If your point is that a govt - any govt - is really just a social model in microcosm,
Hell, no.
A government is a coercive organization that claims first refusal on all use of force and setting of rules for behavior.
I claim:
- that REPUBLICS are an attempt to minimize the violence within the territories they control by doing such modeling in their decision making,
- that that's the POINT of them,
- that any institutional change that reduces the effectiveness of this modeling is dangerous and should be avoided, and
- that this must be UNDERSTOOD, to avoid the temptation to "improve" them (for instance by making them "more fair") and thus break them.
They can be rotten. But the alternatives are SO much worse.
After all, it was blogging that destroyed Dan Rather's career. All news organizations submit lies as news at some point or another. With blogs out there, there's a sort of check on that, and with the media statistically more left wing than right, it's more likely to hurt the left.
I agree with your point in general. But what brought Rather down was not just his running with the story. He could have survived - with a black eye - by doing a quick 180 - or 90 ("Oops! Nevermind. I still think it's true but this doc is a fake.").
What took him out is his continued insistence on the documents' authenticity, in the face of postings that made it utterly obvious that they were not merely forged, but poorly forged. This kept the spotlight on his bias and widened it to cover and discredit his operations procedures and personnel.
This changed the perception of them from a perhaps-left-leaning news operation that made an error to an unreliable propaganda mill, not merely useless as a news source, but dangerous to your welfare if you believe their claims.
Politicians in the US are not, strictly speaking, there to represent their party; they are there representing people who live within a fixed geographic area.
That is a nice sentiment. But it's a desirable second-order effect, rather than the central purpose.
The primary purpose of a republic is to minimize civil war - by modeling it sufficiently accurately that the losers of elections will figure they'd also lose the civil war to reverse the election's result and thus will refrain from fighting it. This redicrects their efforts from violence to evangelism.
While the result tends toward keeping the "representatives" at least somewhat responsive to their constituents, that's neither necessary nor necessarily desirable. To perform its central function the system must also correctly model such as group-joining and demagogue-following.
(It doesn't do a good job of modeling assasination, which is why we still have them occasionally, and why "executive protection" for politicians has been raised to a fine art.)
The problem with McCain Feingold is that it puts a major crimp in the activity of voluntary grass-roots-funded political organizations while leaving billionaires (who can afford to set up the whole operation) and unions free to spend as much as they want. It cripples ad-hoc organizations, hobbles large ones, and puts the power of the mainstream advertising machine in the hands of a small elite.
Which is PRECICELY what it was intended to do.
The importance of this decision is that it blocks the law from doing this on the internet - preserving the disruptive influence of the net's transfer of power into the hands of individuals.
If companies are incorporating patented MS technology into their Linux distros, then why should he rule out going after them? Anybody has to assume they will if they think they have a case; it's only FUD if they do it without a case.
The point of a FUD attack is to scare off customers (or investors, or partners, etc.) by hinting that their is a problem with the competition but without giving enough information about the hinted event for the listener to determine that the hinted-at problem exists.
In this case they're hinting that there is misappropriated technology from some unspecified items from their large patent portfolio in Linux and that at some point in the indefinite future they'll come down on Linux vendors and pull the rug out from under their customers. Yet they don't say when, don't specify what patents, don't specify which Linux components, and so on.
It's a vague threat. It can't be falsified (i.e. potential Linux adopters can't effectively determine whether there are actual violations or if Balmer is speculating through his hat). It would tend to scare away customers, partners, adopters, contributors, etc. Any claim of wrongdoing can be deflected by pointing out that the ACTUAL STATEMENT is just a truism of business policy, not a deliberate attack on Linux and its community.
If it really is just a truism of business, it would not be newsworthy. If Microsoft is actually gearing up for a patent fight it would be very newsworthy. Yet it makes headlines, without announcing the launch of an attack, or anything but the non-newsworthy truism.
So IMNO the fact that he made the statement at all meets the above definition of a FUD attack.
Yes, exactly what we need: a solar cell that actually absorbs *none* of the light that hits it.
That's not the point.
The semiconductor would absorb photons at or above the bandgap (NOT being transparent at that frequency) and pass those at lower frequencies without attenuation. Thus a stack of junctions at progressively lower bandgaps can get better use of the light - since the energy above the bandgap in the layer where the photon is absorbed is lost.
Making a completely transparent (to light below the bandgap) solar cell allows the light propagating to lower layers do do so efficiently. It also allows the CELLS to be stacked, substrate and all, if the materials are incompatable and can't all be layered on one substrate.
So it COULD be a VERY useful improvement in solar cell technology.
(Another thing that would make it useful is if it is CHEAP to manufacture. Solar is getting better but is still not cost-competitive with grid power except in remote locations and small devices such as roadsigns.)
And a little research turns up per-developer pricing, although not the per-unit run-time license cost. That's not actually unreasonable, given the cost of DO-178B Level A documentation, but still. Ouch.
Note that, because it's a Linux API, the bulk of the development can be done on Linux platforms WITHOUT per-developer licenses.
You'd need occasional testing against the real OS by someone "sitting in a licensed seat" - to check the behavior under the real OS's scheduling regime and detect reliance on missing or divergent features. And of course you'd have to hammer on it ifn licensed seats (and real or excelently hardware modeled aircraft devices) for final test. But if the licenses are sufficiently dear you concevably might end up ahead. (You wouldn't need per-seat licenses for initial prototyping work, either.)
(The "reliability tested in later" nature of such an effort wouldn't be an extra burden if machines connected to prototype hardware or timing-accurate models of them also aren't available at all seats all the time.)
A lot of software might not need close modeling thoughout development to get right.
It would only be analogous if kinderstart had been selling web search services and Google had achieved market dominance selling some OTHER product (say, a browser) and both used it both to cross-subsidize a new free search engine and tie it into their dominant product (say, by having a built-in "search via google" button with no corresponding "search via kinderstadt" button).
Kinderstadt is griping that Google's free search engine - which they didn't pay for - isn't doing what they want. Tough.
Just in case you'd like to visit Kinderstart's website and oh, er, use some bandwidth while viewing as much of it as you can, don't let me stop you!
Since they're trying to get their page views UP - apparently to increase advertising revenue - that might actually help their bottom line.
On the other hand, a flood of people viewing them because of the controversy, with no interest in their sponsor's products, might harm them further in the long term, by hurting the price/performance ratio of advertising with them, hitting their advertisers in their pocketbooks with no compensating return.
The "constitutional right to free speech" is a limit on GOVERNMENT interference via lawmaking (and by extension enforcement), not a limit OR a mandate-of-behavior on individuals or companies.
On the other hand, mandating changes to Google's rankings is a government interference in Google's "constitutional right to free speech" - as one court has already ruled.
The mass of material lifted from beside the strike and above what will be the crater goes up with the atmosphere surrounding it and doesn't experience the sort of extreme heating you're supposing.
It's still pretty abrupt accelleration (which bacteria handle pretty well, especially if embedded in something of a similar density). But the rock isn't plowing through dense air that is at a speed differing from its own by something in excess of escape velocity. The air gets launched, too.
And the decelleration and temperature resulting from the crash landing is substantially different from the acceleration and temperature resulting from an explosion that caused the rock to exceed escape velocity in the first place?
Yep.
Not "the explosion" itself, but the environment felt by the launched rock, which could be lifted relatively gently by the rocks and soil under it, as the atmosphere above it is lifted out of the way / along with it by it and the neighboring material.
It isn't the stuff that gets HIT by the asteroid/comet/whatever that get's launched. It's the stuff on and near the top of the ground nearby that gets lifted by the violence spreading out below it.
That's nice, but there's a huge flaw in this analogy as well, which is that Windows doesn't really have an "immune system" at all.
Yes it does. It just isn't born with one. It's transplanted, like bone marrow, from one of several "donors". (Symantec, McAfee, F-secure, Computer Associates,...)
It's interesting how the analogy between malware and lifeforms continues to expand.
Viruses are aptly named because they have many similarities to biological viruses. Anti-virus software is a close analogy to an reactive immune system (such as is found in mammals but not, say, sharks).
Now we have an example of a serious auto-immune disease from a self-attacking malfunction of a reactive immune system.
(An even more viscous hack was to reprogram the terminal's scrolling window to 1x1 character, change the escape sequence for programming it, and store it as the startup configuration. This killed the terminal - permanently. B-b )
Some of the early not-too-smart (pre-computer-running-the-show) terminals - notably the "Ann Arbor Terminals" terminal, the DEC VT105, and anything following the ANSI standard for terminal operation which was based on them - had several "soft keys".
- These could be configured to send any desired sequence of up to maybe 128 or so characters when hit.
- They were configured by an escape sequence.
- The escape sequence could be delivered from the far end of the link. (Typically was, by a program setting up the softkey.)
- The escape sequence setting the key would not produce any visual indication on the screen that this was being done (so as not to corrupt the screen).
- The key could also be "struck" by another escape sequence, also deliverable from the remote end.
- Some talk/chat features (think "stone-age instant messaging") did NOT filter out escape sequences in inter-user messages.
What this meant was that a user (especially one running an early terminal emulator on an early home computer - like an Apple ][) could compose a message to another user that would reprogram one of his softkeys to send anything the malicious user wanted and "hit" it remotely. The time-sharing machine in the middle would interpret the command as if it came from the victim. (This was especially handy if the victim happened to be logged in as the equivalent of a superuser at the time.)
If the message was a multiple command to disable keysroke echoing at the start and reenable it at the end it might not show up at all. (Or screen control stuff could be included to blank out the echoed command before it could be noticed.)
There were revs to the terminals to disable this. But installing them made the terminal no longer standards compliant. B-)
First off: Digital electronics generally requires several voltages. And they're all low, requiring high currents, massive conductors, and local filtering and regulation. So even if you're providing DC power from outside the room, you'll have a switching power supply (or several) in each piece of equipment to convert whatever the rough DC power is to whatever you need, smooth it, and regulate it.
But while some electronic devices use a common switcher to generate all the voltages with one conversion step, others use a "roughing" supply and a bunch of local supplies. Part of that is to get better regulation - part is because the roughing supply must run from 60 (or 50 or whatever) Hz and thus requires big caps to tide you over the low part of the cycles - caps you don't want taking up space near the components.
If you're going to do it in two stages anyhow, you can put your roughing supply OUTSIDE the room and only have the final supplies inside. The roughing supply has a lot of heat dissipation so you save a bunch on your cooling.
Second: There are two standards for power distribution in electronics rooms:
- Your local power line stuff. (120/240/480/208-3-phase in the US)
- The telco standard: x2-redunant 48V DC. A lot of equipment - especially networking equipment - is manufactured for sale to tellcos and other operations that use the standard. They might have initially used it because some of their equipment was co-located in tellco sites, where only 2x48VDC is available - and they got a quantity discount for buying a bunch of the same stuff and went to 48V for their own sites. Or they might use it because it's MUCH simpler to do backup power with floating batteries and century-old technology than with a building-sized UPS. (Note that a UPS CAUSES at least one outage when first installed and on the averate at least one more within the first year of operation from some malfunction. And a UPS dissipates more power than a roughing power supply or a battery charger.)
But the standard for 48VDC is REDUNDANT 48VDC supplies, with the equipment only requiring one (and typically doing "cutover" with diodes B-) ). With the equipment already set up for redundant supplies it's not a lot of cost or work to wire both sides and put in two 48V feeds to the equipment room. (Four diodes are a LOT cheaper than a pair of 120V roughing power supplies at each box, too.) So of course the users of such equipment normally give it dual supplies. (Even if it's a single rack and so they just put two roughing supplies in the rack fed from two different 120V feeds.)
The result is that all the equipment has redundant power supply, and keeps operating glitch-free through a number of kinds of partial outages - AND power supply repair and replacement. This is what's responsible for much of the claimed increase in reliability.
The whole Edison/Tesla DC/AC war had to do with the economics of CROSS-COUNTRY power transmission. AC beat DC there because a century or more ago it was virtually impossible to jack DC voltages up to levels suitable for long-distance transmission and back down to levels safe for distribution within houses, while AC could do that easily and efficiently. So Westinghouse/Tesla could ship cheap power from Niagra Falls to New York City while Edison had to build fuel-burning power plants IN the city. It has essentially nothing to do with shipping the power around within a single building.
BitTorrent will kill the Internet if it can't be made to behave well and not totally flood the network it's running on. The new technologies to prevent that will kill networks.
Imminent death of internet predicted. Film at 11.
Again.
As it has been every few months since there WAS an internet.
Since the engineering for the next generation of internet (in which I'm involved) plans on delivering enough bandwidth for several HDTV unicast streams simultaneously to EACH user, I suspect that even encrypted Bit Torrent won't "kill the internet".
WHY do you think they buried all that "dark fiber", eh?
Slashdot Mirror
If your point is that a govt - any govt - is really just a social model in microcosm,
Hell, no.
A government is a coercive organization that claims first refusal on all use of force and setting of rules for behavior.
I claim:
- that REPUBLICS are an attempt to minimize the violence within the territories they control by doing such modeling in their decision making,
- that that's the POINT of them,
- that any institutional change that reduces the effectiveness of this modeling is dangerous and should be avoided, and
- that this must be UNDERSTOOD, to avoid the temptation to "improve" them (for instance by making them "more fair") and thus break them.
They can be rotten. But the alternatives are SO much worse.
It means I hit the wrong key, didn't notice it before I posted, and didn't want to post an "oops". "IMHO" is what was intended.
After all, it was blogging that destroyed Dan Rather's career. All news organizations submit lies as news at some point or another. With blogs out there, there's a sort of check on that, and with the media statistically more left wing than right, it's more likely to hurt the left.
I agree with your point in general. But what brought Rather down was not just his running with the story. He could have survived - with a black eye - by doing a quick 180 - or 90 ("Oops! Nevermind. I still think it's true but this doc is a fake.").
What took him out is his continued insistence on the documents' authenticity, in the face of postings that made it utterly obvious that they were not merely forged, but poorly forged. This kept the spotlight on his bias and widened it to cover and discredit his operations procedures and personnel.
This changed the perception of them from a perhaps-left-leaning news operation that made an error to an unreliable propaganda mill, not merely useless as a news source, but dangerous to your welfare if you believe their claims.
Politicians in the US are not, strictly speaking, there to represent their party; they are there representing people who live within a fixed geographic area.
That is a nice sentiment. But it's a desirable second-order effect, rather than the central purpose.
The primary purpose of a republic is to minimize civil war - by modeling it sufficiently accurately that the losers of elections will figure they'd also lose the civil war to reverse the election's result and thus will refrain from fighting it. This redicrects their efforts from violence to evangelism.
While the result tends toward keeping the "representatives" at least somewhat responsive to their constituents, that's neither necessary nor necessarily desirable. To perform its central function the system must also correctly model such as group-joining and demagogue-following.
(It doesn't do a good job of modeling assasination, which is why we still have them occasionally, and why "executive protection" for politicians has been raised to a fine art.)
The problem with McCain Feingold is that it puts a major crimp in the activity of voluntary grass-roots-funded political organizations while leaving billionaires (who can afford to set up the whole operation) and unions free to spend as much as they want. It cripples ad-hoc organizations, hobbles large ones, and puts the power of the mainstream advertising machine in the hands of a small elite.
Which is PRECICELY what it was intended to do.
The importance of this decision is that it blocks the law from doing this on the internet - preserving the disruptive influence of the net's transfer of power into the hands of individuals.
If companies are incorporating patented MS technology into their Linux distros, then why should he rule out going after them? Anybody has to assume they will if they think they have a case; it's only FUD if they do it without a case.
The point of a FUD attack is to scare off customers (or investors, or partners, etc.) by hinting that their is a problem with the competition but without giving enough information about the hinted event for the listener to determine that the hinted-at problem exists.
In this case they're hinting that there is misappropriated technology from some unspecified items from their large patent portfolio in Linux and that at some point in the indefinite future they'll come down on Linux vendors and pull the rug out from under their customers. Yet they don't say when, don't specify what patents, don't specify which Linux components, and so on.
It's a vague threat. It can't be falsified (i.e. potential Linux adopters can't effectively determine whether there are actual violations or if Balmer is speculating through his hat). It would tend to scare away customers, partners, adopters, contributors, etc. Any claim of wrongdoing can be deflected by pointing out that the ACTUAL STATEMENT is just a truism of business policy, not a deliberate attack on Linux and its community.
If it really is just a truism of business, it would not be newsworthy. If Microsoft is actually gearing up for a patent fight it would be very newsworthy. Yet it makes headlines, without announcing the launch of an attack, or anything but the non-newsworthy truism.
So IMNO the fact that he made the statement at all meets the above definition of a FUD attack.
Sir Tim Berners-Lee ... says he got domain names backwards in web addresses all those years ago.
But how could you make an advertising jingle out of
"com dot expediAAAAAAHHH!"
Yes, exactly what we need: a solar cell that actually absorbs *none* of the light that hits it.
That's not the point.
The semiconductor would absorb photons at or above the bandgap (NOT being transparent at that frequency) and pass those at lower frequencies without attenuation. Thus a stack of junctions at progressively lower bandgaps can get better use of the light - since the energy above the bandgap in the layer where the photon is absorbed is lost.
Making a completely transparent (to light below the bandgap) solar cell allows the light propagating to lower layers do do so efficiently. It also allows the CELLS to be stacked, substrate and all, if the materials are incompatable and can't all be layered on one substrate.
So it COULD be a VERY useful improvement in solar cell technology.
(Another thing that would make it useful is if it is CHEAP to manufacture. Solar is getting better but is still not cost-competitive with grid power except in remote locations and small devices such as roadsigns.)
And a little research turns up per-developer pricing, although not the per-unit run-time license cost. That's not actually unreasonable, given the cost of DO-178B Level A documentation, but still. Ouch.
Note that, because it's a Linux API, the bulk of the development can be done on Linux platforms WITHOUT per-developer licenses.
You'd need occasional testing against the real OS by someone "sitting in a licensed seat" - to check the behavior under the real OS's scheduling regime and detect reliance on missing or divergent features. And of course you'd have to hammer on it ifn licensed seats (and real or excelently hardware modeled aircraft devices) for final test. But if the licenses are sufficiently dear you concevably might end up ahead. (You wouldn't need per-seat licenses for initial prototyping work, either.)
(The "reliability tested in later" nature of such an effort wouldn't be an extra burden if machines connected to prototype hardware or timing-accurate models of them also aren't available at all seats all the time.)
A lot of software might not need close modeling thoughout development to get right.
I for one welcome our new acronym... OL's.
Over LORDS? Or over LOADS?
I have for some time wanted to write a story including a "car" powered by a V-8 engine which is organic above the crankshaft. ...
Get a horse!
Excessive heat disables biological muscles, too. Temporarily or permanently, depending on the amount and cricumstances.
Not similar at all.
It would only be analogous if kinderstart had been selling web search services and Google had achieved market dominance selling some OTHER product (say, a browser) and both used it both to cross-subsidize a new free search engine and tie it into their dominant product (say, by having a built-in "search via google" button with no corresponding "search via kinderstadt" button).
Kinderstadt is griping that Google's free search engine - which they didn't pay for - isn't doing what they want. Tough.
Just in case you'd like to visit Kinderstart's website and oh, er, use some bandwidth while viewing as much of it as you can, don't let me stop you!
Since they're trying to get their page views UP - apparently to increase advertising revenue - that might actually help their bottom line.
On the other hand, a flood of people viewing them because of the controversy, with no interest in their sponsor's products, might harm them further in the long term, by hurting the price/performance ratio of advertising with them, hitting their advertisers in their pocketbooks with no compensating return.
The "constitutional right to free speech" is a limit on GOVERNMENT interference via lawmaking (and by extension enforcement), not a limit OR a mandate-of-behavior on individuals or companies.
On the other hand, mandating changes to Google's rankings is a government interference in Google's "constitutional right to free speech" - as one court has already ruled.
Launch isn't like reentry.
The mass of material lifted from beside the strike and above what will be the crater goes up with the atmosphere surrounding it and doesn't experience the sort of extreme heating you're supposing.
It's still pretty abrupt accelleration (which bacteria handle pretty well, especially if embedded in something of a similar density). But the rock isn't plowing through dense air that is at a speed differing from its own by something in excess of escape velocity. The air gets launched, too.
And the decelleration and temperature resulting from the crash landing is substantially different from the acceleration and temperature resulting from an explosion that caused the rock to exceed escape velocity in the first place?
Yep.
Not "the explosion" itself, but the environment felt by the launched rock, which could be lifted relatively gently by the rocks and soil under it, as the atmosphere above it is lifted out of the way / along with it by it and the neighboring material.
It isn't the stuff that gets HIT by the asteroid/comet/whatever that get's launched. It's the stuff on and near the top of the ground nearby that gets lifted by the violence spreading out below it.
Lawyers.
They can survive anywhere.
If they're trial lawyers you need at least two of 'em or they'll starve.
That's nice, but there's a huge flaw in this analogy as well, which is that Windows doesn't really have an "immune system" at all.
...)
Yes it does. It just isn't born with one. It's transplanted, like bone marrow, from one of several "donors". (Symantec, McAfee, F-secure, Computer Associates,
It's interesting how the analogy between malware and lifeforms continues to expand.
Viruses are aptly named because they have many similarities to biological viruses. Anti-virus software is a close analogy to an reactive immune system (such as is found in mammals but not, say, sharks).
Now we have an example of a serious auto-immune disease from a self-attacking malfunction of a reactive immune system.
What is this "Open Source A[nti]V[irus}" you're assuming?
The main approach of open source software to viruses is not to be susceptable to them in the first place.
(An even more viscous hack was to reprogram the terminal's scrolling window to 1x1 character, change the escape sequence for programming it, and store it as the startup configuration. This killed the terminal - permanently. B-b )
There was also the "ANSI Standard Back Door".
Some of the early not-too-smart (pre-computer-running-the-show) terminals - notably the "Ann Arbor Terminals" terminal, the DEC VT105, and anything following the ANSI standard for terminal operation which was based on them - had several "soft keys".
- These could be configured to send any desired sequence of up to maybe 128 or so characters when hit.
- They were configured by an escape sequence.
- The escape sequence could be delivered from the far end of the link. (Typically was, by a program setting up the softkey.)
- The escape sequence setting the key would not produce any visual indication on the screen that this was being done (so as not to corrupt the screen).
- The key could also be "struck" by another escape sequence, also deliverable from the remote end.
- Some talk/chat features (think "stone-age instant messaging") did NOT filter out escape sequences in inter-user messages.
What this meant was that a user (especially one running an early terminal emulator on an early home computer - like an Apple ][) could compose a message to another user that would reprogram one of his softkeys to send anything the malicious user wanted and "hit" it remotely. The time-sharing machine in the middle would interpret the command as if it came from the victim. (This was especially handy if the victim happened to be logged in as the equivalent of a superuser at the time.)
If the message was a multiple command to disable keysroke echoing at the start and reenable it at the end it might not show up at all. (Or screen control stuff could be included to blank out the echoed command before it could be noticed.)
There were revs to the terminals to disable this. But installing them made the terminal no longer standards compliant. B-)
The article conflates several things.
First off: Digital electronics generally requires several voltages. And they're all low, requiring high currents, massive conductors, and local filtering and regulation. So even if you're providing DC power from outside the room, you'll have a switching power supply (or several) in each piece of equipment to convert whatever the rough DC power is to whatever you need, smooth it, and regulate it.
But while some electronic devices use a common switcher to generate all the voltages with one conversion step, others use a "roughing" supply and a bunch of local supplies. Part of that is to get better regulation - part is because the roughing supply must run from 60 (or 50 or whatever) Hz and thus requires big caps to tide you over the low part of the cycles - caps you don't want taking up space near the components.
If you're going to do it in two stages anyhow, you can put your roughing supply OUTSIDE the room and only have the final supplies inside. The roughing supply has a lot of heat dissipation so you save a bunch on your cooling.
Second: There are two standards for power distribution in electronics rooms:
- Your local power line stuff. (120/240/480/208-3-phase in the US)
- The telco standard: x2-redunant 48V DC.
A lot of equipment - especially networking equipment - is manufactured for sale to tellcos and other operations that use the standard. They might have initially used it because some of their equipment was co-located in tellco sites, where only 2x48VDC is available - and they got a quantity discount for buying a bunch of the same stuff and went to 48V for their own sites. Or they might use it because it's MUCH simpler to do backup power with floating batteries and century-old technology than with a building-sized UPS. (Note that a UPS CAUSES at least one outage when first installed and on the averate at least one more within the first year of operation from some malfunction. And a UPS dissipates more power than a roughing power supply or a battery charger.)
But the standard for 48VDC is REDUNDANT 48VDC supplies, with the equipment only requiring one (and typically doing "cutover" with diodes B-) ). With the equipment already set up for redundant supplies it's not a lot of cost or work to wire both sides and put in two 48V feeds to the equipment room. (Four diodes are a LOT cheaper than a pair of 120V roughing power supplies at each box, too.) So of course the users of such equipment normally give it dual supplies. (Even if it's a single rack and so they just put two roughing supplies in the rack fed from two different 120V feeds.)
The result is that all the equipment has redundant power supply, and keeps operating glitch-free through a number of kinds of partial outages - AND power supply repair and replacement. This is what's responsible for much of the claimed increase in reliability.
The whole Edison/Tesla DC/AC war had to do with the economics of CROSS-COUNTRY power transmission. AC beat DC there because a century or more ago it was virtually impossible to jack DC voltages up to levels suitable for long-distance transmission and back down to levels safe for distribution within houses, while AC could do that easily and efficiently. So Westinghouse/Tesla could ship cheap power from Niagra Falls to New York City while Edison had to build fuel-burning power plants IN the city. It has essentially nothing to do with shipping the power around within a single building.
BitTorrent will kill the Internet if it can't be made to behave well and not totally flood the network it's running on. The new technologies to prevent that will kill networks.
Imminent death of internet predicted. Film at 11.
Again.
As it has been every few months since there WAS an internet.
Since the engineering for the next generation of internet (in which I'm involved) plans on delivering enough bandwidth for several HDTV unicast streams simultaneously to EACH user, I suspect that even encrypted Bit Torrent won't "kill the internet".
WHY do you think they buried all that "dark fiber", eh?