Well, article aside, there is no different between "living" and "non-living", apart from semantics, so there should logically be no distinction between life evolving and life forming past a very early stage.
In the eyes of super-rich patent trolls, informative blogs are an extremely good reason to eliminate employment (and possibly the individual). There doesn't need to be a legitimate reason to sack someone - most employees sign papers stating that terminating employment needs no reason at all - and it doesn't take much for an organization to inject added commentary to background checks. Some "discrete" disqualifying comments (it's not as if individuals can get hold of those background check reports - or challenge entries if they are wrong) would make it hard for the guy ever getting another job.
Of course, this depends on Cisco being pressured or bribed into letting the guy go. That's the challenge, as other posters have correctly noted that Cisco probably are under far greater threat from such trolls than most (especially with merging with companies like Scientific Atlanta, giving them IP for a much broader range of communications technologies), and they don't seem to have trolled much themselves (although this statement is retractable if I ever learn the guy who posted the PIX sourcecode on the Internet ever took up wearing concrete boots as a fashion accessory). I'm not keen on some of their decisions - there are a lot of proprietary Cisco protocols making true interoperability with Open Source routers impossible. Who knows what Cisco will do?
The rest would be easy going after that. Companies often use similar tactics - either through the notoriously corrupt background check agencies or through one of the good-boys-club networks. Vetting agencies for Government work (in Britain or the US) are often no better, with plenty of reports of dubious or inaccurate information, information supplied by extremist groups such as the Economic League and other such fun. It's a marvel anyone ever gets hired at all.
A year is 365.251 days long. You'd need to increase the orbit so that the year was 366 days. The increase in the distance the Earth would need to travel is (366/365.251)x(distance currently travelled). The circumference is equal to twice the radius times pi. The first five planets have orbits at an almost constant ratio to one another, substantially more than required to move to 366 days. You'd not even notice Mars getting any larger. The question is whether that would be far enough to be safe from solar expansion. You might want to move to much closer to Mars. The moon and Earth form almost a double planet system and the moon is boring. Moving to an Earth/Mars double planet system might be more interesting.
You could bugfix the two-year-old software, do a release on SourceForge, announce on Freshmeat, and THEN post on Slashdot. I bet that would not only boost readership, but it would be a readership that appreciated your efforts. All it would take is a relatively minor bugfix to be a real release. Run splint over it, or put it through dmalloc, fix compiler errors for gcc 4.2, or a dozen other things. A few minutes work, perhaps.
Just give me a long enough lever and a place to stand and I could move the Eath. Or a Greek philosopher/scientist, or something. Though moving an ancient Greek can be difficult at times.
Except truly intelligent bots would realize that reading the help makes them easily distinguishable from humans. Bots that wanted to look human should also have the REFERER field show them as coming from a pr0n or blog site.
Corrections (along with the ones others posted) gratefully accepted. The Russians aren't the only ones with fast reactors - fast breeders are used elsewhere.
The fire at Windscale was caused by a range of strange practices (including manually feeding in the fuel rods and control rods). It took between 2-3 days for the engineers to even realize the fuel rods were white hot and the reactor was fully ablaze, suggesting safety practices and safety monitoring were not top of the list even in the late 50s. The engineers even regarded filters to block radioactive waste as unnecessary and an irritant. An irritant that probably prevented Windscale being as catastrophic as Chernobyl and only got included by brute-force politics in the face of intense opposition from the industry. I doubt a single engineer today would be as stupid or naive. Well, maybe that's a little optimistic, precisely because Chernobyl also involved a chemical fire. In Chernobyl's case, the safety systems were disengaged rather than not being there, but that shows a certain similar attitude - the willingness to believe nothing could possibly go wrong, in the face of all logic and all possible evidence to the contrary. After Windscale and Three Mile Island (again, inept design and use of safety systems), it should have been obvious to the most ignorant of nuclear engineers that if a reactor can fail, it will fail in the most spectacular way the design will allow for. The more recent accident at the Japanese nuclear reactor was also caused by inept handling of safety.
That the underlying cause (although not the mechanics) of every nuclear accident (whether Russian, British, American or Japanese) has been the same does make me wonder if lessons have been learned or merely studiously ignored. Nonetheless, it is obvious that the design of reactors has, over time, improved in regards to safety. It took actual direct human intervention to cause Chernobyl to plaster itself over half the globe, as compared to humans not watching the dials in the Windscale case. I would imagine the most recent generation of reactors are as safe again, although clearly humans can still bypass too many precautions and directly cause major accidents, as Japan successfully demonstrated.
I am not pro-fission, incidently. I regard it as inefficient, too fuel-hungry - nuke fuel reserves are very limited and most will be too deep to obtain, too wasteful - very little fuel is converted, and too polluting. If it is acceptable at all, it should only be acceptable as a transition technology between fossil fuels and fusion. For that, though, Governments need to be investing far far more into fusion research and fusion reactor production. Production? One reactor won't power a planet and even if the design's not perfect, you don't need the final design to build supporting infrastructure and housing. Those will take long enough to build that the test reactor can be finished and a final design figured out by the time there's somewhere to build it. If you reckon on needing two or three fusion reactors per State, that's a gigantic amount of work that needs to be done before the country is even capable in theory of using such a reactor once built.
As for research, it should be obvious from the never-ending delays in generating a self-sustainable reaction and the infinite avenues being explored that the time and money spent on the subject is dwarfed by the scale of the subject matter. If we're serious about fusion, we need to be investing as though we were serious.
I'm basing this on the contents of the BLAST ftp archive, where the plants directory covers almond, barley, various beans, beet, cocoa, corn, eggplant, oat, wheat, onion and tomato, amongst others. These files are down to the nucleotide level and can be processed with any of the open-source BLAST applications (which is good), but I will admit I can't be sure which of these are complete genome sequences and which are partial.
Convert the dotted quad into a long integer, which you assume is figured in zlottys. Convert to dollars and you're done. Oh, that IP! Real estate is valued according to size (well, actually number of bedrooms, which is why so many houses have kitchen cabinets fited out with hammmocks) and location, modified by age and condition. The parallels in software would be functional scope of API and the software's trove categories, modified by the average source check-in date and the outstanding bugs known (whether in the tracker or not). Property surveying would be replaced by software auditing. How you'd apply this to any other IP, I don't know.
There are a lot of downloadable sequences on the Internet for many agriculturally-significant plants. Personally, I consider those the least interesting, as they've been finely-tuned using those same agricultural mechanisms for millenia. Because of that, you've the least diversity and the greatest potential for noise (stuff that's coded for but basically bred out, so there's no real way to know what it does), so you get the least information for your money.
That's not to say that such plants should not be done. They should, and they really should have been sequenced fully BEFORE genetic engineering took hold. If you're going to modify code, at least read it before applying patches, and have a mechanistic (not a symptomatic) understanding of what the patches actually do. On the other hand, plants that are very information-rich - even if there is no known immediate or direct use - tell you the most about the system as a whole, refine the techniques for extracting that information, and build up more of an understanding of what it is that researchers are looking at.
Personally, I think that DNA labs are sufficiently easy to build at this point that it would be helpful for the Governments to splurge out a bit and accelerate the full sequencing process. There's a lot to be learned, including how to make wiser GM decisions at both the industrial and political levels. What is safe, and what the long-term impact would be could be more easily and more accurately determined with better quality data. Confidence is always going to be related to the ability to understand what it is you are confident about.
This would put it in the same category as the massive northeast US seaboard blackout and the London blackout of a few years back then. I'm impressed it only cascaded over such a small region - these sorts of failures (and subsequent surges elsewhere on the grid) have a tendancy to ripple across vast areas very quickly. In the northeast US case, it took out several US States and a large chunk of Canada. This incident merely took out five generators and one small part of one State, which - relatively speaking - is damn impressive in terms of automatic and human responses.
I would want to know more about the maintenance on those switches, their rated capacity, and why enough could fail at the same time to reduce transportable capacity. Even with infinite switches, there'd be a non-zero probability of a complete across-the-board failure, but provided everything is well-maintained, you only need to guarantee that at any given point in the system, what you have spare exceeds what is likely to simultaneously fail, for an acceptable level of "likely".
Were there unnecessary single points of failure or inadequate backup mechanisms? Did so many switches fail at the same time because they were rated far too low for current usage or because poor maintenance degraded them below the ability to handle current usage? Nuclear reactors are extremely bad at handling dynamic loads, so what is going into developing mechanisms for soaking up (or burning up) power when grids do go offline? (Reactors aren't trivial things to restart.)
Nuclear reactors are, by design, extremely sensitive to unexpected conditions. The reactor fire at Windscale, amongst others, convinced reactor designers very early on to install mechanisms for shutting down reactors quickly and safely. Graphite rods, held by fail-safe hair-trigger mechanisms, can be slammed into place, shutting down a reactor quickly. Failures in the lowering of the control rods have happened, but are fortunately rare.
What would it take to trigger the automatic release of the control rods? An earth tremor above a pre-set limit, insufficient input of cooling water from rivers (or water that's too hot or too impure), a controller hitting the wrong switch, a software glitch, a glitch in a clock crystal screwing with timing calculations, a loose connector, a chip in an old-style spring-based socket catapulting itself into the air (which they had a nasty habit of doing), erronious control signals from other power stations, a downed power line on any segment with single points of failure, etc.
Of these, the vast majority apply to any power station - one line down not too long ago caused a blackout that covered three States and half of Canada. One line down between the east and west coasts about 14-15 years ago shut down large parts of the northwest USA for a couple of weeks. Cascading failures are inherent in the meta-stable mashup of networks that form the power grid. Too many SPFs, too little redundancy, too many communication glitches, too few contingency plans.
Personally, I think the grid needs to be massively redesigned, with far better (and more intelligent) signalling, far more redundancy at all levels and a huge upgrade on software and hardware (NT4 and Windows 3.11 are not acceptable to me for mission-critical systems - they're tried and tested, but they're not reliable and they're not secure).
Of course, this won't happen, massive cascading faults will continue to be reported on a regular basis, and people will continue to be surprised when they occur. Preventative maintenance on the scale needed to cure the system as a system is so expensive (even though it's one-off), the distributed costs of regular blackouts on even a gigantic scale look cheaper on the balace sheet, so an inefficient, decrepid, flawed power grid becomes the preferred option.
If the patent trolls thought they could get away with dipping the dollar notes in poison (similar to what was done to Donald Woods' children), I'm sure they'd have no problem with paying him. Although they're stupid enough to destroy the patent system, I doubt they're that stupid. On the other hand, I could see them paying the reward to Cisco to dump the guy. Employment in the US is "by will" and there are no IT unions, so the employee has no protection against malicious termination of employment. (The patent trolls could, quite legally, make it extremely difficult for him to ever be hired again.)
...be hard to do, without a working definition of intelligence. (This is the bane of all studies on intelligence in animals, computers, etc. Until someone can determine what it actually is that people are trying to look for, nobody can be certain whether or not they've found it. All they can be sure of is that they've found something, where the something has properties in common with another something that is believed associated with what they're really interested in.)
That's not a nice experience and it says a lot that you kept your collective sanity intact and worked round the problem. Sadly, that's not the first time I've heard such a story. It makes me seriously question the thought process that leads people to entrusting their tech support to an organization when anecdotal evidence suggests that support is dysfunctional or totally absent.
I sympathise with you, and with anyone else who has had similar experiences. I don't have any easy answers, though. Tech support is, in general, an area that has been allowed to decay over time. Even hardware support - which used to mean company employees with specialist training being there within an hour for an urgent call-out - is now run as a cheap side-line. Ultimately, though, QA and tech support are no less critical than any other part of the operation. You can't just do QA and support, though, Red Hat and SuSE tried that business model in various ways, and although it did seem to produce revenue, I've not heard of it doing well.
If there are any group dynamic psychologists or sociologists on Slashdot looking for a research topic, the dynamics within companies, between companies and users, and between the users themselves, is rife with dysfunction, Type I realities, religion, para-religion, and all sorts of other fun. The science of corporate-provided support systems in society would be worthy PhD material and a good few research papers besides. You could probably make a killing selling a book on how to survive the existing system and how to have a practical system people wouldn't need to worry about having to survive.
That would be fair, if Microsoft's tech support did anything more than an RTFM themselves. They're notorious for overcharging, working from scripts, ignoring issues, blaming customers... Anybody who buys a software product for tech support and accountability are fools. Tech support is an illusion and accountability is deniable under law. There is nobody you can sue or hold legally responsible. Free and OSS is no worse, from that perspective, but are more honest about it.
When they first visited an airshow in Britain, anti-aircraft missile systems tracked them uite nicely. It was a huge PR scandal (that the Brits would point missiles at American aircraft, and that the Stealth bomber wasn't as hard to track as claimed, using top-of-the-line systems). I believe it was the History channel that ran a documentary on the physical shape and observed that the current design is sub-optimal and was superceded very early on in development, but wasn't changed for political reasons.
The status of the Swedish stealth patrol boats is, I think, much more interesting, as smuggling and piracy are major businesses and prop up the organizations that require a full military to attack directly. The replacement for the stealth fighter and stealth bomber is mch less so - I'm going to guess we won't be seeing that for 10-15 years. Hypersonic fighters won't be around for 20-30 years at best, based on typical development cycles.
There is no market so strong that it can't slump. There is no business so economic that it can't become unprofitable. In some cases, the risks are very very small, but they are risks. Nothing is guaranteed. Indeed, if it was possible to guarantee profit, you would guarantee inflation that matched or exceeded that profit, which means you end up with more money but no richer. The more secure the investment, the lower the "guaranteed" profit, the more likely you are to lose after inflation has been taken into consideration. The conservative notion that as investment approaches infinity, profits also approach infinity, is foolishness. One of the causes of the Great Depression was the very high level at which individuals were invested in stocks and shares. This was the worst possible direction for the economy to go in, and claiming that the stock market isn't a gamble is to encourage the very worst in destabilizing behaviours.
You can use USB keys for authentication. If the machine is for one person alone, make a small modification to the utilities used for setting and entering passwords, so that when you set up a password, you enter a hint, and when you enter the password, it shows that hint. Use the OPIE module and assemble a OTP calculator with the password built into it. The screen gives a number, you type it into the calculator, which gives you a different number, which you type back into the computer.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, article aside, there is no different between "living" and "non-living", apart from semantics, so there should logically be no distinction between life evolving and life forming past a very early stage.
Of course, this depends on Cisco being pressured or bribed into letting the guy go. That's the challenge, as other posters have correctly noted that Cisco probably are under far greater threat from such trolls than most (especially with merging with companies like Scientific Atlanta, giving them IP for a much broader range of communications technologies), and they don't seem to have trolled much themselves (although this statement is retractable if I ever learn the guy who posted the PIX sourcecode on the Internet ever took up wearing concrete boots as a fashion accessory). I'm not keen on some of their decisions - there are a lot of proprietary Cisco protocols making true interoperability with Open Source routers impossible. Who knows what Cisco will do?
The rest would be easy going after that. Companies often use similar tactics - either through the notoriously corrupt background check agencies or through one of the good-boys-club networks. Vetting agencies for Government work (in Britain or the US) are often no better, with plenty of reports of dubious or inaccurate information, information supplied by extremist groups such as the Economic League and other such fun. It's a marvel anyone ever gets hired at all.
The last human watches the Earth get destroyed from a nearby spacestation, before getting roasted by The Doctor.
A year is 365.251 days long. You'd need to increase the orbit so that the year was 366 days. The increase in the distance the Earth would need to travel is (366/365.251)x(distance currently travelled). The circumference is equal to twice the radius times pi. The first five planets have orbits at an almost constant ratio to one another, substantially more than required to move to 366 days. You'd not even notice Mars getting any larger. The question is whether that would be far enough to be safe from solar expansion. You might want to move to much closer to Mars. The moon and Earth form almost a double planet system and the moon is boring. Moving to an Earth/Mars double planet system might be more interesting.
You could bugfix the two-year-old software, do a release on SourceForge, announce on Freshmeat, and THEN post on Slashdot. I bet that would not only boost readership, but it would be a readership that appreciated your efforts. All it would take is a relatively minor bugfix to be a real release. Run splint over it, or put it through dmalloc, fix compiler errors for gcc 4.2, or a dozen other things. A few minutes work, perhaps.
Just give me a long enough lever and a place to stand and I could move the Eath. Or a Greek philosopher/scientist, or something. Though moving an ancient Greek can be difficult at times.
Accelerate Earth to put it into a wider orbit. This will solve Global Warming and the Earth being swallowed all in one.
Except truly intelligent bots would realize that reading the help makes them easily distinguishable from humans. Bots that wanted to look human should also have the REFERER field show them as coming from a pr0n or blog site.
The fire at Windscale was caused by a range of strange practices (including manually feeding in the fuel rods and control rods). It took between 2-3 days for the engineers to even realize the fuel rods were white hot and the reactor was fully ablaze, suggesting safety practices and safety monitoring were not top of the list even in the late 50s. The engineers even regarded filters to block radioactive waste as unnecessary and an irritant. An irritant that probably prevented Windscale being as catastrophic as Chernobyl and only got included by brute-force politics in the face of intense opposition from the industry. I doubt a single engineer today would be as stupid or naive. Well, maybe that's a little optimistic, precisely because Chernobyl also involved a chemical fire. In Chernobyl's case, the safety systems were disengaged rather than not being there, but that shows a certain similar attitude - the willingness to believe nothing could possibly go wrong, in the face of all logic and all possible evidence to the contrary. After Windscale and Three Mile Island (again, inept design and use of safety systems), it should have been obvious to the most ignorant of nuclear engineers that if a reactor can fail, it will fail in the most spectacular way the design will allow for. The more recent accident at the Japanese nuclear reactor was also caused by inept handling of safety.
That the underlying cause (although not the mechanics) of every nuclear accident (whether Russian, British, American or Japanese) has been the same does make me wonder if lessons have been learned or merely studiously ignored. Nonetheless, it is obvious that the design of reactors has, over time, improved in regards to safety. It took actual direct human intervention to cause Chernobyl to plaster itself over half the globe, as compared to humans not watching the dials in the Windscale case. I would imagine the most recent generation of reactors are as safe again, although clearly humans can still bypass too many precautions and directly cause major accidents, as Japan successfully demonstrated.
I am not pro-fission, incidently. I regard it as inefficient, too fuel-hungry - nuke fuel reserves are very limited and most will be too deep to obtain, too wasteful - very little fuel is converted, and too polluting. If it is acceptable at all, it should only be acceptable as a transition technology between fossil fuels and fusion. For that, though, Governments need to be investing far far more into fusion research and fusion reactor production. Production? One reactor won't power a planet and even if the design's not perfect, you don't need the final design to build supporting infrastructure and housing. Those will take long enough to build that the test reactor can be finished and a final design figured out by the time there's somewhere to build it. If you reckon on needing two or three fusion reactors per State, that's a gigantic amount of work that needs to be done before the country is even capable in theory of using such a reactor once built.
As for research, it should be obvious from the never-ending delays in generating a self-sustainable reaction and the infinite avenues being explored that the time and money spent on the subject is dwarfed by the scale of the subject matter. If we're serious about fusion, we need to be investing as though we were serious.
I'm basing this on the contents of the BLAST ftp archive, where the plants directory covers almond, barley, various beans, beet, cocoa, corn, eggplant, oat, wheat, onion and tomato, amongst others. These files are down to the nucleotide level and can be processed with any of the open-source BLAST applications (which is good), but I will admit I can't be sure which of these are complete genome sequences and which are partial.
Convert the dotted quad into a long integer, which you assume is figured in zlottys. Convert to dollars and you're done. Oh, that IP! Real estate is valued according to size (well, actually number of bedrooms, which is why so many houses have kitchen cabinets fited out with hammmocks) and location, modified by age and condition. The parallels in software would be functional scope of API and the software's trove categories, modified by the average source check-in date and the outstanding bugs known (whether in the tracker or not). Property surveying would be replaced by software auditing. How you'd apply this to any other IP, I don't know.
That's not to say that such plants should not be done. They should, and they really should have been sequenced fully BEFORE genetic engineering took hold. If you're going to modify code, at least read it before applying patches, and have a mechanistic (not a symptomatic) understanding of what the patches actually do. On the other hand, plants that are very information-rich - even if there is no known immediate or direct use - tell you the most about the system as a whole, refine the techniques for extracting that information, and build up more of an understanding of what it is that researchers are looking at.
Personally, I think that DNA labs are sufficiently easy to build at this point that it would be helpful for the Governments to splurge out a bit and accelerate the full sequencing process. There's a lot to be learned, including how to make wiser GM decisions at both the industrial and political levels. What is safe, and what the long-term impact would be could be more easily and more accurately determined with better quality data. Confidence is always going to be related to the ability to understand what it is you are confident about.
So corn's genetic code is the least a-maizing and less of a maize than the DNA of other plants?
I would want to know more about the maintenance on those switches, their rated capacity, and why enough could fail at the same time to reduce transportable capacity. Even with infinite switches, there'd be a non-zero probability of a complete across-the-board failure, but provided everything is well-maintained, you only need to guarantee that at any given point in the system, what you have spare exceeds what is likely to simultaneously fail, for an acceptable level of "likely".
Were there unnecessary single points of failure or inadequate backup mechanisms? Did so many switches fail at the same time because they were rated far too low for current usage or because poor maintenance degraded them below the ability to handle current usage? Nuclear reactors are extremely bad at handling dynamic loads, so what is going into developing mechanisms for soaking up (or burning up) power when grids do go offline? (Reactors aren't trivial things to restart.)
What would it take to trigger the automatic release of the control rods? An earth tremor above a pre-set limit, insufficient input of cooling water from rivers (or water that's too hot or too impure), a controller hitting the wrong switch, a software glitch, a glitch in a clock crystal screwing with timing calculations, a loose connector, a chip in an old-style spring-based socket catapulting itself into the air (which they had a nasty habit of doing), erronious control signals from other power stations, a downed power line on any segment with single points of failure, etc.
Of these, the vast majority apply to any power station - one line down not too long ago caused a blackout that covered three States and half of Canada. One line down between the east and west coasts about 14-15 years ago shut down large parts of the northwest USA for a couple of weeks. Cascading failures are inherent in the meta-stable mashup of networks that form the power grid. Too many SPFs, too little redundancy, too many communication glitches, too few contingency plans.
Personally, I think the grid needs to be massively redesigned, with far better (and more intelligent) signalling, far more redundancy at all levels and a huge upgrade on software and hardware (NT4 and Windows 3.11 are not acceptable to me for mission-critical systems - they're tried and tested, but they're not reliable and they're not secure).
Of course, this won't happen, massive cascading faults will continue to be reported on a regular basis, and people will continue to be surprised when they occur. Preventative maintenance on the scale needed to cure the system as a system is so expensive (even though it's one-off), the distributed costs of regular blackouts on even a gigantic scale look cheaper on the balace sheet, so an inefficient, decrepid, flawed power grid becomes the preferred option.
If the patent trolls thought they could get away with dipping the dollar notes in poison (similar to what was done to Donald Woods' children), I'm sure they'd have no problem with paying him. Although they're stupid enough to destroy the patent system, I doubt they're that stupid. On the other hand, I could see them paying the reward to Cisco to dump the guy. Employment in the US is "by will" and there are no IT unions, so the employee has no protection against malicious termination of employment. (The patent trolls could, quite legally, make it extremely difficult for him to ever be hired again.)
But only blue fish can speak whale.
...be hard to do, without a working definition of intelligence. (This is the bane of all studies on intelligence in animals, computers, etc. Until someone can determine what it actually is that people are trying to look for, nobody can be certain whether or not they've found it. All they can be sure of is that they've found something, where the something has properties in common with another something that is believed associated with what they're really interested in.)
I sympathise with you, and with anyone else who has had similar experiences. I don't have any easy answers, though. Tech support is, in general, an area that has been allowed to decay over time. Even hardware support - which used to mean company employees with specialist training being there within an hour for an urgent call-out - is now run as a cheap side-line. Ultimately, though, QA and tech support are no less critical than any other part of the operation. You can't just do QA and support, though, Red Hat and SuSE tried that business model in various ways, and although it did seem to produce revenue, I've not heard of it doing well.
If there are any group dynamic psychologists or sociologists on Slashdot looking for a research topic, the dynamics within companies, between companies and users, and between the users themselves, is rife with dysfunction, Type I realities, religion, para-religion, and all sorts of other fun. The science of corporate-provided support systems in society would be worthy PhD material and a good few research papers besides. You could probably make a killing selling a book on how to survive the existing system and how to have a practical system people wouldn't need to worry about having to survive.
That would be fair, if Microsoft's tech support did anything more than an RTFM themselves. They're notorious for overcharging, working from scripts, ignoring issues, blaming customers... Anybody who buys a software product for tech support and accountability are fools. Tech support is an illusion and accountability is deniable under law. There is nobody you can sue or hold legally responsible. Free and OSS is no worse, from that perspective, but are more honest about it.
The status of the Swedish stealth patrol boats is, I think, much more interesting, as smuggling and piracy are major businesses and prop up the organizations that require a full military to attack directly. The replacement for the stealth fighter and stealth bomber is mch less so - I'm going to guess we won't be seeing that for 10-15 years. Hypersonic fighters won't be around for 20-30 years at best, based on typical development cycles.
Nah. They should donate the spare cycles into running slashdot. Can you imagine how fast the main page could be updated?
Vista means view. Nothing in the name about running anything, stability, or whatnot. Narf.
There is no market so strong that it can't slump. There is no business so economic that it can't become unprofitable. In some cases, the risks are very very small, but they are risks. Nothing is guaranteed. Indeed, if it was possible to guarantee profit, you would guarantee inflation that matched or exceeded that profit, which means you end up with more money but no richer. The more secure the investment, the lower the "guaranteed" profit, the more likely you are to lose after inflation has been taken into consideration. The conservative notion that as investment approaches infinity, profits also approach infinity, is foolishness. One of the causes of the Great Depression was the very high level at which individuals were invested in stocks and shares. This was the worst possible direction for the economy to go in, and claiming that the stock market isn't a gamble is to encourage the very worst in destabilizing behaviours.
You can use USB keys for authentication. If the machine is for one person alone, make a small modification to the utilities used for setting and entering passwords, so that when you set up a password, you enter a hint, and when you enter the password, it shows that hint. Use the OPIE module and assemble a OTP calculator with the password built into it. The screen gives a number, you type it into the calculator, which gives you a different number, which you type back into the computer.