I know you think that is a bad thing, but frankly, US consumerism supporting US manufacturing isn't exactly a bad thing.
What it does to other economies around the world isn't really the US governments purview. Ultimately, "free trade" never existed, and it never will until the world is under one unifying government.
You've never actually worked with enterprise class gear have you? It's standard for most of the servers and all of the data storage to have capacitance/battery backups for just such an emergency.
Typically, the raid controller will have enough on board capacity to clear it's write cache before losing power entirely. While the drive array will be connected to a decent UPS that can hold for at least a few minutes. Meanwhile, the server itself will also likely be connected to the same UPS, or a different one.
The real question at hand is, were the UPS between the power distribution node and the server, or were they on the other side of the distribution node, and therefore worthless in a case like this? I've seen both configurations, but the latter is rarer. Not because of this particular case, but because of efficiency concerns.
If there was a failure of design, it was most likely in the building wiring itself. The building was clearly not properly grounded against lightning strikes, as if it was, the surge would never have hit the internal wiring. It might have kicked the building off the grid for a time, but it should never have reached a power distribution node. Although it's likely the outcome would be similar if not identical.
I realize that insisting microsoft is the bad guy is a good way to score some karma on/. , but you may want to check reality once in a while.
MS had only a minor role in the creation of USB. Intel and IBM did most of the heavy lifting as I recall.
Aside from that, USB provides a great many uses that a standard serial interface would never have been able to accomplish. It's the closest thing to a universal interface that we have ever gotten into wide use. As a geek, you should be happy about that. The fact that it's less than perfect really shouldn't be your main point of interest, besides, until you hack together the next universal interface, get it into a significant portion of the devices on the planet and do so without any flaws, you might want to hold onto those stones you are throwing.
MAX runs at an average of 60% of capacity. So while the power used may be green, they are using 40% more power than is strictly required.
The irony is that if they reduce off peak service any more, they are cutting their own hands off. The single most often heard complaint about max is that it doesn't run on a convenient schedule, unless you are riding during peak hours.
Further, the majority of peak riders are driving their cars to a parking lot, jumping max for a short haul into the city and then reversing this process to go home. It might save fuel, and congestion, but it certainly doesn't remove the need for a car.
I loved max when I lived in hillsboro and worked in NE portland. However, I worked grave and it was much, MUCH easier to drive my little mx-6 than it was to take 2 buses and a train to get to work. Now, if I had to fight traffic, I'd feel differently. As for cost, a round trip on Trimet cost about 5 bucks. A lot more if you miss a transfer and have to call a cab. 5 bucks in gas easily got me to work and home in that car. Considering I paid 1200 for the car, and never did any maintence on it for the 4 years I owned it, the daily cost was pretty comparable. The convience more than made up for the slightly higher price, and I'd have to own the car either way, as a family of 4 can't easily survive in suburbia without one. (they could, but I wouldn't choose to)
I'm waiting for your counter points. As of yet, we have a lot of hating and trolling against the US in general, but NOT EVEN ONE decent counter point.
So, tell me, why should the root DNS be handed over to anyone else? AFAIK there hasn't been any serious abuse by the controlling body as of yet. Nor any particular reason to expect any. Frankly, this comes down to a very simple principle. It isn't broken, it doesn't need fixing.
I'll be the first to say that I don't have any problem tearing control away from an abusive power. However, that isn't the case at hand (yet/if). While giving control to any international body will practically promise political games, hypocrisy and abuse. If you can argue that would be an improvement, I'd be extremely interested.
You don't need to rely on Clarkson. Just drive one. Get yourself into a BMW or Mercedes and then try going back to your Ford or Chevy. You'll feel the difference. God forbid you have to go back to a Toyota or a Honda. You'll feel like you are playing with a toy.
In a wreck, I want my BMW 5 series. In a race I want my Mazda RX7. You can keep the rest.
The only american car I've ever owned was a complete pile of gossa. I only had it for 2 months, and I traded it (a 2 year old car with 22k miles) for a 15 year old BMW with 150k. It was the best deal I ever made. The BMW lasted another 5 years and had 252k miles when I sold it. It was the 8th BMW in my family to pass 250k without major problems. Several of which are still in the family and have passed 300k. They just don't die.
EVE's problem isn't really Lag. That is what everyone calls it, but that isn't accurate. EVE's problem is their architecture wasn't build with the scale of play they encourage today in mind.
In EVE a solar system is a discrete "zone", there are many thousands of solar systems. Each one is assigned a node on the server (blades actually) and that node may and probably does host more than one solar system. They have had limited success in beefing up big fights by moving solar systems with expected fights to a node by itself. Thereby offering as much power as their architecture will allow. However, they can only do this at "down time" which is one hour daily, so if a big fight breaks out in the middle of the day, there is no chance of it going well. Most of the REALLY big fights happen in systems that often have very low average traffic, so they are assigned to a shared node. Then for 8 hours, that system has 400 people in it, and the node is past it's limits very quickly. If they had coded the game so that a single solar system could use more than one node at a time, they could brute force the problem away entirely. But that isn't possible the way it's built.
Even so, the EVE cluster is/was on the top 500 list of super computers. You can't say it's not for lack of trying.
Why yes, I WAS an EVE player. From Beta till about a year ago. I finally gave up after countless fleet encounters were destroyed by CCP's clever, but impotent load balancing. The breaking point was when I realized that even when we had a dedicated node for every solar system in our territory, we still couldn't have a full out fleet battle without crashing the node. I'd have been happy to get half our fleet into combat, but we couldn't even do that. Granted, we had 800 ships or so and our opposition had at least 1000. I've yet to see any game that can put nearly 2000 players on a battlefield and still function.
CCP does get credit though for effort. 3 years ago you'd be LUCKY to pull off a 200 man fight. Now you can put 500 or so into a system and get your fight on without major game breaking things happening. It won't be silky smooth, but you can get it done. Ironically, 3 years ago a 200 ship fleet fight was a rare and wondrous spectacle. While a year ago, I could assemble a 200 pilot fleet in 20 minutes. So what was a major event is now a typical saturday night. The servers got better, a lot better, but they aren't keeping up with the players.
I live in a coastal town in oregon. You can't go a block without a wifi signal. I can drive from one end of town to the other (about 5 miles) and never lose my connection once. More often than not I can carry two connection using the built in wifi and my cell phone tethered.
We have so much wifi in this town it's not even funny. First off, we have more hotels per square block than just about anywhere you've ever been. Second, every place in town has wifi for no apparent reason. If the hotels weren't enough (and they are), every other restaurant features wifi, and every single coffee shop has wifi. The vast majority of which are Dlink or Linksys routers configured by a local highschool geek, connected to the local fiber (fiber runs right down the main hwy through town, and everyone is connected to it). It's too the point where I can walk from my place, up the beach 2 miles and carry an active connection the whole way. I'm talking about getting my feet wet in the pacific ocean, and I can't get far enough out to sea while carrying my laptop/phone to NOT get a wifi signal.
I don't even have internet service anymore. From my place, I can reach 3 unsecured networks (1 of which is actually for public use) and 3 more that are "secure" but only in the most novel sense of the word.
Last week I was at the public library and some tourist asked where he could get wifi. After the clerk explained why the library doesn't have wifi, I mentioned that there were currently 5 networks in range, all free and open. One of which is Burger king, one of which is the gawd damned grocery store next door (don't ask, I have no idea why they have wifi) another of which is a private citizen's network labeled "linksys", and the other two were hotels within range.
I will say that the local McD's doesn't have a problem with squatters. No one hangs out at McD's when the casino is across the street, has an ocean view and will serve you drinks while you surf for free on their network, oh, and if you put 5$ on a hand of blackjack every once in a while, the drinks are practically free.
No, I'm not at the casino right now, I'm in the parking lot sobering up for the 2 mile drive home.
That is not the purpose of HR. HR's job is to protect the company from lawsuits.
The reason your sisters HR department went to the trouble of making sure she took her leave, is because if she had been cheated out of even one day of it, the company would have been in violation of federal law, and liable for a nice fat payday.
9 out 10 HR departments don't give a care about the actual employee, they care about liability and employment laws. Ultimately, their goal is not in line with the greater goals of the company, which is why you need HR departments, to protect companies from themselves.
The blog raises some interesting questions. However, your posts to slashdot, and any other comment threads on any other site aren't, or should not be copywritten. The fact that you expect them to be is part of the root of the issue here today.
The bottom line is that if you have an idea that you have yet to capitalize on, you should probably keep it to yourself. That way you are free to move at your own speed, and get it to market in the way you envision. Posting your "creative" concept to a public forum pretty much voids the concept of copywrite.
I don't want to make too many assumptions about what you were doing... BUT, you were doing something wrong. I've been overclocking for fun and ????? profit since celeron As were cheap and plentiful.
I've found that it takes more than a good processor, it takes an exceptional motherboard and top notch memory. Sure you can overclock your dell, but you are going to cook something, and in the mean time, it's not likely to be terribly stable. Even otherwise good motherboards aren't all good for overclocking, which is why communities based around OCing are so popular, few people can afford to experiment with all the available parts.
Actually, the potential loss is to the rental industry. There is no profit sharing system between blockbuster and hollywood. Rental places buy copies of the movie, rent them till they reach a certain usage level, and then sell them as previously viewed.
Technically, you could rip every movie in blockbuster and not have any effect on hollywood what so ever.
In the long run you'll put the rental industry on the ropes, but then, it already is. Netflix, on demand and web based services like HULU have put a HUGE dent in blockbuster and the other major chains. If those fools hadn't wasted all their effort battling each other, they might have been on top of the changing world.
It's worse than you think. There are a great many internet shops that do business through third party suppliers. So the logistics chain looks like this...
Customer > Internet shop > Middleman > Manufacturer.
Or like this...
Customer > Internet shop > Middleman > Distributor > Manufacturer.
So you order something from amazon, and the seller orders it from their supplier, and their supplier orders it from the distributor who either ships it to the customer or orders it from their manufacturer who ships it to the customer. Now tell me, who pays taxes where? It's already bad enough with CC fees, throwing taxes into the mix is a joke. It would take an army of tax agents to even get close to sorting out the logistics, much less which taxes apply where.
Not on a scale of tens of thousands of years. Nor do very many "daily" use items have a tendency to destroy reproductive qualities immediately. Radiation attacks the fast growing cells first (or more rapidly) and therefore renders any biological exposure fatal to the blood line.
The testing in the 50's caused a noticeable legacy. Most of the test sites are still unsafe for human occupation, and the planets background radiation level still hasn't dropped to pre-nuke levels.
I don't have a problem with nuclear power plants. They have proven that they are more or less a safe (acceptable risk) use of the technology. The same can NOT be said for nuclear bombs. Air bursting causes most of the radioactive fallout to go into the super-sphere, but it comes down eventually, some if, if not all. Ground shots tend to destroy any local ecology and permanently irradiate environments. Read up on Bikini Atoll, and the Baker test.
4. The FBI said "this guy has access to all the computers" The judge is an illeterate moron, and decided that this means that all the servers needed to be seized.
The FBI probably knows better, but didn't care. More than likely because this guy is a criminal in their eyes, and therefore gets shafted in every way they can legally justify. Given the above judge, legally justify isn't as hard as it should be.
Interestingly, if this was a self storage facility, they would need a warrant for each unit. If this was an apartment complex, they would need a warrant for each apartment. If it was a parking lot, they would need a warrant for each car (owner).
But because it's a hosting facility, they can just take everything and sort it out later? That will go on until they piss off the wrong company and get slapped down so hard they'll be lucky if they can get a warrant to wipe their asses. Then, later, the FBI will whine about how they can't get warrants for this sort of enforcement anymore, all the while oblivious to the fact that their overzealous and overreaching activity is what caused the problem in the first place.
You got some small portion of that correct. It is in fact expensive.
It is not difficult, nor do I have any idea what mexico has to do with it.
Fully automatic weapons can be purchased in the US by anyone that can legally own a gun. They are called "class 3 firearms". There are not very many of them overall, so they tend to be very expensive.
OTOH, there are less than legal ways of meeting the goal too, but I'm not going to give anyone any ideas.
The humor in all this will be a few years down the road. After P2P monitoring and enforcement of third party ownership is standard fair. That is when someone will point out that if they can monitor and stop movie and music trading, they can go after child pornography... or hold the ISP's responsible when they don't.
That is only true to a point. Once you reach purely digital storage media, it gets a bit more complex. Assuming that the people trying to access the data are technologically advanced, and even assuming they have technology directly descended from our own, they still won't necessarily have the specifications hanging around.
If I gave you a solid metal platter, about the size of a man whole cover, and about 10mm thick. What would you do with it? Take a picture. That didn't get you very far. How about hitting it with an acoustic wave and analyzing the response? Nope, nothing special. How many things would you try before you found out that it was a magnetic media? Would that be before or after you exposed it to even a small magnetic field?
The point is that while technology helps us deal with physical storage mediums. It doesn't necessarily translate to other technological media. This is especially true for the less robust media. A CD might be easy enough to figure out, and robust enough to survive the experiments, but a hard drive would present some unique challenges. How much voltage does it require? What is too much? What coding is used to send/receive information? What are the commands to read/write/erase? How do you avoid sending the wrong command while you work out the correct interface? What the hell is this base 2 system they seem to be using? Didn't 20th century humans use a base 10 math system? ETC ETC ETC.
This is the very reason that microfilm is used for archival storage of important records. Because all it takes to read it is a magnifying glass, and a light source. Both of which can be made with stone age tools.
As someone that has worked with microfilm for years, I can say that it makes a rather robust storage medium. However, it really doesn't work in a digital society. But now we've come full circle, because there is no such thing as "permanent" "digital" media.
I've recovered (scanned) microfilm that is over 100 years old. It was ~85% complete, after 100 years of being stored in a tin box. Consider that this is film created from a hand written book, using a 19th century camera, and chemicals. Modern microfilm systems are somewhat more robust.
I've also pulled out film that was less than 50 years old and had it literally turn to dust in my hands, or be completely blank. That has more to do with storage than anything else. Certain types of microfilm don't play nice with other certain types. More over, heat, humidity, and other factors can greatly increase the decay rate.
I don't know of a single digital media that is anywhere near as robust as microfilm. Nor as easily accessed. Granting, you are still going to have to include a language primer if you expect people a thousand years from now to be able to read it.
Slashdot Mirror
I know you think that is a bad thing, but frankly, US consumerism supporting US manufacturing isn't exactly a bad thing.
What it does to other economies around the world isn't really the US governments purview. Ultimately, "free trade" never existed, and it never will until the world is under one unifying government.
Frankly, if Scientology is the worst possible scum you can come up with, you're so disillusioned you might as well be Hubbard.
You've never actually worked with enterprise class gear have you? It's standard for most of the servers and all of the data storage to have capacitance/battery backups for just such an emergency.
Typically, the raid controller will have enough on board capacity to clear it's write cache before losing power entirely. While the drive array will be connected to a decent UPS that can hold for at least a few minutes. Meanwhile, the server itself will also likely be connected to the same UPS, or a different one.
The real question at hand is, were the UPS between the power distribution node and the server, or were they on the other side of the distribution node, and therefore worthless in a case like this? I've seen both configurations, but the latter is rarer. Not because of this particular case, but because of efficiency concerns.
If there was a failure of design, it was most likely in the building wiring itself. The building was clearly not properly grounded against lightning strikes, as if it was, the surge would never have hit the internal wiring. It might have kicked the building off the grid for a time, but it should never have reached a power distribution node. Although it's likely the outcome would be similar if not identical.
I realize that insisting microsoft is the bad guy is a good way to score some karma on /. , but you may want to check reality once in a while.
MS had only a minor role in the creation of USB. Intel and IBM did most of the heavy lifting as I recall.
Aside from that, USB provides a great many uses that a standard serial interface would never have been able to accomplish. It's the closest thing to a universal interface that we have ever gotten into wide use. As a geek, you should be happy about that. The fact that it's less than perfect really shouldn't be your main point of interest, besides, until you hack together the next universal interface, get it into a significant portion of the devices on the planet and do so without any flaws, you might want to hold onto those stones you are throwing.
MAX runs at an average of 60% of capacity. So while the power used may be green, they are using 40% more power than is strictly required.
The irony is that if they reduce off peak service any more, they are cutting their own hands off. The single most often heard complaint about max is that it doesn't run on a convenient schedule, unless you are riding during peak hours.
Further, the majority of peak riders are driving their cars to a parking lot, jumping max for a short haul into the city and then reversing this process to go home. It might save fuel, and congestion, but it certainly doesn't remove the need for a car.
I loved max when I lived in hillsboro and worked in NE portland. However, I worked grave and it was much, MUCH easier to drive my little mx-6 than it was to take 2 buses and a train to get to work. Now, if I had to fight traffic, I'd feel differently. As for cost, a round trip on Trimet cost about 5 bucks. A lot more if you miss a transfer and have to call a cab. 5 bucks in gas easily got me to work and home in that car. Considering I paid 1200 for the car, and never did any maintence on it for the 4 years I owned it, the daily cost was pretty comparable. The convience more than made up for the slightly higher price, and I'd have to own the car either way, as a family of 4 can't easily survive in suburbia without one. (they could, but I wouldn't choose to)
I think you forgot to include the punchline.
Horribly, appallingly, awesomely sick. Geek projects for the win.
I'm waiting for your counter points. As of yet, we have a lot of hating and trolling against the US in general, but NOT EVEN ONE decent counter point.
So, tell me, why should the root DNS be handed over to anyone else? AFAIK there hasn't been any serious abuse by the controlling body as of yet. Nor any particular reason to expect any. Frankly, this comes down to a very simple principle. It isn't broken, it doesn't need fixing.
I'll be the first to say that I don't have any problem tearing control away from an abusive power. However, that isn't the case at hand (yet/if). While giving control to any international body will practically promise political games, hypocrisy and abuse. If you can argue that would be an improvement, I'd be extremely interested.
You don't need to rely on Clarkson. Just drive one. Get yourself into a BMW or Mercedes and then try going back to your Ford or Chevy. You'll feel the difference. God forbid you have to go back to a Toyota or a Honda. You'll feel like you are playing with a toy.
In a wreck, I want my BMW 5 series. In a race I want my Mazda RX7. You can keep the rest.
The only american car I've ever owned was a complete pile of gossa. I only had it for 2 months, and I traded it (a 2 year old car with 22k miles) for a 15 year old BMW with 150k. It was the best deal I ever made. The BMW lasted another 5 years and had 252k miles when I sold it. It was the 8th BMW in my family to pass 250k without major problems. Several of which are still in the family and have passed 300k. They just don't die.
EVE's problem isn't really Lag. That is what everyone calls it, but that isn't accurate. EVE's problem is their architecture wasn't build with the scale of play they encourage today in mind.
In EVE a solar system is a discrete "zone", there are many thousands of solar systems. Each one is assigned a node on the server (blades actually) and that node may and probably does host more than one solar system. They have had limited success in beefing up big fights by moving solar systems with expected fights to a node by itself. Thereby offering as much power as their architecture will allow. However, they can only do this at "down time" which is one hour daily, so if a big fight breaks out in the middle of the day, there is no chance of it going well. Most of the REALLY big fights happen in systems that often have very low average traffic, so they are assigned to a shared node. Then for 8 hours, that system has 400 people in it, and the node is past it's limits very quickly. If they had coded the game so that a single solar system could use more than one node at a time, they could brute force the problem away entirely. But that isn't possible the way it's built.
Even so, the EVE cluster is/was on the top 500 list of super computers. You can't say it's not for lack of trying.
Why yes, I WAS an EVE player. From Beta till about a year ago. I finally gave up after countless fleet encounters were destroyed by CCP's clever, but impotent load balancing. The breaking point was when I realized that even when we had a dedicated node for every solar system in our territory, we still couldn't have a full out fleet battle without crashing the node. I'd have been happy to get half our fleet into combat, but we couldn't even do that. Granted, we had 800 ships or so and our opposition had at least 1000. I've yet to see any game that can put nearly 2000 players on a battlefield and still function.
CCP does get credit though for effort. 3 years ago you'd be LUCKY to pull off a 200 man fight. Now you can put 500 or so into a system and get your fight on without major game breaking things happening. It won't be silky smooth, but you can get it done. Ironically, 3 years ago a 200 ship fleet fight was a rare and wondrous spectacle. While a year ago, I could assemble a 200 pilot fleet in 20 minutes. So what was a major event is now a typical saturday night. The servers got better, a lot better, but they aren't keeping up with the players.
I live in a coastal town in oregon. You can't go a block without a wifi signal. I can drive from one end of town to the other (about 5 miles) and never lose my connection once. More often than not I can carry two connection using the built in wifi and my cell phone tethered.
We have so much wifi in this town it's not even funny. First off, we have more hotels per square block than just about anywhere you've ever been. Second, every place in town has wifi for no apparent reason. If the hotels weren't enough (and they are), every other restaurant features wifi, and every single coffee shop has wifi. The vast majority of which are Dlink or Linksys routers configured by a local highschool geek, connected to the local fiber (fiber runs right down the main hwy through town, and everyone is connected to it). It's too the point where I can walk from my place, up the beach 2 miles and carry an active connection the whole way. I'm talking about getting my feet wet in the pacific ocean, and I can't get far enough out to sea while carrying my laptop/phone to NOT get a wifi signal.
I don't even have internet service anymore. From my place, I can reach 3 unsecured networks (1 of which is actually for public use) and 3 more that are "secure" but only in the most novel sense of the word.
Last week I was at the public library and some tourist asked where he could get wifi. After the clerk explained why the library doesn't have wifi, I mentioned that there were currently 5 networks in range, all free and open. One of which is Burger king, one of which is the gawd damned grocery store next door (don't ask, I have no idea why they have wifi) another of which is a private citizen's network labeled "linksys", and the other two were hotels within range.
I will say that the local McD's doesn't have a problem with squatters. No one hangs out at McD's when the casino is across the street, has an ocean view and will serve you drinks while you surf for free on their network, oh, and if you put 5$ on a hand of blackjack every once in a while, the drinks are practically free.
No, I'm not at the casino right now, I'm in the parking lot sobering up for the 2 mile drive home.
That is not the purpose of HR. HR's job is to protect the company from lawsuits.
The reason your sisters HR department went to the trouble of making sure she took her leave, is because if she had been cheated out of even one day of it, the company would have been in violation of federal law, and liable for a nice fat payday.
9 out 10 HR departments don't give a care about the actual employee, they care about liability and employment laws. Ultimately, their goal is not in line with the greater goals of the company, which is why you need HR departments, to protect companies from themselves.
The blog raises some interesting questions. However, your posts to slashdot, and any other comment threads on any other site aren't, or should not be copywritten. The fact that you expect them to be is part of the root of the issue here today.
The bottom line is that if you have an idea that you have yet to capitalize on, you should probably keep it to yourself. That way you are free to move at your own speed, and get it to market in the way you envision. Posting your "creative" concept to a public forum pretty much voids the concept of copywrite.
I don't want to make too many assumptions about what you were doing... BUT, you were doing something wrong. I've been overclocking for fun and ????? profit since celeron As were cheap and plentiful.
I've found that it takes more than a good processor, it takes an exceptional motherboard and top notch memory. Sure you can overclock your dell, but you are going to cook something, and in the mean time, it's not likely to be terribly stable. Even otherwise good motherboards aren't all good for overclocking, which is why communities based around OCing are so popular, few people can afford to experiment with all the available parts.
Actually, the potential loss is to the rental industry. There is no profit sharing system between blockbuster and hollywood. Rental places buy copies of the movie, rent them till they reach a certain usage level, and then sell them as previously viewed.
Technically, you could rip every movie in blockbuster and not have any effect on hollywood what so ever.
In the long run you'll put the rental industry on the ropes, but then, it already is. Netflix, on demand and web based services like HULU have put a HUGE dent in blockbuster and the other major chains. If those fools hadn't wasted all their effort battling each other, they might have been on top of the changing world.
It's worse than you think. There are a great many internet shops that do business through third party suppliers. So the logistics chain looks like this...
Customer > Internet shop > Middleman > Manufacturer.
Or like this...
Customer > Internet shop > Middleman > Distributor > Manufacturer.
So you order something from amazon, and the seller orders it from their supplier, and their supplier orders it from the distributor who either ships it to the customer or orders it from their manufacturer who ships it to the customer.
Now tell me, who pays taxes where? It's already bad enough with CC fees, throwing taxes into the mix is a joke. It would take an army of tax agents to even get close to sorting out the logistics, much less which taxes apply where.
Not on a scale of tens of thousands of years. Nor do very many "daily" use items have a tendency to destroy reproductive qualities immediately. Radiation attacks the fast growing cells first (or more rapidly) and therefore renders any biological exposure fatal to the blood line.
The testing in the 50's caused a noticeable legacy. Most of the test sites are still unsafe for human occupation, and the planets background radiation level still hasn't dropped to pre-nuke levels.
I don't have a problem with nuclear power plants. They have proven that they are more or less a safe (acceptable risk) use of the technology. The same can NOT be said for nuclear bombs. Air bursting causes most of the radioactive fallout to go into the super-sphere, but it comes down eventually, some if, if not all. Ground shots tend to destroy any local ecology and permanently irradiate environments. Read up on Bikini Atoll, and the Baker test.
^ THIS
Mod parent up. This is by far the most rational explanation for why nuclear weapons should continue to be deterrents, and nothing else.
Besides, if you just want a big boom, you don't need to irradiate the planet to get it. We have chemical explosives that are more than adequate.
4. The FBI said "this guy has access to all the computers" The judge is an illeterate moron, and decided that this means that all the servers needed to be seized.
The FBI probably knows better, but didn't care. More than likely because this guy is a criminal in their eyes, and therefore gets shafted in every way they can legally justify. Given the above judge, legally justify isn't as hard as it should be.
Interestingly, if this was a self storage facility, they would need a warrant for each unit. If this was an apartment complex, they would need a warrant for each apartment. If it was a parking lot, they would need a warrant for each car (owner).
But because it's a hosting facility, they can just take everything and sort it out later? That will go on until they piss off the wrong company and get slapped down so hard they'll be lucky if they can get a warrant to wipe their asses. Then, later, the FBI will whine about how they can't get warrants for this sort of enforcement anymore, all the while oblivious to the fact that their overzealous and overreaching activity is what caused the problem in the first place.
Now that is how I define irony.
As truth is an absolute defense against libel claims, being broke is an absolute defense against judgments for the former.
So I'm home free.
You got some small portion of that correct. It is in fact expensive. It is not difficult, nor do I have any idea what mexico has to do with it. Fully automatic weapons can be purchased in the US by anyone that can legally own a gun. They are called "class 3 firearms". There are not very many of them overall, so they tend to be very expensive. OTOH, there are less than legal ways of meeting the goal too, but I'm not going to give anyone any ideas.
The humor in all this will be a few years down the road. After P2P monitoring and enforcement of third party ownership is standard fair. That is when someone will point out that if they can monitor and stop movie and music trading, they can go after child pornography... or hold the ISP's responsible when they don't.
I can't wait. Just deserts and all.
That is only true to a point. Once you reach purely digital storage media, it gets a bit more complex. Assuming that the people trying to access the data are technologically advanced, and even assuming they have technology directly descended from our own, they still won't necessarily have the specifications hanging around.
If I gave you a solid metal platter, about the size of a man whole cover, and about 10mm thick. What would you do with it? Take a picture. That didn't get you very far. How about hitting it with an acoustic wave and analyzing the response? Nope, nothing special. How many things would you try before you found out that it was a magnetic media? Would that be before or after you exposed it to even a small magnetic field?
The point is that while technology helps us deal with physical storage mediums. It doesn't necessarily translate to other technological media. This is especially true for the less robust media. A CD might be easy enough to figure out, and robust enough to survive the experiments, but a hard drive would present some unique challenges. How much voltage does it require? What is too much? What coding is used to send/receive information? What are the commands to read/write/erase? How do you avoid sending the wrong command while you work out the correct interface? What the hell is this base 2 system they seem to be using? Didn't 20th century humans use a base 10 math system? ETC ETC ETC.
This is the very reason that microfilm is used for archival storage of important records. Because all it takes to read it is a magnifying glass, and a light source. Both of which can be made with stone age tools.
As someone that has worked with microfilm for years, I can say that it makes a rather robust storage medium. However, it really doesn't work in a digital society. But now we've come full circle, because there is no such thing as "permanent" "digital" media.
I've recovered (scanned) microfilm that is over 100 years old. It was ~85% complete, after 100 years of being stored in a tin box. Consider that this is film created from a hand written book, using a 19th century camera, and chemicals. Modern microfilm systems are somewhat more robust.
I've also pulled out film that was less than 50 years old and had it literally turn to dust in my hands, or be completely blank. That has more to do with storage than anything else. Certain types of microfilm don't play nice with other certain types. More over, heat, humidity, and other factors can greatly increase the decay rate.
I don't know of a single digital media that is anywhere near as robust as microfilm. Nor as easily accessed. Granting, you are still going to have to include a language primer if you expect people a thousand years from now to be able to read it.