At some point in the next few million years, we need to get ourselves a backup planet in case some dino-killer asteroid or whatever wipes out Earth, and in the next few billion years we may want a backup solar system before the Sun goes Foom. But we've got quite a while before that's necessary. In the shorter term, we should probably learn how to deflect big asteroids and comets, which is a lot easier than moving a significant fraction of humanity off-planet, but we've probably got a fair bit of time for that, and it's a job that robots can probably do much better than canned monkeys anyway - it's certainly a lot easier to develop send asteroid-diverter ships if you don't need to maintain an ecosystem or keep your g-forces to a meat-safe level or bring the crew home when you're done.
Meanwhile, any significant human base off-planet needs three things - enough physics to get it built, an ecosystem that can run indefinitely without refills from Earth so we can live there, and some useful job to do once we've built it. Everybody likes to focus on the physics, whether that's rockets or space elevators or starwisps or whatever, but that's in some sense the easy part. There are a lot of useful jobs to do in near-earth orbit, but it's not enough to say we're going to Mars just because it's Way Cool (though it is.) And just because the US Gov't can get the public to fork over a trillion dollars for Fear and Terror, that doesn't mean we'd be that cooperative about spending that much for Phobos and Deimos. There's also a Zeroth requirement, which is that we have to be Not Dead Yet before we can go anywhere else, though that does overlap with the second one.
We can't build a long-term sustainable ecosystem on Mars until we learn how to do it on Earth, and so far we're not putting anywhere near enough science and technology into that - we've built a few little ego-trip terrariums like the Biosphere that haven't worked, and the one big project (Earth itself, with subprojects like Agriculture, and Finding the %$%$ Thermostat) is not going well either. Remember that the cost of spending money on the space program (or on the military) isn't just the money - it's that you're diverting a lot of scientists and engineers and regular workers from what they'd otherwise be doing, whether that's better solar power or cancer research or water purification systems or flying cars or more exciting video games. Sometimes there's synergy - dragging all those engineers into the Space Program helped semiconductor solar cell development, and helped make military airplanes more efficient, and therefore civilian airplanes, but it probably cost your cars a few MPGs, increasing the US need for foreign oil. (We did get Tang and freeze-dried ice cream!) And we got GPS and satellite photo systems, which are seriously useful in understanding the planet.
Going into space isn't a Bad Thing, but it's definitely a job for robots for most of the work, and much of the important space research can be done down here, figuring out how to terraform Earth first.
The moon has one advantage over building in orbit, which is that you can find some of the materials you need there and not have to haul them up from Earth. But you're probably not going to find all of them, and there's a big honkin' gravity well keeping you down there once you're there, with no obvious fuel source for return trips. Mars is a lot more interesting, and it might be possible to terraform it a bit - but otherwise it's just ego-trip tourism. Working in orbit's a lot more useful, because there's a lot we can learn about the Earth from up there; I suppose the moon's a good place to put a telescope or whatever, but it's not that useful otherwise.
But either place you go to, the most important thing you need to do is get a working ecosystem that can run for a fairly long time without significant inputs from outside, and we can do that research just as well in space (and a lot of it down on Earth as well.) So far we don't know how to take cute little terrariums like the Biosphere and run them at steady-state, and we'll need to do a lot more ecological research before it makes sense to do much human travel past orbit or L5 or whatever.
Sending out robots is a different issue - most of the near-term value of space exploration doesn't need canned monkeys to operate things, and you can get by with much smaller simpler spacecraft if you're not trying to maintain an ecosystem. The issues of working at a time-delayed distance mean that it's really helpful to have somewhat artificially intelligent robots and not just waldoes, but there's not much that requires humans to be up close and personal.
We use laptops for almost all employees, which lets us work from home or office or customers' offices. The only people who have desktop computers are either doing specialized work like labs or else they're people whose job requires working in one place like clerks. So the servers are going all the time, and there'd be no good way to shut most of them down without inconveniencing a lot of people. On the other hand, servers are a lot more productive, and most of the power waste happens when people's laptops are burning power unnecessarily (e.g. Mozilla's flailing away at some escaped Javascript.)
Some people use monitors at their desks, and those all have the energy-star shutoff features. And the copy machines power down after a while of non-use, but that's not something that affects many people, and if you're the first one to hit the copy machine, you can go get coffee while it warms up.
It's bad enough that users have to wait for their laptops to power up. Some years, sleep mode works most of the time, and some years it doesn't, depending on what hardware we have, what OS version, and what broken settings the corporate IT department has set this time. My laptop has an unchangeable 10-minute screen locker on it - fine if I'm in the office, really annoying at home, and I can't even change to a different screen saver.
The Feds publish statistics about legal wiretaps; your actual mileage after including illegal ones may vary. The vast majority are for drug cases, and the vast majority of the rest are for gambling; I'm shocked, shocked!, to hear that the Feds aren't paying all their phone bills on those. There may be a few child porn investigations (but those are mostly Internet investigations, without much voice phone call involvement), and there may be a few terrorism investigations where the Feds' informant isn't one end of the call.
Fundamentally, if the Feds aren't careful enough with details to pay the phone bills on their wiretap, they aren't careful enough with details to be trusted to handle evidence, and they ought to get spanked hard by their Internal Affairs organization.
Back when I was in grad school ~30 years ago, Christofides's algorithm could get you within 3/2 of the optimum distance on graphs where triangle-inequality holds, and it's interesting to see that that's still basically the optimum. (I forget what speed the matching-problem part looks like; a brief Wikipedia scan looks like it's something like N**2*logN or N**2.5? And of course you only run the match on the odd-order vertices in the spanning tree, so that's going to be a lot smaller than the ones in the original set.)
I did something similar with pen plotters in the 1980s (remember when that was how you did graphics, with vectors instead of rasters?:-). Since I had a degree in Operations Research, it was nice to find an application where I could actually use my long-rusty education. Our typical maps had a few hundred path segments, so an exact solution to an NP-hard problem wasn't going to happen on a 1.5 MIPS VAX 11/785, and it was a big E-Sized Calcomp plotter. I built some kind of heuristics that sorted the segments by X and Y axis; I think I ended up using the simple greedy-algorithm version that went to the nearest available point from where the pen currently was. It was (literally) close enough for government work.
Most of our plots were US maps with state boundaries (which had long strings of continuous end-to-end line segments) plus a map of the user's network in one or more colors. The other main optimization that I did was a version of the background map that left out intermediate points on short line segments, so "A-B-C-D-E" would get compressed into "A-E" if the segments were short enough. It didn't change the map of Colorado much, but made a huge difference with the fractal Virginia/Carolina coastline and similar wiggly areas.
The TSA people freaked briefly when Richard Reid the "Shoe-Bomber" allegedly tried to trash his plane, but they backed off on that quickly enough.
The main reason for shoe removal, other than keeping the sheep scared, was that lots of shoes have metal stiffeners in them, which set off the metal detectors if they're cranked up high, and it was slowing down the lines having to do secondary scans on people when their shoes set off the detectors. So they started telling people that you should run your shoes through the X-Ray to avoid being delayed at the metal detector. Back when I was flying more often I generally dealt with this by wearing non-metallic shoes - either sneakers, or Tevas instead of Birkenstocks, or some of my hard-sole shoes that didn't have metals. In many airports since then, they've started simply ordering everybody to take them off, and as usual, they'll lie about "That's always been the rule", or occasionally lie about "Been that way since 9/11/2001". Or they'll lie about "It's national policy, at all airports", when it's not. What *is* true is that TSA agents can order you to do anything they feel like, just because they feel like it, and cause you no end of harassment without any repercussions to themselves, and the employee paychecks are scaled for people who are good at Shouting rather than understanding principles of law and applying them correctly to each individual customer.
Heating's a silly concern in a data center environment; computers generate far more excess heat, and the problem is getting rid of it all. If you're floating on water, and your local environmental laws permit it, you could probably use the water as part of your cooling system. (Obviously you're not going to run salty seawater or sludgy Bay water into your cooler, but you might drop radiators into it or something.)
Looks a lot more like classical permanent hosting to me. Ships don't move very fast, and big data centers are going to need big fiber optic connections to feed them. If what you need is a temporary container or two of servers, trucks do a really good job of that, and you can park them right up next to the stadium or convention hall as opposed to down by the docks, and move the container by train for long-haul if you want, and the stadium's more likely to already have fiber to support TV broadcasters. About the only kind of temporary event that needs a data center bigger than that is the Olympics.
These ships aren't sailing the high seas ("Yarrrrr! Belay the Starboard Fiber Optic Extension Cord!"). They're docked by a pier in big cities, attached to land by their data cables, and have to deal with a lot of land-lubber laws like environmental regulations and local sales taxes as well as Coast Guard rules about water safety. In some jurisdictions a subpoena might get delivered by Port Authority cops rather than regular city cops, but that's basically a turf issue like whether they're using Longshoreman's Union vs. Teamsters; it's not like they're under Admiralty Law.
Terrorism's a bogus threat - anybody who wanted to do it today can pop a couple of manhole covers near a big data center and cut some cables, or look for the "Call Before You Dig" signs along railroads. They could try to take out undersea cables near the landings, though those are usually much better protected to prevent problems from ship anchors and fishing nets.
The most common outdoor-plant problem we worry about in the telecom industry is "Bubba the Backhoe Driver" (Flooding and earthquakes can be worse, but backhoes are constant problems, especially for local distribution networks.) These guys have to worry about the sequels "Bubba Goes Fishing" and "Ooops, Where's My Anchor?", but for ships that are basically docked next to the pier, you take pretty similar precautions, and as always you build diverse connections that are far enough apart and have enough slack to handle big waves.
Wireless doesn't begin to have enough capacity for a significant data center - fiber's the only realistic choice. You can get up to a few hundred Megabits/second of bandwidth on wireless, compared to hundreds of gigabits on fiber. Also, wireless works better if the antenna's not rocking up and down or rising and falling with the tide. (Also, interceptions's not a problem, because you obviously need to encrypt, and it's not rocket science any more.) What wireless (and satellite) are useful for in data centers is providing an alternate path for management access, so you can monitor and fix problems with your telecom gear. (Here at The Phone Company we've traditionally used satellite - it's really practical if the main telecom gear is having problems, though data centers are more likely to have problems with their computers or data switches just because they have more of them.)
In the telecom business, our standard failure scenario is a guy named Bubba driving a backhoe. Some of the new carriers who ran their cables along gas pipeline right-of-way were pretty safe, because Bubba understands "Don't dig here, the gas line will blow up and you'll die!", but the rest of us would put up signs saying "Don't dig here, fragile pieces of glass and plastic in the ground!", and Bubba'd never even notice when he ran over it.
So these guys are going to have similar worries about their connections from the pier to their boats, because some guy named Bubba's going to go fishing, or make a wrong turn in his bass-boat and drop the anchor to slow down, plus the land segment of their fiber feeds is still going to have backhoe risks, and maybe Bubba's going to drop his cigarette while he's fishing and catch the pier on fire...
But if they do it well, they should be able to minimize the risks, keep their cables armored well, and run enough diversity from shore that a single failure won't take them out. It shouldn't be too tough, because they're basically parked in the water rather than out moving around.
It used to be that bandwidth was the main constraint in data centers, but improvements in router and switch capacity and fiber multiplexing and the continued free-fall of Internet prices have changed that. Real Estate costs used to be an issue as well, but moving from big servers to 1U servers to blade servers and 386s to whatever the latest N-Core Many-GHz processors and farms of 500-G SATA means that you can fit a lot more computing horsepower into a given space.
But those processors mostly keep burning more and more electricity even though they take less space, so these days the problem is electricity, including per-square-foot density problems and total power demand including cooling, which is why companies like Google have been looking at locating data centers in places where power's cheap.
It's amusing how we keep recycling technical problems. Virtualization has been one of the main buzzwords of the past few years, but it's really just a way to re-invent timesharing, using 2000s microprocessors instead of 1970s minicomputers. A decade and a half ago, if you wanted to locate computers and datacomm gear in a telco office to reduce your communication costs or make your services more reliable, you went through a big detailed study on how much power and cooling you needed, how many square feet, how many phone and data lines, etc. Within a few years the hosting market had evolved enough that we knew that a standardized customer network looked like 19" rack-mounted PCs and Cisco routers, and the power and cooling needs per square foot were pretty much the same for everybody, and it changed a bit with 1U servers but we could still usually stretch the available power. But now? We're back to servers that are increasingly customized and non-standard (disks vs. routers vs. blade servers are much different power densities, etc.)
There are two common reasons for checking a name - one is to see if it's available before you buy it, the other is to see who owns it if there's some reason you care. If you're just checking a single name and not trying to buy all the.com,.net,.org,.eu,.etc variants, the former's kind of silly - just try to buy the name at some registrar other than Network Solutions, and if that fails then you can check the whois (to see if the name's owned by somebody real or by DomainNameSquatters-R-Us.biz) or use the registrar's domain-tasting features to return the ones that worked.
Domain Tasting really needs to go away, but until it does we'll just have to change our paradigms. (Actually I'm kind of surprised - in the past I've thought there was absolutely no good reason for it to exist, but in my previous paragraph of ranting I appear to have found one....:-)
If the consultant says "You should really just RTFM, but if you're not technical enough to do that, or don't know if the web page design tools you're using implemented it correctly, you can hire me to do an audit", that's reasonable. It's probably not worth paying much money for, and the consultant shouldn't be charging you very much, and there are a number of web sites and books that'll help you get up to speed; it's really not very hard.
If the consultant says "Search Engines try to find pages that are interesting and useful for people who read them, and if you want people to read your web pages more than once you need interesting and useful content.", it's a good start. Usually, consultants who say that call themselves "web designers" or "editors" if they're white-hat, and if they call themselves SEOs it's usually because they're trying to sell you prefab robo-generated "content" that'll pump up the advertising revenue on your ad-banner page, and they're probably at least sleazy if not outright black-hat.
If the consultant says "There are billions and billions of web pages out there, and one way for people to find the interesting content on your web site is to advertise on other relevant web pages, and we can help you with that", they'll probably call themselves something like "advertisers" or "marketers" if they're legit, and only call themselves SEOs if they're not, but of course the guys who are not legit sometimes pretend that they are.
If the consultant says "We can help you drive traffic to your site and TRIPLE your advertising revenue", then you know what business they're in, and if you hire them, you know what business you're in. Just make sure your accountant isn't also wearing a black hat.
If the consultant says "You're trying to provide legitimate content about a topic where 99.99% of the web pages are run by scammers who hire SEOs, and you need to find a way to not get lost in all that noise", then you've got an interesting edge case, and you might want to compare the consultant's hat with a Pantone chart to see exactly what color of gray it is. Sometimes that's a non-trivial problem; if you're trying to provide a legitimate online pharmacy or drug information, for instance, there are very few sites above the noise level, and I usually ignore Google and either start with Wikipedia or go to the manufacturer's web page.
Google's algorithms have a pretty straightforward objective - use a herd of dumb robots to feed algorithms to identify pages that humans will find interesting and displaying the most relevant ones first. If you want to make it easy for the robots to find your web pages, they've got a set of rules for how to mark them.
SEOs have a pretty straightforward objective as well - take customers' websites that aren't actually interesting or relevant to humans and lie to the robots so the robots will give the page a high ranking and humans will go look at the customers' pages, triggering their banner ads or deciding that maybe they do want to order some Nigerian Herbal Fake V14grA before going back to the topic they were actually interested in or whatever. It's not like breaking the law, it's just being dishonest.
The rest of it's all implementation details in the Google-Vs-Spammers Arms Race. If Google's algorithms don't handle your pages well, usually you'll get an accidentally low pagerank (and maybe you'll try to fix that), and occasionally you'll get an accidentally high pagerank, and Cutts isn't saying there's anything wrong with either of those. But if you're in the business of exploiting knowledge about Google's algorithms to artificially give your customers much better pageranks than make their pages seem to be much more interesting than they are, you know that that's what you're doing. And if you're ethically challenged about some things, you're probably ethically challenged about other things as well.
Cutts wasn't even talking about click-fraud people who try to crack Google's advertising system's algorithms to generate artificial advertising revenues, though I'm sure Google puts a lot of work into trying to prevent that. He's talking about the kinds of people who build link-farms (to emulate links on that real people put on their web pages pointing to sites they think are interesting) and robo-generate content and put lots of random keywords at the bottom of your pages in very small fonts with white text so it's not visible to the reader and use Stupid HTTP Server Tricks to display different results to Google's and Yahoo's robots than to humans who read the pages, so the Google index says the page is about "Keyword1 Keyword2 Keyword3" but when you read it you get 49 banner ads and an opportunity to order Herbal Fake V14grA and help a corrupt Nigerian official's poor widow get her money out of the country.
Are there other reasons to try to reverse-engineer Google's search algorithms? Sure, the original "404 - Weapons Of Mass Destruction Not Found" and "Miserable Failure" pointing to George Bush's webpage were amusing (though it gets old after a couple of me-too variants, and the originals were amusing because they were technically surprising as well as inherently funny.) And there'll probably be more things like that that get discovered. But you know that that wasn't who Cutts was writing about.
Reason 1 is, as you say, useless; if you worried about it you could just enforce long-enough passphrases.
But your Reason 2, SSHd bugs that might be security holes, is the problem this is trying to address. Various deployed-in-the-real-world SSH implementations have had security holes, and crackers and skript kiddies do go hunting for them, and even if your implementation has been patched around the existing holes, you can still get your logfiles cluttered up with scanning events, plus crackers are always trying to scan random ports anyway.
Your Objection 2, that we also have to test this, is correct, but it's relatively simple testing on a relatively simple program that doesn't have any actual powers to grant the attacker except the ability to forward packets to 127.0.0.1:22, as opposed to sshd which lets you login to the host, potentially as root, and has lots more features and therefore lots more potential holes. If it's not buggy, it'll keep 93.3% of the crackers from bothering you once and keep 6.6% of them from bothering you for more than a minute, which makes it a lot harder for them to do successful attacks and cuts down on the junk in your sshd logfiles. (I assume it's got its own logfiles, but you're mostly not going to watch them for more than a week or two.)
From what I can tell reading NANOG and working at a Tier 1 ISP, most large ISPs can't realistically route IPv6 in the core - they're either tunnelling across IPv4 or using an MPLS core, but the edges that get onto the MPLS aren't quite ready for prime time. (Perhaps Juniper's in better shape on that? I haven't dealt with that tier of their equipment.)
DSL's in a bit better shape than cable modems, because cable modems are generally routed, while DSL is still often using ATM at the DSLAM and only getting routed at a concentrator layer, so DSL providers can upgrade to IPv6 without having to change the DSLAMs. But it's still an ugly world out there on the edges.
Search engines are supposed to tell people what pages are interesting and relevant on specific topics. Since we don't yet have AIs that can actually tell what's interesting, they use robots to search for pages that have patterns that generally correlate with interestingness and relevance, and show the people the more interesting pages first.
About 1% of the SEO job is to make sure that the robots can find your web pages and access the relevant patterns, which is called "RTFM", and is useful for customers who don't have the skills to apply that advice themselves, which is mostly a limited set of web-newbies.
A somewhat larger part of the SEO job is telling customers how to take not-very-interesting pages and make them more interesting, which is called "editing", and there are customers who are clueless enough to hire an SEO to do it instead of an editor or marketing consultant or other directly skilled person.
But the bulk of the SEO job is finding current and creative ways to lie to the robots, so the robots will tell the humans that the customer's uninteresting web page is interesting, so the humans will trigger the customer's banner ads or buy their products or fall for their scams or whatever. Some classic techniques include piling lots of popular search keywords onto the page or building link farms that emulate patterns of actual humans linking to pages they find interesting, etc., but they're all variants on lying about the interestingness of the customer's web site.
So is it any surprise that businesses who hire professional liars are often ethically challenged themselves?
It's not really an issue of breaking rules - it's arms race in which search engines to find dishonestly constructed uninteresting web pages without accidentally blocking legitimate pages, and SEOs try to find new ways to be dishonest without getting caught. The basic rule is "Don't lie to us about how interesting your page is or we'll rank you really low", and the rest is just implementation details by both sides. The search engines publish some of the details so that people with legitimate content can avoid being mistaken for lying SEO customers and ranked as "boring scum".
Slashdot Mirror
And this one avoids many of the jokes about the other ad, because GNU's Not Eunuchs.
Meanwhile, any significant human base off-planet needs three things - enough physics to get it built, an ecosystem that can run indefinitely without refills from Earth so we can live there, and some useful job to do once we've built it. Everybody likes to focus on the physics, whether that's rockets or space elevators or starwisps or whatever, but that's in some sense the easy part. There are a lot of useful jobs to do in near-earth orbit, but it's not enough to say we're going to Mars just because it's Way Cool (though it is.) And just because the US Gov't can get the public to fork over a trillion dollars for Fear and Terror, that doesn't mean we'd be that cooperative about spending that much for Phobos and Deimos. There's also a Zeroth requirement, which is that we have to be Not Dead Yet before we can go anywhere else, though that does overlap with the second one.
We can't build a long-term sustainable ecosystem on Mars until we learn how to do it on Earth, and so far we're not putting anywhere near enough science and technology into that - we've built a few little ego-trip terrariums like the Biosphere that haven't worked, and the one big project (Earth itself, with subprojects like Agriculture, and Finding the %$%$ Thermostat) is not going well either. Remember that the cost of spending money on the space program (or on the military) isn't just the money - it's that you're diverting a lot of scientists and engineers and regular workers from what they'd otherwise be doing, whether that's better solar power or cancer research or water purification systems or flying cars or more exciting video games. Sometimes there's synergy - dragging all those engineers into the Space Program helped semiconductor solar cell development, and helped make military airplanes more efficient, and therefore civilian airplanes, but it probably cost your cars a few MPGs, increasing the US need for foreign oil. (We did get Tang and freeze-dried ice cream!) And we got GPS and satellite photo systems, which are seriously useful in understanding the planet.
Going into space isn't a Bad Thing, but it's definitely a job for robots for most of the work, and much of the important space research can be done down here, figuring out how to terraform Earth first.
But either place you go to, the most important thing you need to do is get a working ecosystem that can run for a fairly long time without significant inputs from outside, and we can do that research just as well in space (and a lot of it down on Earth as well.) So far we don't know how to take cute little terrariums like the Biosphere and run them at steady-state, and we'll need to do a lot more ecological research before it makes sense to do much human travel past orbit or L5 or whatever.
Sending out robots is a different issue - most of the near-term value of space exploration doesn't need canned monkeys to operate things, and you can get by with much smaller simpler spacecraft if you're not trying to maintain an ecosystem. The issues of working at a time-delayed distance mean that it's really helpful to have somewhat artificially intelligent robots and not just waldoes, but there's not much that requires humans to be up close and personal.
The only people who have desktop computers are either doing specialized work like labs
or else they're people whose job requires working in one place like clerks.
So the servers are going all the time, and there'd be no good way to shut most of them down without inconveniencing a lot of people. On the other hand, servers are a lot more productive, and most of the power waste happens when people's laptops are burning power unnecessarily (e.g. Mozilla's flailing away at some escaped Javascript.)
Some people use monitors at their desks, and those all have the energy-star shutoff features. And the copy machines power down after a while of non-use, but that's not something that affects many people, and if you're the first one to hit the copy machine, you can go get coffee while it warms up.
It's bad enough that users have to wait for their laptops to power up.
Some years, sleep mode works most of the time, and some years it doesn't, depending on what hardware we have, what OS version, and what broken settings the corporate IT department has set this time. My laptop has an unchangeable 10-minute screen locker on it - fine if I'm in the office, really annoying at home, and I can't even change to a different screen saver.
Oh, wait, that was Rock&Roll, wasn't it...
Guess my g-g-g-generation are turning into dinosaurs.
Fundamentally, if the Feds aren't careful enough with details to pay the phone bills on their wiretap, they aren't careful enough with details to be trusted to handle evidence, and they ought to get spanked hard by their Internal Affairs organization.
Back when I was in grad school ~30 years ago, Christofides's algorithm could get you within 3/2 of the optimum distance on graphs where triangle-inequality holds, and it's interesting to see that that's still basically the optimum. (I forget what speed the matching-problem part looks like; a brief Wikipedia scan looks like it's something like N**2*logN or N**2.5? And of course you only run the match on the odd-order vertices in the spanning tree, so that's going to be a lot smaller than the ones in the original set.)
Most of our plots were US maps with state boundaries (which had long strings of continuous end-to-end line segments) plus a map of the user's network in one or more colors. The other main optimization that I did was a version of the background map that left out intermediate points on short line segments, so "A-B-C-D-E" would get compressed into "A-E" if the segments were short enough. It didn't change the map of Colorado much, but made a huge difference with the fractal Virginia/Carolina coastline and similar wiggly areas.
The TSA people freaked briefly when Richard Reid the "Shoe-Bomber" allegedly tried to trash his plane, but they backed off on that quickly enough.
The main reason for shoe removal, other than keeping the sheep scared, was that lots of shoes have metal stiffeners in them, which set off the metal detectors if they're cranked up high, and it was slowing down the lines having to do secondary scans on people when their shoes set off the detectors.
So they started telling people that you should run your shoes through the X-Ray to avoid being delayed at the metal detector. Back when I was flying more often I generally dealt with this by wearing non-metallic shoes - either sneakers, or Tevas instead of Birkenstocks, or some of my hard-sole shoes that didn't have metals.
In many airports since then, they've started simply ordering everybody to take them off, and as usual, they'll lie about "That's always been the rule", or occasionally lie about "Been that way since 9/11/2001". Or they'll lie about "It's national policy, at all airports", when it's not. What *is* true is that TSA agents can order you to do anything they feel like, just because they feel like it, and cause you no end of harassment without any repercussions to themselves, and the employee paychecks are scaled for people who are good at Shouting rather than understanding principles of law and applying them correctly to each individual customer.
You're absolutely Not Helping, and therefore you must be helping the Terrorists, and it's No-Fly Status for you for even suggesting such a thing!
But if checked luggage had laptops in it, you could bet it would get lost a lot more often.
Heating's a silly concern in a data center environment; computers generate far more excess heat, and the problem is getting rid of it all. If you're floating on water, and your local environmental laws permit it, you could probably use the water as part of your cooling system. (Obviously you're not going to run salty seawater or sludgy Bay water into your cooler, but you might drop radiators into it or something.)
No, it's like hosting in a land-based trailer park, only you move it with a tugboat instead of a tractor-trailer.
These ships aren't sailing the high seas ("Yarrrrr! Belay the Starboard Fiber Optic Extension Cord!"). They're docked by a pier in big cities, attached to land by their data cables, and have to deal with a lot of land-lubber laws like environmental regulations and local sales taxes as well as Coast Guard rules about water safety. In some jurisdictions a subpoena might get delivered by Port Authority cops rather than regular city cops, but that's basically a turf issue like whether they're using Longshoreman's Union vs. Teamsters; it's not like they're under Admiralty Law.
The most common outdoor-plant problem we worry about in the telecom industry is "Bubba the Backhoe Driver" (Flooding and earthquakes can be worse, but backhoes are constant problems, especially for local distribution networks.) These guys have to worry about the sequels "Bubba Goes Fishing" and "Ooops, Where's My Anchor?", but for ships that are basically docked next to the pier, you take pretty similar precautions, and as always you build diverse connections that are far enough apart and have enough slack to handle big waves.
Wireless doesn't begin to have enough capacity for a significant data center - fiber's the only realistic choice. You can get up to a few hundred Megabits/second of bandwidth on wireless, compared to hundreds of gigabits on fiber. Also, wireless works better if the antenna's not rocking up and down or rising and falling with the tide. (Also, interceptions's not a problem, because you obviously need to encrypt, and it's not rocket science any more.) What wireless (and satellite) are useful for in data centers is providing an alternate path for management access, so you can monitor and fix problems with your telecom gear. (Here at The Phone Company we've traditionally used satellite - it's really practical if the main telecom gear is having problems, though data centers are more likely to have problems with their computers or data switches just because they have more of them.)
So these guys are going to have similar worries about their connections from the pier to their boats, because some guy named Bubba's going to go fishing, or make a wrong turn in his bass-boat and drop the anchor to slow down, plus the land segment of their fiber feeds is still going to have backhoe risks, and maybe Bubba's going to drop his cigarette while he's fishing and catch the pier on fire...
But if they do it well, they should be able to minimize the risks, keep their cables armored well, and run enough diversity from shore that a single failure won't take them out. It shouldn't be too tough, because they're basically parked in the water rather than out moving around.
But those processors mostly keep burning more and more electricity even though they take less space, so these days the problem is electricity, including per-square-foot density problems and total power demand including cooling, which is why companies like Google have been looking at locating data centers in places where power's cheap.
It's amusing how we keep recycling technical problems. Virtualization has been one of the main buzzwords of the past few years, but it's really just a way to re-invent timesharing, using 2000s microprocessors instead of 1970s minicomputers. A decade and a half ago, if you wanted to locate computers and datacomm gear in a telco office to reduce your communication costs or make your services more reliable, you went through a big detailed study on how much power and cooling you needed, how many square feet, how many phone and data lines, etc. Within a few years the hosting market had evolved enough that we knew that a standardized customer network looked like 19" rack-mounted PCs and Cisco routers, and the power and cooling needs per square foot were pretty much the same for everybody, and it changed a bit with 1U servers but we could still usually stretch the available power. But now? We're back to servers that are increasingly customized and non-standard (disks vs. routers vs. blade servers are much different power densities, etc.)
Domain Tasting really needs to go away, but until it does we'll just have to change our paradigms. (Actually I'm kind of surprised - in the past I've thought there was absolutely no good reason for it to exist, but in my previous paragraph of ranting I appear to have found one....
It's kinda obvious that it's humor, but it still was annoying when I Googled for my name and the only result I got back was "He's Dead, Jim!".
SEOs have a pretty straightforward objective as well - take customers' websites that aren't actually interesting or relevant to humans and lie to the robots so the robots will give the page a high ranking and humans will go look at the customers' pages, triggering their banner ads or deciding that maybe they do want to order some Nigerian Herbal Fake V14grA before going back to the topic they were actually interested in or whatever. It's not like breaking the law, it's just being dishonest.
The rest of it's all implementation details in the Google-Vs-Spammers Arms Race. If Google's algorithms don't handle your pages well, usually you'll get an accidentally low pagerank (and maybe you'll try to fix that), and occasionally you'll get an accidentally high pagerank, and Cutts isn't saying there's anything wrong with either of those. But if you're in the business of exploiting knowledge about Google's algorithms to artificially give your customers much better pageranks than make their pages seem to be much more interesting than they are, you know that that's what you're doing. And if you're ethically challenged about some things, you're probably ethically challenged about other things as well.
Cutts wasn't even talking about click-fraud people who try to crack Google's advertising system's algorithms to generate artificial advertising revenues, though I'm sure Google puts a lot of work into trying to prevent that. He's talking about the kinds of people who build link-farms (to emulate links on that real people put on their web pages pointing to sites they think are interesting) and robo-generate content and put lots of random keywords at the bottom of your pages in very small fonts with white text so it's not visible to the reader and use Stupid HTTP Server Tricks to display different results to Google's and Yahoo's robots than to humans who read the pages, so the Google index says the page is about "Keyword1 Keyword2 Keyword3" but when you read it you get 49 banner ads and an opportunity to order Herbal Fake V14grA and help a corrupt Nigerian official's poor widow get her money out of the country.
Are there other reasons to try to reverse-engineer Google's search algorithms? Sure, the original "404 - Weapons Of Mass Destruction Not Found" and "Miserable Failure" pointing to George Bush's webpage were amusing (though it gets old after a couple of me-too variants, and the originals were amusing because they were technically surprising as well as inherently funny.) And there'll probably be more things like that that get discovered. But you know that that wasn't who Cutts was writing about.
But your Reason 2, SSHd bugs that might be security holes, is the problem this is trying to address. Various deployed-in-the-real-world SSH implementations have had security holes, and crackers and skript kiddies do go hunting for them, and even if your implementation has been patched around the existing holes, you can still get your logfiles cluttered up with scanning events, plus crackers are always trying to scan random ports anyway.
Your Objection 2, that we also have to test this, is correct, but it's relatively simple testing on a relatively simple program that doesn't have any actual powers to grant the attacker except the ability to forward packets to 127.0.0.1:22, as opposed to sshd which lets you login to the host, potentially as root, and has lots more features and therefore lots more potential holes. If it's not buggy, it'll keep 93.3% of the crackers from bothering you once and keep 6.6% of them from bothering you for more than a minute, which makes it a lot harder for them to do successful attacks and cuts down on the junk in your sshd logfiles. (I assume it's got its own logfiles, but you're mostly not going to watch them for more than a week or two.)
DSL's in a bit better shape than cable modems, because cable modems are generally routed, while DSL is still often using ATM at the DSLAM and only getting routed at a concentrator layer, so DSL providers can upgrade to IPv6 without having to change the DSLAMs. But it's still an ugly world out there on the edges.
- About 1% of the SEO job is to make sure that the robots can find your web pages and access the relevant patterns, which is called "RTFM", and is useful for customers who don't have the skills to apply that advice themselves, which is mostly a limited set of web-newbies.
- A somewhat larger part of the SEO job is telling customers how to take not-very-interesting pages and make them more interesting, which is called "editing", and there are customers who are clueless enough to hire an SEO to do it instead of an editor or marketing consultant or other directly skilled person.
- But the bulk of the SEO job is finding current and creative ways to lie to the robots, so the robots will tell the humans that the customer's uninteresting web page is interesting, so the humans will trigger the customer's banner ads or buy their products or fall for their scams or whatever. Some classic techniques include piling lots of popular search keywords onto the page or building link farms that emulate patterns of actual humans linking to pages they find interesting, etc., but they're all variants on lying about the interestingness of the customer's web site.
So is it any surprise that businesses who hire professional liars are often ethically challenged themselves?It's not really an issue of breaking rules - it's arms race in which search engines to find dishonestly constructed uninteresting web pages without accidentally blocking legitimate pages, and SEOs try to find new ways to be dishonest without getting caught. The basic rule is "Don't lie to us about how interesting your page is or we'll rank you really low", and the rest is just implementation details by both sides. The search engines publish some of the details so that people with legitimate content can avoid being mistaken for lying SEO customers and ranked as "boring scum".