticated verbal and interpersonal competition and alliance formation and poorly suited to men's more straightforward brand of violence).
There is obviously something going on; but I'd suspect that it is much more closely connected to whatever it is, social or biological, that drives the sex breakdown of high level mathematics departments; not whatever it is that drives the sex breakdown of combat units.
I realize that and fully expected them to take any actual products and either OSS them(if that served a strategic goal in terms of driving WebM adoption) or put them on life support, with essentially no further development and only bare-minimum sales and support.
I'm just a bit surprised that there were products that didn't fall into either of those camps. Google has considerable expertise in low-cost file distribution and sells a few other pieces of software, so I would have expected the marginal cost of adding one more "We don't know why you would want to; but sure, we'll sell you a copy" product to the list would be vanishingly small. Given that, actually going and killing the software was an unexpected move.
Sales must have been really unexciting for them to do that.
It would be totally unsurprising(and seems to be standard industry practice in general) to put any products that you've acquired but have no strategic in more or less on ice, cutting engineering down to bare minimum critical bug fixes and selling on a more or less "only if you ask" basis, rather than actually marketing.
Actually killing a product, though, when all you need to do to keep selling it is maintain some minimal licensing and payment processing system, is pretty dramatic.
Oh, I don't have the slightest optimism about American's capacity for any sort of organized or value-rational "revenge"(heck, we can barely keep ourselves from handing over giant piles of our own money between cries of "thank you sir, may I have another?").
At a population level, though, it would be foolish to dismiss the American capacity for occasional acts of somewhat nihilistic and unhinged lashing out at targets of opportunity. Beyond our small, but genuinely violent, lunatic fringe, which is probably 50% FBI infiltrators and largely harmless; is the pool of otherwise unthreatening people who just crack one day. They tend to be weak on planning or strategy; but even a dumbass can kill 5 or 6 before offing themselves or coming up against cops with expertise in something other than ticket writing.
I love the warm, comforting smell of a "national security problem" that can be solved by giving IBM some of my money, rather than one of those genuinely difficult ones like flushing the peasants with small arms out of some sandbox hellhole or doing something that actually improves airline security, rather than harassing pilots who point out problems...
BOA is a bunch of angels compared to the rest of the financial community, they should probably be investing in security rather than PR...
There is a steady stream of "$PERSON$ loses job/house, kills family, self, occasionally neighbors and/or a cop or two" stories in the US. Given the number of dodgy forclosures BOA is believed to be involved in, including some cases where they didn't even own the loan, or where there was no loan, I could easily imagine some of their more visible people becoming part of dissatisfied customers' blood drenched exits.
The really high level guys probably already take precautions; but a bank the size of BOA probably has a lot of fat around the middle...
There is a special place in hell for vendors who sell bulk licenses(50+ seats) for software whose DRM prevents automated installation, and requires that the IT office's picker of the short straw go around and type in a gigantic license key on all machines.
If a hole has to be punched in the firewall for the online activation/authentication step; because they were just too damn special to use SSL on a standard port like everybody else, that special place in hell is filled with screwworms.
If there is a hardware dongle component(that looks exactly like a USB flash drive, and thus wanders accidentally if not carefully hidden) and requires a new purchase order and a nasty pile of cash to replace, that special place in hell automatically inserts bullet ants into the scrotum of anybody placed there.
MPEG-LA explicitly claims to protect you only from its members. As far as I know, they mostly deliver on that. Now, exactly how forthright their salesweasels are about the fact that the MPEG-LA patent pool is not as exhaustive as commonly believed I don't know....
The concept has been advanced; but my understanding is that(beyond the capital costs of building a gigantic magnetic accelerator) there are issues, for most payloads because of the incredible acceleration needed.
A rocket enjoys continuous thrust, so it can be relatively leisurely about reaching escape velocity. A magnetically accelerated pod has only the length of its accelerator track(and, unless you want that track to be very short or very expensive, you are likely launching at an angle other than vertical, thus travelling through more atmosphere to reach orbit). This means that your accelerator pod ends up pulling some hundreds of Gs for a few seconds, which cuts down on the sort of payloads you can launch. Water? sure. Food? some forms. Crew? only if you like meat paste...