This will be pretty good excuse for government thugs to shut down Bitcoin and possibly jail anyone having some in his/her posession. I'm not sure US government thugs did actually conceive such crap but I'm perfectly sure they wouldn't be happier hearing this news.
Expandable at least. You can plug in two standard SO-DIMM chips, one m-SATA drive and one 2.5" 7mm drive. It also has 14.4" full-HD screen, big enough to use its full resolution (not retina-like ultra-high pixel density where image has to be enlarged 2x, so you get half the resolution). I'm curious about its reliability.
I'm using Asus UX-32VD which has similiar characteristics (notably it has one standard SO-DIMM slot and one standard 7mm 2.5" drive, despite its slim ultrabook-like look). Sometimes I need a bit more power and bigger screen (being "in the field", not at my desk), so standard PC does not count. I would like to see expandable 15"-16" ultrabook with 2576x1600 resolution (three columns of code plus sidebar!) and quad core processor. Ideally with one or two mSATA slots and one 2.5" bay and at least two SO-DIMM slots. Pixel density would be the same as in UX-31, so with good quality IPS display one would use every last bit of it. Something like Asus UX-51 but with better resolution and expandable. This would be terribly setup for techies, programmers in particular. Unfortunately, I'm not aware of such product - unlike desktop PCs where one can built one's own system from scratch, everyone is on vendors mercy when it comes to notebooks or ultrabooks.
Given their record of factuality in their official statements this whole bruhaha about "openess" it is more likely to be lie. Given number of transgressions and laws broken by NSA we've seen in Snowden documents, they just can't release such things, so it is lie for sure. They only thing they propably want to achieve by this manipulation is to make whistleblowers' life harder. After all, despite of all bullshit and propaganda in corporate media citizenry is now behind Snowden. What they want is propably to have some leverage to explain to public that future whistleblowers' revelations are 'redundant', so they'll have public consent to prosecute or exterminate future whistleblowers and also journalists. This corresponds pretty well with latest law pushed by Feinstein that legalizes all NSA transgressions we've seen in latest months and mandates harsh penalties for both whistleblowers leaking inconvenient materials and journalists publishing such revelations. In short, Obama regime is now busy reinforcing its grip on what public should and shouldn't know.
They'll just go screaming to government and receive big bailout. Plus some laws that will force everyone to purchase their crap. This is how modern business works - it too far from how communism operated in the old days.
I think they bet on new, more efficient, cleaner technologies that will replace lead-acid sooner or later (eg. liquid metal batteries) but something has to start this process of development. So yes - lead batteries might be dirty right now but overall process will cut a lot more of impact of coal in the future. Clearly they are far ahead of everyone else in this regard. Renewable energy devices prices are dropping similiarly to computer prices not so long ago. I wonder when (not if) they'll be able to push prices below coal.
Other kinds of rackets also pay big bucks, including Obamacare, bailouts for bankers, money laundering by big banks, waging wars etc. Until someone bans such activities and imposes harsh penalties on PERSONS involved, forget about recovery of US economy.
Quicly looking at comment section of Telegraph article I see that it propably didn't succeed in indoctrinating anyone. Therefore I'm curious why such a piece of crap has been published at all. Maybe it is not directed to unwashed masses. Maybe it is directed to corporate/bankster/military/intelligence estabullshitment, not ordinary people. Maybe it is some kind of message sent by puppet government and puppet media saying something like: "See, we're (still) loyal. We'll go with you everywhere and we're ready to defend your (dirty) business even to our own detriment. We'll do anything, just give us some convenient, well paid position in your corporations when people throw us out.". I see this as a dangerous precedence. Politicians not afraid of what people think about them will not hesitate to send police or military to beat everyone "to the fuck'n skull" or "disappear" people if ordered so by TPTBs. The same with media: seeing journalists producing such crap without any signs of hesitation I smell crappy soviet-style system of propaganda (which I still remeber as I've spent my childhood in communist Poland).
In the meantime Feinstein is busy pushing a new bill through Congress. It will not only legitmize NSA spying on everyone but also impose even harsher penalties for anyone who dares speak out. Despite of majority of citizens now being clearly against it (despite of all bullshit and propaganda thrown at them by corporate media). I know it makes many Americans angry but I don't see much difference between civil liberties in US and China right now, the only one being that US regime is far superior in concealing itself behind "freedom and democracy" mirage.
In other news patent cartel created by Microsoft and Apple attacks Google and others. Somewhat sad to see when one side of this battle uses product superiority and the other one resorts to lawyers and patent trolls. It just underscores roteness and corrupion of US corporate economy.
Even if they try their best to do this. Every article, blog post, every news program always reflects point of view of whoever created this content. Even if such person tries his/hers best to be as objective as possible, it is impossible to avoid bias.
The only truth is what you see yourself which is of course impossible for practical reasons. The second best approximation is to snort though raw footage and original materials. This is very time consuming task and it is also impractical for anyone who is not a professional investigative journalist.
This brings us to preprocessed and prepackaged information spewed by either mainstream or alternative media. What works for me is to assume that they all have a lot of spin in their content and that every spin doctor uses at least partially true arguments supporting his/her position at first, is quiet about arguments contrary to his/her position and resorts to lies and fabrications only if all other alternatives fail. So I'm trying to read arguments of all adversary sides (US media, european media, russian media, chinese media, iranian media) and then use my head to sort out things - pretty much 'Scherlock style' deduction. Unfortunately this requires some time and effort, which most of people do not want to expend.
Very unpleasant thing about this is that western media perform very poorly in this regard, especially since run-up to Iraq war. I attribute this to general situation and 'lack of good arguments' on western side - which directly correlates to our latest economic (2008 crash and afterwards) and social (rise of police state) troubles. We now see things going from bad to worse: UK blocking PressTV, UK government forcing Guardian to destroy its computers, now UK PM threatening all newspapers if they do not obey his demands. The same in the US: Obama prosecuting and jailing more than twice as many whistleblowers as all his predecessors combined, US blocking RT, huge assault on journalists, with some of them propably murdered by government thugs to silence and send a message (Michael Hastings). We are certainly not better in this regard than government controlled eastern media and I suspect we might even crossed point of no return in our way have only to strictly controlled, totalitarian media spewing nothing but lies and propaganda.
Wireless wiretaps started around 10 years ago and now your lovely government starts using them as as Kafka style "evidence". Who needs this pesky "proper" evidence after all. Two years ago Obama, (in typical, cowardly way - on New Year Eve), signed NDAA that contains sections 1021 and 1022 that allow government thugs to jail citizens at whim and keep locked them indefinitely in military facilities without evidence and without access to court. Who needs this pesky judge after all. Guess when (NOT 'if') your ruling class will start using it in large scale against citizens they don't like. Countdown has started, folks.
US of A is almost there. Wait for economic situation deteriorate a bit more, supply of 3-rd world countries still having something to steal dry out (a.k.a "bring democracy - US style"), US public image to deteriorate enough to not be worth defending and you'll see US government hand in hand with US corporations exterminating its own citizens just to steal their belongings. The only thing that keeps US thugs from doing this is publicity. Given current situation, rapidly deteriorating economic situation and rapidly deteriorating public image of USofA around the world, it is only matter of time. Until things won't change radically, which - given Obama administration busy codifying Bush' transgressions, killing its own citizens abroad and jailing its own domestic critics and journalists - won't happen soon.
BP corporation runs this country, so no need for those pesky elections. According to our bankster-corporate overlords, regime working for BP is "democratic" enough.
There was something called "focus fusion" that utilized boron-hygrogen fusion but I'm not sure it did work out well. Regardless, I'm less and less confident if it makes sense. Solar cells and wind turbines are becoming cheaper every year and have passed nuclear energy cost (in $/kWh) some time ago (was it 2010? I don't remember...). Like computers, those devices are becoming cheap commodity and are on their way to take carbon in terms of dollars per kWh. In other worlds, renewables (along with smart grids and energy conservation techniques) are on their way to become new "traditional" energy sources. Bucky Fuller was right after all: nuclear energy (in all its forms) is only marginally better than fossil fuels, renewables take the play to whole new level. We've just missed it for some time because fossil was too cheap (to be frank - partly thanks to stealing fossil fuels from 3-rd world countries by western powers)
Having said that, it does not mean we shouldn't do any research in this area. Basic research is THE basis of achievements of our civilization but please call spades the spades. Don't think it will magically solve our energy problems but there is a chance it will become breakthrough in many ways we don't expect.
It is not about stupidity. It is about control. Obama is a sockpuppet for his corporate sponsors. He does not have his views, he just reads all this crap from his teleprompter and signs whatever his corporate sponsors want him to sign. That's all. After ending his silly presidency, he'll have his well paid, warm chair in Goldman Sachs, Apple or some other corrupt corporation. He'll have his speeches paid $500'000 a pop. Just like Bill Clinton or Tony Blair.
You see, staying in office isn't an end in itself for modern politicians. It is merely an interim position in their quest of getting insanely rich. Their carreer begins AFTER they get out of office and stays until they collect few hundred milions dollars or so. Staying in office for entire life like those pesky congressmen do is so old school.
Despite shutdown US decided to extend military training program for syrian terrorists (err... "rebels") stating that only "moderate rebels" are being trained that is propably yet another of its never ending stream of lies. FOMC is still peddling cheap money to stock markets, so all those Wall Street parasites calling themselves "investors" receive their checks. It's funny as they're just recipients of yet another government giveaway, albeit conceived a noth as instead of directly receiving government money, they're "earning" it from financial markets massively pumped by government via FOMC and similiar mechanisms. Call it socialism for rich people.
In short, two most important functions of US government today - that is funding wars and Wall Street bankers - are alive and kicking.
I tried to a film on deaths in Samsung factories I've seen a while ago on YouTube. It was virtually impossible. Only after I've found this on al-Jazeera pages, I was able to type in exact title and it showed up. Call me a tin foil hater but I suspect this is a modern form of censorship. Those fucks from Google are censoring bad stories on Samsung.
As much as I hate Apple and Microsoft for their business practices, I'm more and more confident that all of them are almost the same. They're all scourge of modern times. Both Google and Samsung aren't much better than Apple or M$. Googlers will sell you out to NSA in a heartbeat (albeit M$ seems to be always the first to do this). Samsung will exploit you to death in their factories.
I'm more and more confident that favorizing ones above others does not make sense. Getting rid of all of them is propably the way to go. No one needs a newest shiny gadget every few months after all. There are so many interesting things to do instead looking into a smartphone all the time.
And who is expecting other outcome than this ? Frankly, I don't expect them paying attention to citzenry at all. Growing political isolation (as we see in Syria case or latest UN meeting) might have bigger impact (either good or bad - no one knows).
So now we know Keith Alexander is a grandiose narcissist. This is who we are forced to give all our secrets to "for the greater good". We are spied by a bunch of psychopaths. Don't expect anything good coming ouf of it. Expect misery, blood, terror and tears - this is the only thing you can expect from psychopaths wielding so much power as Keith Alexander does.
Yout corporate overlords are earning gobs of dollars on this. How much do prison operators charge per jailed soul ? $100 a day ? $250 a day ? This is what big american business morphed into since 1980s.
Syria will hand over their chemical weapons to Russia. Russia will sell them to China. China will pack them into small aluminium containers and sell to US as insect repellant. Goldman Sachs will earn some bucks beacuse of aluminium. Everyone will be happy.
I don't know who created this bunk theory. Wanna see how monarchies work ? See Saudi Arabia. They sell almost as much oil as Russians do, or soviets did. Yet, soviets, with all their crappy, inefficient system, were able to finance huge social security, huge army and lots of other things with their oil money. Maybe not a good things to do, yet Saudis don't even do that. Their petrodolars are used to finance lavish lifestyles of their aristocracy (while rest of their society live in poverty), purchases of ultra-expensive military equipment, US bonds and so called "investments" - in other words, recycling earned petrodollars back into westen economies. Their feudalistic system is terribly inefficient, even compared to very inefficient soviet system, let alone to any other (relatively sane) economy in the world. You see, lack of progress in medieval Dark Ages are directly related to reign of absolute monarchies and feudalism. We've started getting out of medieval darkness mainly because in renesance, power of kings ceased to be absolute.
As globalization is (mostly) perceived in business and financial spheres (big corporations becoming supranational), lots of other aspects are moving along with this process, including bad ones: spying and security apparatus becoming global, tax enforcement becoming global, propaganda apparatus is becoming global (eg. news media in Poland producing basically the same crap and lies as US media about latest Syria debacle). Opression apparatus is also becoming global. Nation states are becoming obsolete, surpassed by moneyed interests. Politicians all around the world are propably blackmailed by NSA/GCHQ/8200 aparatchics who in turn are taking orders from big business bozos. This is why we see such fiascos as latest Obama &Kerry blunder. Not Obama nor Kerry are so stupid to make such suicidal mistakes - someone is firmly holding them by the balls. Exceptions to this rule (that is, not taking orders from NSA boys) are mercilessly pounded in our "objective" media (Putin being prime example) and their countries attacked from various angles and often outright invaded (see Libya, now Syria).
Dark times ahead, folks. With democratic processes basically defunct - at least as defined in traditional terms of national states, truly global backlash and exposing those fucks like Snowden or Greenwald are the our only hope of reversing our quick slide to (new) dark ages. This is serious, folks. It's not about principles (as our media whores try to convince us), it's about survival. It's about ordinary people NOT being crushed by multinationals and NOT becoming serfs in neo-feudal age. We need a thousand Greenwalds and two thousands Snowdens.
Except for some corner cases ? Given that Samsung also learned how to stack their NAND flash and CrossBar technology is almost there ? Traditional disks are almost dead at this point. Relatively high price of SSDs is the only thing that keeps them alive and price is going down fast. 4TB 3.5" SSD drives are already available and 2GB 2.5" drives are certainly possible (if SSD controllers are capable of handling such capacities). Any significant breakthrough in sold state storage technology (vNAND, CrossBar, anyone ?) makes SSD advantages only bigger and there seems to be a lot of room for improvement in this pretty much like in HDD technologies 15 years ago. My bet is that SSDs will take over traditional HDDs in all aspects (including price) in less than 5 yars.
Slashdot Mirror
(from TFA) It turned out that some things have been removed manually, including some Open Source software and people involved did this knowing that WB has absolutely no copyrights. So they lied to court that "it was done by computer" and now they argue they have right to censor works they don't have copyright rights without penalties. I don't have to stress how bad it would be if they set such precedent and defend it in courts. It's pretty much like going back to feudal times.
This will be pretty good excuse for government thugs to shut down Bitcoin and possibly jail anyone having some in his/her posession. I'm not sure US government thugs did actually conceive such crap but I'm perfectly sure they wouldn't be happier hearing this news.
Expandable at least. You can plug in two standard SO-DIMM chips, one m-SATA drive and one 2.5" 7mm drive. It also has 14.4" full-HD screen, big enough to use its full resolution (not retina-like ultra-high pixel density where image has to be enlarged 2x, so you get half the resolution). I'm curious about its reliability.
I'm using Asus UX-32VD which has similiar characteristics (notably it has one standard SO-DIMM slot and one standard 7mm 2.5" drive, despite its slim ultrabook-like look). Sometimes I need a bit more power and bigger screen (being "in the field", not at my desk), so standard PC does not count. I would like to see expandable 15"-16" ultrabook with 2576x1600 resolution (three columns of code plus sidebar!) and quad core processor. Ideally with one or two mSATA slots and one 2.5" bay and at least two SO-DIMM slots. Pixel density would be the same as in UX-31, so with good quality IPS display one would use every last bit of it. Something like Asus UX-51 but with better resolution and expandable. This would be terribly setup for techies, programmers in particular. Unfortunately, I'm not aware of such product - unlike desktop PCs where one can built one's own system from scratch, everyone is on vendors mercy when it comes to notebooks or ultrabooks.
Given their record of factuality in their official statements this whole bruhaha about "openess" it is more likely to be lie. Given number of transgressions and laws broken by NSA we've seen in Snowden documents, they just can't release such things, so it is lie for sure. They only thing they propably want to achieve by this manipulation is to make whistleblowers' life harder. After all, despite of all bullshit and propaganda in corporate media citizenry is now behind Snowden. What they want is propably to have some leverage to explain to public that future whistleblowers' revelations are 'redundant', so they'll have public consent to prosecute or exterminate future whistleblowers and also journalists. This corresponds pretty well with latest law pushed by Feinstein that legalizes all NSA transgressions we've seen in latest months and mandates harsh penalties for both whistleblowers leaking inconvenient materials and journalists publishing such revelations. In short, Obama regime is now busy reinforcing its grip on what public should and shouldn't know.
They'll just go screaming to government and receive big bailout. Plus some laws that will force everyone to purchase their crap. This is how modern business works - it too far from how communism operated in the old days.
I think they bet on new, more efficient, cleaner technologies that will replace lead-acid sooner or later (eg. liquid metal batteries) but something has to start this process of development. So yes - lead batteries might be dirty right now but overall process will cut a lot more of impact of coal in the future. Clearly they are far ahead of everyone else in this regard. Renewable energy devices prices are dropping similiarly to computer prices not so long ago. I wonder when (not if) they'll be able to push prices below coal.
Other kinds of rackets also pay big bucks, including Obamacare, bailouts for bankers, money laundering by big banks, waging wars etc. Until someone bans such activities and imposes harsh penalties on PERSONS involved, forget about recovery of US economy.
Quicly looking at comment section of Telegraph article I see that it propably didn't succeed in indoctrinating anyone. Therefore I'm curious why such a piece of crap has been published at all. Maybe it is not directed to unwashed masses. Maybe it is directed to corporate/bankster/military/intelligence estabullshitment, not ordinary people. Maybe it is some kind of message sent by puppet government and puppet media saying something like: "See, we're (still) loyal. We'll go with you everywhere and we're ready to defend your (dirty) business even to our own detriment. We'll do anything, just give us some convenient, well paid position in your corporations when people throw us out.". I see this as a dangerous precedence. Politicians not afraid of what people think about them will not hesitate to send police or military to beat everyone "to the fuck'n skull" or "disappear" people if ordered so by TPTBs. The same with media: seeing journalists producing such crap without any signs of hesitation I smell crappy soviet-style system of propaganda (which I still remeber as I've spent my childhood in communist Poland).
In the meantime Feinstein is busy pushing a new bill through Congress. It will not only legitmize NSA spying on everyone but also impose even harsher penalties for anyone who dares speak out. Despite of majority of citizens now being clearly against it (despite of all bullshit and propaganda thrown at them by corporate media). I know it makes many Americans angry but I don't see much difference between civil liberties in US and China right now, the only one being that US regime is far superior in concealing itself behind "freedom and democracy" mirage.
In other news patent cartel created by Microsoft and Apple attacks Google and others. Somewhat sad to see when one side of this battle uses product superiority and the other one resorts to lawyers and patent trolls. It just underscores roteness and corrupion of US corporate economy.
Even if they try their best to do this. Every article, blog post, every news program always reflects point of view of whoever created this content. Even if such person tries his/hers best to be as objective as possible, it is impossible to avoid bias.
The only truth is what you see yourself which is of course impossible for practical reasons. The second best approximation is to snort though raw footage and original materials. This is very time consuming task and it is also impractical for anyone who is not a professional investigative journalist.
This brings us to preprocessed and prepackaged information spewed by either mainstream or alternative media. What works for me is to assume that they all have a lot of spin in their content and that every spin doctor uses at least partially true arguments supporting his/her position at first, is quiet about arguments contrary to his/her position and resorts to lies and fabrications only if all other alternatives fail. So I'm trying to read arguments of all adversary sides (US media, european media, russian media, chinese media, iranian media) and then use my head to sort out things - pretty much 'Scherlock style' deduction. Unfortunately this requires some time and effort, which most of people do not want to expend.
Very unpleasant thing about this is that western media perform very poorly in this regard, especially since run-up to Iraq war. I attribute this to general situation and 'lack of good arguments' on western side - which directly correlates to our latest economic (2008 crash and afterwards) and social (rise of police state) troubles. We now see things going from bad to worse: UK blocking PressTV, UK government forcing Guardian to destroy its computers, now UK PM threatening all newspapers if they do not obey his demands. The same in the US: Obama prosecuting and jailing more than twice as many whistleblowers as all his predecessors combined, US blocking RT, huge assault on journalists, with some of them propably murdered by government thugs to silence and send a message (Michael Hastings). We are certainly not better in this regard than government controlled eastern media and I suspect we might even crossed point of no return in our way have only to strictly controlled, totalitarian media spewing nothing but lies and propaganda.
Wireless wiretaps started around 10 years ago and now your lovely government starts using them as as Kafka style "evidence". Who needs this pesky "proper" evidence after all. Two years ago Obama, (in typical, cowardly way - on New Year Eve), signed NDAA that contains sections 1021 and 1022 that allow government thugs to jail citizens at whim and keep locked them indefinitely in military facilities without evidence and without access to court. Who needs this pesky judge after all. Guess when (NOT 'if') your ruling class will start using it in large scale against citizens they don't like. Countdown has started, folks.
US of A is almost there. Wait for economic situation deteriorate a bit more, supply of 3-rd world countries still having something to steal dry out (a.k.a "bring democracy - US style"), US public image to deteriorate enough to not be worth defending and you'll see US government hand in hand with US corporations exterminating its own citizens just to steal their belongings. The only thing that keeps US thugs from doing this is publicity. Given current situation, rapidly deteriorating economic situation and rapidly deteriorating public image of USofA around the world, it is only matter of time. Until things won't change radically, which - given Obama administration busy codifying Bush' transgressions, killing its own citizens abroad and jailing its own domestic critics and journalists - won't happen soon.
BP corporation runs this country, so no need for those pesky elections. According to our bankster-corporate overlords, regime working for BP is "democratic" enough.
There was something called "focus fusion" that utilized boron-hygrogen fusion but I'm not sure it did work out well. Regardless, I'm less and less confident if it makes sense. Solar cells and wind turbines are becoming cheaper every year and have passed nuclear energy cost (in $/kWh) some time ago (was it 2010? I don't remember...). Like computers, those devices are becoming cheap commodity and are on their way to take carbon in terms of dollars per kWh. In other worlds, renewables (along with smart grids and energy conservation techniques) are on their way to become new "traditional" energy sources. Bucky Fuller was right after all: nuclear energy (in all its forms) is only marginally better than fossil fuels, renewables take the play to whole new level. We've just missed it for some time because fossil was too cheap (to be frank - partly thanks to stealing fossil fuels from 3-rd world countries by western powers)
Having said that, it does not mean we shouldn't do any research in this area. Basic research is THE basis of achievements of our civilization but please call spades the spades. Don't think it will magically solve our energy problems but there is a chance it will become breakthrough in many ways we don't expect.
It is not about stupidity. It is about control. Obama is a sockpuppet for his corporate sponsors. He does not have his views, he just reads all this crap from his teleprompter and signs whatever his corporate sponsors want him to sign. That's all. After ending his silly presidency, he'll have his well paid, warm chair in Goldman Sachs, Apple or some other corrupt corporation. He'll have his speeches paid $500'000 a pop. Just like Bill Clinton or Tony Blair.
You see, staying in office isn't an end in itself for modern politicians. It is merely an interim position in their quest of getting insanely rich. Their carreer begins AFTER they get out of office and stays until they collect few hundred milions dollars or so. Staying in office for entire life like those pesky congressmen do is so old school.
Despite shutdown US decided to extend military training program for syrian terrorists (err ... "rebels") stating that only "moderate rebels" are being trained that is propably yet another of its never ending stream of lies. FOMC is still peddling cheap money to stock markets, so all those Wall Street parasites calling themselves "investors" receive their checks. It's funny as they're just recipients of yet another government giveaway, albeit conceived a noth as instead of directly receiving government money, they're "earning" it from financial markets massively pumped by government via FOMC and similiar mechanisms. Call it socialism for rich people.
In short, two most important functions of US government today - that is funding wars and Wall Street bankers - are alive and kicking.
I tried to a film on deaths in Samsung factories I've seen a while ago on YouTube. It was virtually impossible. Only after I've found this on al-Jazeera pages, I was able to type in exact title and it showed up. Call me a tin foil hater but I suspect this is a modern form of censorship. Those fucks from Google are censoring bad stories on Samsung.
As much as I hate Apple and Microsoft for their business practices, I'm more and more confident that all of them are almost the same. They're all scourge of modern times. Both Google and Samsung aren't much better than Apple or M$. Googlers will sell you out to NSA in a heartbeat (albeit M$ seems to be always the first to do this). Samsung will exploit you to death in their factories.
I'm more and more confident that favorizing ones above others does not make sense. Getting rid of all of them is propably the way to go. No one needs a newest shiny gadget every few months after all. There are so many interesting things to do instead looking into a smartphone all the time.
And who is expecting other outcome than this ? Frankly, I don't expect them paying attention to citzenry at all. Growing political isolation (as we see in Syria case or latest UN meeting) might have bigger impact (either good or bad - no one knows).
So now we know Keith Alexander is a grandiose narcissist. This is who we are forced to give all our secrets to "for the greater good". We are spied by a bunch of psychopaths. Don't expect anything good coming ouf of it. Expect misery, blood, terror and tears - this is the only thing you can expect from psychopaths wielding so much power as Keith Alexander does.
Yout corporate overlords are earning gobs of dollars on this. How much do prison operators charge per jailed soul ? $100 a day ? $250 a day ? This is what big american business morphed into since 1980s.
Syria will hand over their chemical weapons to Russia. Russia will sell them to China. China will pack them into small aluminium containers and sell to US as insect repellant. Goldman Sachs will earn some bucks beacuse of aluminium. Everyone will be happy.
I don't know who created this bunk theory. Wanna see how monarchies work ? See Saudi Arabia. They sell almost as much oil as Russians do, or soviets did. Yet, soviets, with all their crappy, inefficient system, were able to finance huge social security, huge army and lots of other things with their oil money. Maybe not a good things to do, yet Saudis don't even do that. Their petrodolars are used to finance lavish lifestyles of their aristocracy (while rest of their society live in poverty), purchases of ultra-expensive military equipment, US bonds and so called "investments" - in other words, recycling earned petrodollars back into westen economies. Their feudalistic system is terribly inefficient, even compared to very inefficient soviet system, let alone to any other (relatively sane) economy in the world. You see, lack of progress in medieval Dark Ages are directly related to reign of absolute monarchies and feudalism. We've started getting out of medieval darkness mainly because in renesance, power of kings ceased to be absolute.
As globalization is (mostly) perceived in business and financial spheres (big corporations becoming supranational), lots of other aspects are moving along with this process, including bad ones: spying and security apparatus becoming global, tax enforcement becoming global, propaganda apparatus is becoming global (eg. news media in Poland producing basically the same crap and lies as US media about latest Syria debacle). Opression apparatus is also becoming global. Nation states are becoming obsolete, surpassed by moneyed interests. Politicians all around the world are propably blackmailed by NSA/GCHQ/8200 aparatchics who in turn are taking orders from big business bozos. This is why we see such fiascos as latest Obama &Kerry blunder. Not Obama nor Kerry are so stupid to make such suicidal mistakes - someone is firmly holding them by the balls. Exceptions to this rule (that is, not taking orders from NSA boys) are mercilessly pounded in our "objective" media (Putin being prime example) and their countries attacked from various angles and often outright invaded (see Libya, now Syria).
Dark times ahead, folks. With democratic processes basically defunct - at least as defined in traditional terms of national states, truly global backlash and exposing those fucks like Snowden or Greenwald are the our only hope of reversing our quick slide to (new) dark ages. This is serious, folks. It's not about principles (as our media whores try to convince us), it's about survival. It's about ordinary people NOT being crushed by multinationals and NOT becoming serfs in neo-feudal age. We need a thousand Greenwalds and two thousands Snowdens.
Except for some corner cases ? Given that Samsung also learned how to stack their NAND flash and CrossBar technology is almost there ? Traditional disks are almost dead at this point. Relatively high price of SSDs is the only thing that keeps them alive and price is going down fast. 4TB 3.5" SSD drives are already available and 2GB 2.5" drives are certainly possible (if SSD controllers are capable of handling such capacities). Any significant breakthrough in sold state storage technology (vNAND, CrossBar, anyone ?) makes SSD advantages only bigger and there seems to be a lot of room for improvement in this pretty much like in HDD technologies 15 years ago. My bet is that SSDs will take over traditional HDDs in all aspects (including price) in less than 5 yars.