... but a compromised virtual machine can still operate a bot and spam the heck out of anybody it pleases, as well as capture any passwords you may type in and mail them back complete with appropriate URLs for your bank site, for as long as you keep the VM session running. Either of these strikes me as a good enough reason to not trust my security wholly to the VM, unless the VM has an *extremely* fine-grained permissions model. And I wouldn't want to have to be the guy who wrote that permissions model.
See, its not just the AdWords (AdSense is for content publishers, AdWords is for advertisers like myself) gives me an additional channel... its that AdWords* gives me *a* channel. I theoretically *could* put a classified advertisement in a magazine devoted to, say, elementary school teaching. And that would cost me hundreds of dollars, without guaranteeing that a single live soul ever saw my website or downloaded my trial. There are plenty of educational publishers which can afford to advertise on paper, but they're the sort that sell at Best Buy and measure their advertising spend in the thousands of dollars.
* A paid channel. I also get a lot of organic search engine traffic, but AdWords was pretty critical during the run-up phase. Hard to get folks to link you if they don't know you exist.
I sell software online. Selling software at Best Buy gets you, perhaps, 40% of every sale, and they won't even think of doing it at the number of units I sell. Unless its to guffaw. Shelf space is limited and projects have to be made on the scales of minor nation states.
On the Internet, startup costs are negligible (I had capital investment of $60), and if you've got an aggregator which has a nation-state scale worth of eyeballs (*cough* Google *cough*) then you can pay them a weeee bit of money to send a sliver of those eyeballs over to you. Transactional costs amount to almost nothing: Paypal takes 4% of every sale. If you count the cost of AdWords, that comes out to 20%, but thats still a third of the traditional retail channel and AdWords scales *down* where retail only scales *up*. You might not think there is that much of a market for a one-screen application that makes reading bingo cards for teachers (www.bingocardcreator.com), but way-down-the-tail made $600 gross, $450 net. Not too terrible for an app which took a man-week to write and, literally, 20 minutes of work in September ("Lost your registration key? No problem, have a new one." "No, thank YOU, Ethel." multiplied by handful of emails).
The other beneficiaries besides me? Google (Adwords), Paypal, and Uncle Sam. They'll get $90, $30, and $lots respectively as a result of September, all for doing zero marginal work: they just let the computer systems/country they established continue to operate, and they get more money.
While I think the trespass is morally wrong and the judge should have left it legally criminal, I can't follow your reasoning here. Suppose I constructively prove P=NP tomorrow, instantly threatening essentially all of modern cryptography. If I call up my bank and say "Hiya, you know that SSL encryption? You're going to want to change that, fast. Why? OK, we'll talk that after I have you NDAed up and some money sitting in my account, because I have literally the most important advance in mathematics in the last 50 years sitting on my PC. Thats worth some serious money to me -- if I'm the first to publish I get the Fields Medal for sure, and thats just for starters.", thats clearly not extortion. I haven't hurt or expressed a plan to hurt the bank yet.
Yep, granted, they'll only know the exact nature of the vulnerability if they either pay me or independently prove P=NP, but that has been true for every day of the last 50 years regardless of what I've done.
"Pay me $250 million dollars or I upload the n*log(n) factoring code to the file sharing networks. Imagine what the Russians could do with that. I'd hate to have a billion dollars an hour running over insecure wires, wouldn't you?", now THATS extortion.
I can't find the crime here which is divorced from the trespass.
Did the NES have interstitial advertising and microdownloads? No. Did NES games get pirated? Yes. Did the SNES have interstitial advertising and microdownloads? No. Did SNES games get pirated. Yes. Did Civilization II require online product activation? No. Did Civ II get pirated? Yes.
The price of a $60 game is too high, the $19.95 game doesn't have as much content as a real game, its insulting to think that I would pay $1 for that content (which I'll happily consume, though). The anti-piracy features are too severe, the door was unlocked so I decided to help myself, hey if you had wanted people to not pirate it you wouldn't have made the protection crackable. I don't want to pay a monthly fee so I run my own private server, if I pay a monthly fee I shouldn't have to pay for a retail box, $13 a month is too much for a video game, $5 a month is too much for a video game, its insulting to think I would pay $2 a month for this "#$", I don't support games which use advertising. I don't support big corporate developers, God this game looks like "#$% compared to GTA or Zelda, why should I pay money for it.
People pirate games because people are amoral and like getting things for free. Everything else is just a post-hoc rationalization.
... I predict some serious mishaps for all involved. The Vomit Comet is a NASA plane which they use to simulate 0G conditions by the simple expedient of taking the plane up really high and then flying it towards the ground, then pulling up and repeating. As I recall the cycle between weightless and "really freaking heavy" takes about 60 seconds, with about half of that time being weightless. Any more and the plane ends up as NASA's 453rd "premature interface of craft and planet". So the surgery would be stopping and starting constantly, and as most surgeries aren't five-minute affairs I can imagine that would be a little irksome.
Lets do some back of the envelope math here, shall we? While it will depend heavily on how well the scene compresses, my digital camera averages about 400kb for a 2 megapixel shot at "pretty decent for mailing home quality" JPG. So that Aussie harbor is probably weighing in at above 300 MBs, and its a static file. This sounds like a job for bittorrent, not for "Hey, I've got a bright idea, lets Slashdot their webpage as the morning rush comes in".
US carrier groups have been pretty underutilized since WWII in terms of their capital cost (the Nimitz cost a couple of billion with a B, and I think she's seen action near Libya once and did some support during the first Gulf War, and thats about it). But the entire purpose of being the biggest guy on the block is that so your fighter aces can grow old and die without ever seeing combat. Every time Communist Russia thought the prospect of universal socialism could be achieved faster by rolling over Western Germany, every time a tinpot dictator thinks "Hmm, starving my people for the last couple of decades has given me enough tanks to crush my neighbor... sounds appealing", every time Kim Jon Quackpot gets tired of eating grass and thinks "Hey I could get some sweet kimchi if I could take a quick vacation in the burning remains of Seoul", they look to the horizon and see a distinct absence of US military ready to kick their ass. And they remember that that could change tomorrow if we had a reason to change it. And so their tanks stay parked collecting rust while they scavenge parts to bring a couple out to the parade ground.
Of course, some folks and even some nation-states occasionally decide "Eh, the Americans were probably kidding about actually using that whole military machine thing". Hiya, Saddam, tell me: how did that invasion of Kuwait go for you again?
"All sorts of development can be funded with a Software Tax:
Suppose everyone who buys a computer has to pay x percent of the price as a software tax. The government gives this to an agency like the NSF to spend on software development.
But if the computer buyer makes a donation to software development himself, he can take a credit against the tax. He can donate to the project of his own choosing--often, chosen because he hopes to use the results when it is done. He can take a credit for any amount of donation up to the total tax he had to pay.
The total tax rate could be decided by a vote of the payers of the tax, weighted according to the amount they will be taxed on."
This is bordering on insanity. It means computers will be overpriced, you'll have to keep your old machine around for longer so you don't sink more money into a tax that doesn't give you any marginal benefits, the software development budget for the *entire world* will be driven by American business users who purchase the majority (in terms of dollar amount) of new PCs, a gigantic transnational boondoggle of a tax agency would be coordinating all paid software development from here to Timbuktu, a police state to stamp out software-for-money outside of the tax system, and the most important skill a programmer could have would be the ability to write a grant proposal (if you've had any connection to how money gets distributed in the NSF, you know that scientific ability is but one small portion of what decides who gets the dough).
Ah, but lets stick to the positive predictions in the same document rather than his suggestions for the future. Was Stallman batting 100% when he predicted that the GNU Hurd would be working by the mid-90s?
Apparently the Department of Homeland Security failed to realized that they just put British bluegills in charge of our national security. (No red-blooded American bluegill would refer to their personal pondscum as a "solicitor" -- sharks are "lawyers" here, except when they're sharks)
Ahh well, could have been worse... at least when the going gets tough I'd trust the British with my back. But if DHS' next bright idea is poison-sensing frogs, well, I'm marching on Washington.
... sometimes it has a tendency to get to your head. You didn't get your EE degree for hammering some nails to string RS-232C, any more than a doctor gets their degree to treat a common cold in a healthy 8-year old. In the same fashion, I didn't get my CS degree to write Swing UIs. Did our educations tangentially cover these things? Yep, they did, but they're a) not our core competencies and b) can be done by someone who is literate and capable of following a simple single sheet of instructions.
Why are our degrees important? Well, one thing they let us do is properly identify edge cases. A self taught programmer implementing a Swing UI with a sorted combobox might decide to use a bubblesort on it, which would work fine through testing right until it got to a customer who put a couple hundred items in it, when the application would just start to unexpectedly hang. The doctor hopefully catches that 1 kid out of 10,000 who doesn't actually have the cold and needs treatment within the next 48 hours to save his life. And you, as an electrical engineer, identify when impedence would be an issue.
Ah, but here's the rub: edge cases are edge cases for a reason, and purported experts who cry wolf regarding the edge cases get ignored by a public which sees solutions which work perfectly for 2.5% of the price. And, as several folks have pointed out, you're crying wolf here. The reason the solution appears to work isn't because the grandparent was ignorant of impedence, its because its just physically impossible for that to be a problem for that device.
Or, as I learned in Engineering school (in tech writing, of all places): "You're going to graduate with a degree from one of the best schools in the country, and you'll be working your first job with tech-school grads who have 15 years of experience, and in your first two weeks one of them is going to say something you learned in school is wrong. You might disagree, perhaps vehemently. But before you voice your disagreement, figure out exactly why he thinks his way will work, because odds are it will. Remember: he's worked there for 15 years and hasn't blown it yet, or he wouldn't still be there."
... didn't come out of YOUR pocket. Seriously, I went to a school populated by far too many rich kids where the cost per year was about $40,000, many kids had a monthly wire from home for $1,000 for "walking around money", and one student got $9k of Neiman-Marcus furniture for an apartment she lived in for a whole year. And when a particular department charged $5/semester for copy fees for the daily worksheets there were howls of protest. That, after all, competes with beer money, in a way tuition charged to scholarships/trust fund/student loans do not.
>> It's like any prohibition: criminalize the behavior and you get even more social dislocation as a result. Then, we're all victims.
The solution is to mandate the use of Free Software everywhere. >>
Well thats a pretty stunning juxtaposition. If the existence of laws creates crime, won't criminalizing closed-source software make criminals out of closed-source software developers, causing even more social dislocation among them and their customers? I can see it now: "Pst, buddy, you need a productivity suite? I got a holo-certified copy of Office 2007 right here. This "#$& is real, holmes -- usable UI, attractive ribbon interface, backwards compatible with all your documents, contains actual documentation, and a comes complete with a toll-free number for tech support. I just gotta ask you -- you ain't a GPLnarc or nothing, right?"
"Open up, this is the police!"
"Aww #$%", its the GPLaw. Quick man, hide that "#$" under a Knoppix CD and pretend we were discussing something innocuous, like crack."
1) Its not environmentally friendly. The paper is going to have to be treated with a witches brew of chemicals, and most of it will not end up being "recycled" because paper rarely survives contact with the enemy (users). The energy cost to produce special paper at boutique sizes (regular paper gets produced on billion dollar machines at outputs you wouldn't believe if I told you, so you can average your costs, including energy, over the whole production run) is probably going to be worse than the energy cost of recycling regular "use it once and then pulp it" $3 a ream paper.
2) Its going to cost a heck of a lot more than basic paper products, which mean for the sort of transient documents that they're contemplating using it on, like the memo that won't mean anything in 24 hours, nobody will want to use it. People are willing to pay serious money for paper (I used to work for an office supply company -- $40 a ream for resume paper, anyone?), but thats *specifically* for paper that marks a very special occasion and has to either a) stick out from a stack of undifferentiated paper, like a resume or b) last for a good deal of time without wearing, like a diploma or library copy of a thesis. For daily use they will go somewhere else if you charge a premium of 10 cents a ream. (One ream is 500 sheets.)
3) Its not secure, and thats going to give people fits. When you shred/pulp a paper, people know that that data is (probably) not coming back to haunt them. Most companies are not going to trust that somebody won't be able to raise the previous version of the data with lemon juice or some other innovative chemical/physical inspection. For compliance-intensive industries (which seems to be all of them, nowadays), the whole "Hmm, that sheet of paper Bob is taking home with him to read on the bus could have customer data on it, we're just not sure..." is a nightmare. The government will expel building materials from their hindquarters before using this stuff.
This is a product which purports to solve a problem that does not exist. Regular office paper cheap, comparitively environmentally friendly, and secure. This product is 0 for 3.
Maybe folks were giving you +1 for "If you have a national nuclear R&D budget to spend, you too can afford a PS3?"
Other government bodies that could buy a PS3:
NASA, but they'd crash it into something and want a new one.
The IRS, but it would depreciate to 20% of its value the day they bought it, unless they sold it on eBay in case its fair value would be $10,000 regardless of the auction final price.
The Marines, except they play Wii, because Marines will only touch a console made for Real Men (TM).
The Navy, because their new supercarrier needs more ballast.
FEMA, because they haven't been involved in a major cluster"#$" recently and are feeling left out.
Nope, things don't scale linearly, most especially not when you're talking government contracting. For comparison, Red Storm at Sandia National Labs cost $90 million. http://www.techcommjournal.org/PDFSVol3No3/16topte nTC11.pdf Japan's Earth Simulator was about a quarter billion.
Slashdot Mirror
... but a compromised virtual machine can still operate a bot and spam the heck out of anybody it pleases, as well as capture any passwords you may type in and mail them back complete with appropriate URLs for your bank site, for as long as you keep the VM session running. Either of these strikes me as a good enough reason to not trust my security wholly to the VM, unless the VM has an *extremely* fine-grained permissions model. And I wouldn't want to have to be the guy who wrote that permissions model.
See, its not just the AdWords (AdSense is for content publishers, AdWords is for advertisers like myself) gives me an additional channel... its that AdWords* gives me *a* channel. I theoretically *could* put a classified advertisement in a magazine devoted to, say, elementary school teaching. And that would cost me hundreds of dollars, without guaranteeing that a single live soul ever saw my website or downloaded my trial. There are plenty of educational publishers which can afford to advertise on paper, but they're the sort that sell at Best Buy and measure their advertising spend in the thousands of dollars.
* A paid channel. I also get a lot of organic search engine traffic, but AdWords was pretty critical during the run-up phase. Hard to get folks to link you if they don't know you exist.
I sell software online. Selling software at Best Buy gets you, perhaps, 40% of every sale, and they won't even think of doing it at the number of units I sell. Unless its to guffaw. Shelf space is limited and projects have to be made on the scales of minor nation states.
On the Internet, startup costs are negligible (I had capital investment of $60), and if you've got an aggregator which has a nation-state scale worth of eyeballs (*cough* Google *cough*) then you can pay them a weeee bit of money to send a sliver of those eyeballs over to you. Transactional costs amount to almost nothing: Paypal takes 4% of every sale. If you count the cost of AdWords, that comes out to 20%, but thats still a third of the traditional retail channel and AdWords scales *down* where retail only scales *up*. You might not think there is that much of a market for a one-screen application that makes reading bingo cards for teachers (www.bingocardcreator.com), but way-down-the-tail made $600 gross, $450 net. Not too terrible for an app which took a man-week to write and, literally, 20 minutes of work in September ("Lost your registration key? No problem, have a new one." "No, thank YOU, Ethel." multiplied by handful of emails).
The other beneficiaries besides me? Google (Adwords), Paypal, and Uncle Sam. They'll get $90, $30, and $lots respectively as a result of September, all for doing zero marginal work: they just let the computer systems/country they established continue to operate, and they get more money.
"Crank up the organ, monkeys" Does this sound dirty to anyone else?
While I think the trespass is morally wrong and the judge should have left it legally criminal, I can't follow your reasoning here. Suppose I constructively prove P=NP tomorrow, instantly threatening essentially all of modern cryptography. If I call up my bank and say "Hiya, you know that SSL encryption? You're going to want to change that, fast. Why? OK, we'll talk that after I have you NDAed up and some money sitting in my account, because I have literally the most important advance in mathematics in the last 50 years sitting on my PC. Thats worth some serious money to me -- if I'm the first to publish I get the Fields Medal for sure, and thats just for starters.", thats clearly not extortion. I haven't hurt or expressed a plan to hurt the bank yet.
Yep, granted, they'll only know the exact nature of the vulnerability if they either pay me or independently prove P=NP, but that has been true for every day of the last 50 years regardless of what I've done.
"Pay me $250 million dollars or I upload the n*log(n) factoring code to the file sharing networks. Imagine what the Russians could do with that. I'd hate to have a billion dollars an hour running over insecure wires, wouldn't you?", now THATS extortion.
I can't find the crime here which is divorced from the trespass.
Did the NES have interstitial advertising and microdownloads? No. Did NES games get pirated? Yes. Did the SNES have interstitial advertising and microdownloads? No. Did SNES games get pirated. Yes. Did Civilization II require online product activation? No. Did Civ II get pirated? Yes.
The price of a $60 game is too high, the $19.95 game doesn't have as much content as a real game, its insulting to think that I would pay $1 for that content (which I'll happily consume, though). The anti-piracy features are too severe, the door was unlocked so I decided to help myself, hey if you had wanted people to not pirate it you wouldn't have made the protection crackable. I don't want to pay a monthly fee so I run my own private server, if I pay a monthly fee I shouldn't have to pay for a retail box, $13 a month is too much for a video game, $5 a month is too much for a video game, its insulting to think I would pay $2 a month for this "#$", I don't support games which use advertising. I don't support big corporate developers, God this game looks like "#$% compared to GTA or Zelda, why should I pay money for it.
People pirate games because people are amoral and like getting things for free. Everything else is just a post-hoc rationalization.
... I predict some serious mishaps for all involved. The Vomit Comet is a NASA plane which they use to simulate 0G conditions by the simple expedient of taking the plane up really high and then flying it towards the ground, then pulling up and repeating. As I recall the cycle between weightless and "really freaking heavy" takes about 60 seconds, with about half of that time being weightless. Any more and the plane ends up as NASA's 453rd "premature interface of craft and planet". So the surgery would be stopping and starting constantly, and as most surgeries aren't five-minute affairs I can imagine that would be a little irksome.
It outputs "Just another perl hacker", unless its Tuesday. You don't want to know what happens on Tuesday.
Lets do some back of the envelope math here, shall we? While it will depend heavily on how well the scene compresses, my digital camera averages about 400kb for a 2 megapixel shot at "pretty decent for mailing home quality" JPG. So that Aussie harbor is probably weighing in at above 300 MBs, and its a static file. This sounds like a job for bittorrent, not for "Hey, I've got a bright idea, lets Slashdot their webpage as the morning rush comes in".
If the had wanted to break *every* rule in the book, NASA would have *missed* the asteroid for a change.
US carrier groups have been pretty underutilized since WWII in terms of their capital cost (the Nimitz cost a couple of billion with a B, and I think she's seen action near Libya once and did some support during the first Gulf War, and thats about it). But the entire purpose of being the biggest guy on the block is that so your fighter aces can grow old and die without ever seeing combat. Every time Communist Russia thought the prospect of universal socialism could be achieved faster by rolling over Western Germany, every time a tinpot dictator thinks "Hmm, starving my people for the last couple of decades has given me enough tanks to crush my neighbor... sounds appealing", every time Kim Jon Quackpot gets tired of eating grass and thinks "Hey I could get some sweet kimchi if I could take a quick vacation in the burning remains of Seoul", they look to the horizon and see a distinct absence of US military ready to kick their ass. And they remember that that could change tomorrow if we had a reason to change it. And so their tanks stay parked collecting rust while they scavenge parts to bring a couple out to the parade ground.
Of course, some folks and even some nation-states occasionally decide "Eh, the Americans were probably kidding about actually using that whole military machine thing". Hiya, Saddam, tell me: how did that invasion of Kuwait go for you again?
Lets pull out the GNU Manifesto, shall we?
"All sorts of development can be funded with a Software Tax:
Suppose everyone who buys a computer has to pay x percent of the price as a software tax. The government gives this to an agency like the NSF to spend on software development.
But if the computer buyer makes a donation to software development himself, he can take a credit against the tax. He can donate to the project of his own choosing--often, chosen because he hopes to use the results when it is done. He can take a credit for any amount of donation up to the total tax he had to pay.
The total tax rate could be decided by a vote of the payers of the tax, weighted according to the amount they will be taxed on."
This is bordering on insanity. It means computers will be overpriced, you'll have to keep your old machine around for longer so you don't sink more money into a tax that doesn't give you any marginal benefits, the software development budget for the *entire world* will be driven by American business users who purchase the majority (in terms of dollar amount) of new PCs, a gigantic transnational boondoggle of a tax agency would be coordinating all paid software development from here to Timbuktu, a police state to stamp out software-for-money outside of the tax system, and the most important skill a programmer could have would be the ability to write a grant proposal (if you've had any connection to how money gets distributed in the NSF, you know that scientific ability is but one small portion of what decides who gets the dough).
Ah, but lets stick to the positive predictions in the same document rather than his suggestions for the future. Was Stallman batting 100% when he predicted that the GNU Hurd would be working by the mid-90s?
Apparently the Department of Homeland Security failed to realized that they just put British bluegills in charge of our national security. (No red-blooded American bluegill would refer to their personal pondscum as a "solicitor" -- sharks are "lawyers" here, except when they're sharks) Ahh well, could have been worse... at least when the going gets tough I'd trust the British with my back. But if DHS' next bright idea is poison-sensing frogs, well, I'm marching on Washington.
... sometimes it has a tendency to get to your head. You didn't get your EE degree for hammering some nails to string RS-232C, any more than a doctor gets their degree to treat a common cold in a healthy 8-year old. In the same fashion, I didn't get my CS degree to write Swing UIs. Did our educations tangentially cover these things? Yep, they did, but they're a) not our core competencies and b) can be done by someone who is literate and capable of following a simple single sheet of instructions.
Why are our degrees important? Well, one thing they let us do is properly identify edge cases. A self taught programmer implementing a Swing UI with a sorted combobox might decide to use a bubblesort on it, which would work fine through testing right until it got to a customer who put a couple hundred items in it, when the application would just start to unexpectedly hang. The doctor hopefully catches that 1 kid out of 10,000 who doesn't actually have the cold and needs treatment within the next 48 hours to save his life. And you, as an electrical engineer, identify when impedence would be an issue.
Ah, but here's the rub: edge cases are edge cases for a reason, and purported experts who cry wolf regarding the edge cases get ignored by a public which sees solutions which work perfectly for 2.5% of the price. And, as several folks have pointed out, you're crying wolf here. The reason the solution appears to work isn't because the grandparent was ignorant of impedence, its because its just physically impossible for that to be a problem for that device.
Or, as I learned in Engineering school (in tech writing, of all places): "You're going to graduate with a degree from one of the best schools in the country, and you'll be working your first job with tech-school grads who have 15 years of experience, and in your first two weeks one of them is going to say something you learned in school is wrong. You might disagree, perhaps vehemently. But before you voice your disagreement, figure out exactly why he thinks his way will work, because odds are it will. Remember: he's worked there for 15 years and hasn't blown it yet, or he wouldn't still be there."
I'll drink to that! 'course, I'll drink to anything! Yarr, another bottle of rum!
Hangovers be something that happen to landlubbers! Pass me the rum!
OK, so they were talking about a chili-hamburger eating contest, but I think the quote aptly describes working at EA.
... didn't come out of YOUR pocket. Seriously, I went to a school populated by far too many rich kids where the cost per year was about $40,000, many kids had a monthly wire from home for $1,000 for "walking around money", and one student got $9k of Neiman-Marcus furniture for an apartment she lived in for a whole year. And when a particular department charged $5/semester for copy fees for the daily worksheets there were howls of protest. That, after all, competes with beer money, in a way tuition charged to scholarships/trust fund/student loans do not.
"We were going to pirate it, but couldn't figure out how."
If you're going to write cyberpunk about cops inforcing the GPL you'd have to call them pengs instead of pigs.
"Awk, man, its the pengs! We're so fcuk'ed."
>>
It's like any prohibition: criminalize the behavior and you get even more social dislocation as a result. Then, we're all victims.
The solution is to mandate the use of Free Software everywhere.
>>
Well thats a pretty stunning juxtaposition. If the existence of laws creates crime, won't criminalizing closed-source software make criminals out of closed-source software developers, causing even more social dislocation among them and their customers? I can see it now: "Pst, buddy, you need a productivity suite? I got a holo-certified copy of Office 2007 right here. This "#$& is real, holmes -- usable UI, attractive ribbon interface, backwards compatible with all your documents, contains actual documentation, and a comes complete with a toll-free number for tech support. I just gotta ask you -- you ain't a GPLnarc or nothing, right?"
"Open up, this is the police!"
"Aww #$%", its the GPLaw. Quick man, hide that "#$" under a Knoppix CD and pretend we were discussing something innocuous, like crack."
1) Its not environmentally friendly. The paper is going to have to be treated with a witches brew of chemicals, and most of it will not end up being "recycled" because paper rarely survives contact with the enemy (users). The energy cost to produce special paper at boutique sizes (regular paper gets produced on billion dollar machines at outputs you wouldn't believe if I told you, so you can average your costs, including energy, over the whole production run) is probably going to be worse than the energy cost of recycling regular "use it once and then pulp it" $3 a ream paper.
2) Its going to cost a heck of a lot more than basic paper products, which mean for the sort of transient documents that they're contemplating using it on, like the memo that won't mean anything in 24 hours, nobody will want to use it. People are willing to pay serious money for paper (I used to work for an office supply company -- $40 a ream for resume paper, anyone?), but thats *specifically* for paper that marks a very special occasion and has to either a) stick out from a stack of undifferentiated paper, like a resume or b) last for a good deal of time without wearing, like a diploma or library copy of a thesis. For daily use they will go somewhere else if you charge a premium of 10 cents a ream. (One ream is 500 sheets.)
3) Its not secure, and thats going to give people fits. When you shred/pulp a paper, people know that that data is (probably) not coming back to haunt them. Most companies are not going to trust that somebody won't be able to raise the previous version of the data with lemon juice or some other innovative chemical/physical inspection. For compliance-intensive industries (which seems to be all of them, nowadays), the whole "Hmm, that sheet of paper Bob is taking home with him to read on the bus could have customer data on it, we're just not sure..." is a nightmare. The government will expel building materials from their hindquarters before using this stuff.
This is a product which purports to solve a problem that does not exist. Regular office paper cheap, comparitively environmentally friendly, and secure. This product is 0 for 3.
Maybe folks were giving you +1 for "If you have a national nuclear R&D budget to spend, you too can afford a PS3?"
Other government bodies that could buy a PS3:
NASA, but they'd crash it into something and want a new one.
The IRS, but it would depreciate to 20% of its value the day they bought it, unless they sold it on eBay in case its fair value would be $10,000 regardless of the auction final price.
The Marines, except they play Wii, because Marines will only touch a console made for Real Men (TM).
The Navy, because their new supercarrier needs more ballast.
FEMA, because they haven't been involved in a major cluster"#$" recently and are feeling left out.
... would have as much computing power as my wristwatch, give or take.
Hah, hah, hah.
e nTC11.pdf Japan's Earth Simulator was about a quarter billion.
Nope, things don't scale linearly, most especially not when you're talking government contracting. For comparison, Red Storm at Sandia National Labs cost $90 million. http://www.techcommjournal.org/PDFSVol3No3/16topt