I thought I had read that many of them were already outraged and many had taken the step of registering their planes with shell LLCs so that existing flight trackers and tail watchers couldn't decode who was on the plane.
If they look it up, all they get it something bogus like "AirplaneHoldings23, LLC, a Delaware Corporation, Proxy Manager, John Smith, Esq."
It's the same gambit the super rich do for high dollar real estate so that the transactions and ownership are completely opaque.
Trump has come out explicitly against the H1-B visa program, in addition to his more salsa-flavored immigration rants.
Although one has to wonder where the Black opposition to Mexican immigration has been all these years.
Unemployment in the 16-26 black male category runs 16-20% and the jobs illiterate, non-English speaking Mexicans take are the very "stepping stone" kinds of unskilled employment that presumably poorly educated urban blacks would otherwise be able to get.
You can't call the employers racist -- they're willing to hire Hispanics with completely unknown backgrounds who quite often can't even speak English and probably aren't literate in Spanish, either, why on earth would they refuse to hire a black who speaks English and while poorly educated is likely at least functionally literate in English as well? At a bare minimum it simplifies management and workflow and keeps you from hiring the bilingual "boss hombre" to tell the workers what to do. (I know manufacturing plants that actually have that as an unofficial job position -- some Mexican who speaks decent English AND Spanish who is hired specifically to ride herd on the other Mexicans who might otherwise "no comprende" their way into not working).
It only leaves a handful of very unflattering explanations. Either blacks just won't do the jobs (ie, believe they should just get a cushy office job at middle-class wages because...racism) or employers just won't hire them -- not because they're KKK racist, but because they're tired of no-shows, laziness, theft, etc, and in their desperation have figured out that by and large the Mexican will do an honest job even if it's kind of a pain in the ass to have employees you can't communicate with.
I'm wondering if maybe there isn't a timing-related element to this, namely the presidential election. I know Trump has come out openly against H1B visas and I think his popularity has forced a couple of others to at least come out softly against it. I'm assuming Bernie Sanders is opposed to it just based on principal.
If such a lawsuit is able to generate enough publicity and obvious evidence of a conspiracy, it might create enough political pressure that a criminal investigation would have to be started.
The politicians are so busy cheerleading the STEM education thing that it seems awkward for them to do so when they let corporations just cancel out any benefits from an education in those fields.
(There I go again, assuming the system actually responds to citizens...)
Wolfram Alpha says a 10 ton mass @ 30 meters has a potential energy of 741 watt-hours.
A megawatt-hour of electricity at 80% mechanical efficiency would require 1,620 masses to be lowered. If each mass required 10 square feet, that's 16,200 square feet of surface area. Call it 20,000 to include the spatial overhead of the rest of the system.
It's a lot of individual masses, but not a lot of area. Maybe it would make sense to make the masses larger to reduce the count or some other similar optimization.
To me the biggest selling point would be the relative simplicity and low maintenance of such a system. You're talking pullies, gears and maybe some flywheels, not a complex high temperature process or a volatile, short-life chemical storage system. In a desert environment it would be extremely low maintenance as corrosion wouldn't be a big problem. In a non-desert environment, you could optimize for square footage and enclose the system to reduce corrosion to a minimum.
I don't think I've been in an Uber where I've seen the driver with less than two phones.
I'd always assumed one was personal and one was their Uber phone, but maybe for some one is Uber and one is Lyft so they can pick and choose based on where they are.
I really hope this tactic is successful, although I always thought RICO was a Federal criminal statute, not something available to civil litigation plaintiffs.
On its face, though, it seems beyond obvious that was indeed a deliberate scheme to use H1B visas to replace U.S. workers. It seems naive in the extreme that Disney executives would believe that they just happened to find a contractor with a pool of domestic labor at rates dramatically cheaper than their local talent -- they HAD to have known their contractor would be using H1B visas to obtain low-cost overseas employees. And it's not like Disney doesn't have extensive experience hiring non-US citizens to staff theme parks like Epcot. To say they didn't know the rules would be not believable.
I hope this works and there is some kind of racketeering prosecution that arises from it. I kind of doubt Disney will be directly prosecuted, they may be able to dredge up some emails that say "OK, we just need some kind of official statement you're not using H1Bs to junk our expensive domestic employees. Just reply to this email and say 'Yes'."
But if the contracting industry, which seems to be where the real hands-on evil takes place, it'd be awesome to see those guys take some RICO prosecutions.
It's not really about racism, it's about basic economics. You flood the supply of labor with cheap imports and you reduce demand for more expensive domestic product.
I guess I'm enough of a dreamer not to be swayed by those answers.
Yes, lifting a single weight a zillion miles is impractical, which is why I think a clockwork kind of mechanism that lifted many weights a lesser distance makes more sense, like lifting two ton concrete slabs 50 feet, but hundreds of them. The power requirements of lifting the individual weights is less, allowing smaller amounts of excess capacity to be put to useful storage work as opposed to needing the entire output of the generation capacity to do a single large amount of work. Plus a distributed mass system could be engineered to work even if some masses were out of commission.
It's not something like batteries that could be more-or-less easily scaled up/down from garage to industrial scale. You may be able to come up with a fridge sized unit that could run a handful of LEDs for an hour, but the ideal application seems to be the kind of acreage footprints available in the desert or rural areas.
Part of the reason it seems appealing to me probably is my absolute lack of understanding of the maths associated with such a system. I'm sure the math of how many X ton weights need to drop Y distance over Z time to generate N watts of power would cause me to reconsider it as totally impractical.
But that ignorance coupled with the relatively simple nature of such a storage system versus a large scale battery system or the more exotic molten-salt type systems still makes me wonder if it would be viable when applied to a renewable energy source with an excess capacity capability and "dark windows" when the renewable source wasn't available, like solar at night or wind during calm weather.
From what I've heard in Minneapolis, oversubscription only seems to be a problem for residential connections in highly dense neighborhoods and only really noticeable at the outer tiers of service (100/10 or whatever it is). I've also seen issues with business customers getting that throughput when they are located in small business nodes surrounded by large residential areas -- they get like 75% of the throughput, but not all of it.
I assume this is mostly due to inadequate backhaul from their local node.
I have Comcast business at my home, and I have no problem pegging my speed tier any time of the day, upload and download.
I lost the better part of an afternoon watching videos on mechanical storage of energy. It was kind of amazing some of the contraptions people had built that would raise weights or wind a collection of springs which would spin a generator as they wound down.
I seem to recall even seeing something being done on a larger scale involving old railcars filled with rocks at some old mine site. They tow empty rail cars a mile up a hill and fill them with rocks at the top and when they need energy they have some means of sending the cars down hill attached to some mechanism or other that generates electricity.
Some seemed to use water as the mass, which gave them the advantage of raising an empty vessel (reducing the use of power) and then using flowing water to fill the elevated vessel.
I still think it's a fascinating take on the battery or, maybe better, "dry" pumped storage, and wonder why, out in the desert where you have the space to build a giant solar array you couldn't store excess capacity in some kind of raised mass clockwork machine that could be discharged at night.
I'm sure they're all hugely inefficient relative to batteries, molten salt and other more exotic storage methods, but they seem appealing because they have near infinite charge/discharge cycles and extremely low maintenance requirements.
This doesn't seem surprising. I'd wager that most of these products use the same code base, with various features enabled/available depending on what underlying hardware they run on.
...how much of this data collection is designed around coming up with "risk correlates" that allow them to increase your insurance costs beyond what they could charge based on your accident and claims history?
It reminds me of the credit reporting agencies that want to include your driving history as a factor in your credit risk instead of determining your credit risk based solely on your use of credit.
And? You're implying they have local recourse to their own governments, which I think is a dubious idea for the most part. Even those that have democratically elected governments don't have much recourse, due to even worse corruption than we have here.
In theory, UBI payments are set at a level where you can meet your basic needs of food, housing and shelter without working at all. So employers who reduce pay to account for UBI basically won't get any employees at all, as they will choose to not work.
The other idea is that UBI is retained even if you get a low paying job -- it just becomes a net increase in income, so it serves as something of an incentive to work because even flipping burgers is financially beneficial.
As I've read about, most theorize that the UBI would be reduced as earned income increased to a point where UBI was zero at a certain level of income which would make it harder for employers to cut wages.
If anything, employers wishing to hire traditionally low wage workers would be required to make their work more appealing, and probably more than just financially but in terms of working conditions.as well or they won't have any workers.
My take away is that UBI does a lot to rebalance the power differential between employers and employees so the choice is better than work at poverty wages or actual poverty.
"Not worth the hassle" is the part that matters. Because for them it's all hassle and no reward.
If the Feds were to open a RICO case against a telemarketer and choose to make the telephony providers who enable them part of the conspiracy and part of the 20 years in prison, $100,000 per count prosecution then you bet your sweet ass they'd be coming up with circuit traces and source information, rapidamente.
I would imagine just considering a RICO case and telling a telco that they were considering including them as a target unless they were willing to provide this information that's a "hassle" would get action, too.
The "hassle" part just means the effort isn't worth the end product. But if the end product is, say, not spending the next 20 years in Lewisburg Penitentiary, then maybe the hassle drops off.
But you have to ask yourself why these kinds of prosecutions haven't ever been brought against spammers or fraudulent telemarketers. If legitimate businesses would quit providing hosting products, financial services, etc to these scam businesses they would be a lot harder to operate and there would be fewer of them, too.
What percentage of IT people do a quick calculation on how extortable the computer owner is? What percentage of computer owners end up paying off the IT guy to keep quiet?
I ran into a situation 15-20 years ago when the company I worked for had just gotten our mail system connected to the Internet. It used a DOS application to serve as an SMTP gateway between the Internet and the mail system.
As you might expect, it was a PITA and a few times a week would choke on messages with attachments for some reason. You had to go into the queue directory manually and figure out which message was choking it, pull it out, restart the gateway and let it process. This was all new enough that I would usually check out the contents of the stuck message to either see if I could tell why it was choking on them and to pass on the email to whoever was the recipient.
As it happens, I opened this one email and found two pictures. One of a well-liked "rising star" employee, one of those people who'd normally be considered a shining example of the meritocracy. Hard working, talented, modest, personable. The other picture was his correspondent commenting on his picture and the picture of the employee. Trouble is, both pictures were almost a portrait-style poses of men in fancy suits with erections and their testicles sticking out of the open fly of their pants.
The employee who belonged to this picture, besides his rising star status, was also (posing) as a kind of conservative Christian -- he had a wife and child in a photo that could have come from the church newsletter stock photo archive.
I just deleted the message, and chalked it up to one more person with odd sexual tastes, although I thought the guy was a total fraud after that. But I also thought how easy would it be to squeeze him for $10K? Hey buddy, what would your wife and pastor think of your fancy-mens-clothes-and-penises fetish? What would your boss think of it?
...and a billion dollars, and a lot of other stuff, too.
I think even die-hard gun owners wouldn't turn down their favorite gun done smart gun style, provided it was the perfect smart gun that only let the people they wanted shoot at the things they wanted shot and worked right every time.
But back in the real world, I can't have a pony, every day isn't my birthday and nobody's going to give me a billion dollars.
And no smart gun will work that way either. They will all have futzy technology that will make them not shoot when they're supposed to, or worse, shoot when they're supposedly not supposed to.
What's amusing is that it would be cheaper to buy a second device than to pay the overages. Either load balance across both devices simultaneously or just watch the data consumption and switch over to the second device.
I would think that the ability to knock out the grid, or parts of it, would be something that wouldn't have a long shelf life.
Components get replaced, security systems change, the people managing it do stuff differently, accounts get removed/added/changed, patches get installed, operating systems change, etc.
Some remote exploits may allow more durable penetration, but I would bet a fair amount just might expire, making maintaining the capability a long-term prospect involving greater exposure and more risk.
It's not like the US hasn't had a shitload of enemies for a long time who would have loved to have turned off the lights. They were willing to fly fucking planes into buildings.
Even your basic basement hacker might have an interest in this, if only for the thrill of knowing you were responsible for a blackout.
Even if you argue that major state actors wouldn't do this until they "needed" it at some crisis moment, that doesn't exclude more generic non-state actors interested in more immediate results.
I think HVM will be here to stay and continue to be widely adopted because its one of the few ways to solve the problems associated with dependencies on the crappy OS underneath. And sometimes the dependency on the crappy OS underneath is really about supporting the crappy application on top which doesn't support a newer version of the OS.
I almost never see a heterogeneous OS environment, at best variation within a given OS family's version (eg, Windows 2003, 2008, 2012) and quite often multiple operating systems, even if the non-Windows ones are just appliance-type instances for supporting other products.
And the appliance piece seems to be a growing, not declining, trend, with some traditionally hardware-based network appliance vendors shipping VM appliances as an option. These don't work at all outside of HVM.
If operating systems would ever stabilize their release cycles and get more into long-term version releases that include bug fixes and non-destructive feature additions, maybe paravirtualization would gain more traction because you wouldn't have the vicious cycle of new apps needing new OSes and old apps being incompatible with new OSes.
I think that's mostly what I described as "linking the executable with the operating system" although perhaps less succinct. It's what I meant to say.:-).
The problem with this, though is the Unix nature of not having a single application + OS, but having functionality spread over many applications. This may make it more complicated to use this type of a system unless it can somehow accommodate multiple applications into a single binary.
It goes against Unix religion, but I always kind of wished applications with heavy dependency on other applications could have just imported their dependencies into the main application versus library calls or worse, actual execution of other executables for some task.
It sounds almost like someone used a smart linker to link in the operating system with the application to create a standalone, appliance-like application with its own integrated kernel.
It kind of makes some sense, if you think about the sort of general trend of "appliance" servers like FreeNAS or Pfsense that are actually customized OSs with applications on top but have functionally complete user interfaces that don't really expose the underlying operating system.
It would be great if there was a way to automate creation of an application appliance, some way to point to an application package, scan it for kernel dependencies and produce a bootable VM or ISO that would just run the application.
Slashdot Mirror
It almost makes you wonder if maybe they shouldn't have found a modern car they could mount the body panels to.
It's kind of too bad you can't very easily have a modular car system where parts could be relatively easily interchanged.
I thought I had read that many of them were already outraged and many had taken the step of registering their planes with shell LLCs so that existing flight trackers and tail watchers couldn't decode who was on the plane.
If they look it up, all they get it something bogus like "AirplaneHoldings23, LLC, a Delaware Corporation, Proxy Manager, John Smith, Esq."
It's the same gambit the super rich do for high dollar real estate so that the transactions and ownership are completely opaque.
Trump has come out explicitly against the H1-B visa program, in addition to his more salsa-flavored immigration rants.
Although one has to wonder where the Black opposition to Mexican immigration has been all these years.
Unemployment in the 16-26 black male category runs 16-20% and the jobs illiterate, non-English speaking Mexicans take are the very "stepping stone" kinds of unskilled employment that presumably poorly educated urban blacks would otherwise be able to get.
You can't call the employers racist -- they're willing to hire Hispanics with completely unknown backgrounds who quite often can't even speak English and probably aren't literate in Spanish, either, why on earth would they refuse to hire a black who speaks English and while poorly educated is likely at least functionally literate in English as well? At a bare minimum it simplifies management and workflow and keeps you from hiring the bilingual "boss hombre" to tell the workers what to do. (I know manufacturing plants that actually have that as an unofficial job position -- some Mexican who speaks decent English AND Spanish who is hired specifically to ride herd on the other Mexicans who might otherwise "no comprende" their way into not working).
It only leaves a handful of very unflattering explanations. Either blacks just won't do the jobs (ie, believe they should just get a cushy office job at middle-class wages because...racism) or employers just won't hire them -- not because they're KKK racist, but because they're tired of no-shows, laziness, theft, etc, and in their desperation have figured out that by and large the Mexican will do an honest job even if it's kind of a pain in the ass to have employees you can't communicate with.
I'm wondering if maybe there isn't a timing-related element to this, namely the presidential election. I know Trump has come out openly against H1B visas and I think his popularity has forced a couple of others to at least come out softly against it. I'm assuming Bernie Sanders is opposed to it just based on principal.
If such a lawsuit is able to generate enough publicity and obvious evidence of a conspiracy, it might create enough political pressure that a criminal investigation would have to be started.
The politicians are so busy cheerleading the STEM education thing that it seems awkward for them to do so when they let corporations just cancel out any benefits from an education in those fields.
(There I go again, assuming the system actually responds to citizens...)
OK, doing some basic (likely wrong) math:
Wolfram Alpha says a 10 ton mass @ 30 meters has a potential energy of 741 watt-hours.
A megawatt-hour of electricity at 80% mechanical efficiency would require 1,620 masses to be lowered. If each mass required 10 square feet, that's 16,200 square feet of surface area. Call it 20,000 to include the spatial overhead of the rest of the system.
It's a lot of individual masses, but not a lot of area. Maybe it would make sense to make the masses larger to reduce the count or some other similar optimization.
To me the biggest selling point would be the relative simplicity and low maintenance of such a system. You're talking pullies, gears and maybe some flywheels, not a complex high temperature process or a volatile, short-life chemical storage system. In a desert environment it would be extremely low maintenance as corrosion wouldn't be a big problem. In a non-desert environment, you could optimize for square footage and enclose the system to reduce corrosion to a minimum.
I don't think I've been in an Uber where I've seen the driver with less than two phones.
I'd always assumed one was personal and one was their Uber phone, but maybe for some one is Uber and one is Lyft so they can pick and choose based on where they are.
I really hope this tactic is successful, although I always thought RICO was a Federal criminal statute, not something available to civil litigation plaintiffs.
On its face, though, it seems beyond obvious that was indeed a deliberate scheme to use H1B visas to replace U.S. workers. It seems naive in the extreme that Disney executives would believe that they just happened to find a contractor with a pool of domestic labor at rates dramatically cheaper than their local talent -- they HAD to have known their contractor would be using H1B visas to obtain low-cost overseas employees. And it's not like Disney doesn't have extensive experience hiring non-US citizens to staff theme parks like Epcot. To say they didn't know the rules would be not believable.
I hope this works and there is some kind of racketeering prosecution that arises from it. I kind of doubt Disney will be directly prosecuted, they may be able to dredge up some emails that say "OK, we just need some kind of official statement you're not using H1Bs to junk our expensive domestic employees. Just reply to this email and say 'Yes'."
But if the contracting industry, which seems to be where the real hands-on evil takes place, it'd be awesome to see those guys take some RICO prosecutions.
It's not really about racism, it's about basic economics. You flood the supply of labor with cheap imports and you reduce demand for more expensive domestic product.
I guess I'm enough of a dreamer not to be swayed by those answers.
Yes, lifting a single weight a zillion miles is impractical, which is why I think a clockwork kind of mechanism that lifted many weights a lesser distance makes more sense, like lifting two ton concrete slabs 50 feet, but hundreds of them. The power requirements of lifting the individual weights is less, allowing smaller amounts of excess capacity to be put to useful storage work as opposed to needing the entire output of the generation capacity to do a single large amount of work. Plus a distributed mass system could be engineered to work even if some masses were out of commission.
It's not something like batteries that could be more-or-less easily scaled up/down from garage to industrial scale. You may be able to come up with a fridge sized unit that could run a handful of LEDs for an hour, but the ideal application seems to be the kind of acreage footprints available in the desert or rural areas.
Part of the reason it seems appealing to me probably is my absolute lack of understanding of the maths associated with such a system. I'm sure the math of how many X ton weights need to drop Y distance over Z time to generate N watts of power would cause me to reconsider it as totally impractical.
But that ignorance coupled with the relatively simple nature of such a storage system versus a large scale battery system or the more exotic molten-salt type systems still makes me wonder if it would be viable when applied to a renewable energy source with an excess capacity capability and "dark windows" when the renewable source wasn't available, like solar at night or wind during calm weather.
From what I've heard in Minneapolis, oversubscription only seems to be a problem for residential connections in highly dense neighborhoods and only really noticeable at the outer tiers of service (100/10 or whatever it is). I've also seen issues with business customers getting that throughput when they are located in small business nodes surrounded by large residential areas -- they get like 75% of the throughput, but not all of it.
I assume this is mostly due to inadequate backhaul from their local node.
I have Comcast business at my home, and I have no problem pegging my speed tier any time of the day, upload and download.
I lost the better part of an afternoon watching videos on mechanical storage of energy. It was kind of amazing some of the contraptions people had built that would raise weights or wind a collection of springs which would spin a generator as they wound down.
I seem to recall even seeing something being done on a larger scale involving old railcars filled with rocks at some old mine site. They tow empty rail cars a mile up a hill and fill them with rocks at the top and when they need energy they have some means of sending the cars down hill attached to some mechanism or other that generates electricity.
Some seemed to use water as the mass, which gave them the advantage of raising an empty vessel (reducing the use of power) and then using flowing water to fill the elevated vessel.
I still think it's a fascinating take on the battery or, maybe better, "dry" pumped storage, and wonder why, out in the desert where you have the space to build a giant solar array you couldn't store excess capacity in some kind of raised mass clockwork machine that could be discharged at night.
I'm sure they're all hugely inefficient relative to batteries, molten salt and other more exotic storage methods, but they seem appealing because they have near infinite charge/discharge cycles and extremely low maintenance requirements.
This doesn't seem surprising. I'd wager that most of these products use the same code base, with various features enabled/available depending on what underlying hardware they run on.
...how much of this data collection is designed around coming up with "risk correlates" that allow them to increase your insurance costs beyond what they could charge based on your accident and claims history?
It reminds me of the credit reporting agencies that want to include your driving history as a factor in your credit risk instead of determining your credit risk based solely on your use of credit.
And? You're implying they have local recourse to their own governments, which I think is a dubious idea for the most part. Even those that have democratically elected governments don't have much recourse, due to even worse corruption than we have here.
In theory, UBI payments are set at a level where you can meet your basic needs of food, housing and shelter without working at all. So employers who reduce pay to account for UBI basically won't get any employees at all, as they will choose to not work.
The other idea is that UBI is retained even if you get a low paying job -- it just becomes a net increase in income, so it serves as something of an incentive to work because even flipping burgers is financially beneficial.
As I've read about, most theorize that the UBI would be reduced as earned income increased to a point where UBI was zero at a certain level of income which would make it harder for employers to cut wages.
If anything, employers wishing to hire traditionally low wage workers would be required to make their work more appealing, and probably more than just financially but in terms of working conditions.as well or they won't have any workers.
My take away is that UBI does a lot to rebalance the power differential between employers and employees so the choice is better than work at poverty wages or actual poverty.
"Not worth the hassle" is the part that matters. Because for them it's all hassle and no reward.
If the Feds were to open a RICO case against a telemarketer and choose to make the telephony providers who enable them part of the conspiracy and part of the 20 years in prison, $100,000 per count prosecution then you bet your sweet ass they'd be coming up with circuit traces and source information, rapidamente.
I would imagine just considering a RICO case and telling a telco that they were considering including them as a target unless they were willing to provide this information that's a "hassle" would get action, too.
The "hassle" part just means the effort isn't worth the end product. But if the end product is, say, not spending the next 20 years in Lewisburg Penitentiary, then maybe the hassle drops off.
But you have to ask yourself why these kinds of prosecutions haven't ever been brought against spammers or fraudulent telemarketers. If legitimate businesses would quit providing hosting products, financial services, etc to these scam businesses they would be a lot harder to operate and there would be fewer of them, too.
What percentage of IT people do a quick calculation on how extortable the computer owner is? What percentage of computer owners end up paying off the IT guy to keep quiet?
I ran into a situation 15-20 years ago when the company I worked for had just gotten our mail system connected to the Internet. It used a DOS application to serve as an SMTP gateway between the Internet and the mail system.
As you might expect, it was a PITA and a few times a week would choke on messages with attachments for some reason. You had to go into the queue directory manually and figure out which message was choking it, pull it out, restart the gateway and let it process. This was all new enough that I would usually check out the contents of the stuck message to either see if I could tell why it was choking on them and to pass on the email to whoever was the recipient.
As it happens, I opened this one email and found two pictures. One of a well-liked "rising star" employee, one of those people who'd normally be considered a shining example of the meritocracy. Hard working, talented, modest, personable. The other picture was his correspondent commenting on his picture and the picture of the employee. Trouble is, both pictures were almost a portrait-style poses of men in fancy suits with erections and their testicles sticking out of the open fly of their pants.
The employee who belonged to this picture, besides his rising star status, was also (posing) as a kind of conservative Christian -- he had a wife and child in a photo that could have come from the church newsletter stock photo archive.
I just deleted the message, and chalked it up to one more person with odd sexual tastes, although I thought the guy was a total fraud after that. But I also thought how easy would it be to squeeze him for $10K? Hey buddy, what would your wife and pastor think of your fancy-mens-clothes-and-penises fetish? What would your boss think of it?
...and a billion dollars, and a lot of other stuff, too.
I think even die-hard gun owners wouldn't turn down their favorite gun done smart gun style, provided it was the perfect smart gun that only let the people they wanted shoot at the things they wanted shot and worked right every time.
But back in the real world, I can't have a pony, every day isn't my birthday and nobody's going to give me a billion dollars.
And no smart gun will work that way either. They will all have futzy technology that will make them not shoot when they're supposed to, or worse, shoot when they're supposedly not supposed to.
Right around that amount.
What's amusing is that it would be cheaper to buy a second device than to pay the overages. Either load balance across both devices simultaneously or just watch the data consumption and switch over to the second device.
I would think that the ability to knock out the grid, or parts of it, would be something that wouldn't have a long shelf life.
Components get replaced, security systems change, the people managing it do stuff differently, accounts get removed/added/changed, patches get installed, operating systems change, etc.
Some remote exploits may allow more durable penetration, but I would bet a fair amount just might expire, making maintaining the capability a long-term prospect involving greater exposure and more risk.
It's not like the US hasn't had a shitload of enemies for a long time who would have loved to have turned off the lights. They were willing to fly fucking planes into buildings.
Even your basic basement hacker might have an interest in this, if only for the thrill of knowing you were responsible for a blackout.
Even if you argue that major state actors wouldn't do this until they "needed" it at some crisis moment, that doesn't exclude more generic non-state actors interested in more immediate results.
So why hasn't it happened yet?
I think HVM will be here to stay and continue to be widely adopted because its one of the few ways to solve the problems associated with dependencies on the crappy OS underneath. And sometimes the dependency on the crappy OS underneath is really about supporting the crappy application on top which doesn't support a newer version of the OS.
I almost never see a heterogeneous OS environment, at best variation within a given OS family's version (eg, Windows 2003, 2008, 2012) and quite often multiple operating systems, even if the non-Windows ones are just appliance-type instances for supporting other products.
And the appliance piece seems to be a growing, not declining, trend, with some traditionally hardware-based network appliance vendors shipping VM appliances as an option. These don't work at all outside of HVM.
If operating systems would ever stabilize their release cycles and get more into long-term version releases that include bug fixes and non-destructive feature additions, maybe paravirtualization would gain more traction because you wouldn't have the vicious cycle of new apps needing new OSes and old apps being incompatible with new OSes.
I think that's mostly what I described as "linking the executable with the operating system" although perhaps less succinct. It's what I meant to say. :-).
The problem with this, though is the Unix nature of not having a single application + OS, but having functionality spread over many applications. This may make it more complicated to use this type of a system unless it can somehow accommodate multiple applications into a single binary.
It goes against Unix religion, but I always kind of wished applications with heavy dependency on other applications could have just imported their dependencies into the main application versus library calls or worse, actual execution of other executables for some task.
It sounds almost like someone used a smart linker to link in the operating system with the application to create a standalone, appliance-like application with its own integrated kernel.
It kind of makes some sense, if you think about the sort of general trend of "appliance" servers like FreeNAS or Pfsense that are actually customized OSs with applications on top but have functionally complete user interfaces that don't really expose the underlying operating system.
It would be great if there was a way to automate creation of an application appliance, some way to point to an application package, scan it for kernel dependencies and produce a bootable VM or ISO that would just run the application.
Unlimited, uncapped and unthrottled LTE data that can be used with a computer?
I could see the $100 unlimited uncapped with throttling or maybe without tethering or off-phone data consumption.
Is this a commercially available plan or some legacy plan?