Well, if the US Government actually gave a shit about the US people, it would prevent such an acquisition.
To an outside observer, the US Government has decided that as long as you take care of US businesses and give them everything they want, the rest will sort itself out.
I remain un-convinced that, empirically, that it works as planned for anybody but the corporations.
I don't use Twitter, so I'm not sure... but I've got AdBlockPlus on my phone.
But this is just one of the many reasons why I'm not interested in Twitter, and have most of my browsers well equipped with cookie blockers, script blockers, and a raft of stuff to keep things like this away from me.
I have no desire to help advertisers and the like collect more information. And I'm certainly not going to provide it if I can avoid it.
Maybe they can sell me targeted ads for tinfoil or something.;-)
Patents are assets. Assets are auctioned off in bankruptcy.
Which, if history is any indication, will go to the existing companies with deep pockets, and will continue to restrict the market to a couple of huge players -- or one smaller one backed by someone with deep pockets.
A collapse of GM would not magically create a bunch of small startups to fill the void. It would mostly just redistribute among the big players.
You think so? You don't think the smoking carcass would own all of the patents and make it impossible for a bunch of new startups to get into the industry?
Because in pretty much every other industry patents essentially prevents that from happening.
I'm of the opinion that in many cases, you'd just end up with a huge patent troll which prevents newcomers from entering the market.
There can be no innovation without really deep pockets to cover all of the rent seeking which happens. Because the game has been stacked that way.
When you see something that is technically sweet, you go ahead and do it and you argue about what to do about it only after you have had your technical success. That is the way it was with the atomic bomb.
In fact, he was later very much opposed to its use:
However, he and many of the project staff were very upset about the bombing of Nagasaki, as they did not feel the second bomb was necessary from a military point of view.[113] He traveled to Washington on August 17 to hand-deliver a letter to Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson expressing his revulsion and his wish to see nuclear weapons banned."
Or a lack of understanding. Or a lack of options in who else to vote for. Or a stunning indifference that as long as you feel safe you don't care about everyone else. Or a sense of entitlement. Or extreme hypocrisy about freedom.
They just didn't mention that they also log all the metadata of "all foreign countries", because per definition all they are doing are 'foreign calls'.
And if any foreign government was doing this to America it would be deemed an act of war.
So at some point, you more or less have to expect the rest of the world to start yelling really loudly to their leaders that they're not willing to put up with this any more.
I would like to think some countries will grow some balls and start saying "you know that navy base, you have to leave now".
If this was Russia or China, America would be indignant. Since it's America, Americans treats it like it's their right. The rest of us don't agree and have no desire to be beholden to your security interests. Because we don't see that your rights supersede ours.
I fear once they get the courts to agree to this, copyright will be essentially extended to include functionality.
They're acting like interfaces should be something you can copyright, despite most of them having initially stolen/borrowed the interfaces that had already been put into languages before they got there.
These companies do not want open standards and interoperability, they want closed systems and a complete inability for people to make other products.
Soon no one will be able to do stuff on their own, as they will be sued into oblivion just for thinking about something.
I believe that's the point.
By the time these large companies patent everything and claim ownership of 'innovations' which had been around for years or were widespread knowledge already, the goal is to more or less ensure there's not a damned thing you can do with technology for which you won't be beholden to them.
It's rent-seeking on a large scale, and the governments are just handing it over to them.
At a certain point, it will be impossible for new companies to create anything at all, because the web of patents and the like will be so extensive we'll have only a few large players.
Welcome to the oligarchy of the future. It will only keep getting worse.
So, which country do you live in that is more free? Or have you just given up and all you have left to offer is snarky cynicism?
I think the point is that the US used to be a fine example of what freedom should look like.
When the US starts down this road, it's terrible news for everyone else on the planet as all of the other governments say "fuck it". And, in many cases, at the request of Americans, they've made the rest of us markedly less free as we get spied on more in order to give the US a sense of security.
America used to be one of the few free places on the planet, and was what we all hoped for. Now, not so much.
Sadly, America has almost become an impediment to everyone else's freedoms. Because they're sure as hell undermining them.
Torture and the taking of political prisoners are touted as flaws of third world dictatorships and communists v. waterboarding
But, but... they got a legal opinion that said it wasn't torture, so it's all above board, right?
Of course, I'm sure the people putting that opinion forth never actually tried it themselves.
That the US might now be exerting a little extra muscle around people for simply disagreeing with them is definitely scary. When your press starts to self-censor, you are rapidly becoming anything but free.
This is true in general and doesn't just apply to storage devices that you think no one else here has ever managed.
I understand that... but it all depends on how you define "enterprise".
Running a NAS box for 100 people versus running big huge storage for an actual 'enterprise' application spanning hundreds of terabytes (and being business critical to a multi-billion dollar company) is a different thing entirely.
In my experience, the people doing the latter pay for the 'pampering' because the outage is ridiculously expensive to your business and trumps the cost of the support agreement. As in, your company will lose millions of dollars for every hour you have a disruption, so the support contract is considered cheap compared to the consequences of a failure.
I've certainly known people who say they work on enterprise class systems who would be laughed at by people who run some really large systems. I've known a few people who call what they do 'enterprise', but which I would call 'departmental'. It's all a matter of scale, and where it fits in your business.
And, at a certain scale, using cheap consumer drives and acting like you've got an enterprise solution is considered a business risk. Which is precisely why on the higher end of this there are such systems and vendors with support contracts and all the pampering.
I know people who do storage for companies where if the storage was to go offline, production halts until it's fixed. As in, entire plants sitting idle and losing product (and revenue) because they can't track and process it.
But consumer hard drives are so much cheaper that it's not really cost effective anymore to buy Enterprise drives.
Do you actually do Enterprise Storage? Because I know people who do.
At the really high end, the machines automatically call home and report a fault to the vendor. The vendor then dispatches someone to replace the faulty bit within the SLA.
In my experience, and from what I've been told by people who do this for a living, the Enterprise class drives come with the benefit of a warranty in which the manufacturer is contractually obligated to get you a replacement within a fixed amount of time.
Anyone doing real enterprise class storage for real mission critical things -- using commercial SATA drives is just not done unless it's cheap/bulk storage. Sure, you pay through the nose to the vendor for that kind of support, but you also have guaranteed service time and availability.
I just don't see evidence of people who do this at an enterprise scale cheaping out on disks for the important stuff.
I guess shielding all the wiring harnesses and electronics individually wouldn't work since the car's body would still pick it up and everything is grounded to it?
LOL... I wasn't really suggesting a plausible way of shielding your car from this.
I have zero actual advice to give on the topic, I assumed the tinfoil reference was sufficient to convey that.;-)
A person can back-load an old portable generator into a transformer and create an EMP that will theoretically immobilize all electronics within a 3-block radius
Wait, that thing from the 'Ocean's X' movie was real?
Even in TFS, this device doesn't target cars specifically, it zapped all of the electronics *in* the car, too.
I think this would merely disrupt. I believe a full on EMP would actually destroy the electronics.
So, in theory at least, you don't wreck every bit of electronics you aim this thing at. Because if police start damaging people's cars for no good reason, there will be hell to pay as people get pissed off at ending up with a huge repair bill -- especially if the officer is mistaken or you're just collateral damage.
Slashdot Mirror
To an outside observer, the US Government has decided that as long as you take care of US businesses and give them everything they want, the rest will sort itself out.
I remain un-convinced that, empirically, that it works as planned for anybody but the corporations.
And this is why ad blockers, cookie blockers, and script blockers are your friends.
Deny them the data is the best approach.
Thereby requiring both eyeball and brain bleach.
Rule #34 is alive and well, and there's some weird stuff out there.
I don't use Twitter, so I'm not sure ... but I've got AdBlockPlus on my phone.
But this is just one of the many reasons why I'm not interested in Twitter, and have most of my browsers well equipped with cookie blockers, script blockers, and a raft of stuff to keep things like this away from me.
I have no desire to help advertisers and the like collect more information. And I'm certainly not going to provide it if I can avoid it.
Maybe they can sell me targeted ads for tinfoil or something. ;-)
Which, if history is any indication, will go to the existing companies with deep pockets, and will continue to restrict the market to a couple of huge players -- or one smaller one backed by someone with deep pockets.
A collapse of GM would not magically create a bunch of small startups to fill the void. It would mostly just redistribute among the big players.
You think so? You don't think the smoking carcass would own all of the patents and make it impossible for a bunch of new startups to get into the industry?
Because in pretty much every other industry patents essentially prevents that from happening.
I'm of the opinion that in many cases, you'd just end up with a huge patent troll which prevents newcomers from entering the market.
There can be no innovation without really deep pockets to cover all of the rent seeking which happens. Because the game has been stacked that way.
If you can afford a Mustang GT, and need a button to do a burnout, you're probably a complete wanker who can't actually drive it.
Just sayin'. This is technology to compensate for lack of skill in middle-aged men.
I'm not sure he saw it that way:
In fact, he was later very much opposed to its use:
Or a lack of understanding. Or a lack of options in who else to vote for. Or a stunning indifference that as long as you feel safe you don't care about everyone else. Or a sense of entitlement. Or extreme hypocrisy about freedom.
And if any foreign government was doing this to America it would be deemed an act of war.
So at some point, you more or less have to expect the rest of the world to start yelling really loudly to their leaders that they're not willing to put up with this any more.
I would like to think some countries will grow some balls and start saying "you know that navy base, you have to leave now".
If this was Russia or China, America would be indignant. Since it's America, Americans treats it like it's their right. The rest of us don't agree and have no desire to be beholden to your security interests. Because we don't see that your rights supersede ours.
Because they can.
Microsoft isn't interested in being a charity, Microsoft is interested in making buckets of money.
If they could figure out how to charge every person on the planet $1/day for the privilege of using computers, they would.
I fear once they get the courts to agree to this, copyright will be essentially extended to include functionality.
They're acting like interfaces should be something you can copyright, despite most of them having initially stolen/borrowed the interfaces that had already been put into languages before they got there.
These companies do not want open standards and interoperability, they want closed systems and a complete inability for people to make other products.
I believe that's the point.
By the time these large companies patent everything and claim ownership of 'innovations' which had been around for years or were widespread knowledge already, the goal is to more or less ensure there's not a damned thing you can do with technology for which you won't be beholden to them.
It's rent-seeking on a large scale, and the governments are just handing it over to them.
At a certain point, it will be impossible for new companies to create anything at all, because the web of patents and the like will be so extensive we'll have only a few large players.
Welcome to the oligarchy of the future. It will only keep getting worse.
I think the point is that the US used to be a fine example of what freedom should look like.
When the US starts down this road, it's terrible news for everyone else on the planet as all of the other governments say "fuck it". And, in many cases, at the request of Americans, they've made the rest of us markedly less free as we get spied on more in order to give the US a sense of security.
America used to be one of the few free places on the planet, and was what we all hoped for. Now, not so much.
Sadly, America has almost become an impediment to everyone else's freedoms. Because they're sure as hell undermining them.
But, but ... they got a legal opinion that said it wasn't torture, so it's all above board, right?
Of course, I'm sure the people putting that opinion forth never actually tried it themselves.
That the US might now be exerting a little extra muscle around people for simply disagreeing with them is definitely scary. When your press starts to self-censor, you are rapidly becoming anything but free.
LOL, you know, I have never had an outage or problem like that from accountants forgetting to pay the bills.
Maybe your accountants suck? ;-)
I understand that ... but it all depends on how you define "enterprise".
Running a NAS box for 100 people versus running big huge storage for an actual 'enterprise' application spanning hundreds of terabytes (and being business critical to a multi-billion dollar company) is a different thing entirely.
In my experience, the people doing the latter pay for the 'pampering' because the outage is ridiculously expensive to your business and trumps the cost of the support agreement. As in, your company will lose millions of dollars for every hour you have a disruption, so the support contract is considered cheap compared to the consequences of a failure.
I've certainly known people who say they work on enterprise class systems who would be laughed at by people who run some really large systems. I've known a few people who call what they do 'enterprise', but which I would call 'departmental'. It's all a matter of scale, and where it fits in your business.
And, at a certain scale, using cheap consumer drives and acting like you've got an enterprise solution is considered a business risk. Which is precisely why on the higher end of this there are such systems and vendors with support contracts and all the pampering.
I know people who do storage for companies where if the storage was to go offline, production halts until it's fixed. As in, entire plants sitting idle and losing product (and revenue) because they can't track and process it.
Do you actually do Enterprise Storage? Because I know people who do.
At the really high end, the machines automatically call home and report a fault to the vendor. The vendor then dispatches someone to replace the faulty bit within the SLA.
In my experience, and from what I've been told by people who do this for a living, the Enterprise class drives come with the benefit of a warranty in which the manufacturer is contractually obligated to get you a replacement within a fixed amount of time.
Anyone doing real enterprise class storage for real mission critical things -- using commercial SATA drives is just not done unless it's cheap/bulk storage. Sure, you pay through the nose to the vendor for that kind of support, but you also have guaranteed service time and availability.
I just don't see evidence of people who do this at an enterprise scale cheaping out on disks for the important stuff.
Everybody who has anything more than a trivial amount of storage.
I don't see giant NetApp filers holding hundreds of terabytes being replaced with SSDs any time soon.
SSDs have their uses, but they're nowhere near cheap enough to replace systems with massive amounts of storage or that rely on RAID.
Depends entirely on your car.
For many cars, premium/high octane gas does very little. For higher-end cars and sports cars, it can make a huge difference.
And then on the really high-end there's a reason they make racing fuel (118 octane), because it makes a huge difference for some things.
A 1996 Buick, not so much. A Porsche or something like that, I bet it makes a huge difference -- both in performance and engine longevity.
I have no doubt about that. But the post I was replying to essentially said "why not EMP, solved problem?"
To my (very limited) understanding, that would be the theoretical difference between an EMP vs an RF pulse.
The poor schmuck with the pacemaker (or insulin pump) will not be as concerned with the nuances.
LOL ... I wasn't really suggesting a plausible way of shielding your car from this.
I have zero actual advice to give on the topic, I assumed the tinfoil reference was sufficient to convey that. ;-)
Wait, that thing from the 'Ocean's X' movie was real?
I think this would merely disrupt. I believe a full on EMP would actually destroy the electronics.
So, in theory at least, you don't wreck every bit of electronics you aim this thing at. Because if police start damaging people's cars for no good reason, there will be hell to pay as people get pissed off at ending up with a huge repair bill -- especially if the officer is mistaken or you're just collateral damage.
Same as everything else ... a large quantity of tinfoil, or a Faraday Cage around your car.
As an added benefit, think of all the interesting people you'll meet trying to explain why your car is plastered in tinfoil.