Yeah, I had heard some idea about using it as an emergency escape pod/ extended living room a few years ago on the ISS. Seems like a great idea to me. Or possibly you could use it to make trips to repair satellites in nearby orbits. I guess it just isn't worth the cost. Maintaining it would probably be nearly impossible, given its age.
Pretty much none of these are actually "cool", except perhaps for the idea about traveling around air show circuits together with the 747. Fake sets of the Space Shuttle would work better for pretty much all of them, although I do have to say using them to line the road would be interesting. Better would be to as one as advertising displays for an Air and Space museum (you know, how they put a fake fighter on a pole. An actual space shuttle would be kinda cool.)
I know it would be impractical/too expensive, but what would be really cool would be launching them into space empty, and putting them into permanent orbit. That would be cool. Perhaps they could even serve as impromptu space stations, but just having them orbiting the Earth forever would be a very fitting retirement. I know, we don't need even more garbage in space, orbits decay, etc. Otherwise, these thing belong in museums, not some kind of advertising for commercial ventures. I mean, come on, a giant Starbucks? Starbucks contributed nothing to space exploration. It would be a horrible abuse of the iconic image for commercial profit to use a shuttle that way.
Now, as part of corporate headquarters for SpaceX... that'd be kinda fitting.
You forgot about C)All the people who hear about the game from friends who pirated it and then go out and buy it. Probably pretty huge. Granted I didn't explicitly mention it (my bad).
However, the whole debate is rather pointless as no one has any really good numbers. Its nearly impossible to know. I do grant that people who bring this argument up in discussions about AAA titles are probably mostly wrong, what with the amount of marketing/demos those already have (and I can personally say that I generally don't buy those games if I pirate them), but I do think its quite relevant when talking about indie games. My point is that piracy is a bad reason to stay away from PC gaming, especially for an indie developer. Oh, and piracy can (and does) happen on consoles, too, although its not as common, and Sony/Microsoft like to pretend it can't.
True, some people will never buy the game. You won't get money from them in any way.
However, for others the case is different. For instance, I first played World of Goo when a friend pirated it and gave it to me. Never would have played it otherwise. Guess what? I now own it on steam. Never installed it (yet), but I might get around to replaying it on there at some point. Regardless, they now have a sale they wouldn't have had it not been for piracy. Piracy can be an indie games greatest advertiser. The game maker even mentions that: he considered that he'd gone big when his game started being pirated. Piracy means your game is actually popular enough people want to share and play it, and that means people will buy it. Some of them anyways.
Anyone who logs into steam sees the front page sales first thing, and this game was on it IIRC. Also, the update news will show new games for those who stay logged in all the time. Not to mention, steam almost always has some pretty good sales going on (even besides the annual summer sale, which is the best in the business) so its worth checking around for new releases/ specials. I do, anyways, and I suspect a lot of others do as well. Combine this with steams relative ease of use and extreme ease of purchase (seriously: I can have the game downloading in under 30 secs after I decide to buy), and you pretty much have a winner. Not sure how easy it is on Xbox, but it can't be a whole lot easier than steam.
Moreover, PC gamers love cheap indie games like this, much more so IMHO than console games. To be honest, I'm note sure why so many indie developers even target Xbox/PS3. Fear of piracy, maybe? If so, its a BS reason: I'll gladly buy a good 3-5$ (sometimes more) game, and so will many others, even those who will happily pirate more expensive AAA games.
As poorly conceived and designed as the shuttle was, it nevertheless stands as an icon and symbol for a generation. I doubt there will be, in the near future, anything that so eminently symbolizes the drive for humans to expand beyond the limits of our own environment, nor anything that can so easily capture the imagination. A spaceplane might be a bad idea in practice: but as a symbol, it is pretty well unbeatable. When people think of spaceflight, they don't think of Saturn rockets or the Apollo landers, although maybe they should. They think of the Shuttle orbiter and its massive fuel tank and rocket boosters. I think this image will be the greatest (only?) loss that the retirement of the Shuttle brings. But for that, shutting the program down is a great sign of potential progress.
This is pretty much the best summary of it I've seen. Even retaining the data a short time makes sense: say if a kidnapping is reported 2-3 days later, knowing where the kidnapper was could be very valuable. TFA mentions one of the city's has a system that overwrites the data after 30 days (still a long time, but moderately reasonable.) But indefinitely? Shared with any agency that asks? There is no good reason for that. No way this kind of info is ever going to be useful in court, as there would be no way to prove who is actually driving the car. Only thing it could be useful for is "probable cause" to harass people they have no real evidence against.
Then again, we do live in a world where courts consider an IP address personally identifying information, so who knows.
You can see the same change with all the "privacy is not important"
And which rock have you been living under, exactly? Google hasn't ever said "privacy is important". I'm getting a little sick of this idea that all your information, which you freely give to Google whenever you search/ sign of for G+/ whatever, should somehow be "private", i.e. Google shouldn't have it. Its one thing to complain if Google was sharing it freely with the world as Facebook tended/tends to do. But they're not: that would in fact undermine their business model. They don't want everyone having your data, they want your data themselves so that they can mine it and profit from it. Data you give to Google may be mined, and the results shared with advertising partners, but it is by no means made public for the world to see. Unless I'm completely wrong about how Adsense works, if so someone please enlighten me. (Seriously: I would love to be corrected on this if I'm wrong.)
Maybe some people at Google abuse it and look up the actual raw data themselves, but I have no reason to suspect the information I give to Google, whether on G+ or their search/ad network, is ever seen by anything besides a computer. (I had trouble parsing your sentence where you claimed otherwise: were these employees IM'ing with the people themselves or what?) And if you don't want a computer seeing that data, STOP USING THE INTERNET. Even using a darknet/VPN/Tor won't stop it completely.
And no offense, but I'll need a little more than someone's "meeting with middle managers" to show that Google is shifting its entire stance, especially when that stance happens to be their entire business model, namely providing free, pretty good quality services in return for being served targeted ads. Google is still funding Mozilla at least through this year, despite having their own web browser. They continue to develop and provide Android under a FOSS license, and built G+ at least partially on offering better and easier to use privacy controls than Facebook. None of that shows a company that is shifting to a "screw our consumers for money till we collapse" mindset that plagues many companies. Maybe its coming, but I just don't see it.
Best part about this, as others mentioned, is that if you disable javascript, you can not only get to the right click menu, you can select/copy/paste the characters. In fact, I was able to do that even with Javascript in Opera. And then for the hell of it I removed the section disabling the right-click, which is conveniently labeled in the source, enabled Javascript, and right-clicked on the page. I just hacked Sony!
BTW, what do they actually use this for? Do they really use it for all their online signups? Not that I would be surprised, just wondering if anyone has a page where this is actually being used so I can laugh even more at Sony.
After a quick glance at NFC, it seems like Bluetooth and NFC don't even fulfill the same roles. NFC only has a working range of 20cm or less, while Bluetooth can reach for something like 20-30 meters (in extreme cases). That seems like it would make NFC useless for headsets, as a phone in the pocket is going to be more than 20cm away from your ear. Same thing for laptops. Also, NFC has an extremely low data rate compared to Bluetooth, so your not going to use it for file transfers. Seems like NFC is mostly useful for things like credit cards/ID badges/ etc. which Bluetooth would be useless for, since it needs pairing, while Bluetooth is used for voice/video communication, file transfers, and the like.
Am I wrong about this? Anyone know more about NFC compared to Bluetooth? I do see that Bluetooth 4.0 is low energy, so it could fill some of the roles of NFC, but it can't do passive RFID like NFC can, so again, different technologies for different uses. Seems like the story (at least the summary) is just sensationalist speculation. Seems like not using NFC would be quite stupid on Apple's part in any case, since nearly everyone else is. Having the iPhone/ MacBook not work with actually deployed technology seems like it would be a huge mistake for Apple.
And virus, bot, and trojan makers the world over rejoice at the new opportunities for exploits! This looks like it will be a bitch to make secure. On the other hand, it also does look like it could be pretty cool.
True. And I'll be honest, I didn't really think of that. Also, I'm pretty sure Amazon's service is intended for use with way smaller amounts of data, in which case it becomes much more cost effective and reasonable. Still, when you could build and maintain servers with 25 times the amount of data for the same cost as Amazon, I'm inclined to say that Amazon is overcharging. It maybe that everyone else in the market does too, and I acknowledge that building that kind of infrastructure and software is no mean feat. Guess I shouldn't complain: the idea of hosting a petabyte of data that can be accessed at high speeds anywhere in the world... well, thats impressive.
They mention that they have one guy dedicated to building new pods and replacing old drives. Out of ~9000 drives and ~200 pods, they replace ~10 drives per week, and with the RAID6 data redundancy the chance of losing data is absolutely minimal. RAID6 uses 2 drives for data parity, so I believe you would need 3 drives out of 45 to fail within a week to actually lose data. I suspect they would shut a pod down if 2 drives in it failed at the same time. Since the failure rate, including infant mortality, is only ~5 percent per year per drive, the chances of even that happening are pretty tiny. I'm not sure what brand of drives the Sun 4500 uses, but 6 a year sounds like a lot. I'm guessing this is considerably more reliable. All in all, because they have a person dedicated to maintaining the system on a weekly basis, this seems like it wouldn't even be all that bad for critical data. I wouldn't make it your only copy (fires/storms do happen) but it definitely seems reliable as an offsite backup.
Here is a link to Backblaze's actual blog entry for the new pods 135TB, and here is the original 67TB pods. The blog article is actually quite fascinating. Apparently they are employee owned, use entirely off-the-shelf parts (except for the case, looks like), and recommend Hitachi drives (Deskstar 5K3000 HDS5C3030ALA630) as having the lowest failure rate of any manufacturer (less than 1% they say).
I found it kinda amusing that ext4's 16TB volume limit was an "issue" for them. Not because its surprising, but because... well, its 16TB. The whole blog post is actually recommended reading for anyone looking to build their own data pods like this. It really does a good job showing their personal experience in the field and problems/not problems they have. For instance: apparently heat isn't an issue, as 2 fans are able to keep an entire pod within the recommended temperature (although they actually use 6). It'll be interesting to see what happens as some of their pods get older, as I suspect that their failure rate will get pretty high fairly soon (their oldest drives are currently 4 years old, I expect when they hit 5-6 years failures will start becoming much more common.) All in all, pretty cool. Oh, and it shows how much Amazon/ Dell price gouges, but that shouldn't really shock anyone. Except the amount. A petabyte for three years is $94,000 with Backblaze, and $2,466,000 with Amazon.
P.S. I suspect they use ext4 over ZFS because ZFS, despite the built in data checks, isn't mature enough for them yet. They mention they used to use JFS before switching to ext4, so I suspect they have done some pretty extensive checking on this.
If it was possible to do this in software to begin with, and they knew the images were "controversial" to begin with, why the hell didn't they just do this from the very beginning? My understanding of the system was that it was the fact that the images revealed everything, so to speak, that they were effective. So either they need to be revealing (which they clearly don't), or they've just been lying the whole time.
Which brings me to my second question. Who is being paid to develop this software? Is this literally a case where they could have done something in the beginning, but didn't so that they could charge extra later, and then look like good guys because they are "protecting our rights"? Or am I missing something here? Because it looks very much to me like this move shows that they were pressing as hard as they could to see how far they could go "to stop terrorists", then, when people object, stepping back the tiniest inch (and BTW, anyone who doesn't go through these still has to be frisked) and trying to look like good guys.
Seriously, this absolutely reeks of deception and probably downright lying. Of course, now people will back off and the TSA can continue with their security theater. The ACLU doesn't need to applaud this decision: they need to launch a class action lawsuit and corruption investigation to shut down the TSA.
Mwahahaha!! My evil plan is... oh wait, I was just trying to make a joke. Ah well, shoulda figured/. would take it as an excuse to start a(nother) completely pointless debate.
This. Hell, my car is visible from space on Google Maps if you zoom in far enough, doesn't really mean much. Whole thing is a giant PR stunt (yeah, I know, duh, I mean calling it "visible from space" when it quite clearly isn't), and it seems like it worked pretty well.
Astronomers using the Hubble Space Telescope discovered a fourth moon orbiting the icy planet Pluto.
There, FTFY:)
More seriously, when did they find the second and third moons? I honestly don't remember ever hearing about them, last I knew Pluto just had Charon. Must be really out of the loop on this.
Well, this is pretty bad, though I imagine it probably happened because one webmaster could control multiple domains that look dissimilar, and they forgot to add checks to make sure that the webmaster really controlled the requested one. Oops. Nowhere near as bad as this, which was simple gross, heads-should-roll, incompetence, but still a pretty big mistake. Kinda sad that address bar "hacks" still work in this day and age. Especially at a company like Google.
Looks like the removal isn't permanent, either, just temporary, so take that for what its worth. Still, wow, a malicious user could do serious damage to a lot of websites with this.
On doing a little research, it looks like you can basically only bow out for religious reasons. According to the IRS form (PDF warning: here ) you must be a member of a religious organization that objects conscientiously to public or private insurance or welfare. There also a few exemptions for students working on dissertations or nonresident aliens working in a few select jobs (according to this). But, no, not just anyone can back out, unless they hid the method for doing so really well.
And no, Pastafarianism wouldn't suffice: the form specifically states that the religious organization must have existed continuously since 1950.
Oh, don't get me wrong: I do still think FBRs are really cool. While I was reading about this reactor, my inner nerd was going "Holy shit, using NaK as a coolant is awesome and kinda badass!" even while it was also going "Holy shit, using a material that can spontaneously explode in air as coolant for nuclear material is a really bad idea!". Many bad ideas are also really cool. Doesn't mean they aren't still bad ideas. Can't even imagine what would happen if the public found out about it. Or if, God forbid, one of these things actually exploded.
Now, something like a Molten Salt Reactor , on the other hand, is both cool and (probably) not a bad idea. And could possibly solve most of the world's ecological problems.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, I had heard some idea about using it as an emergency escape pod/ extended living room a few years ago on the ISS. Seems like a great idea to me. Or possibly you could use it to make trips to repair satellites in nearby orbits. I guess it just isn't worth the cost. Maintaining it would probably be nearly impossible, given its age.
Pretty much none of these are actually "cool", except perhaps for the idea about traveling around air show circuits together with the 747. Fake sets of the Space Shuttle would work better for pretty much all of them, although I do have to say using them to line the road would be interesting. Better would be to as one as advertising displays for an Air and Space museum (you know, how they put a fake fighter on a pole. An actual space shuttle would be kinda cool.)
I know it would be impractical/too expensive, but what would be really cool would be launching them into space empty, and putting them into permanent orbit. That would be cool. Perhaps they could even serve as impromptu space stations, but just having them orbiting the Earth forever would be a very fitting retirement. I know, we don't need even more garbage in space, orbits decay, etc. Otherwise, these thing belong in museums, not some kind of advertising for commercial ventures. I mean, come on, a giant Starbucks? Starbucks contributed nothing to space exploration. It would be a horrible abuse of the iconic image for commercial profit to use a shuttle that way.
Now, as part of corporate headquarters for SpaceX... that'd be kinda fitting.
Let me just say this: Lolololololol.
That is all.
You forgot about
C)All the people who hear about the game from friends who pirated it and then go out and buy it. Probably pretty huge. Granted I didn't explicitly mention it (my bad).
However, the whole debate is rather pointless as no one has any really good numbers. Its nearly impossible to know. I do grant that people who bring this argument up in discussions about AAA titles are probably mostly wrong, what with the amount of marketing/demos those already have (and I can personally say that I generally don't buy those games if I pirate them), but I do think its quite relevant when talking about indie games. My point is that piracy is a bad reason to stay away from PC gaming, especially for an indie developer. Oh, and piracy can (and does) happen on consoles, too, although its not as common, and Sony/Microsoft like to pretend it can't.
True, some people will never buy the game. You won't get money from them in any way.
However, for others the case is different. For instance, I first played World of Goo when a friend pirated it and gave it to me. Never would have played it otherwise. Guess what? I now own it on steam. Never installed it (yet), but I might get around to replaying it on there at some point. Regardless, they now have a sale they wouldn't have had it not been for piracy. Piracy can be an indie games greatest advertiser. The game maker even mentions that: he considered that he'd gone big when his game started being pirated. Piracy means your game is actually popular enough people want to share and play it, and that means people will buy it. Some of them anyways.
Anyone who logs into steam sees the front page sales first thing, and this game was on it IIRC. Also, the update news will show new games for those who stay logged in all the time. Not to mention, steam almost always has some pretty good sales going on (even besides the annual summer sale, which is the best in the business) so its worth checking around for new releases/ specials. I do, anyways, and I suspect a lot of others do as well. Combine this with steams relative ease of use and extreme ease of purchase (seriously: I can have the game downloading in under 30 secs after I decide to buy), and you pretty much have a winner. Not sure how easy it is on Xbox, but it can't be a whole lot easier than steam.
Moreover, PC gamers love cheap indie games like this, much more so IMHO than console games. To be honest, I'm note sure why so many indie developers even target Xbox/PS3. Fear of piracy, maybe? If so, its a BS reason: I'll gladly buy a good 3-5$ (sometimes more) game, and so will many others, even those who will happily pirate more expensive AAA games.
Let me just say it and just get it out of the way:
The DVD is dead. RIP.
As poorly conceived and designed as the shuttle was, it nevertheless stands as an icon and symbol for a generation. I doubt there will be, in the near future, anything that so eminently symbolizes the drive for humans to expand beyond the limits of our own environment, nor anything that can so easily capture the imagination. A spaceplane might be a bad idea in practice: but as a symbol, it is pretty well unbeatable. When people think of spaceflight, they don't think of Saturn rockets or the Apollo landers, although maybe they should. They think of the Shuttle orbiter and its massive fuel tank and rocket boosters. I think this image will be the greatest (only?) loss that the retirement of the Shuttle brings. But for that, shutting the program down is a great sign of potential progress.
This is pretty much the best summary of it I've seen. Even retaining the data a short time makes sense: say if a kidnapping is reported 2-3 days later, knowing where the kidnapper was could be very valuable. TFA mentions one of the city's has a system that overwrites the data after 30 days (still a long time, but moderately reasonable.) But indefinitely? Shared with any agency that asks? There is no good reason for that. No way this kind of info is ever going to be useful in court, as there would be no way to prove who is actually driving the car. Only thing it could be useful for is "probable cause" to harass people they have no real evidence against.
Then again, we do live in a world where courts consider an IP address personally identifying information, so who knows.
You can see the same change with all the "privacy is not important"
And which rock have you been living under, exactly? Google hasn't ever said "privacy is important". I'm getting a little sick of this idea that all your information, which you freely give to Google whenever you search/ sign of for G+/ whatever, should somehow be "private", i.e. Google shouldn't have it. Its one thing to complain if Google was sharing it freely with the world as Facebook tended/tends to do. But they're not: that would in fact undermine their business model. They don't want everyone having your data, they want your data themselves so that they can mine it and profit from it. Data you give to Google may be mined, and the results shared with advertising partners, but it is by no means made public for the world to see. Unless I'm completely wrong about how Adsense works, if so someone please enlighten me. (Seriously: I would love to be corrected on this if I'm wrong.)
Maybe some people at Google abuse it and look up the actual raw data themselves, but I have no reason to suspect the information I give to Google, whether on G+ or their search/ad network, is ever seen by anything besides a computer. (I had trouble parsing your sentence where you claimed otherwise: were these employees IM'ing with the people themselves or what?) And if you don't want a computer seeing that data, STOP USING THE INTERNET. Even using a darknet/VPN/Tor won't stop it completely.
And no offense, but I'll need a little more than someone's "meeting with middle managers" to show that Google is shifting its entire stance, especially when that stance happens to be their entire business model, namely providing free, pretty good quality services in return for being served targeted ads. Google is still funding Mozilla at least through this year, despite having their own web browser. They continue to develop and provide Android under a FOSS license, and built G+ at least partially on offering better and easier to use privacy controls than Facebook. None of that shows a company that is shifting to a "screw our consumers for money till we collapse" mindset that plagues many companies. Maybe its coming, but I just don't see it.
Given that this is /., I'm guessing what those women would tell you they want is "Not you."
Best part about this, as others mentioned, is that if you disable javascript, you can not only get to the right click menu, you can select/copy/paste the characters. In fact, I was able to do that even with Javascript in Opera. And then for the hell of it I removed the section disabling the right-click, which is conveniently labeled in the source, enabled Javascript, and right-clicked on the page. I just hacked Sony!
BTW, what do they actually use this for? Do they really use it for all their online signups? Not that I would be surprised, just wondering if anyone has a page where this is actually being used so I can laugh even more at Sony.
Dear Kotick, people actually do get tired of cash-ins.
"Dear i kan reed,
See Madden."
Laughing all the way to the bank, Bobby Kotick
After a quick glance at NFC, it seems like Bluetooth and NFC don't even fulfill the same roles. NFC only has a working range of 20cm or less, while Bluetooth can reach for something like 20-30 meters (in extreme cases). That seems like it would make NFC useless for headsets, as a phone in the pocket is going to be more than 20cm away from your ear. Same thing for laptops. Also, NFC has an extremely low data rate compared to Bluetooth, so your not going to use it for file transfers. Seems like NFC is mostly useful for things like credit cards/ID badges/ etc. which Bluetooth would be useless for, since it needs pairing, while Bluetooth is used for voice/video communication, file transfers, and the like.
Am I wrong about this? Anyone know more about NFC compared to Bluetooth? I do see that Bluetooth 4.0 is low energy, so it could fill some of the roles of NFC, but it can't do passive RFID like NFC can, so again, different technologies for different uses. Seems like the story (at least the summary) is just sensationalist speculation. Seems like not using NFC would be quite stupid on Apple's part in any case, since nearly everyone else is. Having the iPhone/ MacBook not work with actually deployed technology seems like it would be a huge mistake for Apple.
And virus, bot, and trojan makers the world over rejoice at the new opportunities for exploits! This looks like it will be a bitch to make secure. On the other hand, it also does look like it could be pretty cool.
Also, oblig xkcd .
True. And I'll be honest, I didn't really think of that. Also, I'm pretty sure Amazon's service is intended for use with way smaller amounts of data, in which case it becomes much more cost effective and reasonable. Still, when you could build and maintain servers with 25 times the amount of data for the same cost as Amazon, I'm inclined to say that Amazon is overcharging. It maybe that everyone else in the market does too, and I acknowledge that building that kind of infrastructure and software is no mean feat. Guess I shouldn't complain: the idea of hosting a petabyte of data that can be accessed at high speeds anywhere in the world... well, thats impressive.
They mention that they have one guy dedicated to building new pods and replacing old drives. Out of ~9000 drives and ~200 pods, they replace ~10 drives per week, and with the RAID6 data redundancy the chance of losing data is absolutely minimal. RAID6 uses 2 drives for data parity, so I believe you would need 3 drives out of 45 to fail within a week to actually lose data. I suspect they would shut a pod down if 2 drives in it failed at the same time. Since the failure rate, including infant mortality, is only ~5 percent per year per drive, the chances of even that happening are pretty tiny. I'm not sure what brand of drives the Sun 4500 uses, but 6 a year sounds like a lot. I'm guessing this is considerably more reliable. All in all, because they have a person dedicated to maintaining the system on a weekly basis, this seems like it wouldn't even be all that bad for critical data. I wouldn't make it your only copy (fires/storms do happen) but it definitely seems reliable as an offsite backup.
Here is a link to Backblaze's actual blog entry for the new pods 135TB, and here is the original 67TB pods. The blog article is actually quite fascinating. Apparently they are employee owned, use entirely off-the-shelf parts (except for the case, looks like), and recommend Hitachi drives (Deskstar 5K3000 HDS5C3030ALA630) as having the lowest failure rate of any manufacturer (less than 1% they say).
I found it kinda amusing that ext4's 16TB volume limit was an "issue" for them. Not because its surprising, but because... well, its 16TB. The whole blog post is actually recommended reading for anyone looking to build their own data pods like this. It really does a good job showing their personal experience in the field and problems/not problems they have. For instance: apparently heat isn't an issue, as 2 fans are able to keep an entire pod within the recommended temperature (although they actually use 6). It'll be interesting to see what happens as some of their pods get older, as I suspect that their failure rate will get pretty high fairly soon (their oldest drives are currently 4 years old, I expect when they hit 5-6 years failures will start becoming much more common.) All in all, pretty cool. Oh, and it shows how much Amazon/ Dell price gouges, but that shouldn't really shock anyone. Except the amount. A petabyte for three years is $94,000 with Backblaze, and $2,466,000 with Amazon.
P.S. I suspect they use ext4 over ZFS because ZFS, despite the built in data checks, isn't mature enough for them yet. They mention they used to use JFS before switching to ext4, so I suspect they have done some pretty extensive checking on this.
If it was possible to do this in software to begin with, and they knew the images were "controversial" to begin with, why the hell didn't they just do this from the very beginning? My understanding of the system was that it was the fact that the images revealed everything, so to speak, that they were effective. So either they need to be revealing (which they clearly don't), or they've just been lying the whole time.
Which brings me to my second question. Who is being paid to develop this software? Is this literally a case where they could have done something in the beginning, but didn't so that they could charge extra later, and then look like good guys because they are "protecting our rights"? Or am I missing something here? Because it looks very much to me like this move shows that they were pressing as hard as they could to see how far they could go "to stop terrorists", then, when people object, stepping back the tiniest inch (and BTW, anyone who doesn't go through these still has to be frisked) and trying to look like good guys.
Seriously, this absolutely reeks of deception and probably downright lying. Of course, now people will back off and the TSA can continue with their security theater. The ACLU doesn't need to applaud this decision: they need to launch a class action lawsuit and corruption investigation to shut down the TSA.
Mwahahaha!! My evil plan is... oh wait, I was just trying to make a joke. Ah well, shoulda figured /. would take it as an excuse to start a(nother) completely pointless debate.
This. Hell, my car is visible from space on Google Maps if you zoom in far enough, doesn't really mean much. Whole thing is a giant PR stunt (yeah, I know, duh, I mean calling it "visible from space" when it quite clearly isn't), and it seems like it worked pretty well.
Astronomers using the Hubble Space Telescope discovered a fourth moon orbiting the icy planet Pluto.
There, FTFY :)
More seriously, when did they find the second and third moons? I honestly don't remember ever hearing about them, last I knew Pluto just had Charon. Must be really out of the loop on this.
Well, this is pretty bad, though I imagine it probably happened because one webmaster could control multiple domains that look dissimilar, and they forgot to add checks to make sure that the webmaster really controlled the requested one. Oops. Nowhere near as bad as this, which was simple gross, heads-should-roll, incompetence, but still a pretty big mistake. Kinda sad that address bar "hacks" still work in this day and age. Especially at a company like Google.
Looks like the removal isn't permanent, either, just temporary, so take that for what its worth. Still, wow, a malicious user could do serious damage to a lot of websites with this.
On doing a little research, it looks like you can basically only bow out for religious reasons. According to the IRS form (PDF warning: here ) you must be a member of a religious organization that objects conscientiously to public or private insurance or welfare. There also a few exemptions for students working on dissertations or nonresident aliens working in a few select jobs (according to this). But, no, not just anyone can back out, unless they hid the method for doing so really well.
And no, Pastafarianism wouldn't suffice: the form specifically states that the religious organization must have existed continuously since 1950.
Oh, don't get me wrong: I do still think FBRs are really cool. While I was reading about this reactor, my inner nerd was going "Holy shit, using NaK as a coolant is awesome and kinda badass!" even while it was also going "Holy shit, using a material that can spontaneously explode in air as coolant for nuclear material is a really bad idea!". Many bad ideas are also really cool. Doesn't mean they aren't still bad ideas. Can't even imagine what would happen if the public found out about it. Or if, God forbid, one of these things actually exploded.
Now, something like a Molten Salt Reactor , on the other hand, is both cool and (probably) not a bad idea. And could possibly solve most of the world's ecological problems.