"When errors can be attributed to incompetence or malice, it's always more likely to be the former." While this is generally true, it is important to take things in context. 9/11 started two wars. The average cost of those wars for the last 8 years far has been about a quarter of a million dollars PER MINUTE. That is a total of almost $1 Trillion SO FAR. You don't cover up mistakes by making bigger, outrageously expensive, ones. That is money that came from you and me and went into the pockets of the politically connected. It is money that got sucked out of the economy and slowed growth for the past 8 years, contributed to the economic crash and will weigh even more heavily as debt that must be paid off while we try to grow out of a depression. It's going to reduce the quality of life for our kids and worst of all it was used to murder hundreds of thousands of innocents and destroy the lives of millions both here and abroad. The military didn't want to go to war. No generals or commanders thought this was a good idea. Their duty to serve overrides the instinct to do what's right. Yes, military leadership are political animals, but they volunteered to serve and by that virtue, the armed forces filters out most of the truly bad people.
That kind of cash flow isn't overreaction. It's greed. Wake up. We're slaves. It sucks. Are you going to just pretend it didn't happen or help enlighten the rest of the flock so that we can finally do something about it?
If anyone wants a choice quote from me about the recent Linux holes,
this is what I have to say:
Linus is too busy thinking about masturabating monkeys, he doesn't
have time to care about Linux security.
Being both right and being an asshole still makes you an asshole. People can improve their perspective on technical matters by listening to those who are better informed. However, virtually no one will listen to a better informed jerk just because he's right. Linus has a good point. The user base for windows is an order of magnitude higher than Linux which is Linux has an order of magnitude higher deployment than OpenBSD. Though being more popular doesn't make any system or the people that build the system any better, it's terribly counterproductive to actively alienate the vast majority of those who could benefit a change in thinking about security by being inflammatory to any and all who don't automatically agree.
They were ahead of schedule to profitability. They lost funding for the next gen. equipment development because one of their VCs was overextended (read: losing too much money on other risky ventures) and decided to pull out. The risk with a company like that may be high but once you get enough profitability, you can fund further product development internally. They had sold about twenty $1.5M machines in about a year's time on the market. They said they were about 1.5 years to profitability, so I'm guessing that they were expecting to sell another 75 or 100 top-end machines to get to break-even. At that rate, they were probably spending less than $20M a year on development. I'm guessing that they burned up $100M to get were they got. In the overall scheme of things, that's not a big bet. If they managed to develop 20 to 50- thousand node machines and increase the output per core within 3 years, that is something that would have been able to do more than fill a niche. They probably would have developed some game-changing technology in the bargain. Stuff that the Intel and Google might just be interested in.
To be clear: this was not a failure due to the economics of competing against Intel/x86. This was a failure due to not being lucky. It takes sustained funding to make your way from start-up to profit in most technical businesses. HPC is more technical and thus more expensive than most.
Remember, you've already got PV conversion loss up in space. Probably they'll get around 20% efficiency up there and 75% efficiency in transit to the ground. So overall you're getting around 15% of the power that will hit the satellites. On the other hand, itâ(TM)s base-load, you get a lot more light hitting panels in space (vs. on the ground) and the system has got low on-going costs. If they manage to build their birds to last longer than 30 years and the damn things actually work, they will likely make good money.
I use both Linux and Windows at work. Both on 2-year-old machines. I consistently find that web browsing on Windows is far superior to browsing on Linux. I have the latest proprietary drivers for the latest Ubuntu and the lastest Firefox with all the pretty fonts enabled.
Programs are often slower and uglier on Linux, especially with web pages that include flash. The same goes for Eclipse. Same goes for viewing PDFs.
Most things on my Linux machine just worked upon installation. There are a few gotchas. (Printing to networked PCL laser printers sometimes mysteriously fails).
Ubuntu boots and shuts down way faster.
I am super-comfortable with Windows Explorer and Nautilus is just not as easy and fast to use for navigation
Calixte is accused by his roommate of illegally gaining access to the BU grade-keeping system to change students' class grades. He is also accused of misrepresenting himself as his roommate on a gay singles forum and mailing list online. Finally, he is accused of breaking the estranged roommate's computer. They have some dorm IP records and email server logs that indicate that the email came from the suspect's computer.
Use of Linux is a red herring here. The suspect likely did some bad things. It's apparent from the warrant application that the applicant has limited personal experience investigating computer crime and limited technology knowledge, but he is being backed up by one or more people who do have the knowledge and don't have the ability or the duty to file the warrant application.
You're right that this debate is not much different than Vi vs. Emacs, but you can count this post as being for Visual Studio.
It does have some warts, but Visual Studio is often more responsive and less cumbersome than Eclipse. It has a good debugger and it is on-par or better in terms of stability. I use VS, Eclipse and NetBeans, and by a small but real margin, I prefer using Visual Studio. Once you add in Whole Tomato's VisualAssistX (better auto-complete, refactoring, macros), Visual Studio becomes very productive. Without VisuallAssistX, I would probably opt for Eclipse, except for when doing Windows application development.
Here in Pasco county Florida, we have no room for science. You guys already know we can't count (ballots) so this should come as no big surprise. My wife teaches kindergarten and my mom teaches elementary science and math in the slightly more learning-friendly nearby Hillsborough county.
Here's the run down for Pasco:
No living things more active than moss are allowed in the classroom. No turtles, no hamsters, no fish, no frogs, no rabbits...
Every minute of every day of these kids schooling is planned out and filled with rigid, must-do activities. Yes, even the kindergartners. They are filled with things like a 45 minute "reading" block. 5-year-olds have a attention span of 5 minutes, if you're lucky. Many adults that I know chafe if they have to sit and read or listen for that long. Another great must-do is teacher-supervised exercise periods every day. They are made to walk in circles around the bus loop for a half hour or more. This is not recess. The kids don't get to run around in a field under a tree or play on swings and jungle-jims. They walk. Sometimes they do walking games like follow-the-leader. I personally cannot think of a more asinine waste of childhood. Kids need uncontrolled, low-supervision time to just play but instead we are conditioning them into exercising from the beginning of their internment at school.
In Hillsborough county teachers do get merit pay. It's based on test scores and voting. It is highly politicized. Most decent teachers hate it. In Pasco, the teachers were at least smart enough to say no to merit pay, foreseeing the acrimony that it would create because school administration does not have the ability to implement it in an objective and unfair way.
Teachers teach the standarized tests. Schools, not students, are being judged by these tests. Florida was held up as one of the models for the nation in no child left behind. It's a complete disaster. There is no single piece of data that shows that the testing and teaching to the testing is helping the kids learn any better. It is, however, creating a great deal of expensive bureaucracy and causing pain for the kids and the teachers, because one of the features of the testing is that if you don't pass, you don't move up a grade and if your school doesn't make sufficient "adequate yearly progress" you get a whole lot more mandatory attention and supervision from the district administration. In other words, schools that don't meet arbitrary standards will get micro-managed for at least a year and become even-more miserable places to work.
The standarized tests (FCAT) are focused on reading, writing and math. The science portion has almost nothing to do with real science that kids could learn and teachers could teach.
We're facing budget cuts.
More administration, more top-down control and more regulation of "education" are not needed. Teachers have college degrees and pass tests to become professionals. They should be treated like professionals. They should be fired when they don't perform and they should be rewarded when they excel. There is no provision for this at all. Good luck improving your science scores.
Seriously? Really seriously? There is a war? Over touchscreens? Does it have to be a war? Call up the Red Cross! We're going to have some bloodied fingers due to dueling cell phones.
Stop sensationalizing this kind of crap. It's bad enough on Digg, were half-clever adsense whores with a talent for top-ten lists can get the mob to vote up whatever random wikipedia-sourced slop he's crapping out that day, but can we try to have something a little more akin to journalistic standards here on Slashdot where at least the editors are paid and therefore by the least common denominator of the word's meaning, they are "professionals."
So if someone has broken the captcha, spam bots can send spam from the fake google accounts. Google can rate-limit outgoing email. Also they can watch accounts that send identical or similar emails. They already do profiling of accounts for adsense. By profiling accounts to filter spam, they can warn and then close down spammy accounts or simply close down the ones that look very spammy. Additionally, they can filter IPs and use cookies to identify infected spamnet computers.
If the web browser guys could agree on a standard to inform people that their computers look like they're infected, the major email and associated portal providers could start inserting signed messages in web pages that will inform the users that their computers are infected based on this kind of information.
I wonder if it's worth it to Microsoft and Google and Yahoo and AOL to team up to fight these increasingly powerful and sophisticated bot nets.
I think the ending was well done. Everyone in my house was getting agitated about Tony getting killed. The music was loud. The suspense was up. Everyone is checking their watch and asking each other if this was going to be a 2 hour episode.
And then black. And I'm sure millions of people, just like me, said, what the hell? Did my cable just go out? I was thinking, as the end was coming up, that there was no way to end the series normally because there just wasn't enough time left. There certainly wasn't enough time for reaction shots from the family that we would certainly want to see. It was also apparent, from the fact that we were spending so much time seeing the details of this little seemingly meaningless meal that we're seeing details of Tony's life that usually get left out. Seeing a little bit of his perspective and feeling a bit of the tension that he feels. It was, overall a good ending because the tenor of the series over all of these years just doesn't point to us seeing Tony die. No real fan of the show wanted to see that. It might have been a plausible excuse to end the series, but the fact of the matter is that we've tuned in for so long because we want Tony and his family to live on. I think that when we look back on it in years to come, we'll be more satisfied knowing that he's still around. Still, I have to admit that it was a bit disappointing. Not least of all because there was no music for the end credits which has been a Sopranos signature.
I'd have to say that this ending doesn't compare favorably to the endings of other series such as HBOs own Six Feet Under. As far as I'm concerned their montage ending that touched on the highlights of the live of the remaining characters with some extra attention to Claire's point of view had unbelievable emotional impact.
On the other hand, the focus of Six Feet Under was the struggles and the lives of the characters to get past their more-or-less ordinary personal challenges and make something meaningful of their lives within the norms of society. While the Sopranos relied just as heavily on the intimate details of the lives of the main characters, we're not rooting for Tony to overcome his own personal hurdles and to reach his dreams in any traditional way. We tuned into Sopranos to see Tony struggle and fight, to take on those same problems like a mobster. We want to see him do things the way he would do it and we can't (or at least probably can't get away with). Seeing Tony get old or finally succumb to the forces that would bring him down aren't what we want to see. So in this case, it's best to see him at the top of his game. I know that I will always want to remember him that way.
The demand for these kinds of infrastructure projects indicates the operation of a strong trading economy. The fact that Russia wants to build this is a signal that we are behind the curve and our manufacturing and export trade economy is in the crapper.
This is kind of a standard business/legal move. It's certainly in their best interest to not have to re-work their system and potentially disrupt service to millions of customers while implementing a fix that will work around Verizon's patent(s). That fix is likely a very expensive undertaking. For now it's probably a lot cheaper to pay a few lawyers to plead for mercy with the courts. If the court effectively allows them to continue operating without any painful restrictions, Vonage gets two benefits: a) Verizon's patent(s) are no longer a threat and b) they've saved the cost of re-tooling. If the court decides to impose penalties on Vonage that would necessitate re-tooling to stay in business, then they will not only have to bear that cost, but they'll be exposed to a second round of lawsuits from Verizon or possibly someone else who may have patents that cover Vonage's work-around. For Vonage, the best outcome is for the court to judge in favor of Verizon but make the penalties so low that Vonage can effectively continue to do business relatively unimpeded.
Were I the judge, I'd be tempted to rule that way. But then I have a tidbit of common sense. Practical thinking seems to be a handicap for those in the legal professions these days.
Does public education mean that the public pays so that each student may be forced to learn what the teacher is forced to teach by ever higher layers of autocratic bureaucracy? This, rather than, say, a system funded by the public, that supplies to each of the diverse and competent faculty it employs a set of resources and guidelines for teaching and discipling the students according to their own judgment?
It is neither the society, the school, nor the teacher who is responsible for learning. The student and his parents are responsible for learning. The rest of the parties are only there to provide the means and the opportunity. Nowhere in this picture are there technocrats deciding what web sites entire districts or schools get to access. The competent teacher will make this policy himself. If your locality is lacking for such, then the web sites on the blocked list are certainly a lower priority than getting competent teachers and equipping them to handle disciplining their own classes.
But both of us know that would be too much the right thing and too little the easy one.
When it comes to government and other monopolies, less transparency is almost always bad. There has to be an extraordinary reason to reduce transparency. The potential reasons given so far are all mundane. None are critical. Many of us would like to have more privacy and freedom for a lot of non-critical reasons and some crucial reasons. However, government and big businesses trample over our wishes and our rights all the time without ever noticing. There is no reason why the biggest consumers should have any more legal privileges than the smallest ones.
I'm getting really tired of the might-makes-right order of things. I hope there's plenty of others out there who feel the same.
How far will they go before there's a major backlash? This power consumption disclosure law isn't anywhere near the worst offense, but it sure speaks volumes about what dishonorable, corrupt and stupid cretins we have running the show these days.
I've been banging my head on a problem for a few days now. I have an XP machine sharing directories on the workgroup with usernames/passwords that my new shiny craptastic laptop with Vista Home Premium can't copy files from. I've twiddled every permission and bit... Nothing works. I can authenticate, create new files in the network share, open the files in some programs (e.g. open PDFs or TXT files in Acrobat Reader and Notepad), but it WON'T COPY FILES FROM THE "SERVER" to the local directories on the Vista machine. At the end of the (sometimes extremely long copy operation, if it's, say, a large set of files) Vista informs me that I don't have permission to copy the files to the local target directory. It doesn't matter what directory it is. It doesn't matter if it trusts the network; firewall settings make no difference; UAC on or off = no change. The FLAMING thing won't copy files from user authenticated network shares.
The machine in question came with Vista. It's about to get a new hard disk and an OS _upgrade_ to XP. As far as I'm concerned, Vista is badly broken.
OK. It's not hard to find a widescreen TV these days but my 4:3 still works. It's still good enough. How hard would it have been to just fit the stupid menus in 4:3 format as an option? Apple may be human-focused but it certainly isn't customer-focused.
It's not that hard for these OEMs to get step 0. Pay some attention to designing your system and only put in parts that have drivers (preferably open source) available. Then you build a repository of those drivers and write some readmes. Test the drivers on a few popular distributions. Maybe Fedora, Ubuntu and another. This can't be any more work than their driver teams do already. You don't have to preinstall Linux. You don't have to officially certify anything. Just get it working and write some installation notes. Put it all up on a moderated wiki so that the customer community can do a bunch of "support" for you. Viola.
Bonus points if you, for instance, provide a first-boot installation option that gives you the choice to a) Install Windows b) Install Nothing (maybe boot to FreeDOS)
Bottom line: you don't have to support Linux users. To get our business, you just have to make it (possible) easy for us to do what we want with the hardware.
I agree, most people are willing to pay $10k to not die. People will do anything to save their lives. However, once the hospitals and the HMO's and all of the bureaucracy gets its part of the pie, the $10k treatment is really more like $40k or $50k. Modern hospital healthcare is wildly inefficient. Granted, you would pay that $40k or $50k to save your own life if you had it, but are you interested in increasing your health insurance payments a couple of percent so that a few thousand people can get less harmful cancer treatment? Most business owners aren't interested in having higher insurance payments. Bean counters aren't going to go for this until the price comes down and it becomes more universally useful.
TFA discusses highly energetic ions from cyclotrons and synchrotrons used for treatment. The equipment would cost as much as $200M to install per hospital. Treating 2000 patients a year for ten years would cost about $10K per patient just for the equipment, not including labor, overhead, etc!
The last couple sentences in the article were thrown in offhandedly mentioning that **someday, maybe** someone could theoretically use antimatter to treat cancer. You know how much that stuff costs? According to wikipedia, $1 x 10^18 (One Quintillion) per gram. Granted, you might only need a few pico- or nanograms to treat cancer, so that's between a $10M and $100K per treatment. By the way, in the past 25 years our worldwide annual production of the stuff worldwide has basically not increased. It's no where near enough for using medically.
So yea, you could treat cancer with antimatter... if you're the sort of person who also swats flies with nuclear weapons.
I believe that the odds are that if you do vote, you are much more likely to become informed and more useful to the society and to yourself than a lazy, non-participatory ignoramus. When a small fraction of the people vote, the candidates have less incentive to listen to their constituents because a) their choices as leaders and legislators are obviously not well-scrutinized by the ignorant masses, b) they can statistically determine which population segments are most likely to vote and therefore non-representative population groups tend to amass unnatural political power (e.g. those on the far ends of the political spectrum, the NRA, the senior citizens, etc.) The political will of the voting minority can be more easily gamed by techniques like gerrymandering and by targeting advertising and message development. Overall the actions of the politicians will tend to less and less reflect the desires of the actual majority of the public.
Just vote. You will statistically broaden the reach of the moderate political will, create more opportunity for meaningful commerce of political ideas and reduce the effectiveness of political gamesmanship. Not to mention that your predecessors fought and died for your right to do so. Every time you don't vote, you bring nearer the day when we will again have to make that sacrifice to re-secure our rights.
First of all, if the execs who are concerned about privacy really want their information safe, they should encrypt it. Email, files, whatever. Admins certainly aren't the ones who they should be most or first worried about when it comes to spying on their unencrypted info. Keep your assets locked if you are worried about them and that keeps all prying eyes from
Can't figure out how to encrypt your files and mail? Make the admin show you and prove that it's secure. Second of all, admins are given the responsiblity of managing and maintaining complex, critical systems that keep the business running. That is not a trivial thing. Decision makers need to hire people they can trust to be honorable and trustworthy to take the responsiblity of being the admin. It's their own fault if they don't.
In short, if you don't have much respect for the admin, you're liable to get screwed by him. Not because he's likely evil, but because you're likely stupid.
Slashdot Mirror
That kind of cash flow isn't overreaction. It's greed. Wake up. We're slaves. It sucks. Are you going to just pretend it didn't happen or help enlighten the rest of the flock so that we can finally do something about it?
If anyone wants a choice quote from me about the recent Linux holes, this is what I have to say: Linus is too busy thinking about masturabating monkeys, he doesn't have time to care about Linux security.
Being both right and being an asshole still makes you an asshole. People can improve their perspective on technical matters by listening to those who are better informed. However, virtually no one will listen to a better informed jerk just because he's right. Linus has a good point. The user base for windows is an order of magnitude higher than Linux which is Linux has an order of magnitude higher deployment than OpenBSD. Though being more popular doesn't make any system or the people that build the system any better, it's terribly counterproductive to actively alienate the vast majority of those who could benefit a change in thinking about security by being inflammatory to any and all who don't automatically agree.
To be clear: this was not a failure due to the economics of competing against Intel/x86. This was a failure due to not being lucky. It takes sustained funding to make your way from start-up to profit in most technical businesses. HPC is more technical and thus more expensive than most.
Remember, you've already got PV conversion loss up in space. Probably they'll get around 20% efficiency up there and 75% efficiency in transit to the ground. So overall you're getting around 15% of the power that will hit the satellites. On the other hand, itâ(TM)s base-load, you get a lot more light hitting panels in space (vs. on the ground) and the system has got low on-going costs. If they manage to build their birds to last longer than 30 years and the damn things actually work, they will likely make good money.
Use of Linux is a red herring here. The suspect likely did some bad things. It's apparent from the warrant application that the applicant has limited personal experience investigating computer crime and limited technology knowledge, but he is being backed up by one or more people who do have the knowledge and don't have the ability or the duty to file the warrant application.
You're right that this debate is not much different than Vi vs. Emacs, but you can count this post as being for Visual Studio. It does have some warts, but Visual Studio is often more responsive and less cumbersome than Eclipse. It has a good debugger and it is on-par or better in terms of stability. I use VS, Eclipse and NetBeans, and by a small but real margin, I prefer using Visual Studio. Once you add in Whole Tomato's VisualAssistX (better auto-complete, refactoring, macros), Visual Studio becomes very productive. Without VisuallAssistX, I would probably opt for Eclipse, except for when doing Windows application development.
Here's the run down for Pasco:
Stop sensationalizing this kind of crap. It's bad enough on Digg, were half-clever adsense whores with a talent for top-ten lists can get the mob to vote up whatever random wikipedia-sourced slop he's crapping out that day, but can we try to have something a little more akin to journalistic standards here on Slashdot where at least the editors are paid and therefore by the least common denominator of the word's meaning, they are "professionals."
If the web browser guys could agree on a standard to inform people that their computers look like they're infected, the major email and associated portal providers could start inserting signed messages in web pages that will inform the users that their computers are infected based on this kind of information.
I wonder if it's worth it to Microsoft and Google and Yahoo and AOL to team up to fight these increasingly powerful and sophisticated bot nets.
I think the ending was well done. Everyone in my house was getting agitated about Tony getting killed. The music was loud. The suspense was up. Everyone is checking their watch and asking each other if this was going to be a 2 hour episode.
And then black. And I'm sure millions of people, just like me, said, what the hell? Did my cable just go out? I was thinking, as the end was coming up, that there was no way to end the series normally because there just wasn't enough time left. There certainly wasn't enough time for reaction shots from the family that we would certainly want to see. It was also apparent, from the fact that we were spending so much time seeing the details of this little seemingly meaningless meal that we're seeing details of Tony's life that usually get left out. Seeing a little bit of his perspective and feeling a bit of the tension that he feels. It was, overall a good ending because the tenor of the series over all of these years just doesn't point to us seeing Tony die. No real fan of the show wanted to see that. It might have been a plausible excuse to end the series, but the fact of the matter is that we've tuned in for so long because we want Tony and his family to live on. I think that when we look back on it in years to come, we'll be more satisfied knowing that he's still around. Still, I have to admit that it was a bit disappointing. Not least of all because there was no music for the end credits which has been a Sopranos signature.
I'd have to say that this ending doesn't compare favorably to the endings of other series such as HBOs own Six Feet Under. As far as I'm concerned their montage ending that touched on the highlights of the live of the remaining characters with some extra attention to Claire's point of view had unbelievable emotional impact.
On the other hand, the focus of Six Feet Under was the struggles and the lives of the characters to get past their more-or-less ordinary personal challenges and make something meaningful of their lives within the norms of society. While the Sopranos relied just as heavily on the intimate details of the lives of the main characters, we're not rooting for Tony to overcome his own personal hurdles and to reach his dreams in any traditional way. We tuned into Sopranos to see Tony struggle and fight, to take on those same problems like a mobster. We want to see him do things the way he would do it and we can't (or at least probably can't get away with). Seeing Tony get old or finally succumb to the forces that would bring him down aren't what we want to see. So in this case, it's best to see him at the top of his game. I know that I will always want to remember him that way.
It's free. You get what you pay for. Even free and with the occasional glitch, Google is pretty darn good.
The demand for these kinds of infrastructure projects indicates the operation of a strong trading economy. The fact that Russia wants to build this is a signal that we are behind the curve and our manufacturing and export trade economy is in the crapper.
Were I the judge, I'd be tempted to rule that way. But then I have a tidbit of common sense. Practical thinking seems to be a handicap for those in the legal professions these days.
It is neither the society, the school, nor the teacher who is responsible for learning. The student and his parents are responsible for learning. The rest of the parties are only there to provide the means and the opportunity. Nowhere in this picture are there technocrats deciding what web sites entire districts or schools get to access. The competent teacher will make this policy himself. If your locality is lacking for such, then the web sites on the blocked list are certainly a lower priority than getting competent teachers and equipping them to handle disciplining their own classes.
But both of us know that would be too much the right thing and too little the easy one.
I'm getting really tired of the might-makes-right order of things. I hope there's plenty of others out there who feel the same.
How far will they go before there's a major backlash? This power consumption disclosure law isn't anywhere near the worst offense, but it sure speaks volumes about what dishonorable, corrupt and stupid cretins we have running the show these days.
No. Go check your math.
The machine in question came with Vista. It's about to get a new hard disk and an OS _upgrade_ to XP. As far as I'm concerned, Vista is badly broken.
OK. It's not hard to find a widescreen TV these days but my 4:3 still works. It's still good enough. How hard would it have been to just fit the stupid menus in 4:3 format as an option? Apple may be human-focused but it certainly isn't customer-focused.
Bonus points if you, for instance, provide a first-boot installation option that gives you the choice to a) Install Windows b) Install Nothing (maybe boot to FreeDOS)
Bottom line: you don't have to support Linux users. To get our business, you just have to make it (possible) easy for us to do what we want with the hardware.
I agree, most people are willing to pay $10k to not die. People will do anything to save their lives. However, once the hospitals and the HMO's and all of the bureaucracy gets its part of the pie, the $10k treatment is really more like $40k or $50k. Modern hospital healthcare is wildly inefficient. Granted, you would pay that $40k or $50k to save your own life if you had it, but are you interested in increasing your health insurance payments a couple of percent so that a few thousand people can get less harmful cancer treatment? Most business owners aren't interested in having higher insurance payments. Bean counters aren't going to go for this until the price comes down and it becomes more universally useful.
The last couple sentences in the article were thrown in offhandedly mentioning that **someday, maybe** someone could theoretically use antimatter to treat cancer. You know how much that stuff costs? According to wikipedia, $1 x 10^18 (One Quintillion) per gram. Granted, you might only need a few pico- or nanograms to treat cancer, so that's between a $10M and $100K per treatment. By the way, in the past 25 years our worldwide annual production of the stuff worldwide has basically not increased. It's no where near enough for using medically.
So yea, you could treat cancer with antimatter... if you're the sort of person who also swats flies with nuclear weapons.
Just vote. You will statistically broaden the reach of the moderate political will, create more opportunity for meaningful commerce of political ideas and reduce the effectiveness of political gamesmanship. Not to mention that your predecessors fought and died for your right to do so. Every time you don't vote, you bring nearer the day when we will again have to make that sacrifice to re-secure our rights.Wow. Horrible comment. lesson #2: re-read before you post. i must be tired.
Can't figure out how to encrypt your files and mail? Make the admin show you and prove that it's secure. Second of all, admins are given the responsiblity of managing and maintaining complex, critical systems that keep the business running. That is not a trivial thing. Decision makers need to hire people they can trust to be honorable and trustworthy to take the responsiblity of being the admin. It's their own fault if they don't.
In short, if you don't have much respect for the admin, you're liable to get screwed by him. Not because he's likely evil, but because you're likely stupid.