But why weren't they locked down to prevent installations of software, etc?
Locking down the machine is a start, but there are enough local exploits on Windoze that an attacker could get in without an unreasonable amount of effort. And, unless the machine has no floppy, or has a password-protected BIOS to protect the boot configuration (with floppy disabled), there's always the boot-from-floppy approach. It's always best to assume that if someone has physical access to a computer that it's been owned.
... but I do mind a tax on "downloads". What a load of BS. How do these techno wizard politicians propose to do that? Just what *is* a "download" anyway? Reading a web page requires a download. Getting a PDF document from anywhere on the web is a download. FTPing the source code of somebody's hobby programming project is a download. Snatching pr0n off the web is a download. Doing a "whois" for some domain you're curious about is a download. Will this all be taxable? That would be asinine. So how does one differentiate between a taxable download and a nontaxable download, if there will even be such a thing? This kind of garbage is going to kill the Internet, or at least the Internet in CA/US.
I, for one, will colocate a small server outside of CA if this happens, simply for the purpose of serving my downloads/website, and for downloading stuff (rather than to my workstation at home in CA).
let me guess, you are either in academia or have never worked with someone who actually applied xp.
I guess you didn't actually read my post. When I said I worked with some guys who used XP, what do you think I was saying? And I find your comment about academia humorous. It supposes that nobody would want to actually *design* something before building it except for academics. Wrong, sparky. I work for a company that takes pride in actual engineering.
This story supposes that Microsoft should somehow be a paragon of network infrastructure. It's clear from past events that MS is among the lamer of companies when it comes to infrastructure/security. Take, for example, the time DNS for just about the entire collection of MS domains, such as msdn.com and microsoft.com, were completely disabled by an attacker. They had all four of their nameservers on the same subnet, and all running Microsoft DNS software. An easy target to say the least. Calling this sophomoric is being kind. It didn't take them long to fix it, and I believe that now they contract out their DNS to get maximum diversity (and they even utilize Unix nameservers!).
I fully expect to see more entertaining stories like this for a long time to come.
In my experience, extreme programming was invented by/for programmers who hate designing and discipline, and just want to start hacking. It leads to sloppiness and half-finished code, and it's not a scalable approach for large projects. I had the misfortune of having some guys on a project who insisted on working this way, and we had a huge mess to clean up in their wake. I'm glad this programming philosophy seems to be dying out.
I believe the MySQL servers are FreeBSD, not 100% sure. If not, then Linux. Since our queries are well-defined and never ad-hoc, we access a simple (non-SQL) Berkeley DB database (www.sleepycat.com) directly from PHP. Licensing is cheap, but not free. We have a site license, and it cost about as much as one of our servers. So far it's quite fast and reliable. Don't know how much faster than MySQL it is, though I suspect it's measurable.
You were the one who claimed to have hundreds of servers running MySQL.
Lots of servers does not equate to dozens of people or multiple databases. We have *one* database, and we replicate it to multiple MySQL servers. You certainly read a lot into my message, which mentioned only that we had multiple *servers*, and not what was on them or how they were configured.
Now, I have little doubt that some people have success with MySQL. But in our simple setup, a single, relatively small, read-only database propagated to multiple MySQL servers with local storage, we've experienced enough wierdness that I have to seriously question the suitability of the product.
The intellectual capital to compentently maintain hundreds or even thousands of seperate databases is pretty heavy.
Huh? You can (and must!) automate service architectures that require multiple identical servers. It generally does not require a whole lot of people to manage. Software and data pushes are automated, monitoring is automated, and so on. Just about all that's not automated is repairing broken machines, and that's greatly minimized by having clearly-defined procedures. But if you have lots-o-machines that conk out strangely and regularly, it can tax resources to keep things running smoothly. We take out MySQL, and things are much more smooth. That's all I'm saying.
Not quite sure what you're driving at with the "dozens of people" statement. We have a couple of people maintaining/developing the database for MySQL. And we build the database periodically on a single machine and replicate it on the front-line servers. It's not a complicated database, nor a complicated usage mode. And it's read-only. Such a simple setup shouldn't be so difficult to keep running, but MySQL craps out regularly.
Your mileage may vary, of course, but real databases generally don't behave like this.
Oh, and to the moderator who gave me a troll point: disagreeing with me is quite a different thing from me being a troll. Read the moderator guidelines.
PHP is essential, but MySQL is not stable enough for a real 24x7 web service. The lack of stability of/. probably a good example of this point. And my experience at work also bears this out. We're going to greath lengths to replace all MySQL servers with something else which is actually reliable.
Someone showed me a quote on the web that said something like, "MySQL is quite stable - I'm able to run for 100 days without restarting it!" That's hardly the definition of stable in my book. Unless you're a hobbyist, or have very few servers and can tolerate some unscheduled downtime in your service, there is no place for MySQL in a web service. Especially when you've got dozens, or even hundreds, of SQL servers. It becomes extremely burdensome to keep them all running, and to write software which is tolerant of SQL server downtime.
What about the cost of advertising and promotion? I've heard those are the biggest costs in producing and selling an album, and dwarf the cost of actually recording the album itself.
Scientists have never been able to agree on the definition of a species. In high school biology, they often teach that the ability to interbreed indicates that two organisms are the same species. This is a naive view.
There are numerous cases where organisms that were once the same species still retain the ability to interbreed even after much genetic drift. As a species begins to "speciate" due to geographical separation, etc., the various distinct groups of individuals may still be sufficiently similar genetically to interbreed, even if they have begun to differ greatly genetically/physiologically. It is unclear at what point two fairly distinct groups of animals become different species.
A good example of this is homo sapiens (us) and Neanderthals. It's believed that these two different species may have had the ability to interbreed, and that they did so, even though they had very different mental capacity, physiology, social structure, and so on.
So, simply because the X-Men look like humans (for the most part), have mostly similar physiologies to humans, have families and breed with humans, etc., it is not clear that they are actually human. It largely depends on genes - how much do they differ genetically from the human population at large. If it's just a matter of a few genes here or there, then the case could probably be made that they're still human. Otherwise, it the argument becomes gray, and is open for discussion amongst those educated on the topic of evolution. This does not include a judge, in my opinion, as it is doubtful that any judge has enough education (or genetic evidence) to make a call either way. Frankly, Marvel Comics is probably the only entity who can shed any light on the argument, since they are the final arbiter as to the genetic makeup of the characters they've created. If they say that the X-Men have little genetic resemblance to humans, then who is to argue?
The DMCA is a Copyright Act. It makes circumvention of protected copyrighted works. What copy protection scheme does this mod allow us to circumvent?
Since this mod apparently requires you to flash the 9500 with the 9700 firmware, you would at very least be violating copyright on the 9700 firmware. Unless, of course, you somehow paid for a copy of the 9700 firmware. The only way I know to do that would be to buy a 9700, and not actually use it.
This guy is an idiot who deserves to lose in court. If someone wants to run a message board purely for exterminators to discuss their occupational issues, that's their right. If some idiot won't adhere to their use policy and repeatedly tries to interfere with their site, it's their right to boot him. Technical and legal means are both valid ways of doing this. The latter is valid, IMHO, because it's a much more powerful deterrent, and detracts less from the webmaster's daily work. Even/. can't keep the trolls away through technical means w/o crippling the site in unpleasant ways.
Of course, having posted this story here, the/. folks have cause a horde of infantile nerdlings to bombard the pest control message board with goatse photos and the like. I feel sorry for them - both the message board people and the idiot trolls (or crapflooders, rather) bombarding the site, though for different reasons.
M$ has simply developed a method of putting two images on a CD - one readable by PC CD ROMs and one readable by CD players. I assume that's done by making the lower layer permeable by the laser wavelengths used by one device or the other. There is no actual copy protection scheme here.
The record labels would simply use the protection scheme of their choice on the PC-readable layer.
The idea/technology here is actually kind of cool. It's unfortunate it was designed for evil purposes. I also wonder if such CDs will have the longevity of the standard single-layer aluminum CDs? I guess it depends what material they use for the semi-transparent layer.
Don't want this to turn into a flamefest, but some things have to be noted.
Another cause for your problem might be heat dissipation. SmartUPSes heat a lot (gee, I wonder why, since they are sooo dumb and only activated when the voltage is too low/high - maybe something is actually happening to your power as it gets inputted to your device. Never thought of that?).
I don't disagree. The UPS is doing something, of course. I'm not 100% aware of everything it does, but it's at least monitoring power in some way, keeping the battery topped off, etc. It might well overheat, and it's possible it didn't have the necessary cooling in my environment. (My new UPS has a fan, which should minimize such problems.) However, my mode of failure was identical to the one described in this APC recall. Hmm. 2+2=?
Personally, I try to keep ANY UPS I have to less than half-load. It helps them live longer, it gives me more uptime. It reduces the strain on all the components. It reduces the possibility of one device interfering with the other RFI-wise as the RFI filters can be applied to full potential.
Not a bad idea. I'm running at 27% at the moment. But I should be able to run it at 100% or less at all times, ignoring spikes, without it flaming, shouldn't I?
Again, as per experience, I do not try to find replacement for something that ain't broken... and I try to find the cause of the breakage if it's only me that got a problem.
Weellll, my UPS was broken. And since this recall seems to describe my UPSes failure mode, I don't think I'm the only one with this problem (also note the quote from someone else here with the same problem as me). For me, time==money, and it just wasn't worth my while to try and resolve this problem. It was cheaper to replace all three with a single, superior unit that generates it's own sine wave, supports hot battery replacement, supports SNMP via a NIC module, etc., for roughly the same price as the three APCs cost put together.
You don't like my method, fine, but when you have no free time for dealing with broken crap, it's often more worthwhile to just replace it. I got a bad hard drive, I buy a new one and give the old one to someone who has the time to get it fixed. I don't have time to deal with flaky hardware. I've had enough experience dealing with "repaired" hardware that wasn't really repaired that I don't want to waste my time with it.
Finally, I am really unlucky on some of my components. I did get a dud GameCube, even if it's one of the most stable console that existed. And no I didn't went to replace it with a XBox
because it was screwed.
This example isn't apt. I depend on my computers, and it hurts more than a little to have them offline. After seeing what the APCs did, I do not trust them to protect my computers. Much less my house (and not to mention family), which could have conceivably been destroyed if I didn't catch the UPS as fast as I did. After crap like that, I see no reason to trust them any further. A game console, on the other hand, is a toy. If an expensive toy breaks, I get it fixed. Nothing critical depends on it. Unless I play console games for a living, I won't lose income. If it melted, I might consider getting a different brand, otherwise I'd just get it fixed or replaced. Is this so hard to understand?
SmartUPS is not the same. Technically, when you plug in a SmartUPS, all your power cord does is charge the battery. Everything plugged on your SmartUPS gets its current from the battery, which is really decently sine-waved.
Ummm, no. Please get a clue. You go much higher-end before you find a unit that truly isolates the output from the line input. The SmartUPS does not do that. Period. It only generates its own sine wave when the power's out. Otherwise it just filters the incoming signal from the wall. Quite a different thing.
Simply the fact that you didn't even tried to send them in before buying one makes me feel like this story is a complete troll.
Wrong again sparky. I have little tolerance for bullshit. I have three UPSes die in a short period of time, two of them the same model and all the same make, I'm tossing them. The cost/hassle of shipping them off, replacing batteries, and running with NO UPS for days at the least, is unacceptable. And if I replace them, I look forward to the possibility of more failures. Screw that. I donated them to a friend who could make use of them as parts. I still have the melted battery, if you want me to send it to you as proof.
One Smart UPS melted, one had a battery failure after 6 months. The last, a 600 VA unit, also lost its battery w/o any warning. BTW, overloading a UPS won't cause it to flame out. It just won't be able to supply power if you lose utility power (or it will blow a fuse if grossly overloaded). There is no excuse for the failure I experienced.
Oh, and I should have mentioned it wasn't one of the models listed in the story. It was a Smart UPS 450. In other words, don't trust APC units, period. Clearly their other models are also at risk, but they're not fessing up until they have to.
...my APC UPS melted down. Really nasty. It filled the atmosphere in my house with toxic gas. My two other APC units failed within the next week. I'm through with APC. I bought a Liebert Upstation instead. A much better unit, and not horribly more expensive than the three UPSes it replaces.
Until they support actual handwriting. Mine sits on my desk unused because I don't want to waste my time learning a new alphabet - an alphabet that was created out of the need for a company to sell a product ASAP instead of innovating (like Apple tried to do with the Newton).
Weather control may be bad for many reasons, not excluding military purposes. Imagine if you could cause endless crippling storms to descend upon your enemy. The possibilities are endless. I guarantee that as soon as it's feasible, the military will jump on it. Or even before it's feasible.
Slashdot Mirror
But why weren't they locked down to prevent installations of software, etc?
Locking down the machine is a start, but there are enough local exploits on Windoze that an attacker could get in without an unreasonable amount of effort. And, unless the machine has no floppy, or has a password-protected BIOS to protect the boot configuration (with floppy disabled), there's always the boot-from-floppy approach. It's always best to assume that if someone has physical access to a computer that it's been owned.
... but I do mind a tax on "downloads". What a load of BS. How do these techno wizard politicians propose to do that? Just what *is* a "download" anyway? Reading a web page requires a download. Getting a PDF document from anywhere on the web is a download. FTPing the source code of somebody's hobby programming project is a download. Snatching pr0n off the web is a download. Doing a "whois" for some domain you're curious about is a download. Will this all be taxable? That would be asinine. So how does one differentiate between a taxable download and a nontaxable download, if there will even be such a thing? This kind of garbage is going to kill the Internet, or at least the Internet in CA/US.
I, for one, will colocate a small server outside of CA if this happens, simply for the purpose of serving my downloads/website, and for downloading stuff (rather than to my workstation at home in CA).
I'd hate to think about the quality of software we'd have if people did THOSE things!
Are you saying THOSE things were invented for XP?
let me guess, you are either in academia or have never worked with someone who actually applied xp.
I guess you didn't actually read my post. When I said I worked with some guys who used XP, what do you think I was saying? And I find your comment about academia humorous. It supposes that nobody would want to actually *design* something before building it except for academics. Wrong, sparky. I work for a company that takes pride in actual engineering.
This story supposes that Microsoft should somehow be a paragon of network infrastructure. It's clear from past events that MS is among the lamer of companies when it comes to infrastructure/security. Take, for example, the time DNS for just about the entire collection of MS domains, such as msdn.com and microsoft.com, were completely disabled by an attacker. They had all four of their nameservers on the same subnet, and all running Microsoft DNS software. An easy target to say the least. Calling this sophomoric is being kind. It didn't take them long to fix it, and I believe that now they contract out their DNS to get maximum diversity (and they even utilize Unix nameservers!).
I fully expect to see more entertaining stories like this for a long time to come.
In my experience, extreme programming was invented by/for programmers who hate designing and discipline, and just want to start hacking. It leads to sloppiness and half-finished code, and it's not a scalable approach for large projects. I had the misfortune of having some guys on a project who insisted on working this way, and we had a huge mess to clean up in their wake. I'm glad this programming philosophy seems to be dying out.
I believe the MySQL servers are FreeBSD, not 100% sure. If not, then Linux. Since our queries are well-defined and never ad-hoc, we access a simple (non-SQL) Berkeley DB database (www.sleepycat.com) directly from PHP. Licensing is cheap, but not free. We have a site license, and it cost about as much as one of our servers. So far it's quite fast and reliable. Don't know how much faster than MySQL it is, though I suspect it's measurable.
You were the one who claimed to have hundreds of servers running MySQL.
Lots of servers does not equate to dozens of people or multiple databases. We have *one* database, and we replicate it to multiple MySQL servers. You certainly read a lot into my message, which mentioned only that we had multiple *servers*, and not what was on them or how they were configured.
Now, I have little doubt that some people have success with MySQL. But in our simple setup, a single, relatively small, read-only database propagated to multiple MySQL servers with local storage, we've experienced enough wierdness that I have to seriously question the suitability of the product.
The intellectual capital to compentently maintain hundreds or even thousands of seperate databases is pretty heavy.
Huh? You can (and must!) automate service architectures that require multiple identical servers. It generally does not require a whole lot of people to manage. Software and data pushes are automated, monitoring is automated, and so on. Just about all that's not automated is repairing broken machines, and that's greatly minimized by having clearly-defined procedures. But if you have lots-o-machines that conk out strangely and regularly, it can tax resources to keep things running smoothly. We take out MySQL, and things are much more smooth. That's all I'm saying.
Not quite sure what you're driving at with the "dozens of people" statement. We have a couple of people maintaining/developing the database for MySQL. And we build the database periodically on a single machine and replicate it on the front-line servers. It's not a complicated database, nor a complicated usage mode. And it's read-only. Such a simple setup shouldn't be so difficult to keep running, but MySQL craps out regularly.
Your mileage may vary, of course, but real databases generally don't behave like this.
Oh, and to the moderator who gave me a troll point: disagreeing with me is quite a different thing from me being a troll. Read the moderator guidelines.
PHP is essential, but MySQL is not stable enough for a real 24x7 web service. The lack of stability of /. probably a good example of this point. And my experience at work also bears this out. We're going to greath lengths to replace all MySQL servers with something else which is actually reliable.
Someone showed me a quote on the web that said something like, "MySQL is quite stable - I'm able to run for 100 days without restarting it!" That's hardly the definition of stable in my book. Unless you're a hobbyist, or have very few servers and can tolerate some unscheduled downtime in your service, there is no place for MySQL in a web service. Especially when you've got dozens, or even hundreds, of SQL servers. It becomes extremely burdensome to keep them all running, and to write software which is tolerant of SQL server downtime.
What about the cost of advertising and promotion? I've heard those are the biggest costs in producing and selling an album, and dwarf the cost of actually recording the album itself.
Scientists have never been able to agree on the definition of a species. In high school biology, they often teach that the ability to interbreed indicates that two organisms are the same species. This is a naive view.
There are numerous cases where organisms that were once the same species still retain the ability to interbreed even after much genetic drift. As a species begins to "speciate" due to geographical separation, etc., the various distinct groups of individuals may still be sufficiently similar genetically to interbreed, even if they have begun to differ greatly genetically/physiologically. It is unclear at what point two fairly distinct groups of animals become different species.
A good example of this is homo sapiens (us) and Neanderthals. It's believed that these two different species may have had the ability to interbreed, and that they did so, even though they had very different mental capacity, physiology, social structure, and so on.
So, simply because the X-Men look like humans (for the most part), have mostly similar physiologies to humans, have families and breed with humans, etc., it is not clear that they are actually human. It largely depends on genes - how much do they differ genetically from the human population at large. If it's just a matter of a few genes here or there, then the case could probably be made that they're still human. Otherwise, it the argument becomes gray, and is open for discussion amongst those educated on the topic of evolution. This does not include a judge, in my opinion, as it is doubtful that any judge has enough education (or genetic evidence) to make a call either way. Frankly, Marvel Comics is probably the only entity who can shed any light on the argument, since they are the final arbiter as to the genetic makeup of the characters they've created. If they say that the X-Men have little genetic resemblance to humans, then who is to argue?
The DMCA is a Copyright Act. It makes circumvention of protected copyrighted works. What copy protection scheme does this mod allow us to circumvent?
Since this mod apparently requires you to flash the 9500 with the 9700 firmware, you would at very least be violating copyright on the 9700 firmware. Unless, of course, you somehow paid for a copy of the 9700 firmware. The only way I know to do that would be to buy a 9700, and not actually use it.
Yeah, he burned the Open Source community... but he thinks nothing much bad can come from that. Well, can it?
Well, if one doesn't care about one's own reputation or ethics, then probably no.
I thought Michael Robertson had changed his ways when he started Lindows. Guess not. This seems to be indication that he's got as much hubris as ever.
This guy is an idiot who deserves to lose in court. If someone wants to run a message board purely for exterminators to discuss their occupational issues, that's their right. If some idiot won't adhere to their use policy and repeatedly tries to interfere with their site, it's their right to boot him. Technical and legal means are both valid ways of doing this. The latter is valid, IMHO, because it's a much more powerful deterrent, and detracts less from the webmaster's daily work. Even /. can't keep the trolls away through technical means w/o crippling the site in unpleasant ways.
/. folks have cause a horde of infantile nerdlings to bombard the pest control message board with goatse photos and the like. I feel sorry for them - both the message board people and the idiot trolls (or crapflooders, rather) bombarding the site, though for different reasons.
Of course, having posted this story here, the
M$ has simply developed a method of putting two images on a CD - one readable by PC CD ROMs and one readable by CD players. I assume that's done by making the lower layer permeable by the laser wavelengths used by one device or the other. There is no actual copy protection scheme here. The record labels would simply use the protection scheme of their choice on the PC-readable layer.
The idea/technology here is actually kind of cool. It's unfortunate it was designed for evil purposes. I also wonder if such CDs will have the longevity of the standard single-layer aluminum CDs? I guess it depends what material they use for the semi-transparent layer.
Don't want this to turn into a flamefest, but some things have to be noted.
Another cause for your problem might be heat dissipation. SmartUPSes heat a lot (gee, I wonder why, since they are sooo dumb and only activated when the voltage is too low/high - maybe something is actually happening to your power as it gets inputted to your device. Never thought of that?).
I don't disagree. The UPS is doing something, of course. I'm not 100% aware of everything it does, but it's at least monitoring power in some way, keeping the battery topped off, etc. It might well overheat, and it's possible it didn't have the necessary cooling in my environment. (My new UPS has a fan, which should minimize such problems.) However, my mode of failure was identical to the one described in this APC recall. Hmm. 2+2=?
Personally, I try to keep ANY UPS I have to less than half-load. It helps them live longer, it gives me more uptime. It reduces the strain on all the components. It reduces the possibility of one device interfering with the other RFI-wise as the RFI filters can be applied to full potential.
Not a bad idea. I'm running at 27% at the moment. But I should be able to run it at 100% or less at all times, ignoring spikes, without it flaming, shouldn't I?
Again, as per experience, I do not try to find replacement for something that ain't broken... and I try to find the cause of the breakage if it's only me that got a problem.
Weellll, my UPS was broken. And since this recall seems to describe my UPSes failure mode, I don't think I'm the only one with this problem (also note the quote from someone else here with the same problem as me). For me, time==money, and it just wasn't worth my while to try and resolve this problem. It was cheaper to replace all three with a single, superior unit that generates it's own sine wave, supports hot battery replacement, supports SNMP via a NIC module, etc., for roughly the same price as the three APCs cost put together.
You don't like my method, fine, but when you have no free time for dealing with broken crap, it's often more worthwhile to just replace it. I got a bad hard drive, I buy a new one and give the old one to someone who has the time to get it fixed. I don't have time to deal with flaky hardware. I've had enough experience dealing with "repaired" hardware that wasn't really repaired that I don't want to waste my time with it.
Finally, I am really unlucky on some of my components. I did get a dud GameCube, even if it's one of the most stable console that existed. And no I didn't went to replace it with a XBox because it was screwed.
This example isn't apt. I depend on my computers, and it hurts more than a little to have them offline. After seeing what the APCs did, I do not trust them to protect my computers. Much less my house (and not to mention family), which could have conceivably been destroyed if I didn't catch the UPS as fast as I did. After crap like that, I see no reason to trust them any further. A game console, on the other hand, is a toy. If an expensive toy breaks, I get it fixed. Nothing critical depends on it. Unless I play console games for a living, I won't lose income. If it melted, I might consider getting a different brand, otherwise I'd just get it fixed or replaced. Is this so hard to understand?
SmartUPS is not the same. Technically, when you plug in a SmartUPS, all your power cord does is charge the battery. Everything plugged on your SmartUPS gets its current from the battery, which is really decently sine-waved.
Ummm, no. Please get a clue. You go much higher-end before you find a unit that truly isolates the output from the line input. The SmartUPS does not do that. Period. It only generates its own sine wave when the power's out. Otherwise it just filters the incoming signal from the wall. Quite a different thing.
Simply the fact that you didn't even tried to send them in before buying one makes me feel like this story is a complete troll.
Wrong again sparky. I have little tolerance for bullshit. I have three UPSes die in a short period of time, two of them the same model and all the same make, I'm tossing them. The cost/hassle of shipping them off, replacing batteries, and running with NO UPS for days at the least, is unacceptable. And if I replace them, I look forward to the possibility of more failures. Screw that. I donated them to a friend who could make use of them as parts. I still have the melted battery, if you want me to send it to you as proof.
One Smart UPS melted, one had a battery failure after 6 months. The last, a 600 VA unit, also lost its battery w/o any warning. BTW, overloading a UPS won't cause it to flame out. It just won't be able to supply power if you lose utility power (or it will blow a fuse if grossly overloaded). There is no excuse for the failure I experienced.
Didn't you read the story? They just melt on their own. My UPS was only running at 50% capacity.
Oh, and I should have mentioned it wasn't one of the models listed in the story. It was a Smart UPS 450. In other words, don't trust APC units, period. Clearly their other models are also at risk, but they're not fessing up until they have to.
...my APC UPS melted down. Really nasty. It filled the atmosphere in my house with toxic gas. My two other APC units failed within the next week. I'm through with APC. I bought a Liebert Upstation instead. A much better unit, and not horribly more expensive than the three UPSes it replaces.
Until they support actual handwriting. Mine sits on my desk unused because I don't want to waste my time learning a new alphabet - an alphabet that was created out of the need for a company to sell a product ASAP instead of innovating (like Apple tried to do with the Newton).
Weather control may be bad for many reasons, not excluding military purposes. Imagine if you could cause endless crippling storms to descend upon your enemy. The possibilities are endless. I guarantee that as soon as it's feasible, the military will jump on it. Or even before it's feasible.