How much artwork can he put on it then? Can build a replica and paint it purple? Can he paint it purple and put a yellow oval on the doors? Can he paint it purple with a yellow oval, and put a black baseball bat in the oval? Can he put a not-DC-licensed Batman stylized bat in the oval? Can he sell the car with cans of purple, yellow, and black paint, and say "here you go, one not-Batmobile, and a set of not-official not-Batmobile paints"?
Are the non-structural, non-functional elements artistic? Can he put fins on it, or a blue glowing nuclear powered turbine engine on the back?
There's all kinds of lines that could be crossed here that I think it would take a judge to sort them all out.
you catch too many qualified candidates with that practice and throw them out the door. leaving you with cheats and liars who when it comes to interview time, well mostly suck.
So? If a company is only hiring candidates who are buzzword proficient, they will get exactly what they deserve. You'll only be frustrated if you go work for them.
Eventually they may replace their HR people with competent folks, or they may slowly go out of business. Not my problem.
It's not far-fetched. The potential employers have no knowledge that they need to distinguish the Samantha-the-naughty-party-girl from Samantha-the-cum-laude-graduate search results. So what she needed was a professional photo and professional image so that when the unknown searchers looked for her, they would see pictures of two different looking people.
She also can't tell her potential employers to "search for Samantha -drinking -at -the -foobar -lounge", because that's going to leave them with a bad impression. In seeking a marketing position, it's fatal: if she can't convince them that she can market herself effectively, what good is she to them?
As a bonus - chicken wire fencing would complete the current theme of treating passengers like barnyard animals throughout the check in and boarding procedure. Toss some hay on the floor, give the flight attendants some pitchforks and market it as some throwback to when America Was Great.
There's a vast gulf of difference between the risks the public is willing to take when it comes to aircraft safety as opposed to internet regulation. The image of planes falling from the skies is visceral, and doesn't come with a rational price tag. Even if the math is absolutely correct, saying something like "the loss of 168 passengers in the flight 666 disaster cost each of us an average in $31.41 in taxes" just paints the speaker as a callous bureaucrat. It's very difficult to get people to have that risk/reward conversation. And all of this has nothing to do with talking rationally about internet regulation.
This article is like comparing apples to driveway oil stains. It fails to make a compelling or logical case why the FAA is an example of how regulations fail, as the FAA is actually a pretty good example of an agency that uses regulations well (for the most part.) It has nothing to do with why the U.S. would fail at internet regulation.
Note that I'm not disagreeing with the idea that internet regulation would be stupid -- it would be. It's just that this article is worse than useless at making the case.
Anecdotally, I believe there is an infinitesimally small chance that the EMI from even a gray market electronic device is going to bring down a plane. Pilots have many independent devices working separately confirming they're on the proper heading, approach, glide slope, etc. And interference causing a misreading on one device would not likely cause the same misreading on another unrelated device -- a rogue GPS reading isn't going to bring down a plane when everything else is working.
But one failure of one system never brings down a plane. The RNAV is broken? Check the GPS. GPS is out? Check the compass. Compass is stuck? Look out the window. Foggy? Check the RNAV. There's three or more redundant ways to do anything in a plane.
Your phone might be fine today, or it might be leaking RF ever since that one time you dropped it and an internal shield came loose. It still wouldn't be a problem on an airplane unless a half dozen other things are going wrong for the pilot. It might be a cloudy, rainy day, right about the time he is flying the crazy tight approach into the Hong Kong airport, when a lightning strike takes out one of the engines and the nav radios. And perhaps the mechanic failed to properly seal the GPS antenna connection. At that very particular time a GPS that's being confused by the EM from a faulty phone is not something the pilot needs to deal with.
The thing is that while a series of unfortunate events is extremely unlikely, there are enough flights and planes in the sky every single day, such that the laws of probability are still going to line up the bad stuff every so often. While it would be nice if the pilot asked for the passengers to turn off their phones as a precaution only when he could anticipate difficulty, that would be a lot more convenient, but that's the thing about bad luck: if they could predict all of it, they'd never crash again.
I would say only that RF isolation is a "solvable problem", not "solved in all cases of existing aircraft." And I expect that solving the problem is going to cost a lot more than hanging a sheet of hardware cloth across the cockpit's aft wall.
You mean the "thin ABS plastic wall" between the cockpit and the passenger compartment? Regardless of the construction materials, most planes were not engineered for RF isolation. That big metal tube probably reflects radio waves forward and aft better than a non-metallic skin would. Because it wasn't designed to suppress RF, the tapering of the tail cone may even act as a focusing device for a transmitter located in just the right spot inside the cabin near the back of the plane.
Yeah, it's the same as the "50 danger/warning stickers on a ladder" problem. Nobody reads them all, and very few people read any of them.
And despite actions appearing to the contrary, their mandate is not the growth of the airline industry. The closest thing their mission statement says is "Our continuing mission is to provide the safest, most efficient aerospace system in the world." I'm not sure where "efficiency" comes from other than providing air traffic control services.
Are there lobbyists pushing congressmen to have FAA regulate in their favor? I'm pretty sure that's a big "yes." Are there FAA stooges planted by the airlines and aircraft manufacturers that are "insuring from within" that the FAA does things that benefit them? I don't think anyone can prove that one way or another. Does the FAA get a lot of stupid and crappy input from the DHS? Certainly. But on the whole, I think the FAA is about as independent as a government agency is likely to get.
If they really think that the liquids may be hazardous, then they should treat them as hazardous waste - why would they let the janitor haul out a bin full of suspected explosives?
That's the part that always gets me. If they believed to even 0.001% of a chance that the bottle of water I'm drinking from is a potentially explosive material, would they really tolerate having me toss it in a plastic garbage can next to them?
If they're going to perform Mystery Security Theater 3000 and want us to believe in it, they should at least make sure that Tom Servo is reading from the same script.
There's still a strong argument against permitting passenger electronics, but it's convoluted and you'll have to stick through a few points.
A portable device can adversely impact avionics. (DealExtreme used to sell GPS jammers that were the size of a pack of cards.)
Portable electronic devices sold in the US must pass FCC certification.
Counterfeit electronic devices do not pass FCC certification.
Counterfeit electronic devices are not uncommon.
A flight attendant cannot tell the difference between a certified device and an uncertified device.
Aircraft are not designed with Faraday cages for the passenger compartment, nor are they equipped with RF interference detectors.
Passenger convenience is less important than passenger safety.
When you add up all those factors, the FAA is playing it cautiously, but rationally. They don't get to say "let's see just how many flights are adversely impacted if we allow everyone to turn on randomly RF emitting electronics."
Sure, I know my iPad and iPhone and Kindle won't harm the plane's avionic system. You may know yours won't, either. But my nephew bought a cheap gray market phone that spews RF noise like a plague rat. How does a non-electronic-engineer flight attendant tell the difference?
the first plane crash after devices are allowed and people will change their tune real fast.
That's true - if you have a "shake phone to pick next song in playlist", I suspect the impact of the crash would trigger your phone's accelerometer and could change to the next tune even before the wreckage came to a halt.
If that's not changing your tune fast, I don't think I could come up with a better example.
The blog uses a lot of charged words without saying anything of value. "Rules bad. Regulations bad. FAA dumb." And somehow this translates directly into "regulating the Internet is doomed to fail."
First, I completely disagree with the "FAA dumb" comment. The FAA may be cautious, yes, but their mandate is aircraft safety -- it's their job to be cautious. I don't disagree with the other sentiments, but there is no logical argument put forth that explains why the rules are bad, why the regulations fail, or why the approach taken by an agency whose job is human safety (and not human convenience) will somehow doom the internet.
As I read through these, I couldn't help but do some simple comparing between the Facebook TOS and Chinese laws. Real names, no posting of objectionable material; but then bannination is nothing like being jailed. Now think about the "mom test" (would you add your mom to your "friends" list?), or the general public.
The difference is that I'm a bit older than you, and we've been drawing "the cloud" on diagrams for over 25 years. The idea behind drawing it as a cloud was to impart the idea of "what happens at the far end of this line is not important to this diagram, just accept that the data will flow 'somewhere else' and let's keep the discussion focused on the important components, please." For a long time, we used the cloud simply to mean an IP network, and used it to hide the routers and switches because we cared only about the equipment on the ends of the connection. Then about 13 years ago services started floating to the top of the discussion, and we started using the cloud to refer not only to the network, but to the stuff the network gave us access to. That's the stuff that people are now trying to encapsulate when they claim to come up with an "official" definition of cloud computing, but there isn't real agreement there. And there shouldn't be.
Not all words can be given a definition by a committee. Any committee claiming such a definition is doomed to fail. Language is flexible and is defined by its common usage.
In reality, the word "cloud" should always have an ambiguous definition. We need a word that is not fixed in any one particular technology, or service, or offering. We need something we can use casually to refer to "stuff over there that's not ours and that we don't have to care about in this context." In other words, don't bother trying to nail down the word "cloud", because most of us will continue to use it as a flexible word. You will be very disappointed when you've been in a discussion with other people who don't share your definition, and you discover that they were talking about something different.
Instead of trying to define cloud, learn to choose words that more accurately describe what you're referring to. Select precise words that refer to the specific resources. Do you mean to refer to dynamically allocated CPUs? Calling them elastic resources may be a great choice. But up until I need to specifically define "what does this technically look like", referring to it as "the cloud" fills the need.
I'm not disagreeing that the insult isn't a problem. After all, I even said it was "anti-social", which it is.
Dawkin's viewpoint is not as dangerous as the religious version that you put forth, because his is based on the lowest common denominator: since different religions can't all be right (according to their own internal teachings, each is the only correct viewpoint), all but one of them must be wrong, and there's no evidence saying the last one is right, either. Since science agrees with the viewpoint that there is no explanation for the world that requires the supernatural, this just includes the last religion in the group of "must be wrong."
Of course, this is the epitome of anti-religious. As religions and society are thoroughly intertwined in much of the world, it's taken as an anti-social viewpoint even though it isn't. But if we viewed all religions as anti-social institutions then we have a common ground: anyone who says "exclude unbelievers" or "only include believers" has the dangerous viewpoint.
And religions are anti-social. This is evidenced by the many variations of exclusion they preach, ranging from the gentle: "he who believes in me and is baptized shall be saved" (which translates to the anti-social "we exclude non-believers from our version of an afterlife"); to the violent: "kill the blasphemers". And most religions have had violent sects at some point in their history, meaning that the difference between "tolerable anti-social" and "intolerant anti-social" remains only a fanatic's whim away from being dangerously violent. It's certainly not a stable foundation.
Even if we divide religions into "always gentle", "mostly gentle", and "violent", and decide that we can tolerate one but not another, then we're saying that one is "more right" than the others, perpetuating the problems that any supernatural viewpoint brings. Instead, Dawkins says we should treat them all as equally delusional - any viewpoint that excludes people based on lack of belief in the supernatural is anti-social and dangerous. I know it's a tautology, but it's the only one that brings evidence from the real world into the discussion. And we all have to live in the real world - supernatural beliefs don't change it.
Of course, this leads to an equally large problem of nihilism, which you could argue is the problem that religion "fixes". And we're seeing more of this kind of behavior, where someone "checks out" with an assault rifle or a bomb and takes innocent people with him on his way out of life.
So basically we're screwed no matter what we do or don't believe.
If each type of bacterial pathogen responded only to a narrow spectrum antibiotic, then when you got sick from a bacterial infection the lab would have to assay your blood to figure out which of the millions of bacteria in your system were actually causing the problem, then get you the right medicine. And the moment one of the pathogens mutates, the antibiotic would have less of an effect on it. So add up the expense of the lab work, the delays in treatment that would cause, the stock of custom pharmaceuticals that every pharmacy would have to carry, and it turns out that broad spectrum antibiotics are a whole lot cheaper and overall more effective.
Or to follow on to your suggestion of cocktails, what makes you suppose that any one cocktail wouldn't act exactly as a broad spectrum antibiotic? If a cocktail reduces the probability to P^2, (P^2)>0 is still true, so resistance is still possible.
The problems of resistance are not caused because the antibiotics are broad spectrum, but primarily by the proliferation of under-dosed environments. If you're going to use an antibiotic, it has to be present in a sufficient dose for an appropriate duration to actually kill all of the pathogens. A too-small dose, or a course of treatment that is ended early for any reason, will leave you with some bacteria that survived due to a low-level of resistance. Their offspring will thrive, and some of them will go on to offer higher resistance if your antibiotic treatment resumes.
If you're going to give it to cows, it should be done in response to a specific pathogen, and they should be given the full dose and course of treatment. Their waste should be kept away from other animals that might pick up the infection. But recognizing an infection in a cow, then isolating and treating it is expensive, so it doesn't get done as a first choice.
Tolerating the existence of "people ready to kill over an insult" is the problem, not the insult itself. But how do you get rid of those people without becoming the person that can't be tolerated? That's why people like Dawkins come in and say things like "every one of you who tolerates the belief in a supernatural power makes this problem worse, because these beliefs are always going to be mutually incompatible." His point is to start from the viewpoint that everyone who believes in the supernatural is defective, and should be fixed instead of tolerated.
So I'd say you're exactly half right. Insulting people's religions is antisocial. But if it's part of an attempt to get rid of it, it's not irresponsible.
Has the definition of cloud changed so much that it can even be done now, with a single server?
The definition of cloud has always been intentionally hazy (pun intended.) Because it's not fixed, it can mean whatever the speaker needs it to mean in the current context. At home, I might define the cloud to be "remote access to my data from whatever device I have at hand". That might mean accessing data stored on my own server, or access to my data stored on other people's servers. At work, many of the app people equate "Software as a Service" with cloud, while our infrastructure guys can use it to mean "scalable on-demand platforms" like EC3.
In the most general terms, the cloud is access to any kind of remote resource via the network. Once upon a time, the old name for it was client/server, but that terminology came from the days of dedicated point-to-point lines between machines, and was too technically correct for the illiterate managers who didn't yet understand that an IP network allowed access to any machine on the network.
Anyway, there is no one precise definition of "cloud". In my experience, anyone who is overly hung up on the word seems to be missing the bigger picture.
See also the new HFR High Frame Rate stuff in Hobbit. Not a damned thing seemed odd about that, but then I've been watching TV recently. Who wants artificially-forced degradation?
I do, surprisingly often.
One big problem is that TV and movie sets are just that - sets. They're cardboard and gaffer tape and spray foam and quick drying paint. They are good enough for the medium they're produced for, but nothing better.
Look at any television show from the 1960s that has been recently re-released on digital media - Star Trek, Hogan's Heroes, Mission: Impossible, or whatever. These shows were shot on high resolution film that captured the sets in all their hokey glory: cardboard; tape; foam; runny paint; a vast array of visual sins are painfully visible. The directors relied on their being broadcast in NTSC's System M with its 483 lines of video for TV. The technology of the day hid these flaws because the video was so degraded during delivery. Converting them to digital has revealed just how bad the original sets were, which I personally find very distracting.
I see a couple of choices: I can watch the films in high definition 1080p and be bothered by bad sets, or I can watch them in NTSC and assume the faults I see are of the technology and not of the filmmakers.
Slashdot Mirror
How much artwork can he put on it then? Can build a replica and paint it purple? Can he paint it purple and put a yellow oval on the doors? Can he paint it purple with a yellow oval, and put a black baseball bat in the oval? Can he put a not-DC-licensed Batman stylized bat in the oval? Can he sell the car with cans of purple, yellow, and black paint, and say "here you go, one not-Batmobile, and a set of not-official not-Batmobile paints"?
Are the non-structural, non-functional elements artistic? Can he put fins on it, or a blue glowing nuclear powered turbine engine on the back?
There's all kinds of lines that could be crossed here that I think it would take a judge to sort them all out.
Because if so, it is the world's most overrated server.
you catch too many qualified candidates with that practice and throw them out the door. leaving you with cheats and liars who when it comes to interview time, well mostly suck.
So? If a company is only hiring candidates who are buzzword proficient, they will get exactly what they deserve. You'll only be frustrated if you go work for them.
Eventually they may replace their HR people with competent folks, or they may slowly go out of business. Not my problem.
It's not far-fetched. The potential employers have no knowledge that they need to distinguish the Samantha-the-naughty-party-girl from Samantha-the-cum-laude-graduate search results. So what she needed was a professional photo and professional image so that when the unknown searchers looked for her, they would see pictures of two different looking people.
She also can't tell her potential employers to "search for Samantha -drinking -at -the -foobar -lounge", because that's going to leave them with a bad impression. In seeking a marketing position, it's fatal: if she can't convince them that she can market herself effectively, what good is she to them?
As a bonus - chicken wire fencing would complete the current theme of treating passengers like barnyard animals throughout the check in and boarding procedure. Toss some hay on the floor, give the flight attendants some pitchforks and market it as some throwback to when America Was Great.
Do you work for Delta's marketing department?
Do you want to? :-)
There's a vast gulf of difference between the risks the public is willing to take when it comes to aircraft safety as opposed to internet regulation. The image of planes falling from the skies is visceral, and doesn't come with a rational price tag. Even if the math is absolutely correct, saying something like "the loss of 168 passengers in the flight 666 disaster cost each of us an average in $31.41 in taxes" just paints the speaker as a callous bureaucrat. It's very difficult to get people to have that risk/reward conversation. And all of this has nothing to do with talking rationally about internet regulation.
This article is like comparing apples to driveway oil stains. It fails to make a compelling or logical case why the FAA is an example of how regulations fail, as the FAA is actually a pretty good example of an agency that uses regulations well (for the most part.) It has nothing to do with why the U.S. would fail at internet regulation.
Note that I'm not disagreeing with the idea that internet regulation would be stupid -- it would be. It's just that this article is worse than useless at making the case.
Anecdotally, I believe there is an infinitesimally small chance that the EMI from even a gray market electronic device is going to bring down a plane. Pilots have many independent devices working separately confirming they're on the proper heading, approach, glide slope, etc. And interference causing a misreading on one device would not likely cause the same misreading on another unrelated device -- a rogue GPS reading isn't going to bring down a plane when everything else is working.
But one failure of one system never brings down a plane. The RNAV is broken? Check the GPS. GPS is out? Check the compass. Compass is stuck? Look out the window. Foggy? Check the RNAV. There's three or more redundant ways to do anything in a plane.
Your phone might be fine today, or it might be leaking RF ever since that one time you dropped it and an internal shield came loose. It still wouldn't be a problem on an airplane unless a half dozen other things are going wrong for the pilot. It might be a cloudy, rainy day, right about the time he is flying the crazy tight approach into the Hong Kong airport, when a lightning strike takes out one of the engines and the nav radios. And perhaps the mechanic failed to properly seal the GPS antenna connection. At that very particular time a GPS that's being confused by the EM from a faulty phone is not something the pilot needs to deal with.
The thing is that while a series of unfortunate events is extremely unlikely, there are enough flights and planes in the sky every single day, such that the laws of probability are still going to line up the bad stuff every so often. While it would be nice if the pilot asked for the passengers to turn off their phones as a precaution only when he could anticipate difficulty, that would be a lot more convenient, but that's the thing about bad luck: if they could predict all of it, they'd never crash again.
I would say only that RF isolation is a "solvable problem", not "solved in all cases of existing aircraft." And I expect that solving the problem is going to cost a lot more than hanging a sheet of hardware cloth across the cockpit's aft wall.
You mean the "thin ABS plastic wall" between the cockpit and the passenger compartment? Regardless of the construction materials, most planes were not engineered for RF isolation. That big metal tube probably reflects radio waves forward and aft better than a non-metallic skin would. Because it wasn't designed to suppress RF, the tapering of the tail cone may even act as a focusing device for a transmitter located in just the right spot inside the cabin near the back of the plane.
So no, it's not a Faraday cage.
Yeah, it's the same as the "50 danger/warning stickers on a ladder" problem. Nobody reads them all, and very few people read any of them.
And despite actions appearing to the contrary, their mandate is not the growth of the airline industry. The closest thing their mission statement says is "Our continuing mission is to provide the safest, most efficient aerospace system in the world." I'm not sure where "efficiency" comes from other than providing air traffic control services.
Are there lobbyists pushing congressmen to have FAA regulate in their favor? I'm pretty sure that's a big "yes." Are there FAA stooges planted by the airlines and aircraft manufacturers that are "insuring from within" that the FAA does things that benefit them? I don't think anyone can prove that one way or another. Does the FAA get a lot of stupid and crappy input from the DHS? Certainly. But on the whole, I think the FAA is about as independent as a government agency is likely to get.
If they really think that the liquids may be hazardous, then they should treat them as hazardous waste - why would they let the janitor haul out a bin full of suspected explosives?
That's the part that always gets me. If they believed to even 0.001% of a chance that the bottle of water I'm drinking from is a potentially explosive material, would they really tolerate having me toss it in a plastic garbage can next to them?
If they're going to perform Mystery Security Theater 3000 and want us to believe in it, they should at least make sure that Tom Servo is reading from the same script.
There's still a strong argument against permitting passenger electronics, but it's convoluted and you'll have to stick through a few points.
When you add up all those factors, the FAA is playing it cautiously, but rationally. They don't get to say "let's see just how many flights are adversely impacted if we allow everyone to turn on randomly RF emitting electronics."
Sure, I know my iPad and iPhone and Kindle won't harm the plane's avionic system. You may know yours won't, either. But my nephew bought a cheap gray market phone that spews RF noise like a plague rat. How does a non-electronic-engineer flight attendant tell the difference?
the first plane crash after devices are allowed and people will change their tune real fast.
That's true - if you have a "shake phone to pick next song in playlist", I suspect the impact of the crash would trigger your phone's accelerometer and could change to the next tune even before the wreckage came to a halt.
If that's not changing your tune fast, I don't think I could come up with a better example.
The blog uses a lot of charged words without saying anything of value. "Rules bad. Regulations bad. FAA dumb." And somehow this translates directly into "regulating the Internet is doomed to fail."
First, I completely disagree with the "FAA dumb" comment. The FAA may be cautious, yes, but their mandate is aircraft safety -- it's their job to be cautious. I don't disagree with the other sentiments, but there is no logical argument put forth that explains why the rules are bad, why the regulations fail, or why the approach taken by an agency whose job is human safety (and not human convenience) will somehow doom the internet.
Now if we could just get confirmation that 90% of the people watching "Here Comes Honey Boo-boo" are bots too...
They ARE mindless robots. Just that they're the flesh and blood kind, so they still get pageviews.
This post belongs in a fan, if you catch my meaning.
Oh, now I get it! It's a joke about shit hitting a fan. It's funny because it's true!
</family_guy_ESL_foreigner_voice>
The Prince of Darkness is now the Archfiend of Antarctic Drilling.
All I could think of was "cool story, bro."
As I read through these, I couldn't help but do some simple comparing between the Facebook TOS and Chinese laws. Real names, no posting of objectionable material; but then bannination is nothing like being jailed. Now think about the "mom test" (would you add your mom to your "friends" list?), or the general public.
Is that what most people want?
The difference is that I'm a bit older than you, and we've been drawing "the cloud" on diagrams for over 25 years. The idea behind drawing it as a cloud was to impart the idea of "what happens at the far end of this line is not important to this diagram, just accept that the data will flow 'somewhere else' and let's keep the discussion focused on the important components, please." For a long time, we used the cloud simply to mean an IP network, and used it to hide the routers and switches because we cared only about the equipment on the ends of the connection. Then about 13 years ago services started floating to the top of the discussion, and we started using the cloud to refer not only to the network, but to the stuff the network gave us access to. That's the stuff that people are now trying to encapsulate when they claim to come up with an "official" definition of cloud computing, but there isn't real agreement there. And there shouldn't be.
Not all words can be given a definition by a committee. Any committee claiming such a definition is doomed to fail. Language is flexible and is defined by its common usage.
In reality, the word "cloud" should always have an ambiguous definition. We need a word that is not fixed in any one particular technology, or service, or offering. We need something we can use casually to refer to "stuff over there that's not ours and that we don't have to care about in this context." In other words, don't bother trying to nail down the word "cloud", because most of us will continue to use it as a flexible word. You will be very disappointed when you've been in a discussion with other people who don't share your definition, and you discover that they were talking about something different.
Instead of trying to define cloud, learn to choose words that more accurately describe what you're referring to. Select precise words that refer to the specific resources. Do you mean to refer to dynamically allocated CPUs? Calling them elastic resources may be a great choice. But up until I need to specifically define "what does this technically look like", referring to it as "the cloud" fills the need.
I'm not disagreeing that the insult isn't a problem. After all, I even said it was "anti-social", which it is.
Dawkin's viewpoint is not as dangerous as the religious version that you put forth, because his is based on the lowest common denominator: since different religions can't all be right (according to their own internal teachings, each is the only correct viewpoint), all but one of them must be wrong, and there's no evidence saying the last one is right, either. Since science agrees with the viewpoint that there is no explanation for the world that requires the supernatural, this just includes the last religion in the group of "must be wrong."
Of course, this is the epitome of anti-religious. As religions and society are thoroughly intertwined in much of the world, it's taken as an anti-social viewpoint even though it isn't. But if we viewed all religions as anti-social institutions then we have a common ground: anyone who says "exclude unbelievers" or "only include believers" has the dangerous viewpoint.
And religions are anti-social. This is evidenced by the many variations of exclusion they preach, ranging from the gentle: "he who believes in me and is baptized shall be saved" (which translates to the anti-social "we exclude non-believers from our version of an afterlife"); to the violent: "kill the blasphemers". And most religions have had violent sects at some point in their history, meaning that the difference between "tolerable anti-social" and "intolerant anti-social" remains only a fanatic's whim away from being dangerously violent. It's certainly not a stable foundation.
Even if we divide religions into "always gentle", "mostly gentle", and "violent", and decide that we can tolerate one but not another, then we're saying that one is "more right" than the others, perpetuating the problems that any supernatural viewpoint brings. Instead, Dawkins says we should treat them all as equally delusional - any viewpoint that excludes people based on lack of belief in the supernatural is anti-social and dangerous. I know it's a tautology, but it's the only one that brings evidence from the real world into the discussion. And we all have to live in the real world - supernatural beliefs don't change it.
Of course, this leads to an equally large problem of nihilism, which you could argue is the problem that religion "fixes". And we're seeing more of this kind of behavior, where someone "checks out" with an assault rifle or a bomb and takes innocent people with him on his way out of life.
So basically we're screwed no matter what we do or don't believe.
Broad-spectrum == economical solution.
If each type of bacterial pathogen responded only to a narrow spectrum antibiotic, then when you got sick from a bacterial infection the lab would have to assay your blood to figure out which of the millions of bacteria in your system were actually causing the problem, then get you the right medicine. And the moment one of the pathogens mutates, the antibiotic would have less of an effect on it. So add up the expense of the lab work, the delays in treatment that would cause, the stock of custom pharmaceuticals that every pharmacy would have to carry, and it turns out that broad spectrum antibiotics are a whole lot cheaper and overall more effective.
Or to follow on to your suggestion of cocktails, what makes you suppose that any one cocktail wouldn't act exactly as a broad spectrum antibiotic? If a cocktail reduces the probability to P^2, (P^2)>0 is still true, so resistance is still possible.
The problems of resistance are not caused because the antibiotics are broad spectrum, but primarily by the proliferation of under-dosed environments. If you're going to use an antibiotic, it has to be present in a sufficient dose for an appropriate duration to actually kill all of the pathogens. A too-small dose, or a course of treatment that is ended early for any reason, will leave you with some bacteria that survived due to a low-level of resistance. Their offspring will thrive, and some of them will go on to offer higher resistance if your antibiotic treatment resumes.
If you're going to give it to cows, it should be done in response to a specific pathogen, and they should be given the full dose and course of treatment. Their waste should be kept away from other animals that might pick up the infection. But recognizing an infection in a cow, then isolating and treating it is expensive, so it doesn't get done as a first choice.
Tolerating the existence of "people ready to kill over an insult" is the problem, not the insult itself. But how do you get rid of those people without becoming the person that can't be tolerated? That's why people like Dawkins come in and say things like "every one of you who tolerates the belief in a supernatural power makes this problem worse, because these beliefs are always going to be mutually incompatible." His point is to start from the viewpoint that everyone who believes in the supernatural is defective, and should be fixed instead of tolerated.
So I'd say you're exactly half right. Insulting people's religions is antisocial. But if it's part of an attempt to get rid of it, it's not irresponsible.
Has the definition of cloud changed so much that it can even be done now, with a single server?
The definition of cloud has always been intentionally hazy (pun intended.) Because it's not fixed, it can mean whatever the speaker needs it to mean in the current context. At home, I might define the cloud to be "remote access to my data from whatever device I have at hand". That might mean accessing data stored on my own server, or access to my data stored on other people's servers. At work, many of the app people equate "Software as a Service" with cloud, while our infrastructure guys can use it to mean "scalable on-demand platforms" like EC3.
In the most general terms, the cloud is access to any kind of remote resource via the network. Once upon a time, the old name for it was client/server, but that terminology came from the days of dedicated point-to-point lines between machines, and was too technically correct for the illiterate managers who didn't yet understand that an IP network allowed access to any machine on the network.
Anyway, there is no one precise definition of "cloud". In my experience, anyone who is overly hung up on the word seems to be missing the bigger picture.
See also the new HFR High Frame Rate stuff in Hobbit. Not a damned thing seemed odd about that, but then I've been watching TV recently. Who wants artificially-forced degradation?
I do, surprisingly often.
One big problem is that TV and movie sets are just that - sets. They're cardboard and gaffer tape and spray foam and quick drying paint. They are good enough for the medium they're produced for, but nothing better.
Look at any television show from the 1960s that has been recently re-released on digital media - Star Trek, Hogan's Heroes, Mission: Impossible, or whatever. These shows were shot on high resolution film that captured the sets in all their hokey glory: cardboard; tape; foam; runny paint; a vast array of visual sins are painfully visible. The directors relied on their being broadcast in NTSC's System M with its 483 lines of video for TV. The technology of the day hid these flaws because the video was so degraded during delivery. Converting them to digital has revealed just how bad the original sets were, which I personally find very distracting.
I see a couple of choices: I can watch the films in high definition 1080p and be bothered by bad sets, or I can watch them in NTSC and assume the faults I see are of the technology and not of the filmmakers.