My 8 year old has been reading Girl Genius comics for over a year now. She can't get enough of them. The comics are free online, you only pay for print versions and merch. She has all of the print copies, and rereads them regularly.
Actually, no. He represents the area north of San Diego, which does have some tech, but nothing on the scale of the Silicon Valley (which is several hundred miles away). He does, however, have a background in running an electronics company that made car alarms for the Viper and other such things.
On the other side of this, he is chairman on oversight and judicial committees in the House, so his putting this out on the net for commet and review is likely a good thing. Relevant link- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darrell_Issa
So, basically, the more educated/affluent families *might* spend about an hour and a half of quality time with their kids per day, and this makes all of the difference in the world? Even if this is true, as a dad, I'm still trying to wrap my head around how a kid gets 10 to 12 hours of media time per day. Wow.
That is because the last person to leave did all of those jobs- which is why he or she left! The person also probably warned management they were being overworked, and the company is probably still in denial that they just tripled or quintupled their staff costs by losing that one person that they wouldn't give a small raise to. In a year or two, after being screwed by a couple of staffing agencies making vague assurances, there will probably be 3 to 5 reqs open, all paying above the median.
Or the company will fail. Like I've told my management, and they understand to be true, "The day you replaced file folders for file servers is the day you went from a company that does X, to being an IT company that does X."
Management are finally discovering what experienced IT staffers have been warning them about for years- failure to invest in training and mentoring entry-level staff will result in shortages over all levels of skill in the future.
Skilled staff are not a commodity. They are not widgets that can be easily replaced. Moreover, the attrition rate for the IT field is high- I am one of 4 people I know among my extended group of friends with more than 20 years in the business who are still working as non-management. Everyone else has either changed professions to something else, or is in management.
The unemployment rate for IT staff in my region is less than 3%. I stopped trying to get requisitions for new staff to train up years ago when I realized that until their pants are on fire, management at most companies simply won't understand that it can take three to five years to train up a good IT staffer, provided the will and funding are there to do it. So, this new "news" is not a surprise to me, and I've taken a more laid back approach as I've realized that there isn't any purpose to changing some peoples' minds about the growing staff shortage. As of now, I'm enjoying the ride, letting people call me and determining where I'm going to have to argue least about pay.
Yep, his only two options are to either spend most of the rest of his life servicing his debt in indentured servitude to the RIAA, or flee the country illegally. Unfortunately for him, leaving with a passport isn't going to be likely- the current administration recently made it possible to revoke or deny passports to debtors, so he would have to find a country that would take his young and unskilled self as a political refugee, or some he would have to fall into a similar class where a passport isn't a requirement. Even joining the French Foreign Legion isn't an option for him now, as he has to legally enter the country in order to join.
I'd agree. In fact, people trained as professional artists and photographers are in demand by the same companies that make their living on 3D rendering and imaging. All of those "realistic" lighting effects in CGI come from people with an extensive background in film and photography creating virtual light rigs, etc, to create the realism people think is so easy to achieve.
It supports access via CIFs, NFS, and Fuzelibs. Of course, his smallest disk is going to limit assignment of one filespace brick for replication on another drive to a file of the same size, but he could conceivably jigger around his assignments to use all of the disk space he has.
Well, I hope he has a *really* fast switch if he does that; and there is that issue with power for all of those hosts, if he wants that kind of redundancy...
Agreed. That is what I recall as well. Quite the bait and switch.
The current President voted up Patriot Act II as a Senator. He sponsored tort reform as a Senator that could be used as a bludgeon against free speech. He sponsored ACTA, and tried to keep the contents of the treaty a state secret.
I'd not hold my breath waiting for a veto on this.
"Flow is an easy to use diagramming and flowcharting application with tight integration to the other Calligra applications. It enables you to create network diagrams, organisation charts, flowcharts and more."
That is all they have on their website. About as useful as a box of rocks. If anyone has some experience with the latest Calligra Flow, can they post whether or not there is any ability to use Visio compatible figures, or read Visio documents? Or, at the very least, easily import images and set glue points in some kind of sane fashion?
I was living and working in the Bay Area back in 1991. Yahoo! was primarily a massive indexing operation then, the largest employer of library sciences majors outside of the CIA, and employed several friends of mine. Historically, they have always laid off large groups of staff, and then hired new staff to replace them under different titles, thereby skirting state employment law. I've pretty much been able to time their layoffs, because their recruiters have my number, and they start doing interviews in advance of the firings, like clockwork. Well, up until I told them in several rude ways to stop calling me.
Nobody who wants a long term job works for Yahoo. I'd say the current round of layoffs is just that, the current round. Continuously firing their performing (ie, highest wage earning) staff would also explain why they have done nothing notable since, oh, the early 90s. Everything they have done was simply to keep up with the Joneses. Web space didn't happen until geocities and angelfire became popular, and after their own failed attempts Yahoo then just bought Geo. Mail wasn't added until HotMail took off. Automating directory services didn't happen until Google. I could go on- but they have always been an overhyped dog of a stock, slow to adapt, and their lugubrious descent into failure hasn't surprised me in the least.
The clincher for me was when they were considered the "gold standard", and their shares were over at over $450 per. This was when they were still doing indexing with librarians. Once I saw that, I quickly changed my skillset to survive the coming dot-bomb and socked away my cash.
Los Altos school district has a pilot program with Khan Academy to do exactly this. Instead of lecturing in class and sending homework, they actually have kids watch the instructional videos, and the teachers help the students learn in class depending on their graphed and measured feedback. I'd say that Khan Academy is probably the leader in the next generation of education technologies. It is a free service and the organization is a non-profit. It is worth checking out.
The flipside of this issue is inertia. Most teachers and parents aren't very tech savvy, and shrink from having anything to do with fundamental changes to routine. I'm having an uphill battle convincing key PTA members at our school to implement Google Apps for Non-profits, even though they have had several communication issues where having a service like that would have made a world of difference. The problem is that enough of them simply cannot see the value of the technology. I'm having to go *very* slowly and do my best to not alienate people because of their own prejudices surrounding "it's tech, so it's hard".
At least, that is what I got out of the warnings in the article. It wasn't about the FBI needing more money, so much as his discussion of the absolutely deplorable state of most business networks. Most businesses, even IT managers within businesses, seem to think that best security practice means sending someone to a Cisco firewall class, putting an ASA into an external facing connection, and passing a security scan as all they need to stop the bad guys. They never really consider what it means to really monitor the health of a network, or have an understanding of how their internal applications operate across their machines, nor are they willing to really invest in the kind of staffing and knowledge needed to make sure their data is actually secure. In the end, they are better off with making that early investment, because that knowledge also translates into fewer expenditures on gimmicky appliances, and a better focus on having things run right. It is a shame that mostly these businesses are blithely whistling past the graveyard.
Most businesses seem to miss from the day they replaced their file drawers with a file server, they went from a "widget" company to an IT company that does widgets. It is a subtle but definitive change in how businesses need to focus investments in resources. Unfortunately, most businesses just don't get it. They think because some snake oil dealer slapped "security" on the side of the box that the word means anything.
What I'd like to see is ACM, the ISC, ISC2 (no relation), and other organizations start pushing for more stringent best practices written into regulation (not law). Basically, if a business doesn't take the effort to invest in their own security, then they should be held liable if they get broken into. Don't expect insurance to pay out. Don't expect to be personally shielded by corporate liability if your client data goes into the wild. On the other hand, if businesses DO meet those standards, then they likewise shouldn't be held liable. I would really like to see the above organizations testifying on the Hill about what that would mean.
How is this surprising? Highly paid knowledge workers are under heavy demand to perform. Their entire job can be measured in hours of "non-productive" time, which would include learning a new workflow process (Linux desktop and software) so they can do the job that they are already doing quite well. If some tool written under windows is the tool they need, then they get that tool on the latest version. Not giving it to them means the inflow of money stops.
Same can't be said for most of the other staff. Linux is fantastic for call centers, admin assistants, and the like. Most of their work can be done through a browser. A desktop admin can remotely lock down their machines, choose which options of which applications to enable remotely, push and roll back software updates- all with free tools. It cuts down on the amount of staff needed to keep those parts of a company running without much pushback. No more need for licensed backup, anti-virus, update, software push, or upgrade software, and all of the admin headaches that come along with that.
Companies are cheap in general, economy doesn't really make much difference in that regard.
Right now, a lot of companies are coming up short on finding IT staff. Since the dot com bomb, companies stopped training up their own staff to save on costs as well, which means that between the lack of new staff, and the attrition rate of more than 80% from the bomb, there aren't enough knowledgable people to go around. That has resulted in a huge knowledge gap, as IT is either self-taught through trial and error (less than 10% of IT workers are really capable of this), or a guided apprenticeship (no, school just gives you a starting point). As veteran staff cycled out, so did all of that knowledge. Only now are business owners and their management seeing the tip of an iceberg sized problem.
The unemployment rate for IT in my region is 3%, which is fueling a new round of people job-hopping to gain pay, because their current employers are going through the cycle of 1) undervaluing IT staff contributions, 2) not paying them what they are worth, 3) refusing to believe the IT people were each doing 3 peoples' jobs when their staff walked out, 4) finally coming to terms with the fact that they are going to have to pay more people to do more things once again.
I've seen this cycle repeatedly. One could call it a macro-economic Dunning-Kruger effect. The best way to avoid it is to confront management head on with their own lack of understanding- ask them what business was like before they added servers and network infrastructure. Then remind them that they stopped being a company that does X when they replaced all of those people with a few machines- they are now an IT company that does X, and it is not your job to make up for their own failure to adapt to the consequences of their own decisions. Politely, of course.
I've been through the jury selection process. By identifying oneself as aware of or willing to nullify, a person could either be kicked out of the pool, or even be declared in contempt of court (skirting one's duty to faithfully serve as instructed, as a means of skipping jury duty). It depends on jurisdiction, how one states his or her opinion to the court, and the judge's mood.
In my case, I didn't have to press the issue- they found jurors before they got to me and asked their questions.
Well, that sounds nice, but wouldn't they be adding 200 kph + the force of gravity in order to walk about the cabin? I mean, taking a dump would be dead easy, but crawling to the toilet would be a bear. I'm sure it would let up after a while, but still, I'd have to wonder how long that 200 kph would be pushing you down.
Actually, 80% of the freshwater used in California is used by agriculture. Cities here regularly ration water, and we are pretty much exhorted to not exceed the 20% we normally use. It is somewhat of a bone of contention up and down the state, because generally that 80% is used wastefully and is polluted with chemicals and animal waste when the large agribusiness concerns are done with most of it. Even long droughts aren't much of an issue here- we have an extensive system of dams, dikes, levees, spillways, and other water management systems to deal with up to seven years of drought. But this is also why we are so adamant about using water wisely (and why people here tend to get a bit upset over ag water waste, the "big players" are always the last to come on board).
The more serious problem the state has is sprawl expansion covering arable land. That is a serious issue that has more to do with county level greed and a misanthropic commercial property tax code than anything else.
People with computer knowledge are analogs to witches of the Middle Ages. All you have to do is accuse someone of being a "hacker", and if they have any actual computer knowledge, they are pretty much convicted and sentenced to jail terms that others would get for only the most heinous murders and violations.
Megaupload is a Hong Kong based company. The only reason they were charged in the US was because they used servers for hosting in the US. This pretty much sends a message to anyone who might do business in the States that they are not welcome, and that justice is pretty much bought and sold by how much money and influence you have. This is not a good message to be sending out to businesses overseas, looking to invest here. Freezing a foreign company's assets worldwide over what is a domestic issue is going to give a lot of international entrepreneurs reasons to look elsewhere.
Kim Dotcom did the smart thing- he made sure there was a time limit set on his user's data if someone bigger than his company came along and tried to forcibly take it. By the time someone shutting down his operations finally figured out where the real data was held, all of it is going to be deleted- unless they return his funds and let him continue to operate. Damned if they do shut him down, because now he and his company are a damaged party and the US takes a hit in the international markets, damned if they don't shut him down completely, because then the Feds look weak and ineffectual.
Exculpatory evidence and discovery for the trial are irreparably damaged by the Prosecution, the Defendants can now sue in civil and international court for damages (whether they see them or not), and Kim Dotcom may even become a cause celebre. That is, if the US doesn't hold him indefinitely under the NDAA...
All it looks like to me is that the FBI is finally joining the other TLAs in putting out an RFP that specifically is tailored to the makers of Palantir getting a contract.
MIT is showcasing this vehicle, because some of their forecasts are showing that larger vehicles in urban environments are going to be on the decline. This vehicle is intended for use inside urban environments as a shared vehicle (like ZipCars), as most urban vehicles are only used ~10% of the time. It also is electric powered, and will have a variety of electronic safety features. It is NOT intended for highway use amongst homicidal SUV drivers, so those people can continue to "drive" with a clear conscience, yakking on their phones and running over cyclists, etc. without having to worry about something larger leaving a serious dent in their day.
The showcase vehicle is a sized-down prototype. It is not intended to be driven by ants or other arthropods. Actually, it would be the first publicly viewed prototype, but I've seen concept photos of vehicles in Japan with designs like this. This prototype is going into production with models coming out in 2013, so obviously there are businesses and municipalities already putting in orders to fund this.
Which means that folks should be paying attention to the sub-text of the discussion going on in the video- there is an expectation that there will be more people in cities, and fewer resources to go around.
Slashdot Mirror
My 8 year old has been reading Girl Genius comics for over a year now. She can't get enough of them. The comics are free online, you only pay for print versions and merch. She has all of the print copies, and rereads them regularly.
http://www.girlgeniusonline.com/
Actually, no. He represents the area north of San Diego, which does have some tech, but nothing on the scale of the Silicon Valley (which is several hundred miles away). He does, however, have a background in running an electronics company that made car alarms for the Viper and other such things.
On the other side of this, he is chairman on oversight and judicial committees in the House, so his putting this out on the net for commet and review is likely a good thing. Relevant link- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darrell_Issa
So, basically, the more educated/affluent families *might* spend about an hour and a half of quality time with their kids per day, and this makes all of the difference in the world? Even if this is true, as a dad, I'm still trying to wrap my head around how a kid gets 10 to 12 hours of media time per day. Wow.
That is because the last person to leave did all of those jobs- which is why he or she left! The person also probably warned management they were being overworked, and the company is probably still in denial that they just tripled or quintupled their staff costs by losing that one person that they wouldn't give a small raise to. In a year or two, after being screwed by a couple of staffing agencies making vague assurances, there will probably be 3 to 5 reqs open, all paying above the median.
Or the company will fail. Like I've told my management, and they understand to be true, "The day you replaced file folders for file servers is the day you went from a company that does X, to being an IT company that does X."
Management are finally discovering what experienced IT staffers have been warning them about for years- failure to invest in training and mentoring entry-level staff will result in shortages over all levels of skill in the future.
Skilled staff are not a commodity. They are not widgets that can be easily replaced. Moreover, the attrition rate for the IT field is high- I am one of 4 people I know among my extended group of friends with more than 20 years in the business who are still working as non-management. Everyone else has either changed professions to something else, or is in management.
The unemployment rate for IT staff in my region is less than 3%. I stopped trying to get requisitions for new staff to train up years ago when I realized that until their pants are on fire, management at most companies simply won't understand that it can take three to five years to train up a good IT staffer, provided the will and funding are there to do it. So, this new "news" is not a surprise to me, and I've taken a more laid back approach as I've realized that there isn't any purpose to changing some peoples' minds about the growing staff shortage. As of now, I'm enjoying the ride, letting people call me and determining where I'm going to have to argue least about pay.
Yep, his only two options are to either spend most of the rest of his life servicing his debt in indentured servitude to the RIAA, or flee the country illegally. Unfortunately for him, leaving with a passport isn't going to be likely- the current administration recently made it possible to revoke or deny passports to debtors, so he would have to find a country that would take his young and unskilled self as a political refugee, or some he would have to fall into a similar class where a passport isn't a requirement. Even joining the French Foreign Legion isn't an option for him now, as he has to legally enter the country in order to join.
I'd agree. In fact, people trained as professional artists and photographers are in demand by the same companies that make their living on 3D rendering and imaging. All of those "realistic" lighting effects in CGI come from people with an extensive background in film and photography creating virtual light rigs, etc, to create the realism people think is so easy to achieve.
You mean like GlusterFS? www.gluster.org
It supports access via CIFs, NFS, and Fuzelibs. Of course, his smallest disk is going to limit assignment of one filespace brick for replication on another drive to a file of the same size, but he could conceivably jigger around his assignments to use all of the disk space he has.
Well, I hope he has a *really* fast switch if he does that; and there is that issue with power for all of those hosts, if he wants that kind of redundancy...
Agreed. That is what I recall as well. Quite the bait and switch.
The current President voted up Patriot Act II as a Senator. He sponsored tort reform as a Senator that could be used as a bludgeon against free speech. He sponsored ACTA, and tried to keep the contents of the treaty a state secret.
I'd not hold my breath waiting for a veto on this.
"Flow is an easy to use diagramming and flowcharting application with tight integration to the other Calligra applications. It enables you to create network diagrams, organisation charts, flowcharts and more."
That is all they have on their website. About as useful as a box of rocks. If anyone has some experience with the latest Calligra Flow, can they post whether or not there is any ability to use Visio compatible figures, or read Visio documents? Or, at the very least, easily import images and set glue points in some kind of sane fashion?
It was '98. I'm getting old, and thinking in internet years. ;)
I was living and working in the Bay Area back in 1991. Yahoo! was primarily a massive indexing operation then, the largest employer of library sciences majors outside of the CIA, and employed several friends of mine. Historically, they have always laid off large groups of staff, and then hired new staff to replace them under different titles, thereby skirting state employment law. I've pretty much been able to time their layoffs, because their recruiters have my number, and they start doing interviews in advance of the firings, like clockwork. Well, up until I told them in several rude ways to stop calling me.
Nobody who wants a long term job works for Yahoo. I'd say the current round of layoffs is just that, the current round. Continuously firing their performing (ie, highest wage earning) staff would also explain why they have done nothing notable since, oh, the early 90s. Everything they have done was simply to keep up with the Joneses. Web space didn't happen until geocities and angelfire became popular, and after their own failed attempts Yahoo then just bought Geo. Mail wasn't added until HotMail took off. Automating directory services didn't happen until Google. I could go on- but they have always been an overhyped dog of a stock, slow to adapt, and their lugubrious descent into failure hasn't surprised me in the least.
The clincher for me was when they were considered the "gold standard", and their shares were over at over $450 per. This was when they were still doing indexing with librarians. Once I saw that, I quickly changed my skillset to survive the coming dot-bomb and socked away my cash.
Los Altos school district has a pilot program with Khan Academy to do exactly this. Instead of lecturing in class and sending homework, they actually have kids watch the instructional videos, and the teachers help the students learn in class depending on their graphed and measured feedback. I'd say that Khan Academy is probably the leader in the next generation of education technologies. It is a free service and the organization is a non-profit. It is worth checking out.
The flipside of this issue is inertia. Most teachers and parents aren't very tech savvy, and shrink from having anything to do with fundamental changes to routine. I'm having an uphill battle convincing key PTA members at our school to implement Google Apps for Non-profits, even though they have had several communication issues where having a service like that would have made a world of difference. The problem is that enough of them simply cannot see the value of the technology. I'm having to go *very* slowly and do my best to not alienate people because of their own prejudices surrounding "it's tech, so it's hard".
At least, that is what I got out of the warnings in the article. It wasn't about the FBI needing more money, so much as his discussion of the absolutely deplorable state of most business networks. Most businesses, even IT managers within businesses, seem to think that best security practice means sending someone to a Cisco firewall class, putting an ASA into an external facing connection, and passing a security scan as all they need to stop the bad guys. They never really consider what it means to really monitor the health of a network, or have an understanding of how their internal applications operate across their machines, nor are they willing to really invest in the kind of staffing and knowledge needed to make sure their data is actually secure. In the end, they are better off with making that early investment, because that knowledge also translates into fewer expenditures on gimmicky appliances, and a better focus on having things run right. It is a shame that mostly these businesses are blithely whistling past the graveyard.
Most businesses seem to miss from the day they replaced their file drawers with a file server, they went from a "widget" company to an IT company that does widgets. It is a subtle but definitive change in how businesses need to focus investments in resources. Unfortunately, most businesses just don't get it. They think because some snake oil dealer slapped "security" on the side of the box that the word means anything.
What I'd like to see is ACM, the ISC, ISC2 (no relation), and other organizations start pushing for more stringent best practices written into regulation (not law). Basically, if a business doesn't take the effort to invest in their own security, then they should be held liable if they get broken into. Don't expect insurance to pay out. Don't expect to be personally shielded by corporate liability if your client data goes into the wild. On the other hand, if businesses DO meet those standards, then they likewise shouldn't be held liable. I would really like to see the above organizations testifying on the Hill about what that would mean.
How is this surprising? Highly paid knowledge workers are under heavy demand to perform. Their entire job can be measured in hours of "non-productive" time, which would include learning a new workflow process (Linux desktop and software) so they can do the job that they are already doing quite well. If some tool written under windows is the tool they need, then they get that tool on the latest version. Not giving it to them means the inflow of money stops.
Same can't be said for most of the other staff. Linux is fantastic for call centers, admin assistants, and the like. Most of their work can be done through a browser. A desktop admin can remotely lock down their machines, choose which options of which applications to enable remotely, push and roll back software updates- all with free tools. It cuts down on the amount of staff needed to keep those parts of a company running without much pushback. No more need for licensed backup, anti-virus, update, software push, or upgrade software, and all of the admin headaches that come along with that.
Companies are cheap in general, economy doesn't really make much difference in that regard.
Right now, a lot of companies are coming up short on finding IT staff. Since the dot com bomb, companies stopped training up their own staff to save on costs as well, which means that between the lack of new staff, and the attrition rate of more than 80% from the bomb, there aren't enough knowledgable people to go around. That has resulted in a huge knowledge gap, as IT is either self-taught through trial and error (less than 10% of IT workers are really capable of this), or a guided apprenticeship (no, school just gives you a starting point). As veteran staff cycled out, so did all of that knowledge. Only now are business owners and their management seeing the tip of an iceberg sized problem.
The unemployment rate for IT in my region is 3%, which is fueling a new round of people job-hopping to gain pay, because their current employers are going through the cycle of 1) undervaluing IT staff contributions, 2) not paying them what they are worth, 3) refusing to believe the IT people were each doing 3 peoples' jobs when their staff walked out, 4) finally coming to terms with the fact that they are going to have to pay more people to do more things once again.
I've seen this cycle repeatedly. One could call it a macro-economic Dunning-Kruger effect. The best way to avoid it is to confront management head on with their own lack of understanding- ask them what business was like before they added servers and network infrastructure. Then remind them that they stopped being a company that does X when they replaced all of those people with a few machines- they are now an IT company that does X, and it is not your job to make up for their own failure to adapt to the consequences of their own decisions. Politely, of course.
I've been through the jury selection process. By identifying oneself as aware of or willing to nullify, a person could either be kicked out of the pool, or even be declared in contempt of court (skirting one's duty to faithfully serve as instructed, as a means of skipping jury duty). It depends on jurisdiction, how one states his or her opinion to the court, and the judge's mood.
In my case, I didn't have to press the issue- they found jurors before they got to me and asked their questions.
On the heels of the FBI cleaning up their Lulzsec false flag op (which they funded) against Stratfor, I'd have to agree.
Well, that sounds nice, but wouldn't they be adding 200 kph + the force of gravity in order to walk about the cabin? I mean, taking a dump would be dead easy, but crawling to the toilet would be a bear. I'm sure it would let up after a while, but still, I'd have to wonder how long that 200 kph would be pushing you down.
On bagpipes, no less.
Actually, 80% of the freshwater used in California is used by agriculture. Cities here regularly ration water, and we are pretty much exhorted to not exceed the 20% we normally use. It is somewhat of a bone of contention up and down the state, because generally that 80% is used wastefully and is polluted with chemicals and animal waste when the large agribusiness concerns are done with most of it. Even long droughts aren't much of an issue here- we have an extensive system of dams, dikes, levees, spillways, and other water management systems to deal with up to seven years of drought. But this is also why we are so adamant about using water wisely (and why people here tend to get a bit upset over ag water waste, the "big players" are always the last to come on board).
The more serious problem the state has is sprawl expansion covering arable land. That is a serious issue that has more to do with county level greed and a misanthropic commercial property tax code than anything else.
People with computer knowledge are analogs to witches of the Middle Ages. All you have to do is accuse someone of being a "hacker", and if they have any actual computer knowledge, they are pretty much convicted and sentenced to jail terms that others would get for only the most heinous murders and violations.
Megaupload is a Hong Kong based company. The only reason they were charged in the US was because they used servers for hosting in the US. This pretty much sends a message to anyone who might do business in the States that they are not welcome, and that justice is pretty much bought and sold by how much money and influence you have. This is not a good message to be sending out to businesses overseas, looking to invest here. Freezing a foreign company's assets worldwide over what is a domestic issue is going to give a lot of international entrepreneurs reasons to look elsewhere.
Kim Dotcom did the smart thing- he made sure there was a time limit set on his user's data if someone bigger than his company came along and tried to forcibly take it. By the time someone shutting down his operations finally figured out where the real data was held, all of it is going to be deleted- unless they return his funds and let him continue to operate. Damned if they do shut him down, because now he and his company are a damaged party and the US takes a hit in the international markets, damned if they don't shut him down completely, because then the Feds look weak and ineffectual.
Exculpatory evidence and discovery for the trial are irreparably damaged by the Prosecution, the Defendants can now sue in civil and international court for damages (whether they see them or not), and Kim Dotcom may even become a cause celebre. That is, if the US doesn't hold him indefinitely under the NDAA...
All it looks like to me is that the FBI is finally joining the other TLAs in putting out an RFP that specifically is tailored to the makers of Palantir getting a contract.
MIT is showcasing this vehicle, because some of their forecasts are showing that larger vehicles in urban environments are going to be on the decline. This vehicle is intended for use inside urban environments as a shared vehicle (like ZipCars), as most urban vehicles are only used ~10% of the time. It also is electric powered, and will have a variety of electronic safety features. It is NOT intended for highway use amongst homicidal SUV drivers, so those people can continue to "drive" with a clear conscience, yakking on their phones and running over cyclists, etc. without having to worry about something larger leaving a serious dent in their day.
The showcase vehicle is a sized-down prototype. It is not intended to be driven by ants or other arthropods. Actually, it would be the first publicly viewed prototype, but I've seen concept photos of vehicles in Japan with designs like this. This prototype is going into production with models coming out in 2013, so obviously there are businesses and municipalities already putting in orders to fund this.
Which means that folks should be paying attention to the sub-text of the discussion going on in the video- there is an expectation that there will be more people in cities, and fewer resources to go around.