Obviously justified cases? How would we ever really know?
In some jurisdictions there is a reasonably sane process led by reasonably honest people to investigate police killings, but in all jurisdictions we basically rely on the police investigating the police. That's a setup for confirmation bias at a minimum and a huge loophole for all manner over cover ups and dissembling to create justification.
Further, the prosecution of police is controlled by the same prosecutors who work hand in hand with the police 365 days a year. You don't think they have the motivation to give the police every possible break?
It kind of boggles my mind why Microsoft bothered to make PowerShell so unique and so incompatible with a well-known Unix shell like Bash.
PowerShell isn't always totally awful, but where the heck is stuff like less, tail, head, etc? IIRC the last time I went looking for it, PowerShell's version of tail and grep are totally retarded and difficult next to the relative simplicity of $foo | tail -n 10 or something.
They could have just made it a near-bash clone, along with a non-retarded shell window that supported putty or ConEmu-style terminal features and it would be SO MUCH better.
My question is whether it was just part of the "we're microsoft" culture of pretending that nothing else exists or whether it was some deliberately conspiratorial move to force an investment of time and effort on the part of Windows admins to keep them in the fold versus learning a skill that could be portable to Unix shells.
There's no guarantee that the driver will have insurance, even in states that require it. I got hit by one and my insurance covered the loss (less my deductable) and eventually sued the driver who lost by default because she was a no-show in court.
(As an aside, my insurance company told me that she was a Native American who had returned to her reservation and was basically untouchable for this incident as long as the reservation was her home. I was told that defaulting on the lawsuit would cost her a state driver's license, but as a reservation resident she could just get one from her reservation.)
Pretty much any serious accident (by any driver, Uber or not) is going to wind up in court no matter what, as most policies won't have adequate coverage for serious losses or injuries, resulting in personal liability to the driver for damages over what their policy covers.
I guess I don't understand why the Uber liability policy isn't considered "good enough" here as extra insurance or why Uber wouldn't be a a party to the tort if it happened. I'm curious if anyone has been injured by an Uber driver (in a modern Western country, not some third world place with a dubious legal system).and whether they have been able to sue Uber.
If Uber itself has zero liability legally, then I might agree there is some enhanced risk that should be fixed somehow, but then I think of their policy that's been talked about and wonder why that's inadequate.
I think you can get almost home-like financing on motorhomes (and boats) that can be lived in, and possibly treat them as homes from a tax perspective.
It would at least be respectably configured for living in (bathroom, sink, heat/ac, fridge, etc). Solar on the roof would keep the batteries up with minimal need for generator run time.
If you wanted to go minimalist, you could probably get a pickup camper.
I think I'll stick primarily with good old fashioned cash. It isn't as readily hacked, and is virtually untraceable to any company or govt wanting to know what I"m spending my $$ on.
It isn't readily hacked as long as your definition of "hacked" doesn't include counterfeiting or theft.
It isn't traceable unless you start engaging in transaction in excess of the reporting limits or they decide to investigate you because you're avoiding the transaction limits.
I don't think you can correlate it to the civilian world. Many Senior NCOs have college degrees if not master's degrees. They have no interest in becoming Officers because it would mean an actual decrease in authority and prestige (despite the increase in pay). Note that all this applies to the Army. YMMV with the other services but I imagine it's similar if not the same.
I don't think it's that different than the civilian world -- many "executives" manage business units with employees older, more experienced and better educated than them -- this is, in fact, the classic kind of IT complaint about management -- someone with no field experience or expertise making ridiculous decisions.
I would maybe argue that the missing element in civilian organizations is that they don't particularly create or value NCO-level leadership, or if they do ("team lead", etc) they don't delegate enough authority and instead micromanage.
Or it may be that the "middle management" level should more properly be a kind of NCO position, but through the inevitable class politics it became more "executive" and less functional, probably because more senior executive management only sees managers and employees.
People may be awful at judging risks, but are they that bad at judging risks related to riding in a car?
The way some Uber critics describe it, it's as if Uber drivers are not driving the same cars we all drive, but are driving some new, unknown form of transportation with unproven and untested technologies.
Everyone knows there are inherent risks to riding in any car, but,. by and large we find the risks to be low enough that most people don't hesitate to get into a car to go someplace. Those risks are understood even if imperfectly. Most clear headed people wouldn't get into a car with an obviously drunk driver, either, so it's not like we blindly will get into a car with any driver, there is SOME filtering.
ANY car can go out of control and break stuff, it's not some new and unique risk to Uber drivers. And it's not like questions of insurance are solved by mandating insurance for non-Uber drivers -- the last accident I was in was getting rear-ended by an uninsured motorist, despite the state requiring no-fault insurance.
The military thing crossed my mind as I wrote the parent message. I was thinking of fresh-faced 1st Lieutenants who ignored their NCOs, did stupid stuff, got some people killed and then ate a fragmentation grenade.
I can see lots of reasonable explanations -- older people have more experience and demand higher salaries, older people have more life commitments and are less likely to work "epic hours", and maybe even older people have higher health care costs even.
I'm curious how the average age of managers relates to this. As humans, we're raised by adults -- people usually 20 or more years older than us and for the better part of the first 20-25 years of our life, ALL of our authority figures are people older than us. Historically, hiring and promotion practices have meant that managers and more senior employees were also older than the people they managed, even if this got somewhat blurred past age 40 or so.
I wonder if at a given company if you have a lot of senior managers in their early-mid 30s if there's not something intimidating, awkward or socially uncomfortable for a manager to be managing someone who psychologically somehow represents an authority figure to you. I can believe some manager in their early 30s feels like they are the authority figure when dealing with 20-somethings, but when they're dealing with someone in the mid-40s they are dealing with someone where that kind of natural authority is just lacking.
And I can believe it works the other way around -- it can be awkward working for someone who is much younger than you. Seldom are they gifted or experienced enough to avoid the mistakes someone more experienced -- not just in work, but in life -- wouldn't make. And it can create real friction to have that gap -- the manager hates being second guessed, and the employee resents extra work that's a byproduct of inexperience, especially when proffered advice is ignored because a manager is trying to flex their authority.
I wonder if maybe this isn't the real source of the problem.
Will they finally allow pairing a BT mouse with the iPad Pro?
I like my iPad 3 for infotainment consumption. I use a keyboard case and have always wished for the ability to pair a mouse, even if I could only use it with an RDP app. It's the one thing that might drive me to an ultrabook-type laptop, although I think I'd miss the simplicity of IOS for the things I use it for.
You say that taxis have essential regulations necessary for their service, that the regulations reduce the risks associated with the rides.
The market says differently -- the perception that most people have is that Uber rides aren't risky, and for its customers they are willing to forgo the presumed risk amelioration of the regulations in exchange for an Uber ride vs. a taxi. If Uber rides actually turned out to be higher risk than taxis, then people wouldn't take Uber. They would decide that the costs associated with the risks wasn't worth the pricing discount Uber rides have by being less regulated.
You're arguing for a whole set of regulations that you assert are necessary for Uber to provide safe and reliable transportation, but the market experience is that these regulations aren't necessary -- the risks they are supposed to protect against are too small to be worth regulating.
This leads to the argument that conventional taxi service is over-regulated and creates artificially high prices. It also leads to the reasonable suspicion that the regulations may be set not because they address reasonable concerns, but are regulations designed to create barriers to entry for competition.
If taxis are so great in Germany, then Uber should fail massively.
If Uber hasn't failed, then despite your utopian view of taxis, the market believes otherwise and is willing to accept whatever tradeoffs Uber offers in exchange for whatever benefits Uber provides over taxis.
But, for backups, development VMs, docker playground, VMs, etc, etc, I keep a near-consumer-grade (i.e., no redundant power supply) 4U box, stuffed with consumer-grade SATA 2TB drives (in RAID 6), in one of those cheapy DCs for under $50 a month. Gives me a lot of functionality that would cost a crap-ton more than $50 a month to replicate with AWS or DigitalOcean.
That's exactly the kind of cost point I'm thinking of -- I think that works out to about $500/rack, $250/half rack. At those kinds of prices, many of the SMBs I work with would be pretty eager to colocate equipment for backup, DR or HA purposes.
There's just a whole universe of SMBs with infrastructure running on premises for whom the costs, limitations or functionality of public cloud or high-end colocation is just not workable and for whom facility limitations make ISP redundancy, generators, etc unobtainable or just too expensive.
A $10k or $15k investment in a mid-range Dell ESXi host with ~10 TB of RAID-6 + hotspare would prevent reasonable redundancy, some offsite backup/replication and could probably come out as a wash in terms of cost when you start doing the math on extra hardware, licensing, etc. for single-site HA.
Will there ever be small-scale, self-storage type data centers?
Most of the data centers I've been in are large and elaborate affairs, with extensive security systems, a dozen or more (that I could see) on site staff, and all the requisite complexity of systems that allows them to house 10s of thousands of square feet of racks.
This scale and complexity comes at a price, though, which often seems to price out SMBs looking for just an incrementally more reliable place to house offsite systems than the overloaded literal closets they use at the office with dodgy cooling, limited UPS-only power outage time and often limited availability of redundant high speed internet due to carrier/geographic availability.
It kind of makes me wonder if there's room for a more simplified, smaller-scale data center that might offer better facilities than the SMB office will ever have but not the kind of intensive scale and complexity of a typical, high-end data center. Like providing generator power within 5 minutes of an outage, but not providing whole-building UPS redundancy, less elaborate security systems, perhaps 2-3 upstream Internet providers versus a mini-NAP, etc.
This would make going off-site for a lot of SMBs or even hobbyists more affordable. I realize "the cloud" is supposed to shoulder some of this burden, but doing a lot of stuff in the cloud is more expensive and troublesome than a roll-your-own second site in a simplified facility might be.
You could even look at retrofitting existing self-storage buildings.
If you can't introspect a car without putting in jeopardy anyone's safety, then this is just another DMCA.
I imagine this is just another wolf in sheep's clothing.
Define any access to vehicle systems that doesn't take place in a dealership as criminal hacking. This kills several birds with one stone -- the pedantic security researchers, the third part parts and maintenance people, the automotive performance guys -- all are now locked out.
And that privacy policy will be just another 10 page list of legalistic gibberish that amounts to "We will fuck you in the ass, but only after telling you we will fuck you in the ass. And when we say fuck you in the ass, this is not limited to putting our dick in your ass. We may put it in your ass and then in your mouth or we may ram a dildo in your ass as well. And when we say we, we might mean us, or any of our friends, or really anyone who will give us anything of value. And if we should ejaculate during this process, we will expect you to swallow and tell us how much you liked it."
Had we not interject ourselves when the Russians were attacking Afghanistan, we wouldn't have the messy mixed up with Pakistan and the mujahideen which morphed into the Taliban, and the super powerful bin laden family
So what's the complete counter-factual scenario? Without US-supplied MANPADs, the Soviets are able to successfully pacify Afghan resistance by 1983. The relatively short and successful conflict and limited application of resources prevents it from being a drag on the Soviet economy and reinforces internal nationalism. The Soviet economy is salvaged by reforms, extending the lifespan of the Soviet Union.
I also think you give too much weight to the value of the Taliban and Bin Laden. Bin Laden didn't invent Islamic fundamentalism -- the Iranian revolution largely validated the concept of the Islamic State and the notion of Islamic revolution.
Another interesting concept is what would have happened with the Iraq-Iran war -- what if the Soviets, unburdened by a quagmire in Afghanistan had decided to re-arm and provide strategic guidance to the Iraqis during the Iraq-Iran war, leading to Iraqi seizures of Iranian oil fields?
Does Hussein, encouraged and re-armed by the Soviets with control of Iranian oil fields to finance his military, still invade Kuwait? If so, what does the US response to an invasion of Kuwait look like in the face of a better armed Iraqi force aligned with a still-extant Soviet Union look like?
like making a raid from a bunch of thumb drives LOL
How bad would that be, really? Even the store-branded USB3 flash drives at Microcenter have reasonable benchmarks. I get 110 MB/sec sequential reads and 70 MB/sec sequential writes out of one.
I would expect something approaching 200 MB/sec sequential reads out of a simple mirror of them, a RAID-10 set of 4 ought to improve on that for reads and double write speeds.
As for practical value, OK, it's probably pretty low, but I don't think I paid all that much for a USB3 128 GB thumb drive. It's not hard to see where it might actually be useful for some scratchpad uses to have a 256 GB RAID-10 or even a 512 GB RAID-0 array of thumb drives.
And if you could make the process of creating such an array simple and make it portable to another system, the idea that you could have a reasonably fast, usefully large array you could put in your pocket might not be bad.
There might even be some privacy value to a physically portable array that striped the data in a way that having only one or two of the members wasn't enough to reconstruct the data, or conversely, the loss of one or two of the members wouldn't be enough to lose all the data.
It's always kind of annoyed me that Microsoft's built-in array functionality wouldn't let you use a thumb drive to create a storage space or one of the older software RAID sets,
I would imagine that the contracts give them that "right" but I'd also wager than many companies running Oracle are dependent on ongoing Oracle support and updates to keep business-dependent systems up and running.
I wonder what happens when a company actually does decline to allow themselves to be audited and how long they could put it off.
Let's say you were running Oracle, but unhappy with it and you began planning a migration off it, so you quit paying for support. Oracle believes this makes you in violation and they decide they want to audit you.
The first step is the Sending of the Scary Letters. You "ignore" the first few letters because they weren't sent certified or the "signature" was some mail room drone scribble for a whole bushel basket of packages. I don't know, but I'm guessing you could dodge even certified letters for a while if the responsible parties were never available. Let's say it buys you two months.
Since you actually manage to read the letters, you finally decide to reply officially. So you start the next phase, which is the Sparring of the Lawerly Letters, where you attorney and their attorney send snail mail letters back and forth challenging each other's position. Since you rely on snail mail, you might get a couple of months of delaying action out of this.
So Oracle decides to sue to enforce the contract terms. How much delaying can you buy here? It may just be too much TV, but it seems like there's lots of room for delays here. Discovery motions, challenges to evidence, requests for delays, just getting a trial date may take months.
Before you ultimately have to give in, you could possibly have bought a year fighting this. Maybe by then you've migrated to your new DB platform, removed all the Oracle and there's nothing for them to audit. Maybe between a friendly local judge and a good attorney, you intimidate Oracle by getting some kind of a discovery motion that makes them want to fold rather than give up "all emails related to licensing and audit policies and procedures" for fear you'll find out it really is a fishing/shakedown expedition.
The other scenario I wonder about is the company that has some kind of defense contract. "No, I'm sorry, but auditing those systems is impossible. They're classified. If we let you audit them, both of us have just violated national security and are subject to prosecution for espionage."
There was no use for gigabit ethernet in a consumer environment, either, but economies of scale won because it stopped making sense to produce 100 meg silicon.
My question is why is 10 gig silicon so much more expensive that manufacturers haven't given up on 1 gig silicon in their designs? Is it so vastly more complex that the cost increase outweighs the economies of scale?
What's sad is that in an ideal world, the NSA *would* help and perform security audits to keep citizens, businesses and government safe from malicious actors.
But sadly, their version of help means inserting back doors and compromising security in the name of DEA parallel constructions to jail some hippie for growing pot.
When there's no provable number involved, everybody uses the number that suits their own interests. How else can you explain estimates that vary by 3x?
Police? If the issue isn't police malfeasance, they like the higher number. If there was a riot, the large number supports their "need" for more police officers, weapons and expanded powers (greater leniency on the use of violence, more intelligence gathering, etc). If the protest was non-violent, they get to claim the credit for successfully managing it and keeping it peaceful.
Government? They usually like the lower number, as it allows them to claim the organizers or issues lack political support so they can keep doing whatever it is they want.
Protesters? They like the bigger number, it shows how much support they have.
I'd just guess that Ukraine has decided that going with the West and its broader expectations for legal and economic transparency not to mention Washington's diplomatic and military support.
They can either continue to run an organized crime structured economy and get extremely limited Western investment or try to go the route of Poland or other former East Bloc countries.
Slashdot Mirror
Obviously justified cases? How would we ever really know?
In some jurisdictions there is a reasonably sane process led by reasonably honest people to investigate police killings, but in all jurisdictions we basically rely on the police investigating the police. That's a setup for confirmation bias at a minimum and a huge loophole for all manner over cover ups and dissembling to create justification.
Further, the prosecution of police is controlled by the same prosecutors who work hand in hand with the police 365 days a year. You don't think they have the motivation to give the police every possible break?
It kind of boggles my mind why Microsoft bothered to make PowerShell so unique and so incompatible with a well-known Unix shell like Bash.
PowerShell isn't always totally awful, but where the heck is stuff like less, tail, head, etc? IIRC the last time I went looking for it, PowerShell's version of tail and grep are totally retarded and difficult next to the relative simplicity of $foo | tail -n 10 or something.
They could have just made it a near-bash clone, along with a non-retarded shell window that supported putty or ConEmu-style terminal features and it would be SO MUCH better.
My question is whether it was just part of the "we're microsoft" culture of pretending that nothing else exists or whether it was some deliberately conspiratorial move to force an investment of time and effort on the part of Windows admins to keep them in the fold versus learning a skill that could be portable to Unix shells.
If any car hits someone or something, who pays?
There's no guarantee that the driver will have insurance, even in states that require it. I got hit by one and my insurance covered the loss (less my deductable) and eventually sued the driver who lost by default because she was a no-show in court.
(As an aside, my insurance company told me that she was a Native American who had returned to her reservation and was basically untouchable for this incident as long as the reservation was her home. I was told that defaulting on the lawsuit would cost her a state driver's license, but as a reservation resident she could just get one from her reservation.)
Pretty much any serious accident (by any driver, Uber or not) is going to wind up in court no matter what, as most policies won't have adequate coverage for serious losses or injuries, resulting in personal liability to the driver for damages over what their policy covers.
I guess I don't understand why the Uber liability policy isn't considered "good enough" here as extra insurance or why Uber wouldn't be a a party to the tort if it happened. I'm curious if anyone has been injured by an Uber driver (in a modern Western country, not some third world place with a dubious legal system).and whether they have been able to sue Uber.
If Uber itself has zero liability legally, then I might agree there is some enhanced risk that should be fixed somehow, but then I think of their policy that's been talked about and wonder why that's inadequate.
I think you can get almost home-like financing on motorhomes (and boats) that can be lived in, and possibly treat them as homes from a tax perspective.
It would at least be respectably configured for living in (bathroom, sink, heat/ac, fridge, etc). Solar on the roof would keep the batteries up with minimal need for generator run time.
If you wanted to go minimalist, you could probably get a pickup camper.
I think I'll stick primarily with good old fashioned cash. It isn't as readily hacked, and is virtually untraceable to any company or govt wanting to know what I"m spending my $$ on.
It isn't readily hacked as long as your definition of "hacked" doesn't include counterfeiting or theft.
It isn't traceable unless you start engaging in transaction in excess of the reporting limits or they decide to investigate you because you're avoiding the transaction limits.
I don't think you can correlate it to the civilian world. Many Senior NCOs have college degrees if not master's degrees. They have no interest in becoming Officers because it would mean an actual decrease in authority and prestige (despite the increase in pay). Note that all this applies to the Army. YMMV with the other services but I imagine it's similar if not the same.
I don't think it's that different than the civilian world -- many "executives" manage business units with employees older, more experienced and better educated than them -- this is, in fact, the classic kind of IT complaint about management -- someone with no field experience or expertise making ridiculous decisions.
I would maybe argue that the missing element in civilian organizations is that they don't particularly create or value NCO-level leadership, or if they do ("team lead", etc) they don't delegate enough authority and instead micromanage.
Or it may be that the "middle management" level should more properly be a kind of NCO position, but through the inevitable class politics it became more "executive" and less functional, probably because more senior executive management only sees managers and employees.
People may be awful at judging risks, but are they that bad at judging risks related to riding in a car?
The way some Uber critics describe it, it's as if Uber drivers are not driving the same cars we all drive, but are driving some new, unknown form of transportation with unproven and untested technologies.
Everyone knows there are inherent risks to riding in any car, but,. by and large we find the risks to be low enough that most people don't hesitate to get into a car to go someplace. Those risks are understood even if imperfectly. Most clear headed people wouldn't get into a car with an obviously drunk driver, either, so it's not like we blindly will get into a car with any driver, there is SOME filtering.
ANY car can go out of control and break stuff, it's not some new and unique risk to Uber drivers. And it's not like questions of insurance are solved by mandating insurance for non-Uber drivers -- the last accident I was in was getting rear-ended by an uninsured motorist, despite the state requiring no-fault insurance.
The military thing crossed my mind as I wrote the parent message. I was thinking of fresh-faced 1st Lieutenants who ignored their NCOs, did stupid stuff, got some people killed and then ate a fragmentation grenade.
I can see lots of reasonable explanations -- older people have more experience and demand higher salaries, older people have more life commitments and are less likely to work "epic hours", and maybe even older people have higher health care costs even.
I'm curious how the average age of managers relates to this. As humans, we're raised by adults -- people usually 20 or more years older than us and for the better part of the first 20-25 years of our life, ALL of our authority figures are people older than us. Historically, hiring and promotion practices have meant that managers and more senior employees were also older than the people they managed, even if this got somewhat blurred past age 40 or so.
I wonder if at a given company if you have a lot of senior managers in their early-mid 30s if there's not something intimidating, awkward or socially uncomfortable for a manager to be managing someone who psychologically somehow represents an authority figure to you. I can believe some manager in their early 30s feels like they are the authority figure when dealing with 20-somethings, but when they're dealing with someone in the mid-40s they are dealing with someone where that kind of natural authority is just lacking.
And I can believe it works the other way around -- it can be awkward working for someone who is much younger than you. Seldom are they gifted or experienced enough to avoid the mistakes someone more experienced -- not just in work, but in life -- wouldn't make. And it can create real friction to have that gap -- the manager hates being second guessed, and the employee resents extra work that's a byproduct of inexperience, especially when proffered advice is ignored because a manager is trying to flex their authority.
I wonder if maybe this isn't the real source of the problem.
Will they finally allow pairing a BT mouse with the iPad Pro?
I like my iPad 3 for infotainment consumption. I use a keyboard case and have always wished for the ability to pair a mouse, even if I could only use it with an RDP app. It's the one thing that might drive me to an ultrabook-type laptop, although I think I'd miss the simplicity of IOS for the things I use it for.
Risk analysis is part of the market dynamic.
You say that taxis have essential regulations necessary for their service, that the regulations reduce the risks associated with the rides.
The market says differently -- the perception that most people have is that Uber rides aren't risky, and for its customers they are willing to forgo the presumed risk amelioration of the regulations in exchange for an Uber ride vs. a taxi. If Uber rides actually turned out to be higher risk than taxis, then people wouldn't take Uber. They would decide that the costs associated with the risks wasn't worth the pricing discount Uber rides have by being less regulated.
You're arguing for a whole set of regulations that you assert are necessary for Uber to provide safe and reliable transportation, but the market experience is that these regulations aren't necessary -- the risks they are supposed to protect against are too small to be worth regulating.
This leads to the argument that conventional taxi service is over-regulated and creates artificially high prices. It also leads to the reasonable suspicion that the regulations may be set not because they address reasonable concerns, but are regulations designed to create barriers to entry for competition.
If taxis are so great in Germany, then Uber should fail massively.
If Uber hasn't failed, then despite your utopian view of taxis, the market believes otherwise and is willing to accept whatever tradeoffs Uber offers in exchange for whatever benefits Uber provides over taxis.
But, for backups, development VMs, docker playground, VMs, etc, etc, I keep a near-consumer-grade (i.e., no redundant power supply) 4U box, stuffed with consumer-grade SATA 2TB drives (in RAID 6), in one of those cheapy DCs for under $50 a month. Gives me a lot of functionality that would cost a crap-ton more than $50 a month to replicate with AWS or DigitalOcean.
That's exactly the kind of cost point I'm thinking of -- I think that works out to about $500/rack, $250/half rack. At those kinds of prices, many of the SMBs I work with would be pretty eager to colocate equipment for backup, DR or HA purposes.
There's just a whole universe of SMBs with infrastructure running on premises for whom the costs, limitations or functionality of public cloud or high-end colocation is just not workable and for whom facility limitations make ISP redundancy, generators, etc unobtainable or just too expensive.
A $10k or $15k investment in a mid-range Dell ESXi host with ~10 TB of RAID-6 + hotspare would prevent reasonable redundancy, some offsite backup/replication and could probably come out as a wash in terms of cost when you start doing the math on extra hardware, licensing, etc. for single-site HA.
Will there ever be small-scale, self-storage type data centers?
Most of the data centers I've been in are large and elaborate affairs, with extensive security systems, a dozen or more (that I could see) on site staff, and all the requisite complexity of systems that allows them to house 10s of thousands of square feet of racks.
This scale and complexity comes at a price, though, which often seems to price out SMBs looking for just an incrementally more reliable place to house offsite systems than the overloaded literal closets they use at the office with dodgy cooling, limited UPS-only power outage time and often limited availability of redundant high speed internet due to carrier/geographic availability.
It kind of makes me wonder if there's room for a more simplified, smaller-scale data center that might offer better facilities than the SMB office will ever have but not the kind of intensive scale and complexity of a typical, high-end data center. Like providing generator power within 5 minutes of an outage, but not providing whole-building UPS redundancy, less elaborate security systems, perhaps 2-3 upstream Internet providers versus a mini-NAP, etc.
This would make going off-site for a lot of SMBs or even hobbyists more affordable. I realize "the cloud" is supposed to shoulder some of this burden, but doing a lot of stuff in the cloud is more expensive and troublesome than a roll-your-own second site in a simplified facility might be.
You could even look at retrofitting existing self-storage buildings.
If you can't introspect a car without putting in jeopardy anyone's safety, then this is just another DMCA.
I imagine this is just another wolf in sheep's clothing.
Define any access to vehicle systems that doesn't take place in a dealership as criminal hacking. This kills several birds with one stone -- the pedantic security researchers, the third part parts and maintenance people, the automotive performance guys -- all are now locked out.
And that privacy policy will be just another 10 page list of legalistic gibberish that amounts to "We will fuck you in the ass, but only after telling you we will fuck you in the ass. And when we say fuck you in the ass, this is not limited to putting our dick in your ass. We may put it in your ass and then in your mouth or we may ram a dildo in your ass as well. And when we say we, we might mean us, or any of our friends, or really anyone who will give us anything of value. And if we should ejaculate during this process, we will expect you to swallow and tell us how much you liked it."
Pacification is really a euphemism for killing anyone who opposes you when it boils down to it. That works, but you have to have the stomach for it.
Had we not interject ourselves when the Russians were attacking Afghanistan, we wouldn't have the messy mixed up with Pakistan and the mujahideen which morphed into the Taliban, and the super powerful bin laden family
So what's the complete counter-factual scenario? Without US-supplied MANPADs, the Soviets are able to successfully pacify Afghan resistance by 1983. The relatively short and successful conflict and limited application of resources prevents it from being a drag on the Soviet economy and reinforces internal nationalism. The Soviet economy is salvaged by reforms, extending the lifespan of the Soviet Union.
I also think you give too much weight to the value of the Taliban and Bin Laden. Bin Laden didn't invent Islamic fundamentalism -- the Iranian revolution largely validated the concept of the Islamic State and the notion of Islamic revolution.
Another interesting concept is what would have happened with the Iraq-Iran war -- what if the Soviets, unburdened by a quagmire in Afghanistan had decided to re-arm and provide strategic guidance to the Iraqis during the Iraq-Iran war, leading to Iraqi seizures of Iranian oil fields?
Does Hussein, encouraged and re-armed by the Soviets with control of Iranian oil fields to finance his military, still invade Kuwait? If so, what does the US response to an invasion of Kuwait look like in the face of a better armed Iraqi force aligned with a still-extant Soviet Union look like?
like making a raid from a bunch of thumb drives LOL
How bad would that be, really? Even the store-branded USB3 flash drives at Microcenter have reasonable benchmarks. I get 110 MB/sec sequential reads and 70 MB/sec sequential writes out of one.
I would expect something approaching 200 MB/sec sequential reads out of a simple mirror of them, a RAID-10 set of 4 ought to improve on that for reads and double write speeds.
As for practical value, OK, it's probably pretty low, but I don't think I paid all that much for a USB3 128 GB thumb drive. It's not hard to see where it might actually be useful for some scratchpad uses to have a 256 GB RAID-10 or even a 512 GB RAID-0 array of thumb drives.
And if you could make the process of creating such an array simple and make it portable to another system, the idea that you could have a reasonably fast, usefully large array you could put in your pocket might not be bad.
There might even be some privacy value to a physically portable array that striped the data in a way that having only one or two of the members wasn't enough to reconstruct the data, or conversely, the loss of one or two of the members wouldn't be enough to lose all the data.
It's always kind of annoyed me that Microsoft's built-in array functionality wouldn't let you use a thumb drive to create a storage space or one of the older software RAID sets,
I would imagine that the contracts give them that "right" but I'd also wager than many companies running Oracle are dependent on ongoing Oracle support and updates to keep business-dependent systems up and running.
I wonder what happens when a company actually does decline to allow themselves to be audited and how long they could put it off.
Let's say you were running Oracle, but unhappy with it and you began planning a migration off it, so you quit paying for support. Oracle believes this makes you in violation and they decide they want to audit you.
The first step is the Sending of the Scary Letters. You "ignore" the first few letters because they weren't sent certified or the "signature" was some mail room drone scribble for a whole bushel basket of packages. I don't know, but I'm guessing you could dodge even certified letters for a while if the responsible parties were never available. Let's say it buys you two months.
Since you actually manage to read the letters, you finally decide to reply officially. So you start the next phase, which is the Sparring of the Lawerly Letters, where you attorney and their attorney send snail mail letters back and forth challenging each other's position. Since you rely on snail mail, you might get a couple of months of delaying action out of this.
So Oracle decides to sue to enforce the contract terms. How much delaying can you buy here? It may just be too much TV, but it seems like there's lots of room for delays here. Discovery motions, challenges to evidence, requests for delays, just getting a trial date may take months.
Before you ultimately have to give in, you could possibly have bought a year fighting this. Maybe by then you've migrated to your new DB platform, removed all the Oracle and there's nothing for them to audit. Maybe between a friendly local judge and a good attorney, you intimidate Oracle by getting some kind of a discovery motion that makes them want to fold rather than give up "all emails related to licensing and audit policies and procedures" for fear you'll find out it really is a fishing/shakedown expedition.
The other scenario I wonder about is the company that has some kind of defense contract. "No, I'm sorry, but auditing those systems is impossible. They're classified. If we let you audit them, both of us have just violated national security and are subject to prosecution for espionage."
There was no use for gigabit ethernet in a consumer environment, either, but economies of scale won because it stopped making sense to produce 100 meg silicon.
My question is why is 10 gig silicon so much more expensive that manufacturers haven't given up on 1 gig silicon in their designs? Is it so vastly more complex that the cost increase outweighs the economies of scale?
What's sad is that in an ideal world, the NSA *would* help and perform security audits to keep citizens, businesses and government safe from malicious actors.
But sadly, their version of help means inserting back doors and compromising security in the name of DEA parallel constructions to jail some hippie for growing pot.
The scoops are coming!
Your protest for more Soylent Yellow means you'll be turned into Soylent Green!
Soylent Green is People!!!
When there's no provable number involved, everybody uses the number that suits their own interests. How else can you explain estimates that vary by 3x?
Police? If the issue isn't police malfeasance, they like the higher number. If there was a riot, the large number supports their "need" for more police officers, weapons and expanded powers (greater leniency on the use of violence, more intelligence gathering, etc). If the protest was non-violent, they get to claim the credit for successfully managing it and keeping it peaceful.
Government? They usually like the lower number, as it allows them to claim the organizers or issues lack political support so they can keep doing whatever it is they want.
Protesters? They like the bigger number, it shows how much support they have.
I'd just guess that Ukraine has decided that going with the West and its broader expectations for legal and economic transparency not to mention Washington's diplomatic and military support.
They can either continue to run an organized crime structured economy and get extremely limited Western investment or try to go the route of Poland or other former East Bloc countries.