Calling Obama a SOCIALIST would be political speech. As would the caption WAR CRIMINAL under a picture of Bush. This is exactly the kind of thing that the 1st Amendment was designed to protect: freedom of speech against government. The first amendment protects freedom of POLITICAL speech, you are not allowed to say anything you'd like about anyone for any reason.
This would be libel and for to court to determine if it really is libel or if what the blogger wrote was true or not.
I recently put Windows 7 on my Bootcamp partition and I've been pleasantly surprised. It runs pretty snappy on this older MacBook with 2GB of ram. All of our Windows based apps work fine. I could even get it to boot in Parallels Desktop 3, but not do much. (Need to upgrade to Parallels 4 to get it to work with Windows 7). Hell, it recognized the Airport card out of the box. Same with the Intel GMA drivers. Only thing I needed from Bootcamp was the "Restart in OSX" option.
I've even installed Windows 7 on a number of friends vista machine and they all are much more impressed at how snappy it is compared to Vista even on older hardware.
Depends on what world you're living in. If you're an Unix Systems admin, there is an aweful lot of perl around. Especially if you are doing any type of log analysis. We've used PERL to generate billing reports and other tasks on the backend for years and the same goes for a lot of systems tasks. But recently we've found ourselves going back to PERL for a lot of our web work.
We've just started porting our web-based apps from PHP to PERL because we're moving from PostgreSQL to an Enterprise class database system that has 2 PERL modules that support it and PHP has nothing but ODBC. And our tests show that MOD_PERL with the database DBI module is much faster than PHP/ODBC. Script execution time is slower, but database access time is an order of magnitude better in PERL.
That being said, all of our Desktop GUI interfaces are written in JAVA. We looked at Python and C#, but the local university teaches 4 - 6 semesters of JAVA in their CS department. We can always find someone local to maintain Java based code. Not so much with Python. C# is nice, but JAVA is still write once, run on any desktop. So we don't have to worry if our clients are running Windows, Mac, or Linux. It just works.
Point isn't to counter the russians or chinese as nations. MAD still applies to anyone with more than 100 warheads. This designed at countries that may have a few dozen missiles at most and the bravato to rattle them around in return for respect. Or it is designed to prevent things going bad if say a single missile gets hijacked by evil doers and manage a launch of holy fire against the heathens...or something like that.
Basically that means North Korea and Iran. If you can shoot down those missiles in the event of a launch, then you have the option of using conventional means of dealing with the people who launched them as opposed to having to use the "Automatic Radioactive Glass Parking Lot" option.
The Navy's SM-3 system seems to work if there's an Agies Crusier/destroyer in theater. And in those theaters, there are generally a couple around at any given time. The Air Force's "hit a bullet with a bullet" approach probably will never work.
ABL seems to be something in between. I view it as more of a back up option in case the SM-3's fail to hit in the initial boost phase. But the aircraft has to be on station and in theatre.
Now this only works for ballistic missiles. In the case of North Korea, you might be able to save Japan. But this does nothing to stop cruise missiles. Which is mostly what Pakistan has.
So am I. But guess what, I get reamed on premiums for things like insurance because my Credit Score is low. Why is it low? Because I have 1 credit card with no balance, it does get used, and pay cash for pretty much everything else. According to lenders, I "Don't have enough credit".
My last car, I paid cash. I don't own a home, I rent. In fact I didn't really realize it until I went to get my iPhone and it finally took that I had the credit card with a higher limit than I really need and has 10 years of good payment history. I hadn't had anything on my credit report for 4 years. I was pretty much blank.
But things like my Car Insurance and health insurance premiums (I run a small business and pay for it out of pocket), are 30% higher because of it. When I started to look at buying a house, the bank sat down and told me the fact that I didn't have ENOUGH credit was a problem and the interest rate was going to around 7% instead around 6% at the time. And I had a 20% down payment, which this was during the "No down payment" days.
Same bank that I've maintained at least a $5k balance in the checking account for 6 years and more in savings.
The fact that my credit score went up 90 points after the finical meltdown last fall was enough to make me think that the whole credit game is just a racket that needs a serious look by regulators.
It has a few interesting features, like being able to have the browser refresh a page every x seconds instead of having to code that in. Useful for the web-based admin panel that lets users request 3 hours of internet time at the coffee shop. We use it with Google Docs and Gmail as well as Pandora. Seems to use less memory than FireFox and it's not IE. It also seems to be stable enough to last days before having to be restarted. It even has a bittorrent client built in.
Everyone is already complaining about it being unfair, but remind me, how much is congress getting ready to spend on Cash for Clunkers again? $50M is chump change. Hell, I can make the argument that NASA's entire budget is chump change these days compared to many other departments and all the other spending that is going on.
I wonder if people opinion would be different if they called it $50 Million in economic research stimulus.
Doesn't Yahoo employ several key members of the FreeBSD project to work on it as much of their infrastructure (at least at one time) was powered by FreeBSD?
It's not multimedia, it's still hardware and software. Recently we needed to get one of our Linux test boxes on wireless lan. So I went out to Staples and googled the only PCI wifi card they had left. According the the results, it was an atheros chipset, therefore it should work. There were even a bunch of positive reviews of the card on linux.
Got it home and as it turns out it was a different hardware revision from the ones I read about using another chipset. A chipset without Linux drivers. (At least none OpenSuSE could find). I ended up having to use a NDIS wrapper, which worked fine. But I have about a decade plus experience administrating FreeBSD and Linux boxes. 99% of the people I deal with aren't able to do this. They wouldn't know where to begin.
Same goes with software. They can't install and run any boxed software from the big box marts. Hell, even Best buy/staples/et. al. have a section of Mac software again (although be it one shelf or a very small section).
Japan off-shores their manufacturing to the United States because it costs something like 1/3rd the cost (don't remember the exact savings, but it was considerable) to manufacture over here than it does in Japan mainly because land and labor is far cheaper.
So do a few European companies.
So, when you hear about companies off-shoring, it's not all going to India and China.
And it turned into a real job. I write software that was all originally designed for the coffee shop. Things like a gateway that allows people who buy a drink 3 hours of internet access before they have to buy another one, an online ordering system for people to order coffee (now used by a bunch of other coffee shops and restaurants), and a customized OpenBravoPOS system. So technically now, there is two companies at the shop's location. There is the Coffee Shop and then the Technology company I co-founded with the coffeeshop owner.
...in transitioning from systems & coding to PHB: I now have to keep a schedule with the rest of the world. I used to be able to come in at 11AM or Noon, leave at 3, come back at 6 and work till midnight if I wanted. If I wanted to see a movie at 2PM on a tuesday afternoon, I went to the movie. But our entire development team in that time consisted of me, myself, and I. Now I have 2 full-time developers and 2 more contract developers that I have to coordinate with. I still have some flexibly, but generally I need to be in the office by 9 or 10AM to answer emails and to go through the support tickets, assign tasks, etc.. The coders usually show up sometime between 11AM and 1PM and then work for a couple hours, head home, then do their real work usually between 10PM - 4AM. The time they are in the office is usually spent asking questions, or we're doing testing to see if things work in the production mock up.
I don't care when or how the work gets done, just so long as assigned tasks get finished in a reasonable amount of time. And if they are having problems, let me know. Other than that, our developers have a free hand.
I don't get to schoomze. That's the other co-founder and CEO's job. Granted he owns another business that is the primary source of his income and that takes a lot of his time. We generally meet 3 hours a week total, make sure we're on the same page, and he does the sales negotiations with clients and corporate paperwork (like payroll and taxes). Meanwhile I have the title of COO and over see the day to day operations of the company.
to the point of taking notes in classes was pretty much useless. Fortunately I have a good memory. Strike that, great memory. I used to take history classes in college to boost the GPA because they were easy. Names, dates, and events always came naturally to me. Generally speaking, I could either pay attention to the lectures or take notes, not do both. So generally I paid attention to the lectures and managed to well enough (3.4 undergrad GPA, 3.8 Grad School). There were a few classes it did hurt me in, Economics and fiance mainly, but over all not that badly.
Something my dad taught me as I started filling out applications was to use block letters. Once I did, my handwriting became much clearer to read. Other than my signature, I can't think of anything I write in script. In the business world, everything I do is via a digital device of some type, either computer or iPhone.
It's more than just an OS preference. When I buy from Apple, I'm dealing with one company if something goofs up. When I buy any other machine with Linux or Windows, the software is coming from one group, the hardware a different group. I've been in enough "It's a software problem!" / "No it's a Hardware problem!" pissing matches in my life. I can't go out and buy a Microsoft Laptop. I can't buy a Canonical Laptop. I can buy one from Dell or HP or some other company with Windows (or Linux for that matter), but not from Microsoft or Canonical.
I prefer having the total package just work. And if something doesn't work, one place to deal with to fix it.
That depends. Around here Verizon has the better network hands down. I have AT&T as I have an iPhone and AT&T is what the company uses. Voice call signal and quality is fine, but we're on Edge. 3G was supposed to be here at the start of the year, then this summer, then this winter....maybe. A lot of people hate what verizon does with the shitty software they put on otherwise good phones, but the fact they can get 3G data and generally a little better coverage makes all the difference.
Google may have the phone, but Verizon has the network. T-Mobile doesn't even exist in this market Google may have the OS, but they don't have the network. Plus there is the whole GSM/CDMA divide across carries. I know this is supposed to be resolved as everyone is looking at the same 4G technology. But if we don't have 3G now, I don't think we'll be seeing 4G for a good long while.
Both at work and at home. I don't have to reinstall my OS at least once a year, run defrag on a monthly basis, worry about anti-virus updates every week, or spend hours trying to find and compile drivers for some piece of hardware as I always seem to with Linux even today. It just works. That's what I want, and I'll pay the price difference upfront. I got a good 4 years out of my old PowerBook. It needs a new power adaptor (fell on a ceramic tile floor and busted). but should still work and my QuadCore PowerMac G5 is still going strong and it's 4.5 years old. Most I've done to it is add an extra 500GB internal to store video files for video editing. (before external drives came down in price).
I now have a MacBook Pro provided by work. Does everything I want and can even boot into XP if I need too for testing (or to play an occasional old game from my PC collection).
Really, have you driven a GM car in the past 15 - 20 years? Since 1985 my family and I have owned 5 chevy's and a saturn. Baring car accidents, they've all lasted 10 years + or 150k miles or more. (that's our arbitrary cut off to get a new vehicle) And we've never had any major problems, just routine maintenance. All we've ever done was change the oil every 3k miles. Then usually a couple new sets of tires, new breaks @ 60k, a new alternator about 80k miles, and new plugs/plugwires around 100k and that's been about it. The only major problem we had in the last series of purchases was a fuel pump had to be replaced on a 1997 Astro van in 2007 at 120k miles. We still got the van and use it to haul stuff down on the farms.
When I bought my Malibu, it was about $5k less than a Honda or Toyota. Only things I had done to it in 56k miles was change the oil, new tires, and new breaks before it got totaled from falling debris after an ice storm. That cost me about $500 total. So I was still $4500 ahead. I now have an Impala with 86k on it. So far, new tires and breaks. I suspect they'll be a battery to replace in the next year, probably an alternator. It's been a good car. If I had to buy a new one tomorrow, I'd probably go back and get another Chevy.
Actually it was McDonnell Douglas who sued the DoD and initially won the case for Breach of Contract and was awarded $500M in damages. Just recently it was reversed by an appellate court, but the legal fight there isn't over yet as Boeing is going to continue to fight it.
However, what Mac did get right was the Super Hornet. Project came in on time and under budget and turned the hornet into an effective bombing platform.
That being said, what we need is a new A-10. Something that can fly low and slow and dish out a lot of death.
The problem there is that not all browsers follow the standards. Specifically the one that most people still use. Especially in Corporate environments. I know that we make sure out stuff works on IE first, Safari second, firefox third, and then Opera. Because our traffic breaks down to 88% MSIE, 8% Safari/Safari Mobile, 3% FireFox, 1% other.
We've written standards complaint code before that works in everything but MSIE. The previous guy at my post held the opinion "They should upgrade to a real browser". Our company lost sales and he lost his job.
What are you saying there aren't smart, technical savvy people inside Iran, some of whom may work for their security services? There are fairly bright people all over this earth, and they all different ideas of "right/wrong". SIGINT's price tag has come down a lot thanks to commodity hardware and community software. I'm willing someone somewhere in their intelligence apparatus saw this coming, had the tools, but had to have the right time to show case their talents. And given Iran's nature of wanting to build an internal arms manufacturing base in the past, it wouldn't surprise me if they haven't homegrown a lot of the skills needed either.
That being said. I'm sure there are lot of Chinese Engineers willing to trade their "expertise" for Euros.
And what if they're using *gasp* linux. A local coffee shop I frequent use many of the same techniques to try to stop people from downloading torrent files after getting a couple infringement notices. They do it via a Gentoo linux box and off the shelf FOSS tools. They don't do the DPI or SPI, but everything else, such as QoS, blocking ports, and IP blocks they do and it doesn't take a super consultant to set it up. I know the kid who set up this box. He's knows enough to do it, but isn't any type of super genius.
Can you get around the blocks here at the shop? Yes, but only if you know what you're doing. I can do it. I know a couple others who can as well, but 95% of the people sipping coffee around me don't have a clue. And it's enough to thwart the average attempt to use services like limewire and Bit Torrent.
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Credit Card processing is a competitive business.
Our online credit card rates are $0.15 + 1.70% per transactions. That is much cheaper than paypal.
Calling Obama a SOCIALIST would be political speech. As would the caption WAR CRIMINAL under a picture of Bush. This is exactly the kind of thing that the 1st Amendment was designed to protect: freedom of speech against government. The first amendment protects freedom of POLITICAL speech, you are not allowed to say anything you'd like about anyone for any reason.
This would be libel and for to court to determine if it really is libel or if what the blogger wrote was true or not.
I recently put Windows 7 on my Bootcamp partition and I've been pleasantly surprised. It runs pretty snappy on this older MacBook with 2GB of ram. All of our Windows based apps work fine. I could even get it to boot in Parallels Desktop 3, but not do much. (Need to upgrade to Parallels 4 to get it to work with Windows 7). Hell, it recognized the Airport card out of the box. Same with the Intel GMA drivers. Only thing I needed from Bootcamp was the "Restart in OSX" option.
I've even installed Windows 7 on a number of friends vista machine and they all are much more impressed at how snappy it is compared to Vista even on older hardware.
Depends on what world you're living in. If you're an Unix Systems admin, there is an aweful lot of perl around. Especially if you are doing any type of log analysis. We've used PERL to generate billing reports and other tasks on the backend for years and the same goes for a lot of systems tasks. But recently we've found ourselves going back to PERL for a lot of our web work.
We've just started porting our web-based apps from PHP to PERL because we're moving from PostgreSQL to an Enterprise class database system that has 2 PERL modules that support it and PHP has nothing but ODBC. And our tests show that MOD_PERL with the database DBI module is much faster than PHP/ODBC. Script execution time is slower, but database access time is an order of magnitude better in PERL.
That being said, all of our Desktop GUI interfaces are written in JAVA. We looked at Python and C#, but the local university teaches 4 - 6 semesters of JAVA in their CS department. We can always find someone local to maintain Java based code. Not so much with Python. C# is nice, but JAVA is still write once, run on any desktop. So we don't have to worry if our clients are running Windows, Mac, or Linux. It just works.
Point isn't to counter the russians or chinese as nations. MAD still applies to anyone with more than 100 warheads. This designed at countries that may have a few dozen missiles at most and the bravato to rattle them around in return for respect. Or it is designed to prevent things going bad if say a single missile gets hijacked by evil doers and manage a launch of holy fire against the heathens...or something like that.
Basically that means North Korea and Iran. If you can shoot down those missiles in the event of a launch, then you have the option of using conventional means of dealing with the people who launched them as opposed to having to use the "Automatic Radioactive Glass Parking Lot" option.
The Navy's SM-3 system seems to work if there's an Agies Crusier/destroyer in theater. And in those theaters, there are generally a couple around at any given time. The Air Force's "hit a bullet with a bullet" approach probably will never work.
ABL seems to be something in between. I view it as more of a back up option in case the SM-3's fail to hit in the initial boost phase. But the aircraft has to be on station and in theatre.
Now this only works for ballistic missiles. In the case of North Korea, you might be able to save Japan. But this does nothing to stop cruise missiles. Which is mostly what Pakistan has.
So am I. But guess what, I get reamed on premiums for things like insurance because my Credit Score is low. Why is it low? Because I have 1 credit card with no balance, it does get used, and pay cash for pretty much everything else. According to lenders, I "Don't have enough credit".
My last car, I paid cash. I don't own a home, I rent. In fact I didn't really realize it until I went to get my iPhone and it finally took that I had the credit card with a higher limit than I really need and has 10 years of good payment history. I hadn't had anything on my credit report for 4 years. I was pretty much blank.
But things like my Car Insurance and health insurance premiums (I run a small business and pay for it out of pocket), are 30% higher because of it. When I started to look at buying a house, the bank sat down and told me the fact that I didn't have ENOUGH credit was a problem and the interest rate was going to around 7% instead around 6% at the time. And I had a 20% down payment, which this was during the "No down payment" days.
Same bank that I've maintained at least a $5k balance in the checking account for 6 years and more in savings.
The fact that my credit score went up 90 points after the finical meltdown last fall was enough to make me think that the whole credit game is just a racket that needs a serious look by regulators.
It has a few interesting features, like being able to have the browser refresh a page every x seconds instead of having to code that in. Useful for the web-based admin panel that lets users request 3 hours of internet time at the coffee shop. We use it with Google Docs and Gmail as well as Pandora. Seems to use less memory than FireFox and it's not IE. It also seems to be stable enough to last days before having to be restarted. It even has a bittorrent client built in.
Everyone is already complaining about it being unfair, but remind me, how much is congress getting ready to spend on Cash for Clunkers again? $50M is chump change. Hell, I can make the argument that NASA's entire budget is chump change these days compared to many other departments and all the other spending that is going on.
I wonder if people opinion would be different if they called it $50 Million in economic research stimulus.
Doesn't Yahoo employ several key members of the FreeBSD project to work on it as much of their infrastructure (at least at one time) was powered by FreeBSD?
It's not multimedia, it's still hardware and software. Recently we needed to get one of our Linux test boxes on wireless lan. So I went out to Staples and googled the only PCI wifi card they had left. According the the results, it was an atheros chipset, therefore it should work. There were even a bunch of positive reviews of the card on linux.
Got it home and as it turns out it was a different hardware revision from the ones I read about using another chipset. A chipset without Linux drivers. (At least none OpenSuSE could find). I ended up having to use a NDIS wrapper, which worked fine. But I have about a decade plus experience administrating FreeBSD and Linux boxes. 99% of the people I deal with aren't able to do this. They wouldn't know where to begin.
Same goes with software. They can't install and run any boxed software from the big box marts. Hell, even Best buy/staples/et. al. have a section of Mac software again (although be it one shelf or a very small section).
Japan off-shores their manufacturing to the United States because it costs something like 1/3rd the cost (don't remember the exact savings, but it was considerable) to manufacture over here than it does in Japan mainly because land and labor is far cheaper.
So do a few European companies.
So, when you hear about companies off-shoring, it's not all going to India and China.
And it turned into a real job. I write software that was all originally designed for the coffee shop. Things like a gateway that allows people who buy a drink 3 hours of internet access before they have to buy another one, an online ordering system for people to order coffee (now used by a bunch of other coffee shops and restaurants), and a customized OpenBravoPOS system. So technically now, there is two companies at the shop's location. There is the Coffee Shop and then the Technology company I co-founded with the coffeeshop owner.
And where do I find this android? T-Mobile doesn't even offer service in this market.
...in transitioning from systems & coding to PHB: I now have to keep a schedule with the rest of the world. I used to be able to come in at 11AM or Noon, leave at 3, come back at 6 and work till midnight if I wanted. If I wanted to see a movie at 2PM on a tuesday afternoon, I went to the movie. But our entire development team in that time consisted of me, myself, and I. Now I have 2 full-time developers and 2 more contract developers that I have to coordinate with. I still have some flexibly, but generally I need to be in the office by 9 or 10AM to answer emails and to go through the support tickets, assign tasks, etc.. The coders usually show up sometime between 11AM and 1PM and then work for a couple hours, head home, then do their real work usually between 10PM - 4AM. The time they are in the office is usually spent asking questions, or we're doing testing to see if things work in the production mock up.
I don't care when or how the work gets done, just so long as assigned tasks get finished in a reasonable amount of time. And if they are having problems, let me know. Other than that, our developers have a free hand.
I don't get to schoomze. That's the other co-founder and CEO's job. Granted he owns another business that is the primary source of his income and that takes a lot of his time. We generally meet 3 hours a week total, make sure we're on the same page, and he does the sales negotiations with clients and corporate paperwork (like payroll and taxes). Meanwhile I have the title of COO and over see the day to day operations of the company.
to the point of taking notes in classes was pretty much useless. Fortunately I have a good memory. Strike that, great memory. I used to take history classes in college to boost the GPA because they were easy. Names, dates, and events always came naturally to me. Generally speaking, I could either pay attention to the lectures or take notes, not do both. So generally I paid attention to the lectures and managed to well enough (3.4 undergrad GPA, 3.8 Grad School). There were a few classes it did hurt me in, Economics and fiance mainly, but over all not that badly.
Something my dad taught me as I started filling out applications was to use block letters. Once I did, my handwriting became much clearer to read. Other than my signature, I can't think of anything I write in script. In the business world, everything I do is via a digital device of some type, either computer or iPhone.
It's more than just an OS preference. When I buy from Apple, I'm dealing with one company if something goofs up. When I buy any other machine with Linux or Windows, the software is coming from one group, the hardware a different group. I've been in enough "It's a software problem!" / "No it's a Hardware problem!" pissing matches in my life. I can't go out and buy a Microsoft Laptop. I can't buy a Canonical Laptop. I can buy one from Dell or HP or some other company with Windows (or Linux for that matter), but not from Microsoft or Canonical.
I prefer having the total package just work. And if something doesn't work, one place to deal with to fix it.
That depends. Around here Verizon has the better network hands down. I have AT&T as I have an iPhone and AT&T is what the company uses. Voice call signal and quality is fine, but we're on Edge. 3G was supposed to be here at the start of the year, then this summer, then this winter....maybe. A lot of people hate what verizon does with the shitty software they put on otherwise good phones, but the fact they can get 3G data and generally a little better coverage makes all the difference.
Google may have the phone, but Verizon has the network. T-Mobile doesn't even exist in this market Google may have the OS, but they don't have the network. Plus there is the whole GSM/CDMA divide across carries. I know this is supposed to be resolved as everyone is looking at the same 4G technology. But if we don't have 3G now, I don't think we'll be seeing 4G for a good long while.
Both at work and at home. I don't have to reinstall my OS at least once a year, run defrag on a monthly basis, worry about anti-virus updates every week, or spend hours trying to find and compile drivers for some piece of hardware as I always seem to with Linux even today. It just works. That's what I want, and I'll pay the price difference upfront. I got a good 4 years out of my old PowerBook. It needs a new power adaptor (fell on a ceramic tile floor and busted). but should still work and my QuadCore PowerMac G5 is still going strong and it's 4.5 years old. Most I've done to it is add an extra 500GB internal to store video files for video editing. (before external drives came down in price).
I now have a MacBook Pro provided by work. Does everything I want and can even boot into XP if I need too for testing (or to play an occasional old game from my PC collection).
Really, have you driven a GM car in the past 15 - 20 years? Since 1985 my family and I have owned 5 chevy's and a saturn. Baring car accidents, they've all lasted 10 years + or 150k miles or more. (that's our arbitrary cut off to get a new vehicle) And we've never had any major problems, just routine maintenance. All we've ever done was change the oil every 3k miles. Then usually a couple new sets of tires, new breaks @ 60k, a new alternator about 80k miles, and new plugs/plugwires around 100k and that's been about it. The only major problem we had in the last series of purchases was a fuel pump had to be replaced on a 1997 Astro van in 2007 at 120k miles. We still got the van and use it to haul stuff down on the farms.
When I bought my Malibu, it was about $5k less than a Honda or Toyota. Only things I had done to it in 56k miles was change the oil, new tires, and new breaks before it got totaled from falling debris after an ice storm. That cost me about $500 total. So I was still $4500 ahead. I now have an Impala with 86k on it. So far, new tires and breaks. I suspect they'll be a battery to replace in the next year, probably an alternator. It's been a good car. If I had to buy a new one tomorrow, I'd probably go back and get another Chevy.
Actually it was McDonnell Douglas who sued the DoD and initially won the case for Breach of Contract and was awarded $500M in damages. Just recently it was reversed by an appellate court, but the legal fight there isn't over yet as Boeing is going to continue to fight it.
However, what Mac did get right was the Super Hornet. Project came in on time and under budget and turned the hornet into an effective bombing platform.
That being said, what we need is a new A-10. Something that can fly low and slow and dish out a lot of death.
Five words: Breeder Reactors and fuel reprocessing
Proliferation treaties be damned. We've already got more than enough warheads and the only place we export our nukes to is England.
And the cost of energy and materials to produce the solar cells needed to capture said solar energy?
The problem there is that not all browsers follow the standards. Specifically the one that most people still use. Especially in Corporate environments. I know that we make sure out stuff works on IE first, Safari second, firefox third, and then Opera. Because our traffic breaks down to 88% MSIE, 8% Safari/Safari Mobile, 3% FireFox, 1% other.
We've written standards complaint code before that works in everything but MSIE. The previous guy at my post held the opinion "They should upgrade to a real browser". Our company lost sales and he lost his job.
What are you saying there aren't smart, technical savvy people inside Iran, some of whom may work for their security services? There are fairly bright people all over this earth, and they all different ideas of "right/wrong". SIGINT's price tag has come down a lot thanks to commodity hardware and community software. I'm willing someone somewhere in their intelligence apparatus saw this coming, had the tools, but had to have the right time to show case their talents. And given Iran's nature of wanting to build an internal arms manufacturing base in the past, it wouldn't surprise me if they haven't homegrown a lot of the skills needed either.
That being said. I'm sure there are lot of Chinese Engineers willing to trade their "expertise" for Euros.
And what if they're using *gasp* linux. A local coffee shop I frequent use many of the same techniques to try to stop people from downloading torrent files after getting a couple infringement notices. They do it via a Gentoo linux box and off the shelf FOSS tools. They don't do the DPI or SPI, but everything else, such as QoS, blocking ports, and IP blocks they do and it doesn't take a super consultant to set it up. I know the kid who set up this box. He's knows enough to do it, but isn't any type of super genius.
Can you get around the blocks here at the shop? Yes, but only if you know what you're doing. I can do it. I know a couple others who can as well, but 95% of the people sipping coffee around me don't have a clue. And it's enough to thwart the average attempt to use services like limewire and Bit Torrent.