No, you misunderstand. It's some soldier who married a porn star and gets to see her picture when he's deployed oversees by checking out that website. Totally legit. This is why we have freedom of speech in the US: To prevent overzealous legislators from harassing hard-working patriots from doing perfectly acceptable things.
Uh, so in my small-to-medium size business I won't touch overpriced cisco crap with a 10 foot pole. But compared to the telcos, I really don't have much traffic (or distance). Perhaps Juniper and F5 and Brocade have alternatives that match performance, but Cisco has huge market share and I doubt the three of those companies could take Cisco's place quickly if telcos started dumping Cisco stuff.
Plus, if you tell AT&T that you use Comcast because AT&T uses Cisco, I'd bet AT&T is well aware that Comcast uses a lot of Cisco equipment too. So your argument seems a bit unpersuasive.
What we need is a law that allows victims of identity theft to sue companies who report that they paid wages to the victim when, in fact, they paid those wages to someone who stole the victim's identity. A special court should be set up to handle such cases, and the victim should simply need to show that they didn't actually receive the wages reported to the IRS by the company.
Companies would then be required to pay the victim all the wages they said they did, plus interest, legal and accounting costs, and any IRS fees and penalties the victim may have incurred. This way, the IRS gets their money, the victim gets his or her money back (and then some), and law enforcement doesn't have to waste tax dollars hunting down illegal immigrants that aren't otherwise criminals.
I know what you're thinking. This would hurt the legal immigrants and non-white U.S. citizens who couldn't get a job because employers weren't certain of their identity. Yes, that's an unfortunate side-effect, but imagine if some June the IRS sent a nasty reply to your tax return saying that you'd failed to report a bunch of your income. When I think about the headache that would be, fuck 'em!
Push the responsibility onto businesses, let them demand a method of verifying someone's right to work, and then don't complain when we get a national ID card with a picture and RFID chip. And don't pull out the stupid privacy argument. Of course the government already has such info on all of use. Let's make it official and perhaps the courts will get the opportunity to opine on how it's used.
Despise other comments to this post claiming that these apps had the malicious payload intentionally included, I can't find anything confirming that's the case. Are we sure it's not a matter for developer keys (or even the Google Marketplace or phone OS) getting compromised? Anyone see that info anywhere
Actually, there's a lot. Because while users aren't willing to pay the outrageous prices Apple charges for their home computers, they want a Mac because of the grass-is-always-greener perception and are more than willing to have their employer pay for it. So, in companies where users get what they want from IT, we buy macs for people. And then curse the ground they walk on because they're quite a headache for enterprise support, but do-it-yourself and dealing with Apple customer support (which is as bad as it gets unless you need someone who can hold your hand through how to click the mouse).
So this doesn't surprise me at all. But it does make me a bit sick. Except, of course, for the fact that as we move to macs, users will need more support for these wrong-for-the-enterprise machines, which will result in better job prospects for me. On second thought, I'm all in favor of it!
From one of TFAs: AppleCare: Well, Iâ(TM)m sure youâ(TM)re aware of what Mac Defender pops up on your screen if you donâ(TM)t buy it. Last call i got before the weekend was a mother screaming at her kids to get out of the room because she didnâ(TM)t want them seeing the images.
Those stupid virus writers got it backwards. They're supposed to ask you for money *before* they show you the dirty pictures. That's the time-tested strategy for making a profit on the Internet.
Also, I don't have Mac. Are you/sure/ it's not available for PCs?
Wait, what!?! The NSA releases their bulletins in PDF format? Isn't it a bit ironic, considering all the security problems with Acrobat, that the NSA would be encouraging...
Oh, I get it. Oh well, at least this implies there probably isn't a backdoor in Windows itself. The NSA just waits for users to read NSA PDF bulletins.
> 'Coming into today's hearing, I couldn't understand what was meant by a class.'
No shame in that Judge Alsop. I once had a CS professor describe the concepts of a 'class' and 'object' as something along the lines of "an amorphous cloud" in a lecture for a software engineering course. If the guys who get paid to do research on such things can't come up with a better definition better than that, we can't really expect a layman to understand it.
Of course, I'd describe a class/object as "a collection of related information and instructions for common manipulations of that information". The fact that idiots in universities who waste time thinking about software engineering in the abstract can't seem to come up with anything remotely useful doesn't mean those of us in the real world don't a good job of it.
I just hope Judge Alsop is having an actual programmer explain things to him as opposed to some academic who can't help but make software design seem overly complicated because his entire career is built on doing so. Unfortunately, unless Judge Alsop is quite dumb, I'm guessing that's what's happening.
True, browser makers could have all release updates that removed comodo as a trusted root CA instead of just blacklisting the 9 certs that they think were signed. But that would have done the following:
1) Made users of any site who got their cert signed by Comodo see a popup (which they'd probably suffer no ill effects from clicking through, further training users to ignore such warnings).
2) next time a CA got hacked, they'd never admit it since it would mean certain death for the company. So instead of reading about it on slashdot, you'd find out about it years later when someone finally figured out that all there data had been going to Iran, despite SSL encryption.
That's why we still trust Comodo. They did the wrong thing in letting the certs get issued, but they did the right thing in announcing it to mitigate the damage. This probably isn't the first time a root CA has been compromised, just the first time it's been made public. So is Comodo really all that bad?
And yes, SSL is a bit of false security, but until you figure out a way to traing the entire web browsing population on how to verify an SSL key (and have some really massive key signing parties), it's the best we've got and a heck of a lot better than nothing.
I have no problem with them having my info (after all, it's gun ownership, not laws, that protect us from the rise of Hitler in our country). And if I have to see ads I prefer targeted ones.
But what happens if one of these companies gets hacked and, as a result, someone uses my name and ssn for things that harm my credit score? My company's human resources department is scared stiff about accidentally disclosing that type of info in a security breech. And I imagine the same is true for companies who have it because I'm a customer of theirs. But do these companies have the same legal responsibilities to protect data about me? If not, they should.
And more importantly, we need laws that help track down the source of identity theft so I can hold such companies accountable. Something like any company who collects personal information on American citizens must register with some federal bureau and list what they collect. Victims of identity theft should be able to request what information any company in the list has on them, as well as a list of when, how, and to whom it was disclosed.
It may be antiquated, but it really does work, mostly because it's simple. True, you can't do certain fine-grained things, but try ACLs in Windows. There's all kinds of confusion with inheritance and allow/deny. And that's before you click the Advanced button to set special permissions. Granted, I'm grateful that the complexity means companies need to hire guys like me who understand it, but the simpler Unix security model I think is just more effective. Besides, most modern Linux/Unix filesystems support ACLs (without SELinux) if you need to get more complicated.
Maybe you don't get the point of cloud computing. It's not new technology that allows you to do things never done before. It's cheap technology that allows you to do what you can already do, but cheaper, and with the ability to grow cheaply. Even the most expensive hardware can fail, so if you really need uptime, you buy two (at least) of anything and configure failover and load balancing, etc. "Cloud" computing is simply the idea of doing this at a large scale so you can bring more equipment online and move things around quickly, easily and cheaply. The real question is not whether or not nodes fail, but whether or not nodes are cheap enough that you've got plenty of extras on hand so you don't have to much care when they do. (And, of course, whether or not the cloud platform makes the failover setup quick and easy and reliable, but that's UEC's problem, not Dell's).
Of course, I've never though of Dell's as particularly cheap (though cheaper than IBM and Sun). But for the record, I work with hundreds of dell server and workstation machines running Debian and Red Had they mostly work just fine, LSI raid and all.
I'm not sure if "remind everyone that Greene's book is more theory than fact" was from Nature or the story submitter, but no wonder the general public is quite confused about science in general. The sentence implies that it's "just a theory" and that theories aren't highly thought of by scientists, yet the same types of people who object to Mr. Greene's work being though of as useful rant and rave when the theory of evolution is treated as anything other than fact.
If his work is a theory and is supported by enough empirical evidence that we assume it's correct in most circumstances, then it really is interesting and I'd like to know about it. If it's not, don't call it a theory (even if he does). Call it a hypothesis or science fiction or some such thing.
Net Neutrality has so many definitions floating around that it's to confusing to bother with. Until now. Despite the fact that it's a very hard-to-read sentence, I think this is actually what a violation of net neutrality: "6) charge[ing] a content, application, or service provider for access to the broadband Internet access service providers' end users based on differing levels of quality of service or prioritized delivery of Internet protocol packets". Let's just make that illegal and forget the rest.
Though the original purpose of education in America may have been to have a not-too-stupid-to-vote public (since all white men were allowed to vote, a novel idea at the time), education in America for the past half-century or so simply serves to get the kids out of the house so mom can go to work, just like dad. And no, that's not a women's lib issue. It's about increasing the labor supply without increasing the number of mouths to feed, thereby keeping the cost of labor relatively lower.
The result has been a sharp decline in the relative standard of living and distribution of wealth. It now takes two incomes for a family to get by in America, and it's getting worse every day. Supposed "home ownership" has been declining too if you subtract the portion of our homes actually owned by the bank. Government-subsidized home ownership simply drove up prices and put us all in debt (supposedly 'good' debt) to keep us working. Employer-sponsored health insurance does the same thing (better not quit or you'll lose your coverage. Unless you're really young and really healthy, you won't find any reasonably priced insurance in the market.).
Education was simply the first step in a long-running conspiracy by very rich people who control the planet to enslave us all. You might say "but life ain't so bad here in the U.S.". And you're somewhat correct. But 200+ years ago we had an entire nation full of resources free for the taking (my apologies to Native Americans and Mother Nature) and a supposedly free country where people (well, white men, anyway) could build a life for themselves. Yet wealth didn't naturally distribute itself anywhere close to evenly. Today we have 90%+ of the wealth in the hands of the same 1% of the population that got all the wealth when it was distributed under monarchies and dictatorships.
And it's getting worse. We were given a little to get us to develop this "great nation", but now they're in the process of taking it away. We have lots of material things, but time is so hard to come by that there's no way we could survive without out cars and dish washers and vacuum cleaners and washing machines. Some of us see our families 2/7 days a week, but we don't get to teach our kids a profession -- that have to go to college for that. Which involves more debt, just to make sure that if we happen to pay off our home loans before we die our kids still enter into the workforce with some huge monthly payment to keep 'em working.
When Lincoln may have outlawed slavery by race, they just figured out that race was too limiting anyway. Why just enslave black people when you can have the almost entire population at your disposal? And just as black slaves were taught that they were stupid and not good enough in order to keep them in line, we're all taught that separation from our families and debt and dependence on machines and an employer-sponsored healthcare system are part of some fare system that we've all chosen to participate in.
But it's not true. Wake Up America! Demand not just restoration of the middle class, but creation of a true middle class with both the financial and voting power to choose our own destines.
Of course I haven't a single policy idea on what exactly we need to do to make that happen, but I'm quite certain we're all the victims of something and I'm eager to do something about it as soon as someone figures out what that is.
If you compromised an account, why would you change the key, an action that would quite likely trigger some sort of alert (as it did). Wouldn't you just silently look around until you knew what you wanted to do with it and then do all your damage at once before they could cut you off?
So am I to infer from this that I should switch to SuSE (/spits foul taste from mouth) or slackware? Or are those distros just too insignificant to make the news when compromised?
This is great news! All that extra copper will drive down the price and a penny will no longer cost more than $0.01 to produce. It may only have a small impact on the federal budget deficit, but every little bit helps.
Wait, you're telling me I can get porn on my android phone? Sweet! Why didn't anyone tell me about this earlier.
I'm not sure what Steve was thinking when he said that though. He's probably not really sick. They just asked him to step down because his big mouth sunk iPhone sales.
Pardon me for opining on something I know little about (well, I guess this is slashdot), but last time I looked at the cloud offerings, Google's was some crappy proprietary interface which I'm sure is quite fast when you work within its limitations, but hardly useful for general purpose stuff or anything you don't want tied to a vendor. Microsoft gave you a visualized windows box, so that's a great cloud platform so long as you're working with stuff that runs well on Windows. (You're not that tied to a vendor since you can always just set up your own Windows boxes in your own datacenter and move your app there if you need to). But Amazon has the only remotely useful cloud infrastructure. You get a visualized box and you can run the OS of your choice (Windows, Linux *BSD, etc.) or anything else that compiles on x86.
So Amazon should thank Google. I can't imagine anyone in their right mind would choose the Google cloud for anything. If they reconsider, they'll end up on Amazon if they're smart.
> one high-performance-computing vendor executive joked about stringing together 100,000 Android smartphones to get...
Now that's not entirely fair. I just looked at an Android smartphone at Best Buy, and the sales rep assured me that I should be buying the bigger, more expensive one, rather than the one I could fit in my pocket, because it was faster. It even has a snapdragon processor! (whatever that is) Surely it can't be that far away from a true supercomputer.
It might if they Sweden the deal with a better GUI Denmark-it it as a cheaper alternative to Windows. Iceland-er X/KDE/Gnome too much though. The latest versions are pretty good.
(10 mod points for anyone who can add Esonia, Latvia or Lithuania).
So let me get this straight. The U.S. Military has now privatized missile launches and US Airways was the lowest bidder?!? I know the republicans worked quickly, but that's some damn fine big-gov't cuttin', especially considering they only have one house of congress.
Tripled in the last 12 years? That seems about right, given inflation and all. I know that in the last 12 years my stock portfolio has... hey, wait a minute!!!
Just kidding. Actually I think $80B seems like a small amount of the $600B defense budget. After all, it's probably much cheaper to have good intelligence and make the best use of our troops than to just invade countries at random in hopes of making America safer (not that that would ever happen;). Of course, we have no idea if we're really getting our money's worth for this necessarily un-transparent expenditure, but all us patriotic Americans here on/. know that our wonderful government officials are generally trustworthy and honest. (At least those of us with our tinfoil hats firmly atop our heads).
Slashdot Mirror
No, you misunderstand. It's some soldier who married a porn star and gets to see her picture when he's deployed oversees by checking out that website. Totally legit. This is why we have freedom of speech in the US: To prevent overzealous legislators from harassing hard-working patriots from doing perfectly acceptable things.
Uh, so in my small-to-medium size business I won't touch overpriced cisco crap with a 10 foot pole. But compared to the telcos, I really don't have much traffic (or distance). Perhaps Juniper and F5 and Brocade have alternatives that match performance, but Cisco has huge market share and I doubt the three of those companies could take Cisco's place quickly if telcos started dumping Cisco stuff.
Plus, if you tell AT&T that you use Comcast because AT&T uses Cisco, I'd bet AT&T is well aware that Comcast uses a lot of Cisco equipment too. So your argument seems a bit unpersuasive.
What we need is a law that allows victims of identity theft to sue companies who report that they paid wages to the victim when, in fact, they paid those wages to someone who stole the victim's identity. A special court should be set up to handle such cases, and the victim should simply need to show that they didn't actually receive the wages reported to the IRS by the company.
Companies would then be required to pay the victim all the wages they said they did, plus interest, legal and accounting costs, and any IRS fees and penalties the victim may have incurred. This way, the IRS gets their money, the victim gets his or her money back (and then some), and law enforcement doesn't have to waste tax dollars hunting down illegal immigrants that aren't otherwise criminals.
I know what you're thinking. This would hurt the legal immigrants and non-white U.S. citizens who couldn't get a job because employers weren't certain of their identity. Yes, that's an unfortunate side-effect, but imagine if some June the IRS sent a nasty reply to your tax return saying that you'd failed to report a bunch of your income. When I think about the headache that would be, fuck 'em!
Push the responsibility onto businesses, let them demand a method of verifying someone's right to work, and then don't complain when we get a national ID card with a picture and RFID chip. And don't pull out the stupid privacy argument. Of course the government already has such info on all of use. Let's make it official and perhaps the courts will get the opportunity to opine on how it's used.
Despise other comments to this post claiming that these apps had the malicious payload intentionally included, I can't find anything confirming that's the case. Are we sure it's not a matter for developer keys (or even the Google Marketplace or phone OS) getting compromised? Anyone see that info anywhere
Actually, there's a lot. Because while users aren't willing to pay the outrageous prices Apple charges for their home computers, they want a Mac because of the grass-is-always-greener perception and are more than willing to have their employer pay for it. So, in companies where users get what they want from IT, we buy macs for people. And then curse the ground they walk on because they're quite a headache for enterprise support, but do-it-yourself and dealing with Apple customer support (which is as bad as it gets unless you need someone who can hold your hand through how to click the mouse).
So this doesn't surprise me at all. But it does make me a bit sick. Except, of course, for the fact that as we move to macs, users will need more support for these wrong-for-the-enterprise machines, which will result in better job prospects for me. On second thought, I'm all in favor of it!
From one of TFAs: AppleCare: Well, Iâ(TM)m sure youâ(TM)re aware of what Mac Defender pops up on your screen if you donâ(TM)t buy it. Last call i got before the weekend was a mother screaming at her kids to get out of the room because she didnâ(TM)t want them seeing the images.
Those stupid virus writers got it backwards. They're supposed to ask you for money *before* they show you the dirty pictures. That's the time-tested strategy for making a profit on the Internet.
Also, I don't have Mac. Are you /sure/ it's not available for PCs?
Wait, what!?! The NSA releases their bulletins in PDF format? Isn't it a bit ironic, considering all the security problems with Acrobat, that the NSA would be encouraging...
Oh, I get it. Oh well, at least this implies there probably isn't a backdoor in Windows itself. The NSA just waits for users to read NSA PDF bulletins.
> 'Coming into today's hearing, I couldn't understand what was meant by a class.'
No shame in that Judge Alsop. I once had a CS professor describe the concepts of a 'class' and 'object' as something along the lines of "an amorphous cloud" in a lecture for a software engineering course. If the guys who get paid to do research on such things can't come up with a better definition better than that, we can't really expect a layman to understand it.
Of course, I'd describe a class/object as "a collection of related information and instructions for common manipulations of that information". The fact that idiots in universities who waste time thinking about software engineering in the abstract can't seem to come up with anything remotely useful doesn't mean those of us in the real world don't a good job of it.
I just hope Judge Alsop is having an actual programmer explain things to him as opposed to some academic who can't help but make software design seem overly complicated because his entire career is built on doing so. Unfortunately, unless Judge Alsop is quite dumb, I'm guessing that's what's happening.
True, browser makers could have all release updates that removed comodo as a trusted root CA instead of just blacklisting the 9 certs that they think were signed. But that would have done the following:
1) Made users of any site who got their cert signed by Comodo see a popup (which they'd probably suffer no ill effects from clicking through, further training users to ignore such warnings).
2) next time a CA got hacked, they'd never admit it since it would mean certain death for the company. So instead of reading about it on slashdot, you'd find out about it years later when someone finally figured out that all there data had been going to Iran, despite SSL encryption.
That's why we still trust Comodo. They did the wrong thing in letting the certs get issued, but they did the right thing in announcing it to mitigate the damage. This probably isn't the first time a root CA has been compromised, just the first time it's been made public. So is Comodo really all that bad?
And yes, SSL is a bit of false security, but until you figure out a way to traing the entire web browsing population on how to verify an SSL key (and have some really massive key signing parties), it's the best we've got and a heck of a lot better than nothing.
So quit yer' whining!
I have no problem with them having my info (after all, it's gun ownership, not laws, that protect us from the rise of Hitler in our country). And if I have to see ads I prefer targeted ones.
But what happens if one of these companies gets hacked and, as a result, someone uses my name and ssn for things that harm my credit score? My company's human resources department is scared stiff about accidentally disclosing that type of info in a security breech. And I imagine the same is true for companies who have it because I'm a customer of theirs. But do these companies have the same legal responsibilities to protect data about me? If not, they should.
And more importantly, we need laws that help track down the source of identity theft so I can hold such companies accountable. Something like any company who collects personal information on American citizens must register with some federal bureau and list what they collect. Victims of identity theft should be able to request what information any company in the list has on them, as well as a list of when, how, and to whom it was disclosed.
It may be antiquated, but it really does work, mostly because it's simple. True, you can't do certain fine-grained things, but try ACLs in Windows. There's all kinds of confusion with inheritance and allow/deny. And that's before you click the Advanced button to set special permissions. Granted, I'm grateful that the complexity means companies need to hire guys like me who understand it, but the simpler Unix security model I think is just more effective. Besides, most modern Linux/Unix filesystems support ACLs (without SELinux) if you need to get more complicated.
Maybe you don't get the point of cloud computing. It's not new technology that allows you to do things never done before. It's cheap technology that allows you to do what you can already do, but cheaper, and with the ability to grow cheaply. Even the most expensive hardware can fail, so if you really need uptime, you buy two (at least) of anything and configure failover and load balancing, etc. "Cloud" computing is simply the idea of doing this at a large scale so you can bring more equipment online and move things around quickly, easily and cheaply. The real question is not whether or not nodes fail, but whether or not nodes are cheap enough that you've got plenty of extras on hand so you don't have to much care when they do. (And, of course, whether or not the cloud platform makes the failover setup quick and easy and reliable, but that's UEC's problem, not Dell's).
Of course, I've never though of Dell's as particularly cheap (though cheaper than IBM and Sun). But for the record, I work with hundreds of dell server and workstation machines running Debian and Red Had they mostly work just fine, LSI raid and all.
I'm not sure if "remind everyone that Greene's book is more theory than fact" was from Nature or the story submitter, but no wonder the general public is quite confused about science in general. The sentence implies that it's "just a theory" and that theories aren't highly thought of by scientists, yet the same types of people who object to Mr. Greene's work being though of as useful rant and rave when the theory of evolution is treated as anything other than fact.
If his work is a theory and is supported by enough empirical evidence that we assume it's correct in most circumstances, then it really is interesting and I'd like to know about it. If it's not, don't call it a theory (even if he does). Call it a hypothesis or science fiction or some such thing.
Net Neutrality has so many definitions floating around that it's to confusing to bother with. Until now. Despite the fact that it's a very hard-to-read sentence, I think this is actually what a violation of net neutrality: "6) charge[ing] a content, application, or service provider for access to the broadband Internet access service providers' end users based on differing levels of quality of service or prioritized delivery of Internet protocol packets". Let's just make that illegal and forget the rest.
Though the original purpose of education in America may have been to have a not-too-stupid-to-vote public (since all white men were allowed to vote, a novel idea at the time), education in America for the past half-century or so simply serves to get the kids out of the house so mom can go to work, just like dad. And no, that's not a women's lib issue. It's about increasing the labor supply without increasing the number of mouths to feed, thereby keeping the cost of labor relatively lower.
The result has been a sharp decline in the relative standard of living and distribution of wealth. It now takes two incomes for a family to get by in America, and it's getting worse every day. Supposed "home ownership" has been declining too if you subtract the portion of our homes actually owned by the bank. Government-subsidized home ownership simply drove up prices and put us all in debt (supposedly 'good' debt) to keep us working. Employer-sponsored health insurance does the same thing (better not quit or you'll lose your coverage. Unless you're really young and really healthy, you won't find any reasonably priced insurance in the market.).
Education was simply the first step in a long-running conspiracy by very rich people who control the planet to enslave us all. You might say "but life ain't so bad here in the U.S.". And you're somewhat correct. But 200+ years ago we had an entire nation full of resources free for the taking (my apologies to Native Americans and Mother Nature) and a supposedly free country where people (well, white men, anyway) could build a life for themselves. Yet wealth didn't naturally distribute itself anywhere close to evenly. Today we have 90%+ of the wealth in the hands of the same 1% of the population that got all the wealth when it was distributed under monarchies and dictatorships.
And it's getting worse. We were given a little to get us to develop this "great nation", but now they're in the process of taking it away. We have lots of material things, but time is so hard to come by that there's no way we could survive without out cars and dish washers and vacuum cleaners and washing machines. Some of us see our families 2/7 days a week, but we don't get to teach our kids a profession -- that have to go to college for that. Which involves more debt, just to make sure that if we happen to pay off our home loans before we die our kids still enter into the workforce with some huge monthly payment to keep 'em working.
When Lincoln may have outlawed slavery by race, they just figured out that race was too limiting anyway. Why just enslave black people when you can have the almost entire population at your disposal? And just as black slaves were taught that they were stupid and not good enough in order to keep them in line, we're all taught that separation from our families and debt and dependence on machines and an employer-sponsored healthcare system are part of some fare system that we've all chosen to participate in.
But it's not true. Wake Up America! Demand not just restoration of the middle class, but creation of a true middle class with both the financial and voting power to choose our own destines.
Of course I haven't a single policy idea on what exactly we need to do to make that happen, but I'm quite certain we're all the victims of something and I'm eager to do something about it as soon as someone figures out what that is.
If you compromised an account, why would you change the key, an action that would quite likely trigger some sort of alert (as it did). Wouldn't you just silently look around until you knew what you wanted to do with it and then do all your damage at once before they could cut you off?
So am I to infer from this that I should switch to SuSE (/spits foul taste from mouth) or slackware? Or are those distros just too insignificant to make the news when compromised?
This is great news! All that extra copper will drive down the price and a penny will no longer cost more than $0.01 to produce. It may only have a small impact on the federal budget deficit, but every little bit helps.
Wait, you're telling me I can get porn on my android phone? Sweet! Why didn't anyone tell me about this earlier.
I'm not sure what Steve was thinking when he said that though. He's probably not really sick. They just asked him to step down because his big mouth sunk iPhone sales.
Pardon me for opining on something I know little about (well, I guess this is slashdot), but last time I looked at the cloud offerings, Google's was some crappy proprietary interface which I'm sure is quite fast when you work within its limitations, but hardly useful for general purpose stuff or anything you don't want tied to a vendor. Microsoft gave you a visualized windows box, so that's a great cloud platform so long as you're working with stuff that runs well on Windows. (You're not that tied to a vendor since you can always just set up your own Windows boxes in your own datacenter and move your app there if you need to). But Amazon has the only remotely useful cloud infrastructure. You get a visualized box and you can run the OS of your choice (Windows, Linux *BSD, etc.) or anything else that compiles on x86.
So Amazon should thank Google. I can't imagine anyone in their right mind would choose the Google cloud for anything. If they reconsider, they'll end up on Amazon if they're smart.
> one high-performance-computing vendor executive joked about stringing together 100,000 Android smartphones to get...
Now that's not entirely fair. I just looked at an Android smartphone at Best Buy, and the sales rep assured me that I should be buying the bigger, more expensive one, rather than the one I could fit in my pocket, because it was faster. It even has a snapdragon processor! (whatever that is) Surely it can't be that far away from a true supercomputer.
...trial by jury, who, by some random coincidence, all also happened to be computer hackers.
It might if they Sweden the deal with a better GUI Denmark-it it as a cheaper alternative to Windows. Iceland-er X/KDE/Gnome too much though. The latest versions are pretty good.
(10 mod points for anyone who can add Esonia, Latvia or Lithuania).
So let me get this straight. The U.S. Military has now privatized missile launches and US Airways was the lowest bidder?!? I know the republicans worked quickly, but that's some damn fine big-gov't cuttin', especially considering they only have one house of congress.
Tripled in the last 12 years? That seems about right, given inflation and all. I know that in the last 12 years my stock portfolio has... hey, wait a minute!!!
Just kidding. Actually I think $80B seems like a small amount of the $600B defense budget. After all, it's probably much cheaper to have good intelligence and make the best use of our troops than to just invade countries at random in hopes of making America safer (not that that would ever happen ;). Of course, we have no idea if we're really getting our money's worth for this necessarily un-transparent expenditure, but all us patriotic Americans here on /. know that our wonderful government officials are generally trustworthy and honest. (At least those of us with our tinfoil hats firmly atop our heads).