For instance, it is likely that thousands of illicit phone calls and text messages are being made/sent on the 28,000 plus US commercial flights each day including during take-offs and landings, without any of them leading to air crashes that we know of.
How many million passenger miles have been flown since personal electronics have been common planes? And have ANY crashes been even remotely attributable to them?
I can only assume these rules are less about hard data and more about apocryphal information from pilots, a desire to impose decorum on the aircraft, and a desire to maintain an absolute economic monopoly on air-ground communications.
It's just my opinion, but Philips screw heads are only slightly better than slotted heads. It's still very easy to torque out of the opening. Square drive, Hex/Allen, Torx all allow much more torque to be applied to the screw without stripping the head. I notice in commercial applications, where driving a large number of fasteners quickly is important (home decking, trailer flooring) you almost always see square or Torx drive heads due to the positive driver/head linkup and the high torque that can be applied.
The non-conspiracy version of this story isn't that Apple's trying to screw the end user, but that they're using Loctite or some other screw fixative on the screws, the screws are torqued in tight and they have a history of stripping the screws to get them out.
I just find it curious they would use pentalobe instead of Torx, or to demonstrate some meanness, security torx.
It's frightening, because it's very easy and -- at least on the face of it -- desirable to be able to access anything from my iPhone -- Evernote, dropbox, email accounts, SSH, RDP sessions, much of it is *right there*.
I totally agree that prosecutors and the cops will sell the idea that proximate access makes for proximate data.
I guess if I was defending this, I'd ask the judge if during a proximate search my keys were found, does this give them probable cause to search every place those keys open, even though the places in question are not physically proximate?
I suspect we will lose more freedom on this issue, but I think they might require prima facie proof that the data was being accessed during the arrest, or make prima facie evidence that the data was not being accessed during the arrest and affirmative defense against the search.
We may also see more apps supporting secondary passwords or requiring passwords to access data every time the user wants it and not caching it locally or purging the cache very quickly.
I'm not a web developer, but isn't DOM manipulation, Ajax, etc dependent on Javascript execution?
I also notice that some web pages (ie, Facebook, NY Times) are very Javascript heavy. On the iPad, for example, these sites are much slower to interact with than other sites less Javascript heavy.
I find it less/not noticeable on a real PC, but more and more people use complex web apps heavy on Javascrpt I think it becomes more critical to have fast Javascript.
Let's assume for argument's sake that I'm stopped by the police and I'm arrested. My phone is unlocked and they start to search it.
Are they entitled to data only ON the phone, or are they allowed to use an application on the phone which allows access to data stored elsewhere on the phone?
In theory, an email client setup for IMAP doesn't store data on the phone -- messages are retrieved from the server. This glosses over caching, butassume the device could be setup to NOT cache messages locally (or background erase them after N seconds/minutes), the data isn't "on the phone" it's only being *presented* on the phone.
My vague understanding of searches when arrested is that proximate searches are OK, but with an always-connected network device, what's proximate, especially if (like almost all IMAP clients, even ones with very limited caching) there's no perceptible difference between data that's local and data that's on some server somewhere else?
Is the limit some dump of flash (and RAM, if they could do that)?
And why stop at smartphone application data? What if I have an RDP or a SSH/telnet app on my phone that gives them access to dozens of machines (which, in turn, may ALSO offer dozens of machines)? Are those remote systems, because they can be accessed as if local, also eligible for a search?
I guess what's scary is that it's not hard to see a slippery slope where anything the phone allows them into they have access to.
It's obvious the US does not intend to stop illegal immigrants form Mexico,
There is no "US intent" on this subject. The political left wants to legitimize the Mexicans as immigrants because it has both short-term value (votes of existing Mexican-American citizens) and longer-term demographic value as illegals gain citizenship and vote Democratic.
The Republicans want to keep Mexicans illegal, but largely wants them left alone to work in low-wage jobs. This keeps business happy and they fund the Republican party. Business also likes that mass immigration suppresses wages and provides a new population to sell crap to.
The Mexican financial elite and government want to unload as many as they can; Mexico's a train wreck of crime, corruption, restive states and economic malaise, and a smaller peasant population helps keep a lid on the domestic situation.
The end result? America flooded with Mexican illegals, because while nobody agrees with anyone's reasoning, they all *want* it to happen.
I see this as some kind of Verizon exclusive for a while. Apple probably had to give Verizon something to keep the phone from being junked up with VZW Crapware, and hotspot functionality was an easy one.
For one, it's an Android feature and Apple would like to sell iPhones to a lot of the people who bought Androids because it was either Verizon or nothing. For another, AT&T was a weak sister when it came to tethering and they probably won't whine about a short-term VZW exclusive iPhone feature they'd probably rather not support.
Long-term, it's hard not to see AT&T & VZW iPhones having the same feature sets eventually (within the limits of their respective network technologies, eg simultaneous voice/data) since the carriers are pretty much now directly competing. I know I wouldn't re-up with AT&T next summer if the iPhone for AT&T was somehow inferior to Verizon's model.
All in all, I think this will be a win for iPhone users. Apple is less beholden to one carrier, and the carriers are forced to keep up with each other's features & pricing.
That's pretty funny. If the US wanted him "renditioned", they would have had him already from the UK. He's much more likely to be safe from US rendition in Sweden.
However, in Sweden, he will have to get up on the stand and answer for his sexual behavior, and that's what he's really worried about.
It's not entirely clear from what I've read that he's an actual rapist, but it sure sounds like he's a real jerk.
9 years is a long time to do something like that. How did they catch him?
Was it on the factory/warehouse end? One gets the impression that they weren't really missing anything, at least for a long time.
Somehow it wouldn't surprise me if EMC actually bought their own parts off the second-hand market. Both for "intelligence" (ie, where are these parts originating) and to keep the used market supply of key parts constrained so that "official" new parts sell better.
...worked anywhere where someone actually swapped CPUs in a server from a real vendor (ie, not some BS whitebox)?
I *added* a CPU to an HP server once (single to dual CPUs) and it was super expensive and not all that easy to get the part. From HP it was OMFG-are-we-really-spending-this-kind-of-money expensive, a "re-certified" part from a third party was still way more than the $300 you'd spend for your home system as the part and its corresponding VRM were proprietary.
And the only reason it was done at all was a branch office needed a dual-CPU system for some application or other and management had one of their periodic "spending freezes" (which never seemed to apply to executive office space remodels or furniture...) that kept the "right" solution, a new box, from being purchased. We did buy the parts on individual invoices to avoid capex.
Anyway, nobody upgrades CPUs in major-vendor products. Too expensive relative to the benefit, especially on systems that are old enough to seem slow or considered lacking in power for some kind of repurposing.
While what you say makes sense, I think the entire philosophy is wrong. I think it's fueled by short term profiteering vs. investing for a profit.
Wider spreads and a more limited market were a disincentive for small-value, short-hold stock trading; they really didn't have any impact on long-term investing in stocks, which was more about buying, holding and collecting dividend checks. Mutual funds had to be more straightforward "baskets of stocks" and not complex, opaque investment vehicles with more churn than a pound of butter.
Basically, the market was more like what it should be for -- a place to invest on longer time horizons and a place for business to raise capital necessary to do something, not a quantitative casino where the house takes bets, makes bets and picks the winners.
Maybe I'm just nostalgic, but I can't help couple American economic decline with all of the short-term thinking associated with HFT, derivatives and all the other smoke and mirrors investing Wall Street has to offer.
I've noticed over the past year that whenever Chinese politics, government or policies are criticized across a range a websites, but particularly technology websites, there's an almost immediate anti-American backlash.
It makes me wonder -- how hard would it be to staff an office of a few hundred Chinese fluent in English and deploy them as "China Defenders" on English language web sites to "match" anti-Chinese sentiment with anti-American propaganda? My guess is that the Chinese could ramp this up to a few thousand people pretty easily.
My touchpad blows, too. It's supposed to be semi-multitouch and have some kind of click and sensitivity options, but it just seems to be inconsistent. I use a bluetooth mouse anytime I use my laptop more than about 5 minutes, so the inconsistent touchpad is less of an annoyance.
I dislike the "nipple" in the center of the keyboard, too, but fortunately that can be disabled completely.
I have an E6500 and several customers have E65xx models.
I've had mine for 18 months and it's been flawless with Windows 7 x64 as have the others running Windows 7 x86.
Two people are running XP on them and have had all manor of problems and what I've tracked down is that Dell's "official" Windows 7 wifi and network drivers are broken -- the devices don't work well with these drivers, cause odd problems unrelated to the drivers (ie, domain logins away from the domain basically hang forever).
I replaced the drivers with Intel-supplied drivers from Intel's web site and they work perfectly. My guess is Dell just didn't care about XP support.
Note that the original article talks about "further investigation"; it doesn't say "public denouncement". It is possible to carry out many stages of an investigation without making an open accusation or announcement.
In many cases, academics are highly competitive, as students compete for limited resources with zero sum outcomes, and not just good grades.
These resources can be money, research grants, access to certain professors, research positions, access to limited enrollment courses, foreign exchange, the list is endless.
In almost all of those cases, the people "investigating" you are the same people making decisions on whether to approve your thesis subject, grant application, etc. When two people with identical records compete for the same thing, the one with the cheating accusation will lose out, even if it was only a "subject of investigation" because the taint will never be eliminated and can't be conclusively disproven.
Except in the most egregiously obvious cases, students will often get one 'free' pass, just because their proctors and teachers recognize their own fallibility.
This part is laughable -- since when do teachers and proctors EVER recognize their own fallibility?
I think you're right. IMHO, the iPad display needs to be higher resolution. And if they ever made a 12" or even better, a 14" version, I'd be all over it -- magazines at actual magazine size, and with "retina" resolution, pretty darn comparable to magazine look. And much improved newspaper layout as well and better web site browsing (still a tad too much zoom & pan).
About the only other thing I'd also do would be more CPU -- I find some web sites with heavy javascript make typing and interaction laggy. OK, one more thing -- how about 128 or 256MB flash?
As others have pointed out, discrimination on origin isn't changed by encryption. The other problem is that many of the devices/services people want to use don't offer encryption -- I can't "enable" encryption watching Netflix streaming from my Tivo, and most high traffic services wouldn't offer it anyway due to the added cost and complexity.
I suspect there is some open source zealot going to beat me up for not using Linux to watch movies downloaded as torrents, where I can control every line of source code and configuration, but while *I* may have that technical ability, most people don't and even if you do, it means a pretty severe quality degradation overall (ie, selection, convenience, portability, etc).
A couple of years ago a friend and I went to a concert on a night it got to about -25F. We took side streets home due to black ice issues on the freeway (and slightly too much to drink..).
We noticed that at stoplights his Honda Odyssey's temperature guage actually went *down* at stoplights. We were at a particularly long light and noticed the heater air getting cooler; it changed quickly once we got moving again, but I think you can lose heat faster than you think in extreme temperatures.
Given the complete garbage put out by all three American car makers over an extended timeframe, I wouldn't count on Detroit getting anything right.
I'm sure they borrow the philosophy from computer hardware design -- "hardware bug? We'll fix it in the OS. OS guys? They'll fix it in the application. Application guys? The users will adjust their process. The users? We need to specify new hardware."
I'm sure in auto manufacturing it goes something like "Design problem? The engineers will fix it. Engineering says they'll fix it manufacturing. Manufacturing says they'll issue a service bulletin for dealers. The dealers say it's not an issue at all."
While some of the heroic recovery methods for getting data off old media, old drives, etc are impressive, it seems that the data is largely in a fairly straightforward format once it's pulled from the media -- ASCII or some other "native" format that is fairly straightforward to work with.
But what about binary data from old applications that only run on old operating systems that only support older hardware?
The example I think of is what we used to run into at my old job. Email for us started out as ccMail in the early 90s, switched to Groupwise 4.x, then Groupwise 5.x and from there to Exchange 2000. IIRC, ccMail didn't require any kind of database back end, it was all file sharing, but Groupwise 4.x and later 5.x were very database oriented and encrypted and 5.x was run without any filesharing. 5.x ran on Netware 4.1, and once we had migrated off of it totally by 2001 we had no systems running it, a stack of Arcserve backup DAT & DLT IV tapes with Netware compressed files written to them that were almost totally useless.
After the economy sank in 2002, we had a ton of layoffs and not a few employment lawsuits requesting emails from the Groupwise era which we could not satisfy. We still had the DLT drives, but the media was unreadable and even if it was, the data on the media wasn't usable unless restored with Arcserve for Netware to a Netware volume that supported compression, and even then there was no accessing the email itself without a functional Groupwise system running on Netware.
Probably a more trivial application via virtualization now, provided you have the media, licenses and know-how still, but I have to believe that there are many situations like this where you need to restore entire systems to get access to data.
It sounds a lot like the system Tivo uses (or used to use). I forget what channel it was on cable (A&E? Discovery?), but overnight the channel would do something very similar -- a field of blinking regions, used to either distribute software or video for the promotional videos.
I only ever saw this with my S2 Tivo because it was in the bedroom at the time, which I considered odd considering how I had it connected via Ethernet. I'm not sure if the newer boxes still use this method and I'm not getting up in the middle of the night to find out, either..
By 2040, oil will be, what, $500 a barrel -- if there's any "open" market at all and its not all locked up as part of a handful of nations' strategic military reserves.
Meaning the machine will be so ridiculously expensive to make due to even small dependencies on oil & oil-based products that it will never get built.
Slashdot Mirror
For instance, it is likely that thousands of illicit phone calls and text messages are being made/sent on the 28,000 plus US commercial flights each day including during take-offs and landings, without any of them leading to air crashes that we know of.
How many million passenger miles have been flown since personal electronics have been common planes? And have ANY crashes been even remotely attributable to them?
I can only assume these rules are less about hard data and more about apocryphal information from pilots, a desire to impose decorum on the aircraft, and a desire to maintain an absolute economic monopoly on air-ground communications.
It's just my opinion, but Philips screw heads are only slightly better than slotted heads. It's still very easy to torque out of the opening. Square drive, Hex/Allen, Torx all allow much more torque to be applied to the screw without stripping the head. I notice in commercial applications, where driving a large number of fasteners quickly is important (home decking, trailer flooring) you almost always see square or Torx drive heads due to the positive driver/head linkup and the high torque that can be applied.
The non-conspiracy version of this story isn't that Apple's trying to screw the end user, but that they're using Loctite or some other screw fixative on the screws, the screws are torqued in tight and they have a history of stripping the screws to get them out.
I just find it curious they would use pentalobe instead of Torx, or to demonstrate some meanness, security torx.
It's frightening, because it's very easy and -- at least on the face of it -- desirable to be able to access anything from my iPhone -- Evernote, dropbox, email accounts, SSH, RDP sessions, much of it is *right there*.
I totally agree that prosecutors and the cops will sell the idea that proximate access makes for proximate data.
I guess if I was defending this, I'd ask the judge if during a proximate search my keys were found, does this give them probable cause to search every place those keys open, even though the places in question are not physically proximate?
I suspect we will lose more freedom on this issue, but I think they might require prima facie proof that the data was being accessed during the arrest, or make prima facie evidence that the data was not being accessed during the arrest and affirmative defense against the search.
We may also see more apps supporting secondary passwords or requiring passwords to access data every time the user wants it and not caching it locally or purging the cache very quickly.
I'm not a web developer, but isn't DOM manipulation, Ajax, etc dependent on Javascript execution?
I also notice that some web pages (ie, Facebook, NY Times) are very Javascript heavy. On the iPad, for example, these sites are much slower to interact with than other sites less Javascript heavy.
I find it less/not noticeable on a real PC, but more and more people use complex web apps heavy on Javascrpt I think it becomes more critical to have fast Javascript.
Let's assume for argument's sake that I'm stopped by the police and I'm arrested. My phone is unlocked and they start to search it.
Are they entitled to data only ON the phone, or are they allowed to use an application on the phone which allows access to data stored elsewhere on the phone?
In theory, an email client setup for IMAP doesn't store data on the phone -- messages are retrieved from the server. This glosses over caching, butassume the device could be setup to NOT cache messages locally (or background erase them after N seconds/minutes), the data isn't "on the phone" it's only being *presented* on the phone.
My vague understanding of searches when arrested is that proximate searches are OK, but with an always-connected network device, what's proximate, especially if (like almost all IMAP clients, even ones with very limited caching) there's no perceptible difference between data that's local and data that's on some server somewhere else?
Is the limit some dump of flash (and RAM, if they could do that)?
And why stop at smartphone application data? What if I have an RDP or a SSH/telnet app on my phone that gives them access to dozens of machines (which, in turn, may ALSO offer dozens of machines)? Are those remote systems, because they can be accessed as if local, also eligible for a search?
I guess what's scary is that it's not hard to see a slippery slope where anything the phone allows them into they have access to.
....until I see the pictures.
It's obvious the US does not intend to stop illegal immigrants form Mexico,
There is no "US intent" on this subject. The political left wants to legitimize the Mexicans as immigrants because it has both short-term value (votes of existing Mexican-American citizens) and longer-term demographic value as illegals gain citizenship and vote Democratic.
The Republicans want to keep Mexicans illegal, but largely wants them left alone to work in low-wage jobs. This keeps business happy and they fund the Republican party. Business also likes that mass immigration suppresses wages and provides a new population to sell crap to.
The Mexican financial elite and government want to unload as many as they can; Mexico's a train wreck of crime, corruption, restive states and economic malaise, and a smaller peasant population helps keep a lid on the domestic situation.
The end result? America flooded with Mexican illegals, because while nobody agrees with anyone's reasoning, they all *want* it to happen.
It doesn't mute videos, which I find entirely annoying, especially when my wife wonders what Im watching.
I see this as some kind of Verizon exclusive for a while. Apple probably had to give Verizon something to keep the phone from being junked up with VZW Crapware, and hotspot functionality was an easy one.
For one, it's an Android feature and Apple would like to sell iPhones to a lot of the people who bought Androids because it was either Verizon or nothing. For another, AT&T was a weak sister when it came to tethering and they probably won't whine about a short-term VZW exclusive iPhone feature they'd probably rather not support.
Long-term, it's hard not to see AT&T & VZW iPhones having the same feature sets eventually (within the limits of their respective network technologies, eg simultaneous voice/data) since the carriers are pretty much now directly competing. I know I wouldn't re-up with AT&T next summer if the iPhone for AT&T was somehow inferior to Verizon's model.
All in all, I think this will be a win for iPhone users. Apple is less beholden to one carrier, and the carriers are forced to keep up with each other's features & pricing.
No, but sex without consent is, and from what I've read he did not necessarily have consent for some of his sexcapades.
It's up to a judge & jury to decide if what he did was illegal, the prosecutor only has to decide if its worthy of prosecution.
That's pretty funny. If the US wanted him "renditioned", they would have had him already from the UK. He's much more likely to be safe from US rendition in Sweden.
However, in Sweden, he will have to get up on the stand and answer for his sexual behavior, and that's what he's really worried about.
It's not entirely clear from what I've read that he's an actual rapist, but it sure sounds like he's a real jerk.
9 years is a long time to do something like that. How did they catch him?
Was it on the factory/warehouse end? One gets the impression that they weren't really missing anything, at least for a long time.
Somehow it wouldn't surprise me if EMC actually bought their own parts off the second-hand market. Both for "intelligence" (ie, where are these parts originating) and to keep the used market supply of key parts constrained so that "official" new parts sell better.
...worked anywhere where someone actually swapped CPUs in a server from a real vendor (ie, not some BS whitebox)?
I *added* a CPU to an HP server once (single to dual CPUs) and it was super expensive and not all that easy to get the part. From HP it was OMFG-are-we-really-spending-this-kind-of-money expensive, a "re-certified" part from a third party was still way more than the $300 you'd spend for your home system as the part and its corresponding VRM were proprietary.
And the only reason it was done at all was a branch office needed a dual-CPU system for some application or other and management had one of their periodic "spending freezes" (which never seemed to apply to executive office space remodels or furniture...) that kept the "right" solution, a new box, from being purchased. We did buy the parts on individual invoices to avoid capex.
Anyway, nobody upgrades CPUs in major-vendor products. Too expensive relative to the benefit, especially on systems that are old enough to seem slow or considered lacking in power for some kind of repurposing.
While what you say makes sense, I think the entire philosophy is wrong. I think it's fueled by short term profiteering vs. investing for a profit.
Wider spreads and a more limited market were a disincentive for small-value, short-hold stock trading; they really didn't have any impact on long-term investing in stocks, which was more about buying, holding and collecting dividend checks. Mutual funds had to be more straightforward "baskets of stocks" and not complex, opaque investment vehicles with more churn than a pound of butter.
Basically, the market was more like what it should be for -- a place to invest on longer time horizons and a place for business to raise capital necessary to do something, not a quantitative casino where the house takes bets, makes bets and picks the winners.
Maybe I'm just nostalgic, but I can't help couple American economic decline with all of the short-term thinking associated with HFT, derivatives and all the other smoke and mirrors investing Wall Street has to offer.
I've noticed over the past year that whenever Chinese politics, government or policies are criticized across a range a websites, but particularly technology websites, there's an almost immediate anti-American backlash.
It makes me wonder -- how hard would it be to staff an office of a few hundred Chinese fluent in English and deploy them as "China Defenders" on English language web sites to "match" anti-Chinese sentiment with anti-American propaganda? My guess is that the Chinese could ramp this up to a few thousand people pretty easily.
My touchpad blows, too. It's supposed to be semi-multitouch and have some kind of click and sensitivity options, but it just seems to be inconsistent. I use a bluetooth mouse anytime I use my laptop more than about 5 minutes, so the inconsistent touchpad is less of an annoyance.
I dislike the "nipple" in the center of the keyboard, too, but fortunately that can be disabled completely.
I have an E6500 and several customers have E65xx models.
I've had mine for 18 months and it's been flawless with Windows 7 x64 as have the others running Windows 7 x86.
Two people are running XP on them and have had all manor of problems and what I've tracked down is that Dell's "official" Windows 7 wifi and network drivers are broken -- the devices don't work well with these drivers, cause odd problems unrelated to the drivers (ie, domain logins away from the domain basically hang forever).
I replaced the drivers with Intel-supplied drivers from Intel's web site and they work perfectly. My guess is Dell just didn't care about XP support.
Note that the original article talks about "further investigation"; it doesn't say "public denouncement". It is possible to carry out many stages of an investigation without making an open accusation or announcement.
In many cases, academics are highly competitive, as students compete for limited resources with zero sum outcomes, and not just good grades.
These resources can be money, research grants, access to certain professors, research positions, access to limited enrollment courses, foreign exchange, the list is endless.
In almost all of those cases, the people "investigating" you are the same people making decisions on whether to approve your thesis subject, grant application, etc. When two people with identical records compete for the same thing, the one with the cheating accusation will lose out, even if it was only a "subject of investigation" because the taint will never be eliminated and can't be conclusively disproven.
Except in the most egregiously obvious cases, students will often get one 'free' pass, just because their proctors and teachers recognize their own fallibility.
This part is laughable -- since when do teachers and proctors EVER recognize their own fallibility?
I think you're right. IMHO, the iPad display needs to be higher resolution. And if they ever made a 12" or even better, a 14" version, I'd be all over it -- magazines at actual magazine size, and with "retina" resolution, pretty darn comparable to magazine look. And much improved newspaper layout as well and better web site browsing (still a tad too much zoom & pan).
About the only other thing I'd also do would be more CPU -- I find some web sites with heavy javascript make typing and interaction laggy. OK, one more thing -- how about 128 or 256MB flash?
Overall, though, I really like my iPad.
As others have pointed out, discrimination on origin isn't changed by encryption. The other problem is that many of the devices/services people want to use don't offer encryption -- I can't "enable" encryption watching Netflix streaming from my Tivo, and most high traffic services wouldn't offer it anyway due to the added cost and complexity.
I suspect there is some open source zealot going to beat me up for not using Linux to watch movies downloaded as torrents, where I can control every line of source code and configuration, but while *I* may have that technical ability, most people don't and even if you do, it means a pretty severe quality degradation overall (ie, selection, convenience, portability, etc).
A couple of years ago a friend and I went to a concert on a night it got to about -25F. We took side streets home due to black ice issues on the freeway (and slightly too much to drink..).
We noticed that at stoplights his Honda Odyssey's temperature guage actually went *down* at stoplights. We were at a particularly long light and noticed the heater air getting cooler; it changed quickly once we got moving again, but I think you can lose heat faster than you think in extreme temperatures.
Given the complete garbage put out by all three American car makers over an extended timeframe, I wouldn't count on Detroit getting anything right.
I'm sure they borrow the philosophy from computer hardware design -- "hardware bug? We'll fix it in the OS. OS guys? They'll fix it in the application. Application guys? The users will adjust their process. The users? We need to specify new hardware."
I'm sure in auto manufacturing it goes something like "Design problem? The engineers will fix it. Engineering says they'll fix it manufacturing. Manufacturing says they'll issue a service bulletin for dealers. The dealers say it's not an issue at all."
While some of the heroic recovery methods for getting data off old media, old drives, etc are impressive, it seems that the data is largely in a fairly straightforward format once it's pulled from the media -- ASCII or some other "native" format that is fairly straightforward to work with.
But what about binary data from old applications that only run on old operating systems that only support older hardware?
The example I think of is what we used to run into at my old job. Email for us started out as ccMail in the early 90s, switched to Groupwise 4.x, then Groupwise 5.x and from there to Exchange 2000. IIRC, ccMail didn't require any kind of database back end, it was all file sharing, but Groupwise 4.x and later 5.x were very database oriented and encrypted and 5.x was run without any filesharing. 5.x ran on Netware 4.1, and once we had migrated off of it totally by 2001 we had no systems running it, a stack of Arcserve backup DAT & DLT IV tapes with Netware compressed files written to them that were almost totally useless.
After the economy sank in 2002, we had a ton of layoffs and not a few employment lawsuits requesting emails from the Groupwise era which we could not satisfy. We still had the DLT drives, but the media was unreadable and even if it was, the data on the media wasn't usable unless restored with Arcserve for Netware to a Netware volume that supported compression, and even then there was no accessing the email itself without a functional Groupwise system running on Netware.
Probably a more trivial application via virtualization now, provided you have the media, licenses and know-how still, but I have to believe that there are many situations like this where you need to restore entire systems to get access to data.
It sounds a lot like the system Tivo uses (or used to use). I forget what channel it was on cable (A&E? Discovery?), but overnight the channel would do something very similar -- a field of blinking regions, used to either distribute software or video for the promotional videos.
I only ever saw this with my S2 Tivo because it was in the bedroom at the time, which I considered odd considering how I had it connected via Ethernet. I'm not sure if the newer boxes still use this method and I'm not getting up in the middle of the night to find out, either..
By 2040, oil will be, what, $500 a barrel -- if there's any "open" market at all and its not all locked up as part of a handful of nations' strategic military reserves.
Meaning the machine will be so ridiculously expensive to make due to even small dependencies on oil & oil-based products that it will never get built.