Can you imagine having to wait for, say, Dell to OK to every package for your next "apt-get update"?
Except Dell will do just this if the update has anything to do with hardware, and in most server environments a lot of it does. I've done the dosey doe with Dell on their server platforms with drivers, debating whether my problems are due to the vendor-supplied drivers sucking or whether the Dell-provided drivers six months behind the OEM vendor are at fault.
I think the problem carriers worry about is unapproved software that effects their networks. My guess is this is pretty remote in reality. but shikata ga nai.
More than a burner, they should coordinate their burners. Load them up with tantalizing information that wastes a ton of investigation time, but being careful not to have any actual prosecutor conspiracies.
Use burners with known weaknesses or backdoors and set them up with passcodes or weak encryption so they look legitimate but are easily broken with diagnostic software.
Emails about stuff supposedly buried in parks, or sunk in lakes at specific GPS coordinates. Treasure-map fantasies. Rent a storage space and decorate it with Independence Day decorations, but make it sound like it's full of anarchist equipment.
Bonus points if you can capture video streams of the Feds digging up a park or walking into a storage locker filled with decorations.
If you did it right, they might get tired of grabbing phones with the idea that they won't know which ones have real solid info and which ones will leave them chasing their tails.
There's a whole world of people for whom the bargain side of everything matters more than the thing they got a bargain on.
My dad is like this -- he will always put up with inferior quality or drastically reduced choice if it saves him a buck and it really has nothing to do with his financial status. In fact, he often has broken or otherwise unusable things cluttering his life that he can't use but can't get rid of because he "spent good money on them"
Meanwhile, he spends so much time shopping for a low price that he doesn't have much time left to enjoy the thing he was looking for a bargain on or the experience is so degraded by low quality that he doesn't get any enjoyment out of it.
In terms of this, it's ridiculously expensive for an average at-home movie night. There's a million movie choices for $5 or less at home.
But there's a lot of ways I could see $30 being reasonable -- a big new movie for a group, people with kids who'd spend $30 on a babysitter alone, etc. It kind of doesn't have to be the greatest movie ever made, because it's about the larger experience. Sure, you could do it 6 months later when it hits Redbox, but by then the impetus is gone because it's just another title.
It closely parallels the road system -- government builds the roads, but they don't deploy commercial services on the roads themselves -- ie, they don't get into the taxi business, the delivery business, etc.
I think it's telling and strange that they complain about this. For one, it says that they are less profitable on actual services delivered over the wire because when faced with competition where pricing is solely determined by content and not delivery.
Strange, because I would kind of expect that physical plant maintenance would be expensive. I see Comcast trucks all the time, which assume at least some percentage of involve physical plant work. If a city put in municipal fiber Comcast could connect subscribers to, I would expect that they would be thrilled to dump a shitload of plant maintenance overhead.
And at some point in the future, I would expect both competitors running fiber to the home and signaling limits on coax cable to render coax plants non-competitive, meaning that cable providers are sitting on something of a timebomb of aging infrastructure which will be very costly to upgrade.
I've often wondered if a smarter strategy for cable providers might not be offering to sell their municipal wire plant (coax to the house plus fiber distribution network) to municipalities. The cable company could spin off an independent plant management company which would actually run the plant -- I would expect any municipal plant to be managed under contract by a private entity anyway. The municipality gets an instant network to homes plus fiber distribution without having to do any construction and the cable company unloads a physical plant which will need a long-term investment to remain viable.
The problem is, does screaming legalese and acts of Congress when you're standing there in the dealership to pick up your car (late for daycare pickup or something) and some low-wage flunky is telling you that you owe $1,787 because the repair isn't covered by the warranty really get you very far?
Sure, you might be *right* but they can say no, not give you your car back until you pay, and generally make your life miserable until you sue them and then they can drag that out until it costs you 10x what the invoice was.
I recently had some work done where the invoice exceeded a written estimate by 20% and explaining the fact that such an overage is illegal in this state really was not effective. They were literally more afraid of me screaming on social media or disputing the charge on my card than they were in breaking the law.
The legalese is great idea, but unless you can call the cops and get somebody arrested for violating consumer protection laws, the imbalance between a large business and the average consumer is so great that its almost like having no protection at all.
I was thinking about this yesterday in a similar way, how once a product's core functionality reaches a certain level you reach a point in its life cycle where as a user you're at risk of significant instability.
Inevitably the desire to add new features to justify additional licensing fees will lead to the "need" to rewrite or significantly restructure the core functionality and they never get that right the first time, often plunging products back to levels of instability not seen in many versions. And often not fixed for a long time, either, as feature bloat dilutes engineering resources and product managers and marketing fall on their sword to preserve the new version.
I sometimes wonder if a strategy to deal with this wouldn't be planning on switching to a rising competitor, even if it meant suffering a competitor's marginally lower stability. The idea being that the competitor hasn't hit a functionality & stability plateau yet and will be mostly increasing stability first and functionality second.
Since we have opioid receptors and endogenous opioids, it would stand to reason that receptors and endogenous opioid production would vary among the population.
So perception of pain is likely to vary in the population as well, as not everyone will produce the same amount of endogenous opioids.
I'd wager that people prone to addiction may produce fewer endogenous opioids or have a greater number of receptors, which causes them to respond more strongly to opioid medications.
I also wonder if below average opioid production isn't somehow conceptually similar to abnormal serotonin levels, making those individuals prone to mood states where opioids act as something like an anti-depressant.
Many addicts who sustain stable maintenance doses report that it makes them "feel normal". Perhaps these are individuals who have subnormal endogenous opiate production and those that stabilize on maintenance doses of opiates are in effect treating a mood disorder caused by low opiate levels.
Such a theory would go a long way towards explaining why millions of people who get opioid prescriptions don't develop addictions. I had half my ring finger amputated after an accident and took oxycodone for months on a regular basis and just kind of stopped without any cravings or side effects.
Most boats down to even 10 meter recreational vessels already have pretty good autopilots, often integrating cartography, bathymetry and radar, but they don't always work that well in close approaches due to shifting channels, local currents and tides.
Most ports have professional pilots that bring large ships into harbors because expertise is needed in those local features, and they might also require tugs, too, for precision movement.
Any globe you buy these days is a cardboard or plastic sphere usually with printed strips glued to the sphere. Are these accurate considering they are actually on a sphere and thus shouldn't suffer from spherical to flat distortion?
And if a physical globe is accurate, why can't they just take all the strips they would normally glue onto the globe and lay them out flat, even if the seams don't line up when flat?
I saw the projection they are advancing and it looks really distorted compared to an actual globe. Whether it's a good projection or not, but of all the dozens of possible projections it looked like it was picked because it makes Africa look much larger, as if that alone would make people stop being racist.
I'd like Amazon to quit being Ebay. Filter off the crap, stop merging SKUs with third party sellers who often sell old revs, fake items or other problematic inventory. Be more aggressive about knock-off products.
If I want to buy a shitty Chinese clone that's probably been already opened, I'll go to Ebay, thanks, or better yet, skip Ebay and go to Craigslist.
If #3 happens, it will be a race-related claim initially and not be relief granted to the general population.
I think the easier solution is to lower the bar for bankruptcy discharge of student loan debt or imposed reductions during bankruptcy.
The devil will be in the details to keep it from becoming abused, but if lenders face increased risks on debt discharge they will end up loaning less money and force educational institutions to figure out how to charge less.
Who knows, maybe lenders could consider taking some kind of underwriting interest in their borrowers education -- is the debt load in line with earnings prospects? How can we help borrowers to become better debt risks, such as employment assistance for unemployed borrowers?
I also think the resort-like expectations of college students is crazy. I went to college in '85 at a well-funded state institution and you got a small box to share with another student and a locker-room style bathroom down the hall. These days, people expect a luxury apartment, private baths, and so on. I can't believe it.
The problem on the ground in New Zealand seems to be something of a side effect of being New Zealand -- a small yet prosperous nation at the end of the world and the end of the supply chain. They kind of need to be an attractive marketplace for sellers otherwise they may not be worth the effort of supplying.
But my problem with meta-national tax strategies isn't really with the avoidance of taxes so much, although slightly irksome. Apple does pay a lot of taxes, although perhaps not enough to specific jurisdictions. If anything, I think Apple owe the US government more as it is the civil authority with the most clout to protect its intellectual property and business interests.
My problem is that so many of these big companies are so profitable yet they just hoard the profits without doing much of anything with them but dump them in short term cash-equivalent securities. They invest tiny portions in R&D, pay out tiny portions in dividends, pay large executive bonuses and then sit on the rest, mostly using it to buy up products that challenge their market dominance.
This last bit skews the larger innovation landscape through perverse motivations on innovators who see winning the buyout lottery as the main end-goal in innovation. Instead of focusing on creating new companies with competitive products, they create new companies that look like competitive products but end up just being buyout bait.
IMHO, the main problem with our current iteration of capitalism is that it enables hoarding of capital and hoarded capital doesn't get put efficiently to work in the economy, and only seems to get put to work staving off competition.
Sure, as a side affect, perhaps this reduces the theft of devices to some degree. I argue that is merely a minor side affect. Thieves are going to grab any device they have a good opportunity to take, because it could be an Android phone, or maybe an iPhone that was not registered with iCloud's Find my Device. But I argue the primary purpose is to increase Apple's profit margins further by "destroying" a significant number of devices that cannot be used by anyone else.
Before they cracked down with activation lock, the argument was that WITHOUT activation lock mobile phone makers were basically profiting from theft because it was so easy to steal a phone and sell it on the black market.
So which is it -- they're ripping us off by limiting post-purchase ownership, or they're ripping us off by making the devices easy to steal?
In your case (which is really pretty niche, actually) I would think that the state would provide proof of purchase of some kind which would let you go into an Apple store and have the device factory reset since you have basically state-sponsored proof of your legitimate ownership.
It'd be impressive if someone could break out of an ESXi hypervisor and then compromise vCenter. Maybe have some kind of command/control daemon on vCenter allowing implanting VMs.
But these are very small targets, and shooting them any time they are not obligingly hovering in place is a tricky proposition.
That's why I think a gatling gun is the right idea, you can put a lot of rounds into the air. If you get the projectiles to be negligible on landing you have gone a long way to solving the problem. We already have a ton of gatling guns, so designing an entirely new weapon systems seems a waste of money if we can just tweak the ammo.
It seems worse than that. Blue collar jobs have a metric assload of harsh rules that regulate everything and make it sound more like a prison sentence than a job.
But you walk into even the lowest end white collar job, the rules are in some dusty HR handbook that nobody gives a shit about.
On top of that bullets have a higher chance of killing someone on the ground vs a missile used as an intercept device.
This is kind of a solved problem already with anti-aircraft guns, they usually have combination fusing on their projectiles, impact and a timer fuse so that the projectile will explode in the sky before landing, which is also useful for zone fire. So you can fire them in built-up areas and not end up shelling the civilians underneath the ballistic path.
But I think a better solution is coming up with new projectile options for existing 7.62mm and.50 cal Gatling guns. Most drones are pretty fragile and low altitude and even if you don't care about what's down range, it doesn't make any more sense to shoot a battery powered drone with a 150 grain or 650 grain lead slug than it does a Patriot missile.
For 7.62mm guns, a jacketed polymer core would make a lot of sense. It would reduce the range and make the gravity terminal velocity negligible. For.50 cal, you could use a sabot that held multiple smaller polymer slugs, improving the amount of fire on target as well.
Variations on this using self-feeding shotgun-type shells would also make sense using polymer projectiles, although existing small lead shot is already pretty harmless at terminal gravity velocity (we'd get rained on at the local shotgun range whenever the duck tower was in use, it was like a handful of sand thrown in the air).
One, is long-term engineering investment. HDDs have been around for decades and current HDDs have the benefit of years of incremental engineering improvement to solve a lot of problems that cause premature failure -- components, manufacturing, software and so on.
SSDs have only been around for maybe a decade and the technology package has been rapidly evolving, including the core storage technology, NAND, so there's still a process of honing the engineering associated with them. Obviously they're advancing by leaps and bounds as cheap consumer models can take PBs of writes without failure of late.
In my specific case, I was talking about a (moderate) misuse of consumer grade SSDs. They're not designed for heavy, write-intensive workloads in more advanced storage environments (RAID, multi-node shared access, server workloads) and NAND flash simply has a durability limit. Using them in those situations is pushing them to the limit of their engineering and premature failure is pretty likely.
My sense is that the *better* drives (like 850 Pros) have kind of moved past a reliability threshold and their failure rate will be less than generally expected in those edge roles. The failure margin will be more than HDDs but the performance margin will be so higher than HDDs that the trade is worth it.
I think there's always that low grade war between HR and line management. HR trying to exercise some level of control over the work force (for good or ill) and line management trying to make personnel decisions without HR's bureaucracy (for good or ill).
I think this is a case that got snagged into HR's orbit and judged a high litigation risk and thus they took the loophole to rescind the offer.
Or it could have had nothing to do with litigation risk and been simply a pissing match between HR and a line manager who didn't care for their rules.
The problem is that existing hardware isn't available forever. Standards change and the underlying hardware changes and you find your $stable_version doesn't have drivers for it.
In theory, virtualization will extend those lifetimes even longer, and it sure seems to be a common use case -- but even hypervisors end support for operating systems.
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Can you imagine having to wait for, say, Dell to OK to every package for your next "apt-get update"?
Except Dell will do just this if the update has anything to do with hardware, and in most server environments a lot of it does. I've done the dosey doe with Dell on their server platforms with drivers, debating whether my problems are due to the vendor-supplied drivers sucking or whether the Dell-provided drivers six months behind the OEM vendor are at fault.
I think the problem carriers worry about is unapproved software that effects their networks. My guess is this is pretty remote in reality. but shikata ga nai.
More than a burner, they should coordinate their burners. Load them up with tantalizing information that wastes a ton of investigation time, but being careful not to have any actual prosecutor conspiracies.
Use burners with known weaknesses or backdoors and set them up with passcodes or weak encryption so they look legitimate but are easily broken with diagnostic software.
Emails about stuff supposedly buried in parks, or sunk in lakes at specific GPS coordinates. Treasure-map fantasies. Rent a storage space and decorate it with Independence Day decorations, but make it sound like it's full of anarchist equipment.
Bonus points if you can capture video streams of the Feds digging up a park or walking into a storage locker filled with decorations.
If you did it right, they might get tired of grabbing phones with the idea that they won't know which ones have real solid info and which ones will leave them chasing their tails.
There's a whole world of people for whom the bargain side of everything matters more than the thing they got a bargain on.
My dad is like this -- he will always put up with inferior quality or drastically reduced choice if it saves him a buck and it really has nothing to do with his financial status. In fact, he often has broken or otherwise unusable things cluttering his life that he can't use but can't get rid of because he "spent good money on them"
Meanwhile, he spends so much time shopping for a low price that he doesn't have much time left to enjoy the thing he was looking for a bargain on or the experience is so degraded by low quality that he doesn't get any enjoyment out of it.
In terms of this, it's ridiculously expensive for an average at-home movie night. There's a million movie choices for $5 or less at home.
But there's a lot of ways I could see $30 being reasonable -- a big new movie for a group, people with kids who'd spend $30 on a babysitter alone, etc. It kind of doesn't have to be the greatest movie ever made, because it's about the larger experience. Sure, you could do it 6 months later when it hits Redbox, but by then the impetus is gone because it's just another title.
Yeah, but I see the bucket lift fairly often and they don't send that to someone's house.
Yes, this is the model that makes the most sense.
It closely parallels the road system -- government builds the roads, but they don't deploy commercial services on the roads themselves -- ie, they don't get into the taxi business, the delivery business, etc.
I think it's telling and strange that they complain about this. For one, it says that they are less profitable on actual services delivered over the wire because when faced with competition where pricing is solely determined by content and not delivery.
Strange, because I would kind of expect that physical plant maintenance would be expensive. I see Comcast trucks all the time, which assume at least some percentage of involve physical plant work. If a city put in municipal fiber Comcast could connect subscribers to, I would expect that they would be thrilled to dump a shitload of plant maintenance overhead.
And at some point in the future, I would expect both competitors running fiber to the home and signaling limits on coax cable to render coax plants non-competitive, meaning that cable providers are sitting on something of a timebomb of aging infrastructure which will be very costly to upgrade.
I've often wondered if a smarter strategy for cable providers might not be offering to sell their municipal wire plant (coax to the house plus fiber distribution network) to municipalities. The cable company could spin off an independent plant management company which would actually run the plant -- I would expect any municipal plant to be managed under contract by a private entity anyway. The municipality gets an instant network to homes plus fiber distribution without having to do any construction and the cable company unloads a physical plant which will need a long-term investment to remain viable.
This is the 2nd winter in a row with less than average snow and higher than average temps. I certainly don't mind.
The best part is that it extends boating season by a month, another month when I get to run twin 350s and burn 20 gallons an hour!
If I can keep it up I may be able to warm it up to get another month!
The problem is, does screaming legalese and acts of Congress when you're standing there in the dealership to pick up your car (late for daycare pickup or something) and some low-wage flunky is telling you that you owe $1,787 because the repair isn't covered by the warranty really get you very far?
Sure, you might be *right* but they can say no, not give you your car back until you pay, and generally make your life miserable until you sue them and then they can drag that out until it costs you 10x what the invoice was.
I recently had some work done where the invoice exceeded a written estimate by 20% and explaining the fact that such an overage is illegal in this state really was not effective. They were literally more afraid of me screaming on social media or disputing the charge on my card than they were in breaking the law.
The legalese is great idea, but unless you can call the cops and get somebody arrested for violating consumer protection laws, the imbalance between a large business and the average consumer is so great that its almost like having no protection at all.
I was thinking about this yesterday in a similar way, how once a product's core functionality reaches a certain level you reach a point in its life cycle where as a user you're at risk of significant instability.
Inevitably the desire to add new features to justify additional licensing fees will lead to the "need" to rewrite or significantly restructure the core functionality and they never get that right the first time, often plunging products back to levels of instability not seen in many versions. And often not fixed for a long time, either, as feature bloat dilutes engineering resources and product managers and marketing fall on their sword to preserve the new version.
I sometimes wonder if a strategy to deal with this wouldn't be planning on switching to a rising competitor, even if it meant suffering a competitor's marginally lower stability. The idea being that the competitor hasn't hit a functionality & stability plateau yet and will be mostly increasing stability first and functionality second.
Since we have opioid receptors and endogenous opioids, it would stand to reason that receptors and endogenous opioid production would vary among the population.
So perception of pain is likely to vary in the population as well, as not everyone will produce the same amount of endogenous opioids.
I'd wager that people prone to addiction may produce fewer endogenous opioids or have a greater number of receptors, which causes them to respond more strongly to opioid medications.
I also wonder if below average opioid production isn't somehow conceptually similar to abnormal serotonin levels, making those individuals prone to mood states where opioids act as something like an anti-depressant.
Many addicts who sustain stable maintenance doses report that it makes them "feel normal". Perhaps these are individuals who have subnormal endogenous opiate production and those that stabilize on maintenance doses of opiates are in effect treating a mood disorder caused by low opiate levels.
Such a theory would go a long way towards explaining why millions of people who get opioid prescriptions don't develop addictions. I had half my ring finger amputated after an accident and took oxycodone for months on a regular basis and just kind of stopped without any cravings or side effects.
Most boats down to even 10 meter recreational vessels already have pretty good autopilots, often integrating cartography, bathymetry and radar, but they don't always work that well in close approaches due to shifting channels, local currents and tides.
Most ports have professional pilots that bring large ships into harbors because expertise is needed in those local features, and they might also require tugs, too, for precision movement.
Any globe you buy these days is a cardboard or plastic sphere usually with printed strips glued to the sphere. Are these accurate considering they are actually on a sphere and thus shouldn't suffer from spherical to flat distortion?
And if a physical globe is accurate, why can't they just take all the strips they would normally glue onto the globe and lay them out flat, even if the seams don't line up when flat?
I saw the projection they are advancing and it looks really distorted compared to an actual globe. Whether it's a good projection or not, but of all the dozens of possible projections it looked like it was picked because it makes Africa look much larger, as if that alone would make people stop being racist.
I'd like Amazon to quit being Ebay. Filter off the crap, stop merging SKUs with third party sellers who often sell old revs, fake items or other problematic inventory. Be more aggressive about knock-off products.
If I want to buy a shitty Chinese clone that's probably been already opened, I'll go to Ebay, thanks, or better yet, skip Ebay and go to Craigslist.
I'd like to remind them as a low-UID Slashdot poster I can be helpful in rounding up others to toil in their investigatory bureaucracies.
If #3 happens, it will be a race-related claim initially and not be relief granted to the general population.
I think the easier solution is to lower the bar for bankruptcy discharge of student loan debt or imposed reductions during bankruptcy.
The devil will be in the details to keep it from becoming abused, but if lenders face increased risks on debt discharge they will end up loaning less money and force educational institutions to figure out how to charge less.
Who knows, maybe lenders could consider taking some kind of underwriting interest in their borrowers education -- is the debt load in line with earnings prospects? How can we help borrowers to become better debt risks, such as employment assistance for unemployed borrowers?
I also think the resort-like expectations of college students is crazy. I went to college in '85 at a well-funded state institution and you got a small box to share with another student and a locker-room style bathroom down the hall. These days, people expect a luxury apartment, private baths, and so on. I can't believe it.
The problem on the ground in New Zealand seems to be something of a side effect of being New Zealand -- a small yet prosperous nation at the end of the world and the end of the supply chain. They kind of need to be an attractive marketplace for sellers otherwise they may not be worth the effort of supplying.
But my problem with meta-national tax strategies isn't really with the avoidance of taxes so much, although slightly irksome. Apple does pay a lot of taxes, although perhaps not enough to specific jurisdictions. If anything, I think Apple owe the US government more as it is the civil authority with the most clout to protect its intellectual property and business interests.
My problem is that so many of these big companies are so profitable yet they just hoard the profits without doing much of anything with them but dump them in short term cash-equivalent securities. They invest tiny portions in R&D, pay out tiny portions in dividends, pay large executive bonuses and then sit on the rest, mostly using it to buy up products that challenge their market dominance.
This last bit skews the larger innovation landscape through perverse motivations on innovators who see winning the buyout lottery as the main end-goal in innovation. Instead of focusing on creating new companies with competitive products, they create new companies that look like competitive products but end up just being buyout bait.
IMHO, the main problem with our current iteration of capitalism is that it enables hoarding of capital and hoarded capital doesn't get put efficiently to work in the economy, and only seems to get put to work staving off competition.
Sure, as a side affect, perhaps this reduces the theft of devices to some degree. I argue that is merely a minor side affect. Thieves are going to grab any device they have a good opportunity to take, because it could be an Android phone, or maybe an iPhone that was not registered with iCloud's Find my Device. But I argue the primary purpose is to increase Apple's profit margins further by "destroying" a significant number of devices that cannot be used by anyone else.
Before they cracked down with activation lock, the argument was that WITHOUT activation lock mobile phone makers were basically profiting from theft because it was so easy to steal a phone and sell it on the black market.
So which is it -- they're ripping us off by limiting post-purchase ownership, or they're ripping us off by making the devices easy to steal?
In your case (which is really pretty niche, actually) I would think that the state would provide proof of purchase of some kind which would let you go into an Apple store and have the device factory reset since you have basically state-sponsored proof of your legitimate ownership.
I really wouldn't want to ever implement and manage WinRM site-wide though until it was super mature.
Some kind of key management fuckup and you're left with a pile of encrypted gibberish.
But only workstation.
It'd be impressive if someone could break out of an ESXi hypervisor and then compromise vCenter. Maybe have some kind of command/control daemon on vCenter allowing implanting VMs.
The historical way this problem has been solved has been for the larger people to simply take the surplus from the smaller people.
But these are very small targets, and shooting them any time they are not obligingly hovering in place is a tricky proposition.
That's why I think a gatling gun is the right idea, you can put a lot of rounds into the air. If you get the projectiles to be negligible on landing you have gone a long way to solving the problem. We already have a ton of gatling guns, so designing an entirely new weapon systems seems a waste of money if we can just tweak the ammo.
It seems worse than that. Blue collar jobs have a metric assload of harsh rules that regulate everything and make it sound more like a prison sentence than a job.
But you walk into even the lowest end white collar job, the rules are in some dusty HR handbook that nobody gives a shit about.
On top of that bullets have a higher chance of killing someone on the ground vs a missile used as an intercept device.
This is kind of a solved problem already with anti-aircraft guns, they usually have combination fusing on their projectiles, impact and a timer fuse so that the projectile will explode in the sky before landing, which is also useful for zone fire. So you can fire them in built-up areas and not end up shelling the civilians underneath the ballistic path.
But I think a better solution is coming up with new projectile options for existing 7.62mm and .50 cal Gatling guns. Most drones are pretty fragile and low altitude and even if you don't care about what's down range, it doesn't make any more sense to shoot a battery powered drone with a 150 grain or 650 grain lead slug than it does a Patriot missile.
For 7.62mm guns, a jacketed polymer core would make a lot of sense. It would reduce the range and make the gravity terminal velocity negligible. For .50 cal, you could use a sabot that held multiple smaller polymer slugs, improving the amount of fire on target as well.
Variations on this using self-feeding shotgun-type shells would also make sense using polymer projectiles, although existing small lead shot is already pretty harmless at terminal gravity velocity (we'd get rained on at the local shotgun range whenever the duck tower was in use, it was like a handful of sand thrown in the air).
A few reasons.
One, is long-term engineering investment. HDDs have been around for decades and current HDDs have the benefit of years of incremental engineering improvement to solve a lot of problems that cause premature failure -- components, manufacturing, software and so on.
SSDs have only been around for maybe a decade and the technology package has been rapidly evolving, including the core storage technology, NAND, so there's still a process of honing the engineering associated with them. Obviously they're advancing by leaps and bounds as cheap consumer models can take PBs of writes without failure of late.
In my specific case, I was talking about a (moderate) misuse of consumer grade SSDs. They're not designed for heavy, write-intensive workloads in more advanced storage environments (RAID, multi-node shared access, server workloads) and NAND flash simply has a durability limit. Using them in those situations is pushing them to the limit of their engineering and premature failure is pretty likely.
My sense is that the *better* drives (like 850 Pros) have kind of moved past a reliability threshold and their failure rate will be less than generally expected in those edge roles. The failure margin will be more than HDDs but the performance margin will be so higher than HDDs that the trade is worth it.
I think there's always that low grade war between HR and line management. HR trying to exercise some level of control over the work force (for good or ill) and line management trying to make personnel decisions without HR's bureaucracy (for good or ill).
I think this is a case that got snagged into HR's orbit and judged a high litigation risk and thus they took the loophole to rescind the offer.
Or it could have had nothing to do with litigation risk and been simply a pissing match between HR and a line manager who didn't care for their rules.
The problem is that existing hardware isn't available forever. Standards change and the underlying hardware changes and you find your $stable_version doesn't have drivers for it.
In theory, virtualization will extend those lifetimes even longer, and it sure seems to be a common use case -- but even hypervisors end support for operating systems.