Well, there is a lot of medical tourism, families of UK residents and everything, to take advantage of the system. As a foreign UK student, I was very surprised I had rights to consultations and medication for free, without me and my family ever contributing a single dime to the system.
As much as the dily mail likes to suggest that medical tourism is bringing about the downfall of the NHS, AFAIK its pretty negligable in the grand scheme of things.
I had a GP consultation for free without talking with a much cheaper proxy beforehand, like, a nurse, you know.
For certain things you are referred to a nurse directly - for example, vaccinations, blood tests, etc are all done by nurses, as are various routine checkups. But there's not a lot of point in paying a nurse to consult with patients who are going to have to consult with a doctor anyway, and I imagine most GP appointments fit into that category.
In general there are no medical co-pays as in the US... Drugs are free BUT, unless are exempt (over 60, under 16, etc) you pay $10 for the prescription...
FWIW it depends where you live. Here in Wales prescriptions are completely free. Even though everyone knows prescriptions in England are chargable, I must admit I was taken a bit by surprise when I had to get a prescription in England and was asked to pay:)
Also stuff like hospital carparks are free in Wales whilst cost a considerable amount of money in England, although I believe you can apply for a subsidy if you are on long-term treatment that would require you to park at the hospital regularly.
The double standard implied is that the Guardian deemed one way of obtaining data unacceptable (hacking into people's voicemail) but not another (downloading your employer's data onto USB sticks and then giving it away).
I would argue the public interest defence. If someone came to me and said, "on that voicemail is X's confession to the abduction and murder, even though he denies it in public", hacking it could be in the public interest, whereas fishing voicemail for gossip is not.
I would say that the news papers cracking IT systems is never in the public interest. If you've got evidence that someone has committed a murder, take it to the polce and they can get a court order to access the voicemail.
*However*, there is a big difference between a whistleblower supplying a paper with information that was acquired illegally (which is what happened with Snowden), and the paper themselves breaking the law to acquire it (which is what happened with the News of the World).
And as you point out, there is a public interest argument - if the government is spying on *me* then that directly affects *me* and *I* have a right to know that and I support the papers telling me what I have a right to know. On the other hand, if $celebrity_a is shagging $celebrity_b then that is of no concern of mine because it doesn't involve me.
Unfortunately, the government seems to think that it is in the public interest to keep this stuff secret.
There's a very simple reason why these spaceships are using heavily outdated electronics: they need to be tough.
Those 16-bit computers you were talking about on the SS, well, were "radiation hardened," not exactly a property you would find in an IBM-PC...
Also, if it ain't broke and the job hasn't changed, why "fix" it? The computers on the STS did the same job when they were retired as they did when they were first built, where's the motivation to upgrade them if they are already working just fine with old well tested (probably more robust) hardware?
It probably has a radio with signals of varying strengths and packet losses.
This is true. Although I suspect a lot of the time the CPU isn't going to get to see a lot of that stuff (although with most wireless chipsets being softmac devices, maybe it does?)
It also probably has a multitude of routed, nonrouted, and broadcast packets on its various network interfaces.
In a dark-start situation (coming up from a wide area power outage), possibly not. Imagine an ADSL router whereby all the clients are connected via wireless. The clients can't talk to the router until it has managed to initialise the wireless encryption subsystems, which requires entropy. Even on a wired network, you may well only see a few DHCP requests from workstations. Obviously rebooting a router onto a large active network is different to rebooting the entire network at the same time, as would happen in a power outage.
And on top of that, it's connected to a global network of nodes with varying packet delivery times, and where at any time it can ask for a multitude of continuously changing and a least partially stochastic metrics (e.g. exchange rates, 4th word of news headlines, youtube +1 counts, etc, etc).
A global network that it may well be unable to access until it has enough entropy to make a cryptographic handshake with the upstream peer.
Despite the differences in orbital shapes, IIRC the delta-V required isn't that obscene
The delta-V is pretty obscene - Hubble and the ISS are on completely different inclinations, and changing inclination involves a *lot* of delta-V.
I've not seen it yet (WTF do we have to wait a *month* for it to be released in the UK?), but I suspect I'm going to have to turn off the bits of my brain that have learnt a bit about orbital mechanics from KSP:)
MicroUSB is another example of this, its ergonomics suck.
So the correct thing to do is identify the problems and work with the industry to produce a standard connector that everyone can use. OTOH, Apple have produced their own proprietary connector, patented the hell out of it and installed an authentication chip in the cable to ensure that it *can't* be standard.
Because nobody will every try to make another new kind of USB connector.
There's a difference between "the existing standard connector doesn't have the features we need, so we will colleborate with the rest of the industry and design a new connector for everyone to use" and "the existing standard connector is unsuitable*, so we will develop our own connector and patent the hell out of it so no one can ever be compatible".
(* Why Apple thought the micro USB connector is unsuitable is debatable... many suspect it was considered unsuitable *because* they couldn't patent the hell out of it).
and she has seen perfectly healthy people die solely as a result of receiving the vaccine.
in this case if adverse effects happen to these girls, the judge needs to be prosecuted.
If the judge made the opposite decision and ordered that the kids *not* be vaccinated, and then one of them caught measles and died, what would your attitude to the judge be then? Prosecute him for endangering their lives?
Herd immunity still doesn't trump individual control of their body (at least IMHO). First, herd immunity is imperfect, secondly unvaccinated persons are rare thus making the argument even less cogent.
Unvaccinated persons *used* to be rare. Then this sort of anti-vaccination crazyness started and we had a serious measles outbreak. As a result, many parents in South Wales realised they had made the wrong decision about refusing the vaccine and over 74,000 kids were vaccinated who should have been previously vaccinated but weren't.
74,000 is a not insignificant number, especially since kids mix with hundreds of other kids in schools, and doesn't include the people who are *still* stubbornly refusing to vaccinate.
It's unfortunate they made the issue out to be the efficacy of the vaccine and not the moral implications about forcing medication on people against their will. I, like most, believe the autism-MMR link is pure nonsense, but I do believe it must be every person's right to refuse medical treatment, including vaccines. (In the case of children, parents sometimes need to make decisions on their behalf, of course, but it shouldn't be the government making those decisions.)
The mother and father disagreed - the mother didn't want the kids to be vaccinated, the father did. If we assume that kids aren't capable of making these sorts of decisions* then who exactly did you want to make the decision? This isn't a court telling a family to get vaccinations against their will, its a court arbitrating a dispute between the two decision makers of the family and supporting one side over the other based on scientific evidence.
(* I think the capability of the kids to make these decisions would depend on the kids in question - some 15 year olds would be able to make a pretty good educated decision whilst others wouldn't.)
And yet Yohimbine is prescribed when SSRIs cause sexual dysfunction. It seems a lot of drugs cause random sex drive side effects; Ritalin can either increase or decrease libido, too.
Notably if you read the side effects list of a lot of drugs, the listed side effects often include the thing they are supposed to treat (my favorite is antidepressants listing "depression, anxiety and suicide" as a side effect).
Not a gene—just a mutation. Perplexingly, there is a drug that blocks the receptor in question, but it's for treating sexual dysfunction. Possibly a goldmine for witty remarks.
Interestingly, selective serotinin reuptake inhibitors (antidepressants) are already used to treat premature ejaculation. As you can imagine, that particular side effect is annoying to people who just want it to fix their depression.
They have a double-digit purchase of the devices and it will be no surprise that the Microsoft people gave them a GREAT deal per unit.
Last I heard, Windows RT devices were going into schools at £150 a pop including Office. That's a pretty good deal - so good that I struggle to believe that MS aren't making a loss on each one. However, that's how MS have always worked with educational discounts - sell their stuff into schools and universities at rock bottom prices so that none of the competition can move into that market. That way they (hope to) get all the kids hooked on their software and carry that out into the real world. It certainly used to work well... I suspect it doesn't work quite so well these days since the kids often have non-MS kit at home now.
FWIW, for the schools only seem to be interested in iPads and Surface - Android doesn't get a look in (possibly because they are either going for "prestige" (iPad) or price (MS's unbeatable education deal)).
Consumers are dumb. They'll say "oohh, they're almost sold out! I need to get one while I can!"
That's what MS believes. I don't think it works anymore.
I think it works with stuff that is already hyped and has a religious following (i.e. Apple saying "the new iPhone has sold out in the first day!" probably does increase demand). I'm pretty sure it won't increase demand where there was already none though - no one wants to be seen with an MS tablet, telling them that its sold out isn't going to make them want to be seen with one more...
The problem is they are too tied to the idea of tying everything to windows...
They put windows on a tablet, and the interface of both the os and its applications were unsuitable for tablets, making them awkward to use and thus undesirable. Apple didn't tie their tablet to osx, they made a different systems designed for a touch interface and it sold.
Apple *did* use an existing platform on their tablets: iPhone OS. If they had come out with a tablet with a brand new platform then it probably would've been a flop - having no third party software would've been a big problem.
What Apple did was create the iPhone - originally this ran *no* third party software at all (hell, even though it was marketted as a smartphone, it really wasn't - there were a very limited selection of built in apps and it didn't do many of the things people had come to expect from a smartphone). What they did get right was that they were about the first phone to incorporate a decent web browser - that appealed to the masses, even though the lack of "normal" smartphone features made it not appeal to a lot of the usual smartphone demographic.
People started to jailbreak iPhones so they could build third party software, and a few years down the line Apple created their appstore and allowed official third party applications. By the time they started selling the iPad, they already had a big following of iPhone fanboys and a huge library of third party apps - these are the things that made the iPad worth having.
Android tablets are basically the same story - by the time they became available there were already a *lot* of happy android phone users and a big library of third party software. When you're happy with your phone, buying a tablet that runs exactly the same OS and can run all your favorite apps is a much lower risk than something that is completely unknown to you.
Similarly, MS have always wanted to keep their existing users and existing third party software library when they release a tablet - if they release a tablet with a brand new OS (which people are therefore not familiar with, making buying the device a bigger risk for them) and no third party software then they aren't going to sell well... which is *exactly* what they are seeing with Windows RT.
MS's problem is that they completely missed the boat with phones, so now they have no "popular" platform to shove on a tablet except Windows itself, which is completely unsuitable. They also seem to be foolishly muddying the waters by using the "windows" brand on Windows RT, despite it not being at all compatible with Windows... I guess they're hoping they can sucker a few people into buying an otherwise unknown OS by misleading them to believe its something they are familiar with.
I always find if funny that almost every revision of Apple phones, there is always as story about how incompetent the Apple engineers are, and how this incompetence is a favor to the customer. Personally, I don't buy it. As you said, most small device manufacturers can make cheap wall warts that don't electrocute customers. To accept that somehow cheap chargers are only dangerous when used with iPhones requires a belief that Apple engineers are not competent.
Its not down to the competence of Apple, its down to them overcharging. Look at it this way: you buy a device from $manufacturer, you need a PSU for it, so you look at $manufacturer's products and find they do a PSU for £5, so you buy that. Conversely, you buy a device from Apple, you need a PSU for it, so you look at Apple's products and find they do PSUs for £30; you realise its way overpriced, think "screw that" and look around on ebay for a cheaper unbranded alternative. The issue isn't that the charger is cheap, its that it is unbranded and therefore pretty much untracable so they don't need to spend the money on ensuring it is robust and safe.
So I guess there are two problems here: 1. Because Apple devices are overpriced, a lot of consumers look for a cheaper alternative and go with the unbranded, untracable devices. 2. Because Apple devices are overpriced, there's a lot of incentive to produce bootleg devices which are indistinguishable from the Apple ones on the outside, and therefore reap the profits.
What? Say your Plutonium-Powered Satellite rides up on a booster, that does the same thing as "Challenger".
How far does the atomised Plutonium disperse?
I for one, really don't like the odds.
Nothing in Challenger exploded - the vehicle turned broad-side in the supersonic airstream, ripping the fuel tank open and the exposed fuel just burnt in the air. The crew compartment remained intact and continued on a ballistic trajectory and there's evidence that the crew even survived the midair disassembly of the shuttle.
So what would happen if you had a few kilos of plutonium on board? Well... not much - you've got a solid lump of plutonium weighing a few kilos. Remember, the crew compartment survived the breakup of Challenger, so a solid lump of plutonium is basically just going to leave the scene of a similar accident a bit like a canonball - intact, not atomised. So its not going to disperse anywhere - it'll drop into the ocean where it can be fished out by the navy.
As others have already noted that P238 isn't really dangerous unless you are going to eat it.
And whilst it is radioactive, the real danger of eating it would be that you would die of heavy metal poisoning... so the radioactivity is probably not worth anyone worrying about:)
This is for the scenario where said last line of defense is meaningless. When your VM is, essentially, all about running a single process, like a webserver
If you're running a single process, you're probably doing things very wrong... Your VM may well be running a single *type* of process (e.g. a web server), but usually there are multiple instances of it running at once. And there is a lot to be said for keeping those instances protected from each other, so if one blows up it doesn't take out everything else on the VM.
I'd also want stuff like the filesystem driver to be protected from userland applications - its one thing for an application to screw up/get compromised and trash a load of files, its quite another for it to cause the filesystem driver to trash the entire FS... There's also a lot to be said for hardening systems by restricting the application from doing things it never needs to do (this is the point of SELinux) - does your web service need to be able to send mail or connect to port 22 on random machines on the internet? No? Then restrict it from doing so (and send warnings to the sysadmin if it tries) and you prevent your web server becoming a spambot/ssh scanner if it gets compromised.
no lights? It's fine if you want to say no computer/TV for a day or something like that..
Why? There's something to be said for kids being entertained by doing unusual things. When I was a kid I used to love power cuts (which didn't happen that often, but certainly more frequently than they do today) because it meant we would be using candles to light the house - yeah, it may not be that practical for doing all the time, but it was interesting _because_ it was out of the ordinary.
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Well, there is a lot of medical tourism, families of UK residents and everything, to take advantage of the system. As a foreign UK student, I was very surprised I had rights to consultations and medication for free, without me and my family ever contributing a single dime to the system.
As much as the dily mail likes to suggest that medical tourism is bringing about the downfall of the NHS, AFAIK its pretty negligable in the grand scheme of things.
I had a GP consultation for free without talking with a much cheaper proxy beforehand, like, a nurse, you know.
For certain things you are referred to a nurse directly - for example, vaccinations, blood tests, etc are all done by nurses, as are various routine checkups. But there's not a lot of point in paying a nurse to consult with patients who are going to have to consult with a doctor anyway, and I imagine most GP appointments fit into that category.
In general there are no medical co-pays as in the US ... Drugs are free BUT, unless are exempt (over 60, under 16, etc) you pay $10 for the prescription ...
FWIW it depends where you live. Here in Wales prescriptions are completely free. Even though everyone knows prescriptions in England are chargable, I must admit I was taken a bit by surprise when I had to get a prescription in England and was asked to pay :)
Also stuff like hospital carparks are free in Wales whilst cost a considerable amount of money in England, although I believe you can apply for a subsidy if you are on long-term treatment that would require you to park at the hospital regularly.
The Chelyabinsk asteroid scared a lot of people and injured a few people, but it wasn't nearly as destructive as your average day of Russian traffic.
But if it had exploded (or impacted) over the centre of Moscow, London, Washington...
The double standard implied is that the Guardian deemed one way of obtaining data unacceptable (hacking into people's voicemail) but not another (downloading your employer's data onto USB sticks and then giving it away).
I would argue the public interest defence. If someone came to me and said, "on that voicemail is X's confession to the abduction and murder, even though he denies it in public", hacking it could be in the public interest, whereas fishing voicemail for gossip is not.
I would say that the news papers cracking IT systems is never in the public interest. If you've got evidence that someone has committed a murder, take it to the polce and they can get a court order to access the voicemail.
*However*, there is a big difference between a whistleblower supplying a paper with information that was acquired illegally (which is what happened with Snowden), and the paper themselves breaking the law to acquire it (which is what happened with the News of the World).
And as you point out, there is a public interest argument - if the government is spying on *me* then that directly affects *me* and *I* have a right to know that and I support the papers telling me what I have a right to know. On the other hand, if $celebrity_a is shagging $celebrity_b then that is of no concern of mine because it doesn't involve me.
Unfortunately, the government seems to think that it is in the public interest to keep this stuff secret.
There's a very simple reason why these spaceships are using heavily outdated electronics:
they need to be tough.
Those 16-bit computers you were talking about on the SS, well, were "radiation hardened," not exactly a property you would find in an IBM-PC...
Also, if it ain't broke and the job hasn't changed, why "fix" it? The computers on the STS did the same job when they were retired as they did when they were first built, where's the motivation to upgrade them if they are already working just fine with old well tested (probably more robust) hardware?
It probably has a radio with signals of varying strengths and packet losses.
This is true. Although I suspect a lot of the time the CPU isn't going to get to see a lot of that stuff (although with most wireless chipsets being softmac devices, maybe it does?)
It also probably has a multitude of routed, nonrouted, and broadcast packets on its various network interfaces.
In a dark-start situation (coming up from a wide area power outage), possibly not. Imagine an ADSL router whereby all the clients are connected via wireless. The clients can't talk to the router until it has managed to initialise the wireless encryption subsystems, which requires entropy. Even on a wired network, you may well only see a few DHCP requests from workstations. Obviously rebooting a router onto a large active network is different to rebooting the entire network at the same time, as would happen in a power outage.
And on top of that, it's connected to a global network of nodes with varying packet delivery times, and where at any time it can ask for a multitude of continuously changing and a least partially stochastic metrics (e.g. exchange rates, 4th word of news headlines, youtube +1 counts, etc, etc).
A global network that it may well be unable to access until it has enough entropy to make a cryptographic handshake with the upstream peer.
Despite the differences in orbital shapes, IIRC the delta-V required isn't that obscene
The delta-V is pretty obscene - Hubble and the ISS are on completely different inclinations, and changing inclination involves a *lot* of delta-V.
I've not seen it yet (WTF do we have to wait a *month* for it to be released in the UK?), but I suspect I'm going to have to turn off the bits of my brain that have learnt a bit about orbital mechanics from KSP :)
MicroUSB is another example of this, its ergonomics suck.
So the correct thing to do is identify the problems and work with the industry to produce a standard connector that everyone can use. OTOH, Apple have produced their own proprietary connector, patented the hell out of it and installed an authentication chip in the cable to ensure that it *can't* be standard.
MicroUSB absolutely sucks compared to lightning.
And any of this changes what I said?
Where's the chaos?
How can *one* choice be regarded as "chaos"? Doesn't that simplify things for the hipsters?
Who mentioned chaos?
Because nobody will every try to make another new kind of USB connector.
There's a difference between "the existing standard connector doesn't have the features we need, so we will colleborate with the rest of the industry and design a new connector for everyone to use" and "the existing standard connector is unsuitable*, so we will develop our own connector and patent the hell out of it so no one can ever be compatible".
(* Why Apple thought the micro USB connector is unsuitable is debatable... many suspect it was considered unsuitable *because* they couldn't patent the hell out of it).
and she has seen perfectly healthy people die solely as a result of receiving the vaccine.
in this case if adverse effects happen to these girls, the judge needs to be prosecuted.
If the judge made the opposite decision and ordered that the kids *not* be vaccinated, and then one of them caught measles and died, what would your attitude to the judge be then? Prosecute him for endangering their lives?
Herd immunity still doesn't trump individual control of their body (at least IMHO). First, herd immunity is imperfect, secondly unvaccinated persons are rare thus making the argument even less cogent.
Unvaccinated persons *used* to be rare. Then this sort of anti-vaccination crazyness started and we had a serious measles outbreak. As a result, many parents in South Wales realised they had made the wrong decision about refusing the vaccine and over 74,000 kids were vaccinated who should have been previously vaccinated but weren't.
74,000 is a not insignificant number, especially since kids mix with hundreds of other kids in schools, and doesn't include the people who are *still* stubbornly refusing to vaccinate.
It's unfortunate they made the issue out to be the efficacy of the vaccine and not the moral implications about forcing medication on people against their will. I, like most, believe the autism-MMR link is pure nonsense, but I do believe it must be every person's right to refuse medical treatment, including vaccines. (In the case of children, parents sometimes need to make decisions on their behalf, of course, but it shouldn't be the government making those decisions.)
The mother and father disagreed - the mother didn't want the kids to be vaccinated, the father did. If we assume that kids aren't capable of making these sorts of decisions* then who exactly did you want to make the decision? This isn't a court telling a family to get vaccinations against their will, its a court arbitrating a dispute between the two decision makers of the family and supporting one side over the other based on scientific evidence.
(* I think the capability of the kids to make these decisions would depend on the kids in question - some 15 year olds would be able to make a pretty good educated decision whilst others wouldn't.)
And yet Yohimbine is prescribed when SSRIs cause sexual dysfunction. It seems a lot of drugs cause random sex drive side effects; Ritalin can either increase or decrease libido, too.
Notably if you read the side effects list of a lot of drugs, the listed side effects often include the thing they are supposed to treat (my favorite is antidepressants listing "depression, anxiety and suicide" as a side effect).
Not a gene—just a mutation. Perplexingly, there is a drug that blocks the receptor in question, but it's for treating sexual dysfunction. Possibly a goldmine for witty remarks.
Interestingly, selective serotinin reuptake inhibitors (antidepressants) are already used to treat premature ejaculation. As you can imagine, that particular side effect is annoying to people who just want it to fix their depression.
The bitch and moan that the US is the world police but of course are shocked that the US will not bankroll an expedition to liberate Syria.
You use that word, but I do not think it means what you think it means...
They have a double-digit purchase of the devices and it will be no surprise that the Microsoft people gave them a GREAT deal per unit.
Last I heard, Windows RT devices were going into schools at £150 a pop including Office. That's a pretty good deal - so good that I struggle to believe that MS aren't making a loss on each one. However, that's how MS have always worked with educational discounts - sell their stuff into schools and universities at rock bottom prices so that none of the competition can move into that market. That way they (hope to) get all the kids hooked on their software and carry that out into the real world. It certainly used to work well... I suspect it doesn't work quite so well these days since the kids often have non-MS kit at home now.
FWIW, for the schools only seem to be interested in iPads and Surface - Android doesn't get a look in (possibly because they are either going for "prestige" (iPad) or price (MS's unbeatable education deal)).
That's what MS believes. I don't think it works anymore.
I think it works with stuff that is already hyped and has a religious following (i.e. Apple saying "the new iPhone has sold out in the first day!" probably does increase demand). I'm pretty sure it won't increase demand where there was already none though - no one wants to be seen with an MS tablet, telling them that its sold out isn't going to make them want to be seen with one more...
The problem is they are too tied to the idea of tying everything to windows...
They put windows on a tablet, and the interface of both the os and its applications were unsuitable for tablets, making them awkward to use and thus undesirable. Apple didn't tie their tablet to osx, they made a different systems designed for a touch interface and it sold.
Apple *did* use an existing platform on their tablets: iPhone OS. If they had come out with a tablet with a brand new platform then it probably would've been a flop - having no third party software would've been a big problem.
What Apple did was create the iPhone - originally this ran *no* third party software at all (hell, even though it was marketted as a smartphone, it really wasn't - there were a very limited selection of built in apps and it didn't do many of the things people had come to expect from a smartphone). What they did get right was that they were about the first phone to incorporate a decent web browser - that appealed to the masses, even though the lack of "normal" smartphone features made it not appeal to a lot of the usual smartphone demographic.
People started to jailbreak iPhones so they could build third party software, and a few years down the line Apple created their appstore and allowed official third party applications. By the time they started selling the iPad, they already had a big following of iPhone fanboys and a huge library of third party apps - these are the things that made the iPad worth having.
Android tablets are basically the same story - by the time they became available there were already a *lot* of happy android phone users and a big library of third party software. When you're happy with your phone, buying a tablet that runs exactly the same OS and can run all your favorite apps is a much lower risk than something that is completely unknown to you.
Similarly, MS have always wanted to keep their existing users and existing third party software library when they release a tablet - if they release a tablet with a brand new OS (which people are therefore not familiar with, making buying the device a bigger risk for them) and no third party software then they aren't going to sell well... which is *exactly* what they are seeing with Windows RT.
MS's problem is that they completely missed the boat with phones, so now they have no "popular" platform to shove on a tablet except Windows itself, which is completely unsuitable. They also seem to be foolishly muddying the waters by using the "windows" brand on Windows RT, despite it not being at all compatible with Windows... I guess they're hoping they can sucker a few people into buying an otherwise unknown OS by misleading them to believe its something they are familiar with.
I always find if funny that almost every revision of Apple phones, there is always as story about how incompetent the Apple engineers are, and how this incompetence is a favor to the customer. Personally, I don't buy it. As you said, most small device manufacturers can make cheap wall warts that don't electrocute customers. To accept that somehow cheap chargers are only dangerous when used with iPhones requires a belief that Apple engineers are not competent.
Its not down to the competence of Apple, its down to them overcharging. Look at it this way: you buy a device from $manufacturer, you need a PSU for it, so you look at $manufacturer's products and find they do a PSU for £5, so you buy that. Conversely, you buy a device from Apple, you need a PSU for it, so you look at Apple's products and find they do PSUs for £30; you realise its way overpriced, think "screw that" and look around on ebay for a cheaper unbranded alternative. The issue isn't that the charger is cheap, its that it is unbranded and therefore pretty much untracable so they don't need to spend the money on ensuring it is robust and safe.
So I guess there are two problems here:
1. Because Apple devices are overpriced, a lot of consumers look for a cheaper alternative and go with the unbranded, untracable devices.
2. Because Apple devices are overpriced, there's a lot of incentive to produce bootleg devices which are indistinguishable from the Apple ones on the outside, and therefore reap the profits.
WHAT WOULD HAPPEN?
What? Say your Plutonium-Powered Satellite rides up on a booster, that does the same thing as "Challenger".
How far does the atomised Plutonium disperse?
I for one, really don't like the odds.
Nothing in Challenger exploded - the vehicle turned broad-side in the supersonic airstream, ripping the fuel tank open and the exposed fuel just burnt in the air. The crew compartment remained intact and continued on a ballistic trajectory and there's evidence that the crew even survived the midair disassembly of the shuttle.
So what would happen if you had a few kilos of plutonium on board? Well... not much - you've got a solid lump of plutonium weighing a few kilos. Remember, the crew compartment survived the breakup of Challenger, so a solid lump of plutonium is basically just going to leave the scene of a similar accident a bit like a canonball - intact, not atomised. So its not going to disperse anywhere - it'll drop into the ocean where it can be fished out by the navy.
So why don't you like the odds?
As others have already noted that P238 isn't really dangerous unless you are going to eat it.
And whilst it is radioactive, the real danger of eating it would be that you would die of heavy metal poisoning... so the radioactivity is probably not worth anyone worrying about :)
This is for the scenario where said last line of defense is meaningless. When your VM is, essentially, all about running a single process, like a webserver
If you're running a single process, you're probably doing things very wrong... Your VM may well be running a single *type* of process (e.g. a web server), but usually there are multiple instances of it running at once. And there is a lot to be said for keeping those instances protected from each other, so if one blows up it doesn't take out everything else on the VM.
I'd also want stuff like the filesystem driver to be protected from userland applications - its one thing for an application to screw up/get compromised and trash a load of files, its quite another for it to cause the filesystem driver to trash the entire FS... There's also a lot to be said for hardening systems by restricting the application from doing things it never needs to do (this is the point of SELinux) - does your web service need to be able to send mail or connect to port 22 on random machines on the internet? No? Then restrict it from doing so (and send warnings to the sysadmin if it tries) and you prevent your web server becoming a spambot/ssh scanner if it gets compromised.
no lights? It's fine if you want to say no computer/TV for a day or something like that..
Why? There's something to be said for kids being entertained by doing unusual things. When I was a kid I used to love power cuts (which didn't happen that often, but certainly more frequently than they do today) because it meant we would be using candles to light the house - yeah, it may not be that practical for doing all the time, but it was interesting _because_ it was out of the ordinary.