What exactly defines a "good place to build"? If you define it as somewhere with low flooding risk, low earthquake risk, low hurricane risk, etc., there are lots of places in the middle of the U.S. that fit that standard.
Most of those places no longer exist. They blew away back in the 1930s, or had their milkshake sucked out by Homo Hoover.
Certain aquifer zones in the High Plains Aquifer System are now empty; these areas will take over 100,000 years to replenish naturally through rainfall.
So your property is cheap to insure, but your futures contract on bottled water breaks the bank. Nice solution.
It's been so long since Google moved the bar on search in a substantive way, I've begun to wonder if they still hold true to their original vision. It was something about indexing and knowledge.
Does it take a miraculous growth spurt of Wolfram Alpha to remind Google that innovation is still possible, fifteen years later? No matter if you burst onto the world stage shaming Picasso, any corporation that sits on its hands long enough eventually becomes part of the problem.
For a while Google was so good one almost believed their principal technology was a time machine. Lately I'm beginning to wonder if the time machine has its dial permanently welded at 2010.
All Shuttleworth had to do was to put some logic into the "upgrade" box that warned people away from Unity whose present system configuration indicated that Unity couldn't possibly amount to a preferred experience at that stage of Unity's evolution—if ever.
Timing the introduction of Unity around an LTS on the old Gnome with an extra year of support would have gone a long ways to keeping some of us old farts in the fold while the new world order shook itself out.
No, the flow of traffic changed from driving on the right to driving on the left without so much as a single advance sign, or a well-marked alternate route driving on the accustomed side of the road. Also changed were the width of the lanes, clearance height on the underpasses, and the legality of making a left turn at a red light (which used to be a right turn), with no posted warnings.
Those of us driving larger loads were blind-sided and left to fend elsewhere, as fast as our little feet could take us there on short notice.
their methodology results in a pretty pricey setup
You're being pedantic in a way that's annoying and counterproductive, unless you're the kind of person who wallet thickens on discovering the following tidbit:
Audioquest Everest are the most expensive speaker cables in the world at over $21000 for 3m.
Oh come on. This does not properly belong in the category of "speaker cables". If it did, "taking a step back" would land you this:
Pear Cable Corporation's ANJOU Speaker Cable, a 12 foot length of which retails for $7,250
The Navy is investigating bills from Grumman Aerospace Corp. to determine why it was charged $660 each for two aircraft ashtrays and $400 each for two socket wrenches.
The costs of the parts, manufactured by Grumman, were revealed during an inspection this month, said Cmdr. Tom Jurkowsky, spokesman for the Pacific Fleet Naval Air Force.
Burch said the Navy officers who authorized the purchases would be disciplined and possibly dismissed.
First cross off anything that will get you disciplined or possibly dismissed, then take a step back toward the sane center. Is that so hard?
I don't build as many boxes as I once did, but it only takes a couple of hours a year to stay current if you know how to parse the tea leaves, and you pick a up quick booster shot from Ars Technica System Guide: July 2013.
When I've purchased bundled systems, I usually discover surprising limitations and short-cuts down the road unless one pays the insurance premium of buying twice the box you really needed.
Apple has a tiny product line, so at least with Apple any warts are soon well known, until the day comes that they change the software underneath you and deprive you of features you had come to depend upon, with little warning and no public rationale. Welcome to an ecosystem with benefits you can't refuse.
Traffic analysis is the process of intercepting and examining messages in order to deduce information from patterns in communication. It can be performed even when the messages are encrypted and cannot be decrypted. In general, the greater the number of messages observed, or even intercepted and stored, the more can be inferred from the traffic.
The primary filter has always been traffic analysis. It constructs the social graph. I've heard that's worth something. An otherwise valueless company seems to trade on it.
Traffic analysis is what one can do effectively on a perversive scale. It puts the "focus" into focused intelligence, which would otherwise amount to extracting needles from haystacks concerning the detection of novel threats. Indeed, often the forest is worth more than the trees. The bits of business of an individual life are often less easy to read than a person's extended social footprint.
Fu..hrermore, in an electronic society where six degrees of separation is an overestimate by half, is there anyone in the population less secluded than a junior wife in a Mormon splinter town who couldn't be painted as a threat for having crossed digital paths with at least three shady characters over three decades of normal living?
The social graph colours all nodes. Does anyone think that members of the judicial oversight committee are required to bone up on Turing's use of log probability to establish meaningful discrimination thresholds?
Consider the four principal categories of metadata: * who * what * when * where
Looks harmless to me. What goes under "why"? Anything their little minds decide to write down.
Who: public school teacher What: google search for "pressure cooker" When: yesterday What: google search for "backpack" When: day before yesterday Where: domestic residence, Springfield
Yet again, the metadata paints a compelling picture: moral turpitude. What could be more obvious among a law enforcement community prone to the syllogism that "I don't like the look on your face" equates to "disturbing the peace".
Checks and balances? Guess what? Metadata signs all cheques.
It was delayed a year and performed like shit on PC when it was released. GTA was originally a PC game and they have been treating PC as a second class revenue stream lately.
FTFY.
The gaming industry has sensation seekers over a barrel. You're only satisfied with the latest and greatest, and you probably value being there and part of the crowd when it happens.
The primacy of first class revenue streams is not going to change until movies earn more revenue not on the opening weekend, but the weekend after—supposing it doesn't suck.
The new shiny! Ready, set, go...
That group experience is what they are really selling here.
GTA was originally a PC game
I imagine you originally fed yourself by sucking on your mother's tit. What changed your mind?
This would be no guarantee of security at all, since it would mean that the email service has everyone's keys and can decrypt everyone's email.
FTFY. The game theory matrices are completely different for capabilities routinely exploited or just held in reserve.
Such an approach would shift the risk profile from ad hoc to systemic. The major surveillance powers actually do manage not to blab everything they intercept onto public networks, which is is not guaranteed with ad hoc interception. There's that word again.
I really wish we took more of a belt and suspenders approach and encouraged encryption at multiple levels. That will never happen if we continue this business of casually equating insufficiency with irrelevance. Wouldn't it be nice if clear text didn't flood onto public wires at the first transient misconfiguration of the The One Armoured Pipe To Rule Them All?
What you seem to mean is that it will change hardly anything from the perspective of the people already supporting or enhancing ZFS.
One would hope that this nice umbrella will evolve into a single point of access to learn about the major initiatives planned or in progress. Sometimes these things turn into just another layer of non-information.
Especially if existing developers perceive the addition as not amounting to change.
but I doubt there will be a perfect automatic speech translation in place that can immediately translate
No, not immediately, unless you count five minutes later and semi-automated as close enough. Man, do you ever underestimate the scope and resources of the surveillance-industrial society.
Not only do they have human ears for every language of the world on tap, but probably also strange fish who speak seven different conlangs, some of whom can place your Klingon dialect to America, central Europe, or Japan. These are the kinds of seriously strange people who inhabit comic book shops.
How quickly your call percolates through this system depends on precisely what shit list you're on. It's nothing more than a routing problem. At the highest level of alert, I would guess an unintelligible fragment is dispatched within fifteen minutes to enough desks to cover 99% of the world's spoken languages. And if that verdict isn't clear, another 30 minutes later they've covered Basque, Sindarin, Klingon, proto-Semitic, Esperanto, and Hungarian pig Latin. Obviously they can't route more than a tiny fraction of what they capture through the cauliflower-ears switchboard. Nevertheless, what gets expedited doesn't stand a chance unless so peculiar that it's permanently archived in the bootstrap corpus of automatic speech decoding. You better hope your off-the-cuff adaptations are incalculably different from your unknown soul-mate of cute obscurity who vanished from the planet five years prior.
At this stage in the process, they don't actually care if you're a terrorist. They care if you cast a large enough footprint of capabilities, connections, and motives to engage in terrorist activities, should you choose to take that path at the next spur-of-the-moment major life setback.
PhD in mathematics or synthetic chemistry? Strike one. Fluent in Farsi? Strike two? Too much money, or too little money? Strike three. Scuba license? Strike four. Longtime Tor user? Strike five. Loss of child custody? Strike six. Attend a Unitarian church? Strike seven. Caught exchanging short messages with another code orange individual, couched in a street slang that not even Henry Higgins crossed with a wind-talking Kimball O'Hara can decipher? Strike fifty-five. Congratulations, you've just a scored yourself a priority routing code on the cauliflower nexus for everything they ever capture that comes out of your mouth, which will be plenty, because you've earned a gold star for that, too.
The exact bumps and gradations within this filter-feeding behemoth have been refined with methodical vigour since about 1940, incorporating in their regression database everything that ever slipped through their fingers, where in retrospect the clue dawned either a little bit or a lot too late. There are small pockets of competence ensconced in these hidebound, dysfunctional organizations that would render Danny Hillis or Craig Venter the dumbest man in the room—or at least put enough fright on them to seriously consider the matter for the first time in their lives (perhaps excluding Danny's private lunches with Richard Feynman, or Craig's lunches near a reflective surface).
For the people who built this system, the Manhattan project was a one-shot dry run. Of course, any program on this scale that runs for sixty years with have more than the normal share of dysfunction, especially at the intake maw concerning the enormous flow of public funds, where the proud bow to the vain. My oh my, that can't be a fun place.
I bet the NSA has some seriously interesting psychological criteria concerning the men who ultimately take on these roles (the highest level of career functionary reporting to anointed bozos). That's one file the bozos will rarely see. The NSA probably has some internal Masonic order to guard over exactly this.
Make no mistake, though, it's a comedy of the hyper-competent.
Nobody goes on a modern cruiseship these days expecting to be "shipwrecked" or "Titanic'd" within the first hours of the cruise..
Certainly none of the people living in the Disney World bubble of credit card reward points.
The autonomous and self-defined individual goes through life expecting the unexpected, but then I suppose this type of person is less attractive to lying about in floating cocoons of immaculate white paint. We might choose a less passive adventure.
There's no such thing as a universal all-efficient work flow. If the OS begins to dictate work flow (or encourage so strongly as to make departure a non-starter) then the creative world will balkanize into work flow camps. Within each camp the efficiency is great. But now you're not actually hiring the best freelancer for your project: you're merely hiring the best guy who has bought into your particular dictatorial OS. This is a loss of efficiency you can't directly measure.
A large pool of talented people offering services to an industry with many different work flow needs is necessarily going to have some friction where work styles clash. This is not an avoidable friction, without sacrificing as much or more than you gain in the larger efficiency of the skill marketplace.
Second, the very same system the creatives want to protect their own work (intellectual property law) has wreaked havoc on happy integration to no-one's great surprise. For portions of property law, we've figured out that the cure is far worse than the disease. But this is legal reform, not software design.
And even without that, the GPU vendors work hard to keep their secret sauce close to the vest, resulting in many of these GPU performance challenges because now the available drivers are determined by the ROI of the market served, and that almost always leads to favouring bland ubiquity.
So yeah, sell up the river everyone's compensation models but your own, and the world becomes a peachy place.
Exactly. This means that the data is bad and you can't change that. Period.
By the prudent norms of science, this is an excellent first approximation. For the first hundred years, the satellite data will support at most modest convictions. Our accumulated climate record will really hit its stride two centuries from now. And actually, from nearly every perspective of human progress, this represents a tremendous leap over what was known previously. Why should the earth's climate prove easier to decode than Mendel's peas? We finally found the actual genes and we're still pretty sketchy about how they really work. Complicated little buggers they are.
That said, the satellite data isn't actually bad, it just falls way short of historical norms of scientific prudence. We're stuck wandering around in the uncanny valley between one sigma and five sigma.
This doesn't mean society can't choose to draw a tentative, intermediate conclusion and act on that basis. However, the consequences of human political resolve are even murkier than the climate science itself, and the scientists can't help up sort this out, unless they have a giant boner for N=1. We have no control planet. Any choice we made can only be compared to counterfactual outcomes grounded in a proto-science itself still slowly gaining clearance from the null hypothesis on its major claim and with error bars a mile wide on the magnitude and immediacy and severity of the presumed effect.
I think we should be paying plenty of attention to the impacts of climate variability whether or not the cause is anthropogenic. Let's just not put the knee-jerk "all change is bad" types in charge who once decided that forests should never burn. Blockading change is change, too. One of the consequences of embarking upon a global economy is that you soon reach the situation where there's no such thing as somebody else's problem, whether the root cause is anthropogenic or not.
I have severe reservations about whether it's a good idea to instigate novel political initiatives on a global scale (e.g. abandonment of the hydrocarbon economy) against a back-drop of alarmist proto-facts. Much of the time our best, well-cured, time-proven facts barely suffice to move the political dial in any coordinated way. That's going to radically change over the twenty years? I highly doubt it. Of course, change has to begin somewhere, however bleak the early returns.
I was reading about some dude yesterday knowingly infected with HIV who had sex with 300 partners, none of whom he informed, and many he lied to. The ultimate self-gratifying scumbag. But what if he only worried he had HIV and never got himself tested? Would he still be a scumbag? Yes, I think so. Even if his worry is only 1.5 sigma? Yes, I think so.
But if Exxon has only 1.5 sigma belief that carbon emissions could prove disastrous, it's business as usual. "We didn't know!" Not with scientific certainty, anyway, which is unfortunately true. Any certainty worth having is late to the party. This is, however, entirely the wrong standard of prudence and concern. While 1.5 sigma is merely a proto-fact, not yet conclusively proven, it nevertheless demands proper consideration. Facthood in the moment is way too high a standard (and harlot to corporate convenience).
In retrospect, we will know the difference. Just as we do now about the impact of CFCs on the ozone layer. Whatever doubt remained about this in 1970 is now totally busted. We could confiscate their profits in retrospect. That would make them think twice about not knowing in the first place. I understand that it's bad form to suddenly shout "New rule!" so we could instead begin by suggesting that existing companies take out insurance against future confiscation of profit derived from embarking upon unproven, potentially destructive lines of business—as soberly judged by a future generation with a vastly superior knowledge base (subject to the same hor
The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.
— George Bernard Shaw, Man and Superman (1903)
What would the NSA do confronted with an individual so high-minded and abrasive as to be relatively immune to the bullying tactics of the second-largest bullhead in the room? They would plant and nurture the meme that Theo sucks as a human being and that one's choice of OS and security software deployed rests on social morality rather than logic.
Who's looking like the reasonable man in the room now?
It's almost tautological than anyone abrasive enough to successfully push back against covert and well-funded NSA assholerly is not going to be a poster child for harmonious cooperation.
I've followed this little soap opera avidly (but with a relatively small corner of my mind) since Bamford's Puzzle Palace in 1982. I was then enrolled in an undergraduate mathematics program at a university famous for its cryptographers and I heard a few stories directly. I suspect I've read twenty books on the origins of these agencies before, during, and after WWII, ranging from espionage to black budgets to the ITAR fiasco.
I'm surprised by exactly none of this. I just didn't know the specifics of how it was done. The peculiar part was that the NSA seemed to have a very low appetite for taking this fight to the courts in the Clipper chip era. Now we know that they had a giant Plan B, much more to their taste than entering into a public process where things get written down.
It's kind of like the "eye of sauron" thing. They may not be omnipotent and able to target everyone at once, but once their eye turns your way there's little you can do about it short of jumping into a volcano.
Did you sleep through the end of the movie? You can't watch everybody all of the time. It ends up becoming a resources issue, and the NSA has finite resources after all (despite spending their secret funds at 100x typical levels of government efficiency).
A central prong in this campaign is to discourage the vast majority of people from even trying to make their communications secure so that they do have enough resources to watch everyone who poses any threat at any level pretty much all the time.
Nevermind the increases in safety. Nevermind the new jobs that this will enable. Nevermind the greater standard of living this will bring to all people. We've got to be concerned about potentially lost jobs above all else.
Nevermind the strawman. Nevermind engaging the non-debate, when the real debate is difficult, even for serious minds. Nevermind that throughout the animal kingdom, the unemployed are soon tagged on the ankle or wrist to become unwilling organ donors. It's not like employment has any bearing on survival or mating opportunities. I suspect one testicle well employed outperforms two testicles unemployed. But don't scream too loud when your first nut is clipped.
The point here is not that the swelling ranks of the unemployed and the under-employed moan loudly, it's that they moan badly, as ignorant gits tend to do. Still, even a bad moan is appropriate when your left one is severed by a rusty plutocracy (stored in damp basement wrapped in seven layers of oil cloth for about three hundred years after everyone in arrived in America fleeing this very same thing). Johnny Appleseed didn't fall far from the tree.
Greenspan held this quaint notion that the superpower quants would self-regulate due to interlocking competition of interests. What actually happened is that the superpower quants looked around the poker table and spotted a trillion dollars in Uncle Sam's pocket while he as stupidly wearing an "aw shucks, too big to fail" quasi-libertarian grin on his face. If there's any business that Government should not be in, first and foremost, that business is libertarianism. Of course, once government takes the first fatal step toward libertarianism, they begin to resemble exactly the straw man that libertarians wish to portray it as being. Call it the straw man death trap, and a fine business this is if your agenda is to lead government into the noose swaying above the trap door.
If the hollowing out of the middle class isn't giving plutocrats everywhere a raging boner, I don't know what would. This observation alone ought to give people pause for thought about committing Greenspan's error with regard to Schumpeter's gale of naively presuming that if it ends well once (or any finite number of times), it ends well in all cases.
After the fiscal crisis, did any of the elites go "my bad" and volunteer to repay the public rescue purse for emergency rescue rendered? Have they clucked about government intervention in their affairs so loudly as to set up a private rescue fund with a twelve digit cushion to tide them over their next salivary mishap? Oh, nooooo. That would never happen.
I can't see far into the future on this one. The one thing I'm fairly certain about is that filthy rich old bastards will require small standing armies of man and woman servants to cater to their every whim. So there will be jobs after all, no matter how this tempest in a teacup finally shakes out.
That came off slightly more cynical than I intended. In truth, I have nothing but gratitude for much of what hippie Google chose to do. My point at this juncture, however, is that that was then, this is now.
In much the same way that the terrorists succeeded in reshaping America in their own image (two crushed fingers was all it took), Facebook has succeeded in reinventing Google in their own image. Zuck, like Bill, was way ahead of his time right from the get go.
As far as I'm concerned Google+ is hardly any different than America+. Any symbol that leaves you asking "plus what?" is not to be trusted. What of this unary additive? Those who know are not entitled to say. Happily, that's as much as we need to know to guess what shape that mark will take once it reaches adult height, wreathed in flames.
If you're not a liberal when you're 20, you have no heart. If you're not a conservative by the time you're 40, you have no brain.
This much-laundered sentiment originated with Francois Guisot (and not as widely believed the sock-prophet Winston Churchill). The genius of Bill Gates was being twenty years ahead of his time. Unfortunately, the life expectancy of a brainy conservative is twenty to thirty years (tops), before the grizzled Ebenezer-in-Chief is forcibly defenestrated.
Roughly twenty years from now, the legacy of Brin and Page will be facing its own mop reduce. Brilliant strategy on their part to postpone the day of reckoning with a youthful sojourn into saccharine Dr Evil.
I read that article yesterday. It's an extremely well done article. Unfortunately, it doesn't actually say what the summary claims.
At the center of the cultural problems was a management system called âoestack ranking.â Every current and former Microsoft employee I interviewedâ"every oneâ"cited stack ranking as the most destructive process inside of Microsoft, something that drove out untold numbers of employees.
When the millionaire mint ran dry, the problems began:
And so, the bureaucratization of Microsoft began. Some executives traced the change to the ascension of Ballmer, but in truth Microsoftâ(TM)s era of fast cash was almost certainly the actual driving force.
Empowered by a dysfunctional incentive culture instigated by His Billness, though some defend it.
From the posts I read, the stack ranking at Microsoft is political and not based on valid accepted metrics that define performance. But Iâ(TM)m inclined to fault the measurement system more than stack ranking.
What a complete idiot. He presumes that such a metric must exist, and completely misses the boat on absolute rather than relative performance norms. As soon as the norms become relative, you're tying your sneakers to outrun your team mate. If that's not political, I don't know what is. There are people who might not be star performers by any specific metric, but who enhance the productivity of any team they join. Guess what other company adopted stack ranking? Enron.
I believe I once read an essay by Drucker where he said if the person who was worth hiring in the first place is underperforming, most likely that person's boss has failed to put that person into the right context.
And software is the worst of all industries to institute such metrics. Any crank an employee can turn at 1000 rpm is better off scripted. The surest route to efficiency is repetition (the athletic model from he cherry picks his favourite aspects). Human repetition is bad repetition, yet metrics never catch up to non-repetitive cultures.
Bullshit. They excelled in maintaining backwards compatibility with BINARY legacy applications coded with all kinds of brutal behaviours under the hood. Often almost beyond the bounds of reason. This was one of the big reasons Apple had so much trouble clawing itself back into the game. MS worked very hard never to give visionary CIOs a good pretext to clean house of horror show legacy applications.
Wow, that was a tortured vortex. I was losing track of which puppet hand had grabbed the microphone, or if it was just one especially wishy-washy devil's advocate.
If the bar is bad faith, we've got a problem, commonly known as Hanlon's razor:
Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.
The party being sued just needs to slit their own throat with Hanlon's razor (duh I'm stoopid) and your case melts away. Unless it takes confessing to a level of stupidity sufficient to get the other party's lawyer disbarred. Then things get interesting.
However, I don't think Hanlon's razor properly belongs in the court room in the first place, where it would more likely be the other way around: never attribute to stupidity, faulty memory, or the dog eating your homework what can adequately be explained by malice, tactical dithering, and premeditation. The line between culpability and incompetence in the courtroom is more gerrymandered than FLA. 5.
By comparison, the dividing line between pornography and naked flesh seemed so obvious that some judge muttered to himself absent-mindedly "I know it when I see it". I suspect that same judge would give his right arm to be able to reliably discern when the defendant protests too much about his own imbecility.
It's an extremely tricky business to write laws which boil down to where having a clue self-incriminates. It's pretty easy to flush clue down the toilet for the duration.
In my opinion, a standard of abuse needs to be set such that ignorance of the law is no excuse, reducing the scope of honest error to where the nuance of the law itself is hark to grok as applied to the relevant circumstance.
Wikipedia informs me of N.C. 12 that `The Wall Street Journal called the district "political pornography."` Note that Democrats holding a huge majority in one seat benefits the Republicans in every other seat they win by a narrow margin.
But your honour, my hand slipped!
Do have medical records to show that you've sought treatment for this dangerous condition?
Uh, no. It only happened just that once.
Fascinating. I've heard that three times already this morning. What I have here (pulls out Hanlon's razor) is a very sharp and heavy blade which you shall hold above your own head for ten minutes. If it slips out of your fingers during that interval, you will receive my sincere apology and a favourable verdict to go along with your stitches.
could out-innovate knowing that was the one thing they could do that M$ couldn't
Did you buy that four-digit ID on eBay? You've combined Microsoft's favourite word into the same sentence with the most geriatric of all derisions.
Microsoft innovated a metric butt unit, but very little of this advantaged the end consumer. They innovated business methods more so than technologies, especially the business method of crossing the legal and ethical line and getting away with it long enough to sip fine Champagne with one foot on Netscape's corpse while confined to the corner of the room wearing a pearl-crusted dunce cap. Vlad the Impaler tips his hat.
Speaking of Vlad, are you man enough to tell Vlad he can't innovate? To his face? Do you wish to wear the outcome of that assertion? Just because he's never much bothered to tweak the recipe for making Damascene steel or grafted on a lickable hilt (one that actually looks attractively lickable)? No, he just sits there thinking "no matter the sword, they all bleed the same way". Admittedly that's not the hallmark of innovation as celebrated among the proletarian ranks, but it works the gutters and coffers just fine.
One would think given his methods that more of the population would elect to somehow slip between his masochistic fingers. And yet they didn't. That's not what happened. Tell me it doesn't take innovation to become that sadistic and not have your entire empire relocate itself to the next valley over. Are your heirlooms and golden geese locked away in a proprietary chest for which only Vlad possesses the master key? You might have suspected something sooner, but you really liked the gaily-painted wooden wheels and the decorative hollow horse head. Steve never managed to sell that, yet somehow Bill was manning triple shifts under the lash to slake demand.
Wolfram Alpha just made me this nice chart in under sixty seconds and a permanently shareable link. Innovation, or just trying harder to please because you catch more flies with honey than vinegar? [when lacking Vlad's henchman army]:
Microsoft had Apple's number for pretty close to twenty years, and without ever suffering cardiac arrest. Apple is cool like Lance: it's amazing what one can achieve sans so many testicles when clad in relentlessly promoted, well-branded apparel. Apple burned through five heart-lung machines before they regrew their permanent hair, but what flowing fleece it was.
Tell me what company in their right mind would deliver innovation to the end-user riding on top of a such a long, gracefully ascending line? Yeah, it faded a bit over the past five years. But Microsoft had it coming. Boy did they have it coming. A hectare of discarded Champagne bottles began to cultivate a mirulent strain of black mold. And right in their own back yard, less than a stone's throw away. Dang, what a mess to have to clean up.
Apple's time is coming, too. The migrant consumer is already beginning to scout valleys even further afield. People only pay through the A$$ for so long before they wise up, unless they're fleeing from fresh horrors of ruthless innovation in the sprawling valley of the damned.
A kinder, gentler Microsoft won't do anything to help Apple sustain its insanely high profit margins. At the same time, a return to form of the old ruthless Microsoft could turn into an expensive tactical nightmare, with the Koreans nipping at their other flank.
Much depends on the new Khan. Personally, I hope their first agenda item is to take a giant bite out of Oracle's rapacious backside. Later they release M$inx in a master stroke of branding genius with all the tedious and uncool APIs of XP's cooling corpse completely open sourced and unencumbered. Just think, you can continue running your old copy of Turbo Tax 2005 all the way to the n
For a glib value of "same thing". I understand the Americans and the British are pretty tight, but I bet there's friction at every other point of exchange, even if it's just the petty little-brother/big-brother dynamic between Canada and the US.
When you're in the thought-crime business, all boundaries are porous. The correct question to the NSA is this: Do you access information on American citizens who have not yet committed a crime? And the obvious answer is: "Of course we do! Isn't the whole point of anti-terrorism to catch terrorists before their crimes are committed?" There's your thoughtcrime mandate signed, sealed and delivered.
The net immediately widens to include anyone with a legitimate or perceived beef with any social institution, and access to a car, an internet connection, or a hardware store.
Slashdot Mirror
Most of those places no longer exist. They blew away back in the 1930s, or had their milkshake sucked out by Homo Hoover.
So your property is cheap to insure, but your futures contract on bottled water breaks the bank. Nice solution.
It's been so long since Google moved the bar on search in a substantive way, I've begun to wonder if they still hold true to their original vision. It was something about indexing and knowledge.
Does it take a miraculous growth spurt of Wolfram Alpha to remind Google that innovation is still possible, fifteen years later? No matter if you burst onto the world stage shaming Picasso, any corporation that sits on its hands long enough eventually becomes part of the problem.
For a while Google was so good one almost believed their principal technology was a time machine. Lately I'm beginning to wonder if the time machine has its dial permanently welded at 2010.
All Shuttleworth had to do was to put some logic into the "upgrade" box that warned people away from Unity whose present system configuration indicated that Unity couldn't possibly amount to a preferred experience at that stage of Unity's evolution—if ever.
Timing the introduction of Unity around an LTS on the old Gnome with an extra year of support would have gone a long ways to keeping some of us old farts in the fold while the new world order shook itself out.
No, the flow of traffic changed from driving on the right to driving on the left without so much as a single advance sign, or a well-marked alternate route driving on the accustomed side of the road. Also changed were the width of the lanes, clearance height on the underpasses, and the legality of making a left turn at a red light (which used to be a right turn), with no posted warnings.
Those of us driving larger loads were blind-sided and left to fend elsewhere, as fast as our little feet could take us there on short notice.
I see you can't resist a willy goad. Shuttleworth goes goatse, and that's what cries out for comment.
You're being pedantic in a way that's annoying and counterproductive, unless you're the kind of person who wallet thickens on discovering the following tidbit:
Oh come on. This does not properly belong in the category of "speaker cables". If it did, "taking a step back" would land you this:
These aren't products, they are honeypots of rarefied nonsense. Navy Investigating Bills For $660 Ashtrays, $400 Wrenches:
First cross off anything that will get you disciplined or possibly dismissed, then take a step back toward the sane center. Is that so hard?
I don't build as many boxes as I once did, but it only takes a couple of hours a year to stay current if you know how to parse the tea leaves, and you pick a up quick booster shot from Ars Technica System Guide: July 2013.
When I've purchased bundled systems, I usually discover surprising limitations and short-cuts down the road unless one pays the insurance premium of buying twice the box you really needed.
Apple has a tiny product line, so at least with Apple any warts are soon well known, until the day comes that they change the software underneath you and deprive you of features you had come to depend upon, with little warning and no public rationale. Welcome to an ecosystem with benefits you can't refuse.
The primary filter has always been traffic analysis. It constructs the social graph. I've heard that's worth something. An otherwise valueless company seems to trade on it.
Traffic analysis is what one can do effectively on a perversive scale. It puts the "focus" into focused intelligence, which would otherwise amount to extracting needles from haystacks concerning the detection of novel threats. Indeed, often the forest is worth more than the trees. The bits of business of an individual life are often less easy to read than a person's extended social footprint.
Fu..hrermore, in an electronic society where six degrees of separation is an overestimate by half, is there anyone in the population less secluded than a junior wife in a Mormon splinter town who couldn't be painted as a threat for having crossed digital paths with at least three shady characters over three decades of normal living?
The social graph colours all nodes. Does anyone think that members of the judicial oversight committee are required to bone up on Turing's use of log probability to establish meaningful discrimination thresholds?
Consider the four principal categories of metadata:
* who
* what
* when
* where
Looks harmless to me. What goes under "why"? Anything their little minds decide to write down.
Who: public school teacher
What: google search for "pressure cooker"
When: yesterday
What: google search for "backpack"
When: day before yesterday
Where: domestic residence, Springfield
Yet again, the metadata paints a compelling picture: moral turpitude. What could be more obvious among a law enforcement community prone to the syllogism that "I don't like the look on your face" equates to "disturbing the peace".
Checks and balances? Guess what? Metadata signs all cheques.
FTFY.
The gaming industry has sensation seekers over a barrel. You're only satisfied with the latest and greatest, and you probably value being there and part of the crowd when it happens.
The primacy of first class revenue streams is not going to change until movies earn more revenue not on the opening weekend, but the weekend after—supposing it doesn't suck.
The new shiny! Ready, set, go ...
That group experience is what they are really selling here.
I imagine you originally fed yourself by sucking on your mother's tit. What changed your mind?
FTFY. The game theory matrices are completely different for capabilities routinely exploited or just held in reserve.
Such an approach would shift the risk profile from ad hoc to systemic. The major surveillance powers actually do manage not to blab everything they intercept onto public networks, which is is not guaranteed with ad hoc interception. There's that word again.
I really wish we took more of a belt and suspenders approach and encouraged encryption at multiple levels. That will never happen if we continue this business of casually equating insufficiency with irrelevance. Wouldn't it be nice if clear text didn't flood onto public wires at the first transient misconfiguration of the The One Armoured Pipe To Rule Them All?
What you seem to mean is that it will change hardly anything from the perspective of the people already supporting or enhancing ZFS.
One would hope that this nice umbrella will evolve into a single point of access to learn about the major initiatives planned or in progress. Sometimes these things turn into just another layer of non-information.
Especially if existing developers perceive the addition as not amounting to change.
No, not immediately, unless you count five minutes later and semi-automated as close enough. Man, do you ever underestimate the scope and resources of the surveillance-industrial society.
Not only do they have human ears for every language of the world on tap, but probably also strange fish who speak seven different conlangs, some of whom can place your Klingon dialect to America, central Europe, or Japan. These are the kinds of seriously strange people who inhabit comic book shops.
How quickly your call percolates through this system depends on precisely what shit list you're on. It's nothing more than a routing problem. At the highest level of alert, I would guess an unintelligible fragment is dispatched within fifteen minutes to enough desks to cover 99% of the world's spoken languages. And if that verdict isn't clear, another 30 minutes later they've covered Basque, Sindarin, Klingon, proto-Semitic, Esperanto, and Hungarian pig Latin. Obviously they can't route more than a tiny fraction of what they capture through the cauliflower-ears switchboard. Nevertheless, what gets expedited doesn't stand a chance unless so peculiar that it's permanently archived in the bootstrap corpus of automatic speech decoding. You better hope your off-the-cuff adaptations are incalculably different from your unknown soul-mate of cute obscurity who vanished from the planet five years prior.
At this stage in the process, they don't actually care if you're a terrorist. They care if you cast a large enough footprint of capabilities, connections, and motives to engage in terrorist activities, should you choose to take that path at the next spur-of-the-moment major life setback.
PhD in mathematics or synthetic chemistry? Strike one. Fluent in Farsi? Strike two? Too much money, or too little money? Strike three. Scuba license? Strike four. Longtime Tor user? Strike five. Loss of child custody? Strike six. Attend a Unitarian church? Strike seven. Caught exchanging short messages with another code orange individual, couched in a street slang that not even Henry Higgins crossed with a wind-talking Kimball O'Hara can decipher? Strike fifty-five. Congratulations, you've just a scored yourself a priority routing code on the cauliflower nexus for everything they ever capture that comes out of your mouth, which will be plenty, because you've earned a gold star for that, too.
The exact bumps and gradations within this filter-feeding behemoth have been refined with methodical vigour since about 1940, incorporating in their regression database everything that ever slipped through their fingers, where in retrospect the clue dawned either a little bit or a lot too late. There are small pockets of competence ensconced in these hidebound, dysfunctional organizations that would render Danny Hillis or Craig Venter the dumbest man in the room—or at least put enough fright on them to seriously consider the matter for the first time in their lives (perhaps excluding Danny's private lunches with Richard Feynman, or Craig's lunches near a reflective surface).
For the people who built this system, the Manhattan project was a one-shot dry run. Of course, any program on this scale that runs for sixty years with have more than the normal share of dysfunction, especially at the intake maw concerning the enormous flow of public funds, where the proud bow to the vain. My oh my, that can't be a fun place.
I bet the NSA has some seriously interesting psychological criteria concerning the men who ultimately take on these roles (the highest level of career functionary reporting to anointed bozos). That's one file the bozos will rarely see. The NSA probably has some internal Masonic order to guard over exactly this.
Make no mistake, though, it's a comedy of the hyper-competent.
Certainly none of the people living in the Disney World bubble of credit card reward points.
The autonomous and self-defined individual goes through life expecting the unexpected, but then I suppose this type of person is less attractive to lying about in floating cocoons of immaculate white paint. We might choose a less passive adventure.
Dude! 1998 called. They want your guru stick back.
Someone mod that up to +15, just for old times' sake. Thanks for the voyage. You made my day.
There's no such thing as a universal all-efficient work flow. If the OS begins to dictate work flow (or encourage so strongly as to make departure a non-starter) then the creative world will balkanize into work flow camps. Within each camp the efficiency is great. But now you're not actually hiring the best freelancer for your project: you're merely hiring the best guy who has bought into your particular dictatorial OS. This is a loss of efficiency you can't directly measure.
A large pool of talented people offering services to an industry with many different work flow needs is necessarily going to have some friction where work styles clash. This is not an avoidable friction, without sacrificing as much or more than you gain in the larger efficiency of the skill marketplace.
Second, the very same system the creatives want to protect their own work (intellectual property law) has wreaked havoc on happy integration to no-one's great surprise. For portions of property law, we've figured out that the cure is far worse than the disease. But this is legal reform, not software design.
And even without that, the GPU vendors work hard to keep their secret sauce close to the vest, resulting in many of these GPU performance challenges because now the available drivers are determined by the ROI of the market served, and that almost always leads to favouring bland ubiquity.
So yeah, sell up the river everyone's compensation models but your own, and the world becomes a peachy place.
By the prudent norms of science, this is an excellent first approximation. For the first hundred years, the satellite data will support at most modest convictions. Our accumulated climate record will really hit its stride two centuries from now. And actually, from nearly every perspective of human progress, this represents a tremendous leap over what was known previously. Why should the earth's climate prove easier to decode than Mendel's peas? We finally found the actual genes and we're still pretty sketchy about how they really work. Complicated little buggers they are.
That said, the satellite data isn't actually bad, it just falls way short of historical norms of scientific prudence. We're stuck wandering around in the uncanny valley between one sigma and five sigma.
This doesn't mean society can't choose to draw a tentative, intermediate conclusion and act on that basis. However, the consequences of human political resolve are even murkier than the climate science itself, and the scientists can't help up sort this out, unless they have a giant boner for N=1. We have no control planet. Any choice we made can only be compared to counterfactual outcomes grounded in a proto-science itself still slowly gaining clearance from the null hypothesis on its major claim and with error bars a mile wide on the magnitude and immediacy and severity of the presumed effect.
I think we should be paying plenty of attention to the impacts of climate variability whether or not the cause is anthropogenic. Let's just not put the knee-jerk "all change is bad" types in charge who once decided that forests should never burn. Blockading change is change, too. One of the consequences of embarking upon a global economy is that you soon reach the situation where there's no such thing as somebody else's problem, whether the root cause is anthropogenic or not.
I have severe reservations about whether it's a good idea to instigate novel political initiatives on a global scale (e.g. abandonment of the hydrocarbon economy) against a back-drop of alarmist proto-facts. Much of the time our best, well-cured, time-proven facts barely suffice to move the political dial in any coordinated way. That's going to radically change over the twenty years? I highly doubt it. Of course, change has to begin somewhere, however bleak the early returns.
I was reading about some dude yesterday knowingly infected with HIV who had sex with 300 partners, none of whom he informed, and many he lied to. The ultimate self-gratifying scumbag. But what if he only worried he had HIV and never got himself tested? Would he still be a scumbag? Yes, I think so. Even if his worry is only 1.5 sigma? Yes, I think so.
But if Exxon has only 1.5 sigma belief that carbon emissions could prove disastrous, it's business as usual. "We didn't know!" Not with scientific certainty, anyway, which is unfortunately true. Any certainty worth having is late to the party. This is, however, entirely the wrong standard of prudence and concern. While 1.5 sigma is merely a proto-fact, not yet conclusively proven, it nevertheless demands proper consideration. Facthood in the moment is way too high a standard (and harlot to corporate convenience).
In retrospect, we will know the difference. Just as we do now about the impact of CFCs on the ozone layer. Whatever doubt remained about this in 1970 is now totally busted. We could confiscate their profits in retrospect. That would make them think twice about not knowing in the first place. I understand that it's bad form to suddenly shout "New rule!" so we could instead begin by suggesting that existing companies take out insurance against future confiscation of profit derived from embarking upon unproven, potentially destructive lines of business—as soberly judged by a future generation with a vastly superior knowledge base (subject to the same hor
— George Bernard Shaw, Man and Superman (1903)
What would the NSA do confronted with an individual so high-minded and abrasive as to be relatively immune to the bullying tactics of the second-largest bullhead in the room? They would plant and nurture the meme that Theo sucks as a human being and that one's choice of OS and security software deployed rests on social morality rather than logic.
Who's looking like the reasonable man in the room now?
It's almost tautological than anyone abrasive enough to successfully push back against covert and well-funded NSA assholerly is not going to be a poster child for harmonious cooperation.
I've followed this little soap opera avidly (but with a relatively small corner of my mind) since Bamford's Puzzle Palace in 1982. I was then enrolled in an undergraduate mathematics program at a university famous for its cryptographers and I heard a few stories directly. I suspect I've read twenty books on the origins of these agencies before, during, and after WWII, ranging from espionage to black budgets to the ITAR fiasco.
I'm surprised by exactly none of this. I just didn't know the specifics of how it was done. The peculiar part was that the NSA seemed to have a very low appetite for taking this fight to the courts in the Clipper chip era. Now we know that they had a giant Plan B, much more to their taste than entering into a public process where things get written down.
This just in: Stephen Hawking's ALS caused by a butterfly in Santiago. Sober minds everywhere weep with shame.
Did you sleep through the end of the movie? You can't watch everybody all of the time. It ends up becoming a resources issue, and the NSA has finite resources after all (despite spending their secret funds at 100x typical levels of government efficiency).
A central prong in this campaign is to discourage the vast majority of people from even trying to make their communications secure so that they do have enough resources to watch everyone who poses any threat at any level pretty much all the time.
Nevermind the strawman. Nevermind engaging the non-debate, when the real debate is difficult, even for serious minds. Nevermind that throughout the animal kingdom, the unemployed are soon tagged on the ankle or wrist to become unwilling organ donors. It's not like employment has any bearing on survival or mating opportunities. I suspect one testicle well employed outperforms two testicles unemployed. But don't scream too loud when your first nut is clipped.
The point here is not that the swelling ranks of the unemployed and the under-employed moan loudly, it's that they moan badly, as ignorant gits tend to do. Still, even a bad moan is appropriate when your left one is severed by a rusty plutocracy (stored in damp basement wrapped in seven layers of oil cloth for about three hundred years after everyone in arrived in America fleeing this very same thing). Johnny Appleseed didn't fall far from the tree.
Greenspan held this quaint notion that the superpower quants would self-regulate due to interlocking competition of interests. What actually happened is that the superpower quants looked around the poker table and spotted a trillion dollars in Uncle Sam's pocket while he as stupidly wearing an "aw shucks, too big to fail" quasi-libertarian grin on his face. If there's any business that Government should not be in, first and foremost, that business is libertarianism. Of course, once government takes the first fatal step toward libertarianism, they begin to resemble exactly the straw man that libertarians wish to portray it as being. Call it the straw man death trap, and a fine business this is if your agenda is to lead government into the noose swaying above the trap door.
If the hollowing out of the middle class isn't giving plutocrats everywhere a raging boner, I don't know what would. This observation alone ought to give people pause for thought about committing Greenspan's error with regard to Schumpeter's gale of naively presuming that if it ends well once (or any finite number of times), it ends well in all cases.
After the fiscal crisis, did any of the elites go "my bad" and volunteer to repay the public rescue purse for emergency rescue rendered? Have they clucked about government intervention in their affairs so loudly as to set up a private rescue fund with a twelve digit cushion to tide them over their next salivary mishap? Oh, nooooo. That would never happen.
I can't see far into the future on this one. The one thing I'm fairly certain about is that filthy rich old bastards will require small standing armies of man and woman servants to cater to their every whim. So there will be jobs after all, no matter how this tempest in a teacup finally shakes out.
That came off slightly more cynical than I intended. In truth, I have nothing but gratitude for much of what hippie Google chose to do. My point at this juncture, however, is that that was then, this is now.
In much the same way that the terrorists succeeded in reshaping America in their own image (two crushed fingers was all it took), Facebook has succeeded in reinventing Google in their own image. Zuck, like Bill, was way ahead of his time right from the get go.
As far as I'm concerned Google+ is hardly any different than America+. Any symbol that leaves you asking "plus what?" is not to be trusted. What of this unary additive? Those who know are not entitled to say. Happily, that's as much as we need to know to guess what shape that mark will take once it reaches adult height, wreathed in flames.
Corporations grow up, just like children.
This much-laundered sentiment originated with Francois Guisot (and not as widely believed the sock-prophet Winston Churchill). The genius of Bill Gates was being twenty years ahead of his time. Unfortunately, the life expectancy of a brainy conservative is twenty to thirty years (tops), before the grizzled Ebenezer-in-Chief is forcibly defenestrated.
Roughly twenty years from now, the legacy of Brin and Page will be facing its own mop reduce. Brilliant strategy on their part to postpone the day of reckoning with a youthful sojourn into saccharine Dr Evil.
I read that article yesterday. It's an extremely well done article. Unfortunately, it doesn't actually say what the summary claims.
When the millionaire mint ran dry, the problems began:
Empowered by a dysfunctional incentive culture instigated by His Billness, though some defend it.
The Case for Stack Ranking of Employees
What a complete idiot. He presumes that such a metric must exist, and completely misses the boat on absolute rather than relative performance norms. As soon as the norms become relative, you're tying your sneakers to outrun your team mate. If that's not political, I don't know what is. There are people who might not be star performers by any specific metric, but who enhance the productivity of any team they join. Guess what other company adopted stack ranking? Enron.
I believe I once read an essay by Drucker where he said if the person who was worth hiring in the first place is underperforming, most likely that person's boss has failed to put that person into the right context.
And software is the worst of all industries to institute such metrics. Any crank an employee can turn at 1000 rpm is better off scripted. The surest route to efficiency is repetition (the athletic model from he cherry picks his favourite aspects). Human repetition is bad repetition, yet metrics never catch up to non-repetitive cultures.
Bullshit. They excelled in maintaining backwards compatibility with BINARY legacy applications coded with all kinds of brutal behaviours under the hood. Often almost beyond the bounds of reason. This was one of the big reasons Apple had so much trouble clawing itself back into the game. MS worked very hard never to give visionary CIOs a good pretext to clean house of horror show legacy applications.
Embrace, extend, and eternalise.
Wow, that was a tortured vortex. I was losing track of which puppet hand had grabbed the microphone, or if it was just one especially wishy-washy devil's advocate.
If the bar is bad faith, we've got a problem, commonly known as Hanlon's razor:
The party being sued just needs to slit their own throat with Hanlon's razor (duh I'm stoopid) and your case melts away. Unless it takes confessing to a level of stupidity sufficient to get the other party's lawyer disbarred. Then things get interesting.
However, I don't think Hanlon's razor properly belongs in the court room in the first place, where it would more likely be the other way around: never attribute to stupidity, faulty memory, or the dog eating your homework what can adequately be explained by malice, tactical dithering, and premeditation. The line between culpability and incompetence in the courtroom is more gerrymandered than FLA. 5.
Imbalance of Power
By comparison, the dividing line between pornography and naked flesh seemed so obvious that some judge muttered to himself absent-mindedly "I know it when I see it". I suspect that same judge would give his right arm to be able to reliably discern when the defendant protests too much about his own imbecility.
It's an extremely tricky business to write laws which boil down to where having a clue self-incriminates. It's pretty easy to flush clue down the toilet for the duration.
In my opinion, a standard of abuse needs to be set such that ignorance of the law is no excuse, reducing the scope of honest error to where the nuance of the law itself is hark to grok as applied to the relevant circumstance.
Wikipedia informs me of N.C. 12 that `The Wall Street Journal called the district "political pornography."` Note that Democrats holding a huge majority in one seat benefits the Republicans in every other seat they win by a narrow margin.
But your honour, my hand slipped!
Do have medical records to show that you've sought treatment for this dangerous condition?
Uh, no. It only happened just that once.
Fascinating. I've heard that three times already this morning. What I have here (pulls out Hanlon's razor) is a very sharp and heavy blade which you shall hold above your own head for ten minutes. If it slips out of your fingers during that interval, you will receive my sincere apology and a favourable verdict to go along with your stitches.
Did you buy that four-digit ID on eBay? You've combined Microsoft's favourite word into the same sentence with the most geriatric of all derisions.
Microsoft innovated a metric butt unit, but very little of this advantaged the end consumer. They innovated business methods more so than technologies, especially the business method of crossing the legal and ethical line and getting away with it long enough to sip fine Champagne with one foot on Netscape's corpse while confined to the corner of the room wearing a pearl-crusted dunce cap. Vlad the Impaler tips his hat.
Speaking of Vlad, are you man enough to tell Vlad he can't innovate? To his face? Do you wish to wear the outcome of that assertion? Just because he's never much bothered to tweak the recipe for making Damascene steel or grafted on a lickable hilt (one that actually looks attractively lickable)? No, he just sits there thinking "no matter the sword, they all bleed the same way". Admittedly that's not the hallmark of innovation as celebrated among the proletarian ranks, but it works the gutters and coffers just fine.
One would think given his methods that more of the population would elect to somehow slip between his masochistic fingers. And yet they didn't. That's not what happened. Tell me it doesn't take innovation to become that sadistic and not have your entire empire relocate itself to the next valley over. Are your heirlooms and golden geese locked away in a proprietary chest for which only Vlad possesses the master key? You might have suspected something sooner, but you really liked the gaily-painted wooden wheels and the decorative hollow horse head. Steve never managed to sell that, yet somehow Bill was manning triple shifts under the lash to slake demand.
Wolfram Alpha just made me this nice chart in under sixty seconds and a permanently shareable link. Innovation, or just trying harder to please because you catch more flies with honey than vinegar? [when lacking Vlad's henchman army]:
appl msft profit over time
Microsoft had Apple's number for pretty close to twenty years, and without ever suffering cardiac arrest. Apple is cool like Lance: it's amazing what one can achieve sans so many testicles when clad in relentlessly promoted, well-branded apparel. Apple burned through five heart-lung machines before they regrew their permanent hair, but what flowing fleece it was.
Tell me what company in their right mind would deliver innovation to the end-user riding on top of a such a long, gracefully ascending line? Yeah, it faded a bit over the past five years. But Microsoft had it coming. Boy did they have it coming. A hectare of discarded Champagne bottles began to cultivate a mirulent strain of black mold. And right in their own back yard, less than a stone's throw away. Dang, what a mess to have to clean up.
Apple's time is coming, too. The migrant consumer is already beginning to scout valleys even further afield. People only pay through the A$$ for so long before they wise up, unless they're fleeing from fresh horrors of ruthless innovation in the sprawling valley of the damned.
A kinder, gentler Microsoft won't do anything to help Apple sustain its insanely high profit margins. At the same time, a return to form of the old ruthless Microsoft could turn into an expensive tactical nightmare, with the Koreans nipping at their other flank.
Much depends on the new Khan. Personally, I hope their first agenda item is to take a giant bite out of Oracle's rapacious backside. Later they release M$inx in a master stroke of branding genius with all the tedious and uncool APIs of XP's cooling corpse completely open sourced and unencumbered. Just think, you can continue running your old copy of Turbo Tax 2005 all the way to the n
For a glib value of "same thing". I understand the Americans and the British are pretty tight, but I bet there's friction at every other point of exchange, even if it's just the petty little-brother/big-brother dynamic between Canada and the US.
When you're in the thought-crime business, all boundaries are porous. The correct question to the NSA is this: Do you access information on American citizens who have not yet committed a crime? And the obvious answer is: "Of course we do! Isn't the whole point of anti-terrorism to catch terrorists before their crimes are committed?" There's your thoughtcrime mandate signed, sealed and delivered.
The net immediately widens to include anyone with a legitimate or perceived beef with any social institution, and access to a car, an internet connection, or a hardware store.