After borrowing a Kindle I for a weekend, I'm almost sold on the device, but not quite. The screen quality was simply amazing. The only thing I can't quite get over is that the sensory experience is very, very bland. I don't know if all the cool technology can win me over with the lack of a more sensory-rich experience.
I was simply amazed at how clear the epaper screen was and how easy it was to read in almost any light. If the light was adequate for reading a book, the kindle did great. The button layout was weak and I kept changing the page when I didn't want to. At least the update was speedy. I just can't quite get into a book on the Kindle the way I get into a real book. The rough feel of the pages, the smell of old binding glue, or the waft of a woman's perfume in a library book are great. Even the sound of turning a page, or the satisfying crackle of the fabric binding on a brand new hard cover are fantastic.
Similarly, the smell of newsprint and the act of folding and unfolding each section is very much tied up in my overall experience of reading the paper. I don't think that any e-reader, no matter the spiffy features, could replace all that.
On the other hand, I could probably learn to love an e-reader for other reasons. For example, the mass of paper waiting to be recycled in the corner of my kitchen would not be missed. I love the idea that distributing news paper electronically would save thousands of tons of trees, CO2 emissions and eventual landfill space.
If the Hurst e-reader is easy to use, inexpensive and isn't as locked down as the Kindle, I would give it a chance. I would even consider switching my subscriptions to full-week instead of Sunday only if they were cheaper and I didn't have to haul off 3 tons of newsprint each week. I hope it actually makes it to the market at a price well under $300.
The "25 Things" meme reminded me of the chain emails that were ever so popular in the early to mid 90s. I wonder how the "rate of infection" on face book compares to a similar meme delivered by email. Specifically, I wonder if the public nature of "25 Things" invitations on facebook enhance its ability to be transmitted from one victim to another. Email is generally read in a very private way, where facebook invitations happen in front of your entire (online) social network.
I find this to be pretty exciting. I was just a little kid when St. Helens blew her top. I remember the ash coating our cars in Colorado. I thought it was so cool that it was snowing dirt.
Then again, I don't live right under the thing and my home, livelihood, health and property aren't currently being threatened by microscopic airborne razor blades.
Have any slashdot readers been close to an erupting volcano? Especially the subduction zone variety? Can you give us an account of what it's like?
These ring-o-fire volcanoes usually explode rather than ooze due to the composition of their magma. There's lots of dissolved gasses that like to become undissolved in massive bangs.
I'm not advocating tossing your drive out the door without any attempt to wipe your personal data, I'm just saying that a 24 hour wipe, re-wipe and visit by the Thermite Fairy are unnecessary based on this research.
A write with lots of zeros will probably do the job just fine. If it really is valuable data that CAN NOT fall into the "wrong hands", then you should shred the drive just to be sure.
From what I understand from TFA, it doesn't matter what you overwrite with. The researcher's ability to read a bit using really advanced tech was rarely better than %50 correct. I think this has something to do with how tiny the domains are and how little material actually stores the information. If they were larger, perhaps it would be easier to find out what the previous orientation was. Maybe random data was more useful when drives were older and had less dense data storage.
DD is probably the best bet for discarded/ebay'ed drives. I can't think of anyone who has the time or resources to dig up my data. If you're a fortune 500 company, or an international drug/arms/people/whatever smuggler, then you probably want to just go ahead and shred the drive. That way you don't have to worry about Joe skipping out early on Friday and forgetting to wipe the out-going CEO's drive.
For the rest of us, just think about the economics of it; what criminal organization has access to a lab full of electron microscopes and has the time and money to search discarded drives for credit card information? Perhaps a large government has access to these resources, but once again, unless you're really up to no good or have a large company, why would anybody bother?
Thank goodness for a suddenoutbreakofcommonsense here.
My girlfriend works 9/80s at Shell and she really likes it. Sometimes she ends up working 10/90, but it usually works out really great. She tends to get a lot of stuff done on the Fridays she has off.
It seems to me that a computer participating in a botnet is already a threat to the public. If "cleaning gone wrong" fouls a computer that's already infected, that's really just 'collateral damage'.
While an infected computer is a threat to the health of the network, it is a minor problem. It's not unlike the difference between say a poorly tuned fire truck and a car-bomb. The poorly tuned fire truck is a threat to public health as it is spewing out more pollution than it should and is indeed harming everyone in the community. The single fire truck is a problem and should be dealt with, but it is a small problem. The overall health and welfare of the community in the form of fire protection trump the minor health risk of the poorly tuned engine.
On the other hand, the car bomb is clearly a health risk for many people with no value to the community and should be eliminated.
The infected computers at a hospital are like the fire engine; they cause a problem and should be dealt with, but their continued functionality is much, much more important than the slight cost they incur on the internet as a whole.
Certainly everyone that has an infected computer should take some of the responsibility, but unfortunately, a good chunk of those infected have no idea that their computers are even a problem. My mom was just recently suckered into downloading something that promised to make her PC run faster. It was obviously malware of some kind, but none of her AV software hit it as a problem. My mom isn't stupid, she's just in that 90% that doesn't really understand what's going on out there on the interwebs. As long as those folks are out there, internet security is going to be a bare.
This is where the developers need to step up and work together to help develop software that is less susceptible to worms.
Not only is it a problem of breaking the law, but there's the problem of "cleaning gone wrong". What if the cleaning program fouls a hospital's computers? Or fouls up some other important infrastructure. Do you want to be the guy standing next to the enter key in that event?
Obviously, infrastructure should be configured and secured against such problems, but it's pretty clear that that assumption is false and dangerous. Just a few months ago a trio of London hospitals went down because of an infection. Granted it was mostly the administrative side that went down, but that still costs a crap load. And what if it's not just the administrative side of say a power distribution grid that shits its self because of some unforeseeable problem with the cleaning worm?
I sure wouldn't want to be the guy responsible for that. There's also the threat that the cleaning will go wrong in completely unexpected ways causing even worse network disruption. If this option is pursued, those that have the magic bullet would probably want to get some sort of pledge of amnesty from their governments to protect them from prosecution in the event that they cause damage.
The difference is what it is used for. A satellite built by Lockeed Martin that observes gamma ray bursts is definitely scientific; a satellite that watches the comings and goings of North Korea is different kind of "science." I'd rather have the DoD/military/whoever worry about spying and NASA focus on science.
The military and Nasa have always had a relationships; choosing astronauts from the ranks of the Air Force, for one. Obviously, the technology developed through the space program has military applications such as spy satellites and obviously a rocket that can put a man in orbit can just as easily deliver a multi-ton warhead to the other side of the planet. What worries me in this plan is shifting the focus from science to defense objectives.
While NASA has a long relationship with the military and shares plenty of technology, they are a civilian organization. I know that up until recently, NASA's mission was, "To understand and protect our home planet...", but the main focus has been to send interplanetary probes into the solar system, bust up comets and generally produce outstanding backgrounds for our desktops. Would this shift in leadership take more energy away from studying the nature of the universe, lofting the next generation of space telescopes and studying our planet from above? Under the military it seems more likely that NASA's goals would shift away from "understanding" and more to "protecting". I imagine this wold involve developing the next generation of anti-satellite and anti-anti-satellite weapons (despite the fact that earth orbit is supposed to be a weapons free zone).
What insight does the slashdot community have on this? Will shifting NASA to military control result in a more nimble and focused organization able to achieve the goal of putting a man on mars in the next 20 years, or will military research take precedence over science?
Whether or not a handle is something a laptop ought to have, details matter. I wish other manufacturers had this attitude; they copy stylistic elements from Apple, but while the result may or may not look great, they still miss important details like managing the cord on the power brick, or the power connector itself.
I was an early adopter of the HDD based mp3 player. I bought Archo's FIRST HDD mp3 player and it was a beast. It took 6(!) AA batteries, had the form factor of a cassette player and charged with an ugly wallwart. It had a reasonable capcity (10GB), but the UI was terrible. The screen was a tiny, muddy backlit mess and it was just about impossible to navigate through the tiny screen. A few years later, after giving up on HDD based mp3 players, I bought an iPod. It was my first experience with an Apple product since middle school.
Comming from a cruddy, unreadable display and a terrible UI to the ipod was a really interesting experience. The thought and precision that went into the design was remarkable. I was amazed at the ingenuity of the click wheel interface. Little things like the international swappable power adapter on the brick were a nice touch too. The short of the long is this: Apple doesn't just make stuff that works, they spend a lot of time (and MONEY!) making stuff that has well crafted details. Like the OP said, sometimes those details are downright silly, but the fact is somebody put a lot of thought into those details. The details, as silly as they might be, for the most part, work as they were intended to.
Other manufactures could do well to take a page from Apple and put as much thought into their products. Sony is a great example, they cram all sorts of awesome features into their products, but in the end, their devices feel cumbersome and difficult to use. And in my experience, every Sony device I've owned has some sort of fatal flaw, like my Sony TV that thinks it knows what my "favorite" channel is and switches to it repeatedly until I unplug it for an hour.
You don't buy a mac to run a server, you buy it to be creative, and I fail to see the drawbacks of such a purchase.
That's exactly why I bought into macs. That and I couldn't bear to upgrade from XP to Vista with a new laptop purchase. I use my macbook for school (as a teacher) and I was doing all my photographic developing on it. I couldn't handle the terrible color consistency on the itty-bitty screen so I upgraded to an iMac. I do most of my school related work on the lappy and use the desktop for all my photography.
I can't get away from linux though. I have a linux box running in the next room as a print/web/music server. It also manages all the local and remote backups. The darwin side of OS X is also pretty awesome. I get to pretend that I know what the hell I'm doing and hack around in the command line and feel like a sys-admin.
As for the "bad sides" of Apple products, there's plenty that Jobs doesn't bother to mention. Like the iron grip Apple has on the iphone appstore, poor material quality on the macbook line (the keyboard deck and backsides are all cracking and crazing-mine has a razor sharp edge right where my right wrist rests). His strength is to make all the good qualities sound so sexy, you're willing to ignore those nasty ones. I sure did when I bought the 3G iphone. I love what the iphone does, but to be perfectly honest, my old Nokia 6000 series had a vastly better call quality and at a fraction of the price ($50).
If 10 years ago you would have told me that a 40 something balding man in a black turtleneck could make consumer computer technology look svelte, I wouldn't have believed you. I still find it hard to believe today. For all the weirdness, secrecy and--reportedly--heavy handedness, Jobs does some amazing work highlighting the positive aspects of Apple's products.
I think it's his confidence and an earnest belief that the product has been engineered to the highest standards that helps him be such an effective salesman. Bill Gates tried to capture some of that same humanity and enthusiasm in his Seinfeld commercials and somehow failed miserably. Perhaps it's Gate's lack of a publicaly accessible side. Or it could be that he's just a robot sent from the future.
Whatever you think about Apple (expensive, overly trendy, defectivebydesign, overly lawyered, Lord Job's GIFT to his children), Jobs does a pretty amazing job of selling it. My girlfriend pointed out that during his introduction of the iPhone, he not only enumerated the features of the device, he also taught everybody how it works. That's a pretty deft presentation.
It's pretty impressive that Facebook has been able to grow so quickly and handle so much traffic. Their down time has been pretty insignificant related to the sheer number of requests that blow through their servers every day.
There's probably a thing or two that can be learned from their developers and IT folks. I just wish I knew more about the whole underlying structure so I could appreciate exactly what they've done.
It is possible that not all of the 21 million work, or are valid. If I were in the criminal's position, I would offer a CD where about 70% were valid. And then when the payment was made, provide a data set that had only a few working accounts and a bunch of garbage.
In any case, it's pretty scary to think that there might that much personal data out there.
FTFA, it seems more like the military is spending the dough to seek out off the shelf technology that can be adapted and integrated into their current systems. I wonder where they look for inspiration? Are they chatting with the folks at Rock Star and Valve?
So, this is a good argument for moving high demand data centers to colder places. I know that this means that latency takes a hit when the data is FAR from you. For some applications, this wouldn't matter, latency wouldn't make a huge difference. I'm thinking sites that display lots of static content, like bank web pages.
Such an interesting phrase, in a discussion of net neutrality.
While I veered FAR off topic of net neutrality, free speech is very different. Net neutrality falls into the category of things that should be regulated by the government in one way or another. It's not unlike RF spectrum. If the government doesn't regulate it, then only those who can shout loudest (most powerful transmitters) or have the best gear will be able to get anything whatever done. Ever.
Free speech is much less dependent on technology, and rather is a concept. For free speech to work, a minority can never have control over what is permissible. For the internet to work, an informed and necessarily small group of people have to agree on one standard or another.
Net neutrality should be discussed and decided on by an informed group of people; that group will probably necessarily be small and not represent everyone. Just like those that should regulate RF spectrum should be engineers and technicians.
It is true that the morally conservative would rally against smut on TV, but perhaps we can move past the vocal minority and allow the market to sort this one out. When one group is allowed to dictate what is and is not obscene, constitutional rights start to get trampled. My art becomes your porn; your ideas become my dangerous propaganda. Clearly, the slippery slope theory isn't very accurate, and we're not going to slip into a 15th century age of repression, but the idea of a minority advocating for the majority is troublesome.
Perhaps using that logic, and the logic of a free market, we can push past the social conservatives and move on to something a bit more free.
Slashdot Mirror
After borrowing a Kindle I for a weekend, I'm almost sold on the device, but not quite. The screen quality was simply amazing. The only thing I can't quite get over is that the sensory experience is very, very bland. I don't know if all the cool technology can win me over with the lack of a more sensory-rich experience.
I was simply amazed at how clear the epaper screen was and how easy it was to read in almost any light. If the light was adequate for reading a book, the kindle did great. The button layout was weak and I kept changing the page when I didn't want to. At least the update was speedy. I just can't quite get into a book on the Kindle the way I get into a real book. The rough feel of the pages, the smell of old binding glue, or the waft of a woman's perfume in a library book are great. Even the sound of turning a page, or the satisfying crackle of the fabric binding on a brand new hard cover are fantastic.
Similarly, the smell of newsprint and the act of folding and unfolding each section is very much tied up in my overall experience of reading the paper. I don't think that any e-reader, no matter the spiffy features, could replace all that.
On the other hand, I could probably learn to love an e-reader for other reasons. For example, the mass of paper waiting to be recycled in the corner of my kitchen would not be missed. I love the idea that distributing news paper electronically would save thousands of tons of trees, CO2 emissions and eventual landfill space.
If the Hurst e-reader is easy to use, inexpensive and isn't as locked down as the Kindle, I would give it a chance. I would even consider switching my subscriptions to full-week instead of Sunday only if they were cheaper and I didn't have to haul off 3 tons of newsprint each week. I hope it actually makes it to the market at a price well under $300.
Doh! 6' wide. Foot, not inch. Foot.
Don't let New Orleans hear about this! It will just give the city another reason to ignore the 6" wide pothole on my street.
The "25 Things" meme reminded me of the chain emails that were ever so popular in the early to mid 90s. I wonder how the "rate of infection" on face book compares to a similar meme delivered by email. Specifically, I wonder if the public nature of "25 Things" invitations on facebook enhance its ability to be transmitted from one victim to another. Email is generally read in a very private way, where facebook invitations happen in front of your entire (online) social network.
Any thoughts on this?
I find this to be pretty exciting. I was just a little kid when St. Helens blew her top. I remember the ash coating our cars in Colorado. I thought it was so cool that it was snowing dirt.
Then again, I don't live right under the thing and my home, livelihood, health and property aren't currently being threatened by microscopic airborne razor blades.
Have any slashdot readers been close to an erupting volcano? Especially the subduction zone variety? Can you give us an account of what it's like?
These ring-o-fire volcanoes usually explode rather than ooze due to the composition of their magma. There's lots of dissolved gasses that like to become undissolved in massive bangs.
I'm not advocating tossing your drive out the door without any attempt to wipe your personal data, I'm just saying that a 24 hour wipe, re-wipe and visit by the Thermite Fairy are unnecessary based on this research.
A write with lots of zeros will probably do the job just fine. If it really is valuable data that CAN NOT fall into the "wrong hands", then you should shred the drive just to be sure.
From what I understand from TFA, it doesn't matter what you overwrite with. The researcher's ability to read a bit using really advanced tech was rarely better than %50 correct. I think this has something to do with how tiny the domains are and how little material actually stores the information. If they were larger, perhaps it would be easier to find out what the previous orientation was. Maybe random data was more useful when drives were older and had less dense data storage.
DD is probably the best bet for discarded/ebay'ed drives. I can't think of anyone who has the time or resources to dig up my data. If you're a fortune 500 company, or an international drug/arms/people/whatever smuggler, then you probably want to just go ahead and shred the drive. That way you don't have to worry about Joe skipping out early on Friday and forgetting to wipe the out-going CEO's drive.
For the rest of us, just think about the economics of it; what criminal organization has access to a lab full of electron microscopes and has the time and money to search discarded drives for credit card information? Perhaps a large government has access to these resources, but once again, unless you're really up to no good or have a large company, why would anybody bother?
Thank goodness for a suddenoutbreakofcommonsense here.
My girlfriend works 9/80s at Shell and she really likes it. Sometimes she ends up working 10/90, but it usually works out really great. She tends to get a lot of stuff done on the Fridays she has off.
According to my google search history I am responsible for about 112 kg of carbon. I wonder how long I have to hold my breath to off set that.
It seems to me that a computer participating in a botnet is already a threat to the public. If "cleaning gone wrong" fouls a computer that's already infected, that's really just 'collateral damage'.
While an infected computer is a threat to the health of the network, it is a minor problem. It's not unlike the difference between say a poorly tuned fire truck and a car-bomb. The poorly tuned fire truck is a threat to public health as it is spewing out more pollution than it should and is indeed harming everyone in the community. The single fire truck is a problem and should be dealt with, but it is a small problem. The overall health and welfare of the community in the form of fire protection trump the minor health risk of the poorly tuned engine.
On the other hand, the car bomb is clearly a health risk for many people with no value to the community and should be eliminated.
The infected computers at a hospital are like the fire engine; they cause a problem and should be dealt with, but their continued functionality is much, much more important than the slight cost they incur on the internet as a whole.
Certainly everyone that has an infected computer should take some of the responsibility, but unfortunately, a good chunk of those infected have no idea that their computers are even a problem. My mom was just recently suckered into downloading something that promised to make her PC run faster. It was obviously malware of some kind, but none of her AV software hit it as a problem. My mom isn't stupid, she's just in that 90% that doesn't really understand what's going on out there on the interwebs. As long as those folks are out there, internet security is going to be a bare.
This is where the developers need to step up and work together to help develop software that is less susceptible to worms.
Not only is it a problem of breaking the law, but there's the problem of "cleaning gone wrong". What if the cleaning program fouls a hospital's computers? Or fouls up some other important infrastructure. Do you want to be the guy standing next to the enter key in that event?
Obviously, infrastructure should be configured and secured against such problems, but it's pretty clear that that assumption is false and dangerous. Just a few months ago a trio of London hospitals went down because of an infection. Granted it was mostly the administrative side that went down, but that still costs a crap load. And what if it's not just the administrative side of say a power distribution grid that shits its self because of some unforeseeable problem with the cleaning worm?
I sure wouldn't want to be the guy responsible for that. There's also the threat that the cleaning will go wrong in completely unexpected ways causing even worse network disruption. If this option is pursued, those that have the magic bullet would probably want to get some sort of pledge of amnesty from their governments to protect them from prosecution in the event that they cause damage.
The difference is what it is used for. A satellite built by Lockeed Martin that observes gamma ray bursts is definitely scientific; a satellite that watches the comings and goings of North Korea is different kind of "science." I'd rather have the DoD/military/whoever worry about spying and NASA focus on science.
The military and Nasa have always had a relationships; choosing astronauts from the ranks of the Air Force, for one. Obviously, the technology developed through the space program has military applications such as spy satellites and obviously a rocket that can put a man in orbit can just as easily deliver a multi-ton warhead to the other side of the planet. What worries me in this plan is shifting the focus from science to defense objectives.
While NASA has a long relationship with the military and shares plenty of technology, they are a civilian organization. I know that up until recently, NASA's mission was, "To understand and protect our home planet...", but the main focus has been to send interplanetary probes into the solar system, bust up comets and generally produce outstanding backgrounds for our desktops. Would this shift in leadership take more energy away from studying the nature of the universe, lofting the next generation of space telescopes and studying our planet from above? Under the military it seems more likely that NASA's goals would shift away from "understanding" and more to "protecting". I imagine this wold involve developing the next generation of anti-satellite and anti-anti-satellite weapons (despite the fact that earth orbit is supposed to be a weapons free zone).
What insight does the slashdot community have on this? Will shifting NASA to military control result in a more nimble and focused organization able to achieve the goal of putting a man on mars in the next 20 years, or will military research take precedence over science?
Whether or not a handle is something a laptop ought to have, details matter. I wish other manufacturers had this attitude; they copy stylistic elements from Apple, but while the result may or may not look great, they still miss important details like managing the cord on the power brick, or the power connector itself.
I was an early adopter of the HDD based mp3 player. I bought Archo's FIRST HDD mp3 player and it was a beast. It took 6(!) AA batteries, had the form factor of a cassette player and charged with an ugly wallwart. It had a reasonable capcity (10GB), but the UI was terrible. The screen was a tiny, muddy backlit mess and it was just about impossible to navigate through the tiny screen. A few years later, after giving up on HDD based mp3 players, I bought an iPod. It was my first experience with an Apple product since middle school.
Comming from a cruddy, unreadable display and a terrible UI to the ipod was a really interesting experience. The thought and precision that went into the design was remarkable. I was amazed at the ingenuity of the click wheel interface. Little things like the international swappable power adapter on the brick were a nice touch too. The short of the long is this: Apple doesn't just make stuff that works, they spend a lot of time (and MONEY!) making stuff that has well crafted details. Like the OP said, sometimes those details are downright silly, but the fact is somebody put a lot of thought into those details. The details, as silly as they might be, for the most part, work as they were intended to.
Other manufactures could do well to take a page from Apple and put as much thought into their products. Sony is a great example, they cram all sorts of awesome features into their products, but in the end, their devices feel cumbersome and difficult to use. And in my experience, every Sony device I've owned has some sort of fatal flaw, like my Sony TV that thinks it knows what my "favorite" channel is and switches to it repeatedly until I unplug it for an hour.
You don't buy a mac to run a server, you buy it to be creative, and I fail to see the drawbacks of such a purchase.
That's exactly why I bought into macs. That and I couldn't bear to upgrade from XP to Vista with a new laptop purchase. I use my macbook for school (as a teacher) and I was doing all my photographic developing on it. I couldn't handle the terrible color consistency on the itty-bitty screen so I upgraded to an iMac. I do most of my school related work on the lappy and use the desktop for all my photography.
I can't get away from linux though. I have a linux box running in the next room as a print/web/music server. It also manages all the local and remote backups. The darwin side of OS X is also pretty awesome. I get to pretend that I know what the hell I'm doing and hack around in the command line and feel like a sys-admin.
As for the "bad sides" of Apple products, there's plenty that Jobs doesn't bother to mention. Like the iron grip Apple has on the iphone appstore, poor material quality on the macbook line (the keyboard deck and backsides are all cracking and crazing-mine has a razor sharp edge right where my right wrist rests). His strength is to make all the good qualities sound so sexy, you're willing to ignore those nasty ones. I sure did when I bought the 3G iphone. I love what the iphone does, but to be perfectly honest, my old Nokia 6000 series had a vastly better call quality and at a fraction of the price ($50).
If 10 years ago you would have told me that a 40 something balding man in a black turtleneck could make consumer computer technology look svelte, I wouldn't have believed you. I still find it hard to believe today. For all the weirdness, secrecy and--reportedly--heavy handedness, Jobs does some amazing work highlighting the positive aspects of Apple's products.
I think it's his confidence and an earnest belief that the product has been engineered to the highest standards that helps him be such an effective salesman. Bill Gates tried to capture some of that same humanity and enthusiasm in his Seinfeld commercials and somehow failed miserably. Perhaps it's Gate's lack of a publicaly accessible side. Or it could be that he's just a robot sent from the future.
Whatever you think about Apple (expensive, overly trendy, defectivebydesign, overly lawyered, Lord Job's GIFT to his children), Jobs does a pretty amazing job of selling it. My girlfriend pointed out that during his introduction of the iPhone, he not only enumerated the features of the device, he also taught everybody how it works. That's a pretty deft presentation.
It's pretty impressive that Facebook has been able to grow so quickly and handle so much traffic. Their down time has been pretty insignificant related to the sheer number of requests that blow through their servers every day.
There's probably a thing or two that can be learned from their developers and IT folks. I just wish I knew more about the whole underlying structure so I could appreciate exactly what they've done.
It is possible that not all of the 21 million work, or are valid. If I were in the criminal's position, I would offer a CD where about 70% were valid. And then when the payment was made, provide a data set that had only a few working accounts and a bunch of garbage.
In any case, it's pretty scary to think that there might that much personal data out there.
Would that be soylent green popcorn? You know the popcorn made from "high-energy plankton" harvested from the bounty of the sea.
Wait, soylent popcorn is made of PEOPLE!
FTFA, it seems more like the military is spending the dough to seek out off the shelf technology that can be adapted and integrated into their current systems. I wonder where they look for inspiration? Are they chatting with the folks at Rock Star and Valve?
So, this is a good argument for moving high demand data centers to colder places. I know that this means that latency takes a hit when the data is FAR from you. For some applications, this wouldn't matter, latency wouldn't make a huge difference. I'm thinking sites that display lots of static content, like bank web pages.
Don't you love the whoosing sound jokes make when they fly over people's heads? I do.
Such an interesting phrase, in a discussion of net neutrality.
While I veered FAR off topic of net neutrality, free speech is very different. Net neutrality falls into the category of things that should be regulated by the government in one way or another. It's not unlike RF spectrum. If the government doesn't regulate it, then only those who can shout loudest (most powerful transmitters) or have the best gear will be able to get anything whatever done. Ever.
Free speech is much less dependent on technology, and rather is a concept. For free speech to work, a minority can never have control over what is permissible. For the internet to work, an informed and necessarily small group of people have to agree on one standard or another.
Net neutrality should be discussed and decided on by an informed group of people; that group will probably necessarily be small and not represent everyone. Just like those that should regulate RF spectrum should be engineers and technicians.
It is true that the morally conservative would rally against smut on TV, but perhaps we can move past the vocal minority and allow the market to sort this one out. When one group is allowed to dictate what is and is not obscene, constitutional rights start to get trampled. My art becomes your porn; your ideas become my dangerous propaganda. Clearly, the slippery slope theory isn't very accurate, and we're not going to slip into a 15th century age of repression, but the idea of a minority advocating for the majority is troublesome.
Perhaps using that logic, and the logic of a free market, we can push past the social conservatives and move on to something a bit more free.