My sense is that flying an F/A-18 SuperHornet off an aircraft carrier crosses a threshold of experience that makes their expertise sufficient. The existence of other fighter pilots with more experience doesn't disqualify these specific pilots' experience or expertise.
It could be a cruise missile test, who knows?
I suspect that these pilots have either the instruction, instrumentation, experience or ground controller feedback to know that it's not a conventional cruise missile. Neither you nor I have any experience with this in-flight imagery platform besides a handful of YouTube videos to even remotely analyze the movement of this object or its possible genesis. This whole video boils down to the pilots' reactions as experienced military aviators in combination with the imagery platform's video.
Now, all this being said, my larger analysis of the "event" this and its companion video is that it's not improbable that the objects they saw were advanced weapons or aircraft systems being tested out of any of the regional Air Force bases. They were flown in close to a carrier/group conducting training specifically to blind test existing combat tracking systems against their development platform. A carrier conducting training in otherwise safe waters is unlikely to respond with live munitions, especially against an unknown object not presenting an objective, immediate threat and the possible testers knew this ahead of time.
The larger idea being if some new drone/flight platform isn't identifiable by our Navy or their aviators, it's not going to be identifiable or maybe even detectable by Russian, Chinese or other hostiles with lesser systems and pilots.
I think you're discounting the experience of fighter pilots. They have hundreds (some thousands) of hours of flight time and a lot of experience not to mention a lot of classroom education devoted to understanding aviation platforms they will encounter and the complexities and contradictions involved in tracking other flying objects (many of which may not be manned, like missiles). They're literally world-class experts at in-flight interception of flying objects.
If these guys are surprised and mystified by something they encounter in flight, I'm willing to accept it's a pretty unusual anomaly. It doesn't mean little green men, but the other extreme implies they're inexperienced or naive, which is even less likely.
I get the outrage, like everyone else it's hard not to think of this as a blacklist designed to rip off customers and with all the Kafkaesque elements you'd expect from an opaque, privately run blacklist.
That being said, if a big part of this is tech "rental" -- buying an item for limited use and then returning, why not approach this as a business opportunity? Create some business model where people can more or less rent these items (purchase minus restocking fee) and where each iteration of sale-return results in a declining, "open box" selling price?
If this "problem" is big enough that it's worth the pure overhead cost of running a blacklist of abusive consumers, it sounds like there's a way to run to use that overhead instead towards basically renting these items to abusive customers.
I think they thought they were going to be sitting in the catbird seat. I think Itanium was supposed to replace PA-RISC *and* PC server processors. So they would have a long-haul future with a new CPU for both PC server and workstation/midrange markets and would be able to start picking off Sun's business, too.
I'm sure there was some MBA math involved that also took into account getting a share of licensing revenue for the chip patents, too.
You have to admit that looking back it didn't seem like a terrible idea.
Medellin refers to a time when one group controlled every aspect of the drug trade, providing a measure of order that we could control. And until somebody finds a way to convince 20% of the population to stop snorting and smoking that shit, order's the best we can hope for. And what you saw up there, was Alejandro working toward returning that order.
So many of our reference concepts for timekeeping like fractional measures of an hour were based around a circular clock face. Now that we've had 40-odd years of digital time display, most people don't think of time in terms of fractions of a circle, they think in digital quantities -- 5 minutes, 10 minutes, 30 minutes.
We might as well consider just making the entire counting system reflect the display system and gain the benefits of simpler time calculations.
It's all academic, short of a major economic force imposing a timekeeping change, it won't change. It might change if we get into space travel where we're on other planets with different solar cycles or on ships with no solar cycle.
There are a lot of ways to reform timekeeping and calendars, the problem isn't finding a better solution but making changes. So much is culturally embedded, especially if it affects religious observances) that changing is probably impossible, at least in any agreed upon fashion.
The only way I can see any kind of reform happening is if a company like Amazon gets into so much of the economy (beyond retail and computing), including travel and other cross-zone and scheduled activity that they decide to switch to a new system for their own purposes and people switch to it because they consume so many services.
But if a change was made, I hope it would rationalize not only timekeeping but the calendar, too, which is a train wreck of historical anachronisms.
I'd go so far as to say we ought to consider a decimal timekeeping system and the international fixed calendar, too. A lot of the reform problems seem to incorporate a bunch of kludges to accommodate related anachronistic time and calendar measurements.
Time zones are still a problem but probably the one necessary evil for common timekeeping we can't get rid of because they allow people to relate time of day to daylight hours. If you switched to decimal time (10 hour days), you might consider 20 global time zones with half-hour differences but more closely rationalized by longitude so sunrise-sunset might be slightly more uniform.
For most a lot of recreational marine use, the usual battery choice seems to be AGM batteries and these usually drive a mix of direct DC loads and an AC inverter.
There are some people that use flooded lead acid batteries, but these tend to be maintenance heavy and that can be a problem when batteries aren't always easily accessible.
I don't think the marine use is any less demanding than a UPS when you consider that driving an inverter is basically UPS use. Much of the time the batteries are under charging current in marine, either from propulsion alternators or due to generator running.
The newer larger vessels seem oriented towards running as much as possible off the inverter. I've seen some larger setups include DC inverter air conditioning due to its low start current requirements, allowing for (limited) air conditioning off the inverter. I think mostly this is for pilot house use when the vessel is under way and is getting power off the alternator.
Solar adoption on power vessels is less than you might expect, but I see setups close to 1500 kw on some new models. But they're still highly generator bound if you want stuff like large air conditioning, water makers, or large appliances like stoves or washer/dryers.
I can only guess that there are people who see "Nazism" as a growing and serious threat to the political order and that if YouTube Nazis are allowed to be on YouTube, they will achieve recruitment and thus further political success.
I think this is a crazy argument, but it seems to be the basis of wanting to stop Nazis from being on YouTube. Personally I think that most people will see them as people who fetishize swastikas and violence and not find them appealing.
I don't think banning Nazis from YouTube will really solve the underlying problems that cause racist right-wing ideologies to bubble up. Broken economics and human beings innate hostility to those they see as different won't be solved by hiding Nazis on YouTube. It literally doesn't fix the actual problems, only one of its uglier symptoms.
I wouldn't be at all surprised if this was a major motivator. Within a few months of a major update, everybody has done whatever they can to ignore, disable or get their unwanted new products out of their daily sight on their computer.
It wouldn't surprise me at all if the releases weren't timed to provide big boosts in Cortana "adoption" numbers that Microsoft can push in the media to create the illusion they're a player people care about in the intelligent assistant space, along with whatever new me-too feature they're shilling this week.
I just can't get over the capacities. Is the difference in performance between Optane and SSD significant enough to make the resulting complex architectures of including relatively small Optane drives into a storage environment even worth the effort?
My long-term take is that the best performing caching and tiering storage systems really only provided marginal performance improvements at significant price premiums and involved complex controller architectures to manage it. And of course the performance improvement often had a bunch of gotchas -- hours or days of controller block usage analysis, didn't work with a lot of read/write use cases, etc.
I'd personally rather have a storage system made up of uniform elements that at least delivered predictable performance across the entire range of use cases with densities in the neighborhood of what's normal.
ABnB works because ad-hoc rooms are cheaper than standard hotel rooms.
So people rush into the ABnB market, removing conventional apartments from the pool of long-term housing, driving up rents as the pool of apartments shrinks.
So if hotels are losing customers, why aren't they cutting hotel rates to be more competitive with ABnB? Hell, why aren't they slashing staff completely and converting some properties to ABnB only -- or becoming apartments?
Do we need to reduce regulation on hotels so they can better compete with ABnB?
Or is it some other thing, like hotels had successfully restricted competition and there was a practical shortage of hotels which drove prices too high?
I think the only tricky thing is that most civilian AR lowers have a shelf/obstacle that prevents a selective fire trigger group from being installed.
But if you didn't have this, I'm not sure why an AR would be any more jam prone than a selective fire rifle from the factory.
Gimmicks like filing the disconnector down may produce "automatic fire" but are dangerous and illegal. When I fit a new precision trigger group, the instructions had a section about making sure you didn't relieve the disconnector too much because it made it an illegal machine gun. IIRC, they even would even exchange the part for free just to keep you from keeping it.
I always thought it was people just weren't willing to admit they were going to vote for Trump, especially to pollsters, to the point that the conventional wisdom said he couldn't win.
And the result was a mash-up of all of it, losing the popular vote but winning the electoral college and thus the election. Pro-Trump wags suggesting it was their 4D chess strategy all along, pro-Hillary wags suggesting he really didn't win since he won the electoral college, and the analysts suggesting that Hillary lost in part because she did pursue a bi-coastal type of electoral college strategy.
Wow, what a fail by Microsoft. It should be beyond obvious to anyone with a pulse that not providing a way to completely disable Cortana opens computers up to an entire Pandora's box of security vulnerabilities.
It's totally obvious Microsoft is just jamming this down everyone's throat, especially business users, because they know they can get big (and mostly bullshit) "adoption" numbers and operational data for Cortana.
Of course the larger problem is nobody wants Microsoft's bullshit attempts to re-invent themselves as Google, Amazon/Alexa or Apple/Siri. So they will cram it down everyone's throats and get some minor level of usage just because it's there even though it aggravates most everyone else.
That's a broad internet-wide benefit, though, and not a terribly Google-specific benefit. They're a smaller player in high-bandwidth products and their core products like search are pretty network efficient. It seems like a big initiative that helps competitors as much if not more than Google.
Maybe it really was a crazy, pro-internet concept and not a Google specific benefit.
Don't you think it's weird that they would dive into a rewrite and not manage to separate out the UI display into its own modules? I'm not even a developer and this is almost the first thing that comes to mind -- classic display, new display, mobile option, and so on.
I suppose they just couldn't resist a bunch of new features, er, monetization options, which weren't compatible with classic interface, either.
I'm not sure it's fair to label every Facebook user as dumb. I think a lot of people use it more or less reasonably and that the base concept (minus timeline manipulation, ads, fake news, personal information selling, etc) isn't unreasonable.
I think most people just don't realize how badly Facebook trolls/manipulates them, especially people who were relatively early adopters and may be biased by "early" Facebook memories when it was a much less manipulative platform.
My hope is that Facebook can't figure out how to fix the platform and their manipulation and intrusiveness wears people out enough to abandon the platform. Once enough reasonable people start leaving, I think it will collapse pretty quickly and become a wasteland.
I suppose the rule to follow is that Google's primary business is advertising, everything else is just about enabling advertising somehow and may not be persistent.
I'm not exactly what Google's actual motivation was for fiber. Did they have some plan to sniff traffic to feed to their advertising platform somehow?
I think there's a lot of projection on the part of people who think they were only in it to compete with traditional broadband providers because you know, more bandwidth for end users helps Google, because Internet and do no evil and fuck beta, etc.
I sometimes wonder if Google Fiber wasn't actually a response to a dispute with Comcast or some other large consumer broadband provider that wasn't really exposed to the general public and Google's response was "OK, we'll build our own" and they actually started doing it to prove they could throw their billions around. The dispute was resolved when Comcast or whoever decided they might be serious and withdrew a threat or something.
I was hoping to see an ELI5 about crime in Iceland. With only about 335K people and what I'd guess is a decent Scandinavian-style social welfare system and an extremely low GINI coefficient, not mention being an island in the North Atlantic, I would kind of expect crime in Iceland to be very minor, relegated to interpersonal disputes or impulsive, drunken-type behavior.
Heists? It seems like it would be difficult to create a criminal conspiracy and carry it out when you stand a good chance of running into someone you might know, if not a relative of some kind, everywhere. And where are you gonna take something you stole? Your choices are kind of limited if they don't involve a boat or the middle of a glacier.
Or is there some weird Norse raider social pathology that nobody talks about going on in Iceland?
I guess I'm still missing out how something like virtualization doesn't make this a lot simpler for them, even if the whole site is running on non-virtualized hardware.
Usually we wouldn't P2V a very large bare metal system (ie, many TB of local disk), we would migrate apps and data to a newer platform running on thevirtualized platform, but I have seen a handful of those kinds of systems P2V'd first because of dubious source hardware or because the client wants to kick the rest of the upgrade down the road a while and just wants the source system in the VM environment.
Anyway, why not virtualize whatever it was they had?
I have this sneaking suspicion that Slashdot still runs on a ton of legacy code and systems that make migrating it far more complex than we think of for other systems. Based on my experience with the site, I don't think it's ever been owned by a particularly deep-pocketed outfit or one that has thought it's worth investing major money in for an overhaul. There was "beta", but as it turned out, fuck beta, as they said.
Still, I would kind of expect it to at least be modular enough (or made modular via virtualization) for the migration to be done in advance and tested thoroughly before final migration. It's not like there aren't many ways to do this pretty simply that are used every day, even for clunky, old applications systems that are "hard to migrate".
And why do the founders want to stay in charge once they've made a fortune?
I get why you would want some founders to stay in charge, there are certain businesses where the founder may actually provide significant product input or be deeply involved in design decisions due to specialized knowledge or experience. But in a lot of these businesses, once "version 1.0" comes out that actually implements the main idea, is the founder's further input really all that important? Especially with Snapchat, it's kind of a one-big-idea kind of company.
I would think VCs would be really interested in marginalizing the Spiegels with the idea that they don't really know how to run a giant company and they also run the risk of letting their egos run rampant and ruin the company since their self-image is so wed to it, especially as owner/managers, and it's not like they need him for more big ideas.
Are VCs all bought into the "genius CEO" concept so much that they fail to see the difference between an actual rare genius (maybe Page/Brin, Jobs, Musk) and a one-hit wonder?
And then I wonder why you'd want to bother sticking around to run a company like Snapchat once you've made a fortune. I mean, is all his Machiavellian bullshit at Snapchat really worth it? I suppose there's some aspect for entrepreneurs where money isn't the point, but I can't imagine Spiegel's Kremlin-level control at Snap is really all that energizing, it sounds very draining.
It's a long way from being torn on what Xi's motivations are and being undecided on whether totalitarian governments are a bad thing.
Totalitarian governments are a bad thing, I think China would have been MUCH better off overhauling their political system decades ago, but it's an open question whether anyone in China could have actually done that, even Deng, without facing revolt from the party or the military.
That being said, China is what China is and despite their problems they probably have made a lot of great strides in reforming Chinese society even if it hasn't involved any political reform. Liberalization of the economy HAS done a lot to not only materially improve life for the Chinese and whether the CCP like it or not it has also decentralized power in a lot of ways that aren't immediately recognizable as political.
In many ways, the greatest trick the West played on China was encouraging it to liberalize its economy. Liberalized economies undermine totalitarian governments long term.
Slashdot Mirror
My sense is that flying an F/A-18 SuperHornet off an aircraft carrier crosses a threshold of experience that makes their expertise sufficient. The existence of other fighter pilots with more experience doesn't disqualify these specific pilots' experience or expertise.
It could be a cruise missile test, who knows?
I suspect that these pilots have either the instruction, instrumentation, experience or ground controller feedback to know that it's not a conventional cruise missile. Neither you nor I have any experience with this in-flight imagery platform besides a handful of YouTube videos to even remotely analyze the movement of this object or its possible genesis. This whole video boils down to the pilots' reactions as experienced military aviators in combination with the imagery platform's video.
Now, all this being said, my larger analysis of the "event" this and its companion video is that it's not improbable that the objects they saw were advanced weapons or aircraft systems being tested out of any of the regional Air Force bases. They were flown in close to a carrier/group conducting training specifically to blind test existing combat tracking systems against their development platform. A carrier conducting training in otherwise safe waters is unlikely to respond with live munitions, especially against an unknown object not presenting an objective, immediate threat and the possible testers knew this ahead of time.
The larger idea being if some new drone/flight platform isn't identifiable by our Navy or their aviators, it's not going to be identifiable or maybe even detectable by Russian, Chinese or other hostiles with lesser systems and pilots.
I think you're discounting the experience of fighter pilots. They have hundreds (some thousands) of hours of flight time and a lot of experience not to mention a lot of classroom education devoted to understanding aviation platforms they will encounter and the complexities and contradictions involved in tracking other flying objects (many of which may not be manned, like missiles). They're literally world-class experts at in-flight interception of flying objects.
If these guys are surprised and mystified by something they encounter in flight, I'm willing to accept it's a pretty unusual anomaly. It doesn't mean little green men, but the other extreme implies they're inexperienced or naive, which is even less likely.
I get the outrage, like everyone else it's hard not to think of this as a blacklist designed to rip off customers and with all the Kafkaesque elements you'd expect from an opaque, privately run blacklist.
That being said, if a big part of this is tech "rental" -- buying an item for limited use and then returning, why not approach this as a business opportunity? Create some business model where people can more or less rent these items (purchase minus restocking fee) and where each iteration of sale-return results in a declining, "open box" selling price?
If this "problem" is big enough that it's worth the pure overhead cost of running a blacklist of abusive consumers, it sounds like there's a way to run to use that overhead instead towards basically renting these items to abusive customers.
I found this wrong information on the web, which I won't read to you.
How many times do I need that to happen before I stop caring?
I think they thought they were going to be sitting in the catbird seat. I think Itanium was supposed to replace PA-RISC *and* PC server processors. So they would have a long-haul future with a new CPU for both PC server and workstation/midrange markets and would be able to start picking off Sun's business, too.
I'm sure there was some MBA math involved that also took into account getting a share of licensing revenue for the chip patents, too.
You have to admit that looking back it didn't seem like a terrible idea.
Medellin refers to a time when one group controlled every aspect of the drug trade, providing a measure of order that we could control. And until somebody finds a way to convince 20% of the population to stop snorting and smoking that shit, order's the best we can hope for. And what you saw up there, was Alejandro working toward returning that order.
Matt the CIA agent from Sicrario.
So many of our reference concepts for timekeeping like fractional measures of an hour were based around a circular clock face. Now that we've had 40-odd years of digital time display, most people don't think of time in terms of fractions of a circle, they think in digital quantities -- 5 minutes, 10 minutes, 30 minutes.
We might as well consider just making the entire counting system reflect the display system and gain the benefits of simpler time calculations.
It's all academic, short of a major economic force imposing a timekeeping change, it won't change. It might change if we get into space travel where we're on other planets with different solar cycles or on ships with no solar cycle.
There are a lot of ways to reform timekeeping and calendars, the problem isn't finding a better solution but making changes. So much is culturally embedded, especially if it affects religious observances) that changing is probably impossible, at least in any agreed upon fashion.
The only way I can see any kind of reform happening is if a company like Amazon gets into so much of the economy (beyond retail and computing), including travel and other cross-zone and scheduled activity that they decide to switch to a new system for their own purposes and people switch to it because they consume so many services.
But if a change was made, I hope it would rationalize not only timekeeping but the calendar, too, which is a train wreck of historical anachronisms.
I'd go so far as to say we ought to consider a decimal timekeeping system and the international fixed calendar, too. A lot of the reform problems seem to incorporate a bunch of kludges to accommodate related anachronistic time and calendar measurements.
Time zones are still a problem but probably the one necessary evil for common timekeeping we can't get rid of because they allow people to relate time of day to daylight hours. If you switched to decimal time (10 hour days), you might consider 20 global time zones with half-hour differences but more closely rationalized by longitude so sunrise-sunset might be slightly more uniform.
For most a lot of recreational marine use, the usual battery choice seems to be AGM batteries and these usually drive a mix of direct DC loads and an AC inverter.
There are some people that use flooded lead acid batteries, but these tend to be maintenance heavy and that can be a problem when batteries aren't always easily accessible.
I don't think the marine use is any less demanding than a UPS when you consider that driving an inverter is basically UPS use. Much of the time the batteries are under charging current in marine, either from propulsion alternators or due to generator running.
The newer larger vessels seem oriented towards running as much as possible off the inverter. I've seen some larger setups include DC inverter air conditioning due to its low start current requirements, allowing for (limited) air conditioning off the inverter. I think mostly this is for pilot house use when the vessel is under way and is getting power off the alternator.
Solar adoption on power vessels is less than you might expect, but I see setups close to 1500 kw on some new models. But they're still highly generator bound if you want stuff like large air conditioning, water makers, or large appliances like stoves or washer/dryers.
What's the point of banning Nazi videos?
I can only guess that there are people who see "Nazism" as a growing and serious threat to the political order and that if YouTube Nazis are allowed to be on YouTube, they will achieve recruitment and thus further political success.
I think this is a crazy argument, but it seems to be the basis of wanting to stop Nazis from being on YouTube. Personally I think that most people will see them as people who fetishize swastikas and violence and not find them appealing.
I don't think banning Nazis from YouTube will really solve the underlying problems that cause racist right-wing ideologies to bubble up. Broken economics and human beings innate hostility to those they see as different won't be solved by hiding Nazis on YouTube. It literally doesn't fix the actual problems, only one of its uglier symptoms.
I wouldn't be at all surprised if this was a major motivator. Within a few months of a major update, everybody has done whatever they can to ignore, disable or get their unwanted new products out of their daily sight on their computer.
It wouldn't surprise me at all if the releases weren't timed to provide big boosts in Cortana "adoption" numbers that Microsoft can push in the media to create the illusion they're a player people care about in the intelligent assistant space, along with whatever new me-too feature they're shilling this week.
I just can't get over the capacities. Is the difference in performance between Optane and SSD significant enough to make the resulting complex architectures of including relatively small Optane drives into a storage environment even worth the effort?
My long-term take is that the best performing caching and tiering storage systems really only provided marginal performance improvements at significant price premiums and involved complex controller architectures to manage it. And of course the performance improvement often had a bunch of gotchas -- hours or days of controller block usage analysis, didn't work with a lot of read/write use cases, etc.
I'd personally rather have a storage system made up of uniform elements that at least delivered predictable performance across the entire range of use cases with densities in the neighborhood of what's normal.
Let me see if I understand this:
ABnB works because ad-hoc rooms are cheaper than standard hotel rooms.
So people rush into the ABnB market, removing conventional apartments from the pool of long-term housing, driving up rents as the pool of apartments shrinks.
So if hotels are losing customers, why aren't they cutting hotel rates to be more competitive with ABnB? Hell, why aren't they slashing staff completely and converting some properties to ABnB only -- or becoming apartments?
Do we need to reduce regulation on hotels so they can better compete with ABnB?
Or is it some other thing, like hotels had successfully restricted competition and there was a practical shortage of hotels which drove prices too high?
I think the only tricky thing is that most civilian AR lowers have a shelf/obstacle that prevents a selective fire trigger group from being installed.
But if you didn't have this, I'm not sure why an AR would be any more jam prone than a selective fire rifle from the factory.
Gimmicks like filing the disconnector down may produce "automatic fire" but are dangerous and illegal. When I fit a new precision trigger group, the instructions had a section about making sure you didn't relieve the disconnector too much because it made it an illegal machine gun. IIRC, they even would even exchange the part for free just to keep you from keeping it.
I always thought it was people just weren't willing to admit they were going to vote for Trump, especially to pollsters, to the point that the conventional wisdom said he couldn't win.
And the result was a mash-up of all of it, losing the popular vote but winning the electoral college and thus the election. Pro-Trump wags suggesting it was their 4D chess strategy all along, pro-Hillary wags suggesting he really didn't win since he won the electoral college, and the analysts suggesting that Hillary lost in part because she did pursue a bi-coastal type of electoral college strategy.
Wow, what a fail by Microsoft. It should be beyond obvious to anyone with a pulse that not providing a way to completely disable Cortana opens computers up to an entire Pandora's box of security vulnerabilities.
It's totally obvious Microsoft is just jamming this down everyone's throat, especially business users, because they know they can get big (and mostly bullshit) "adoption" numbers and operational data for Cortana.
Of course the larger problem is nobody wants Microsoft's bullshit attempts to re-invent themselves as Google, Amazon/Alexa or Apple/Siri. So they will cram it down everyone's throats and get some minor level of usage just because it's there even though it aggravates most everyone else.
That's a broad internet-wide benefit, though, and not a terribly Google-specific benefit. They're a smaller player in high-bandwidth products and their core products like search are pretty network efficient. It seems like a big initiative that helps competitors as much if not more than Google.
Maybe it really was a crazy, pro-internet concept and not a Google specific benefit.
Don't you think it's weird that they would dive into a rewrite and not manage to separate out the UI display into its own modules? I'm not even a developer and this is almost the first thing that comes to mind -- classic display, new display, mobile option, and so on.
I suppose they just couldn't resist a bunch of new features, er, monetization options, which weren't compatible with classic interface, either.
I'm not sure it's fair to label every Facebook user as dumb. I think a lot of people use it more or less reasonably and that the base concept (minus timeline manipulation, ads, fake news, personal information selling, etc) isn't unreasonable.
I think most people just don't realize how badly Facebook trolls/manipulates them, especially people who were relatively early adopters and may be biased by "early" Facebook memories when it was a much less manipulative platform.
My hope is that Facebook can't figure out how to fix the platform and their manipulation and intrusiveness wears people out enough to abandon the platform. Once enough reasonable people start leaving, I think it will collapse pretty quickly and become a wasteland.
I suppose the rule to follow is that Google's primary business is advertising, everything else is just about enabling advertising somehow and may not be persistent.
I'm not exactly what Google's actual motivation was for fiber. Did they have some plan to sniff traffic to feed to their advertising platform somehow?
I think there's a lot of projection on the part of people who think they were only in it to compete with traditional broadband providers because you know, more bandwidth for end users helps Google, because Internet and do no evil and fuck beta, etc.
I sometimes wonder if Google Fiber wasn't actually a response to a dispute with Comcast or some other large consumer broadband provider that wasn't really exposed to the general public and Google's response was "OK, we'll build our own" and they actually started doing it to prove they could throw their billions around. The dispute was resolved when Comcast or whoever decided they might be serious and withdrew a threat or something.
I was hoping to see an ELI5 about crime in Iceland. With only about 335K people and what I'd guess is a decent Scandinavian-style social welfare system and an extremely low GINI coefficient, not mention being an island in the North Atlantic, I would kind of expect crime in Iceland to be very minor, relegated to interpersonal disputes or impulsive, drunken-type behavior.
Heists? It seems like it would be difficult to create a criminal conspiracy and carry it out when you stand a good chance of running into someone you might know, if not a relative of some kind, everywhere. And where are you gonna take something you stole? Your choices are kind of limited if they don't involve a boat or the middle of a glacier.
Or is there some weird Norse raider social pathology that nobody talks about going on in Iceland?
I guess I'm still missing out how something like virtualization doesn't make this a lot simpler for them, even if the whole site is running on non-virtualized hardware.
Usually we wouldn't P2V a very large bare metal system (ie, many TB of local disk), we would migrate apps and data to a newer platform running on thevirtualized platform, but I have seen a handful of those kinds of systems P2V'd first because of dubious source hardware or because the client wants to kick the rest of the upgrade down the road a while and just wants the source system in the VM environment.
Anyway, why not virtualize whatever it was they had?
I have this sneaking suspicion that Slashdot still runs on a ton of legacy code and systems that make migrating it far more complex than we think of for other systems. Based on my experience with the site, I don't think it's ever been owned by a particularly deep-pocketed outfit or one that has thought it's worth investing major money in for an overhaul. There was "beta", but as it turned out, fuck beta, as they said.
Still, I would kind of expect it to at least be modular enough (or made modular via virtualization) for the migration to be done in advance and tested thoroughly before final migration. It's not like there aren't many ways to do this pretty simply that are used every day, even for clunky, old applications systems that are "hard to migrate".
And why do the founders want to stay in charge once they've made a fortune?
I get why you would want some founders to stay in charge, there are certain businesses where the founder may actually provide significant product input or be deeply involved in design decisions due to specialized knowledge or experience. But in a lot of these businesses, once "version 1.0" comes out that actually implements the main idea, is the founder's further input really all that important? Especially with Snapchat, it's kind of a one-big-idea kind of company.
I would think VCs would be really interested in marginalizing the Spiegels with the idea that they don't really know how to run a giant company and they also run the risk of letting their egos run rampant and ruin the company since their self-image is so wed to it, especially as owner/managers, and it's not like they need him for more big ideas.
Are VCs all bought into the "genius CEO" concept so much that they fail to see the difference between an actual rare genius (maybe Page/Brin, Jobs, Musk) and a one-hit wonder?
And then I wonder why you'd want to bother sticking around to run a company like Snapchat once you've made a fortune. I mean, is all his Machiavellian bullshit at Snapchat really worth it? I suppose there's some aspect for entrepreneurs where money isn't the point, but I can't imagine Spiegel's Kremlin-level control at Snap is really all that energizing, it sounds very draining.
It's a long way from being torn on what Xi's motivations are and being undecided on whether totalitarian governments are a bad thing.
Totalitarian governments are a bad thing, I think China would have been MUCH better off overhauling their political system decades ago, but it's an open question whether anyone in China could have actually done that, even Deng, without facing revolt from the party or the military.
That being said, China is what China is and despite their problems they probably have made a lot of great strides in reforming Chinese society even if it hasn't involved any political reform. Liberalization of the economy HAS done a lot to not only materially improve life for the Chinese and whether the CCP like it or not it has also decentralized power in a lot of ways that aren't immediately recognizable as political.
In many ways, the greatest trick the West played on China was encouraging it to liberalize its economy. Liberalized economies undermine totalitarian governments long term.