If the graph is a straight line with the value $0 when nobody else installs anti-virus software, and $10 when everybody else installs anti-virus software, then each additional user installing anti-virus software creates an additional benefit to me of 1/100,000th of a penny (so 1/100,000th of a penny, times 100 million, comes out to $10).
I have four living grandparents non of which own or use a computer much less the internet. While you may claim that it benefits them in some way, they don't give a damn. I think you have a good argument but why not tax internet connections from ISPs instead? You know, like there are home owner taxes there could be internet users taxes that tax specific people. Sure, now you're paying $12.50 instead of $10.00 but at least my retired grandfather isn't paying for your Slashdot habit.
I'm certain there are people my age who are working yet chose not to have internet and that is their right and I do not think they should be paying for our virus problems.
It's a lot less cost-effective to go tomb raiding than to make your own fakes, especially since selling fake artifacts isn't really illegal.
May not be illegal but certainly misrepresentation is a thorn in eBay's side.
The auction depicted in the article reads "100% Guaranteed Authentic" and:
Origin: North Coast Peru
Culture: Moche
Culture Date: 50 A.D. to 750 A.D. Approx.
Notice how they said "culture date" and not actual date of the mask. The phrase "Pre-Columbian" is as misleading as "100% Guaranteed Authentic" and I think I would have a problem if I purchased this as it is a pretty misleading posting.
Setting: The older boys are playing outside with a ball and the younger boy, Amazon, approaches them... Microsoft: Well well well, if it isn't Amazon. Heard you finally got an e-book patent. Sony: Oh god, that is so 1998. Did your mommy get you that patent or did your dead beat dad finally do something for you? Amazon: Leave me alone guys, my Kindle is really popular. IBM: *snort* Yeah, don't remind us. You're the only one stupid enough to manufacture a million little lawsuits without a freaking patent to back it up. You probably don't even have a patent warchest. Hell, even the loser companies like Discovery cable TV network have e-book patents. Discovery cable TV network: Ha! Yeah, you're even more of a loser than me! More loser than sharkweek, more loser than sharkweek, more loser than... Amazon: Cut it out, guys, maybe you haven't heard but I own the one click patent... Microsoft: Aw Christ, here we go again. The one trick pony decides it's time to lord about and hang that piece of contested trash over our heads. I'm sick of it. Probably wouldn't even hold up in court. Amazon: Try it, tough guy. *MySpace pulls up in a brand new NewsCorp convertible* MySpace: Hey, guys, got my dad's mustang for the weekend, wanna go hawk eggs at Facebook's house? *everyone starts to pile into the vehicle* MySpace: Oh, not you, Amazon, I'm not interested in being seen with such a patentless loser. I mean, that kinda shit gets you defriended pretty fast these days... probably even sued. *the gang hi fives MySpace as they drive off leaving Amazon alone*
Setting: press conference room. Shuttleworth is standing behind a podium with disheveled hair and sweat stains spreading underneath his arms. Reporters sit in chairs before him. Reporter A: So... Ubuntu is trying to... "be" Windows? Shuttleworth: Ok, for the last time, I am going to go over this very very slowly. *Shuttleworth writes Ubuntu and Windows on the chalkboard and puts a massive "does not equal" sign in between them.* Shuttleworth: Ubuntu cannot and will not ever "be" Windows. I've been over this for the past two hours, can we move away from Windows/Ubuntu comparisons here? Reporter B: But you want to be a widely used operating system? Shuttleworth: That is correct. Reporter B: And Windows is the most widely user operating system? Shuttleworth: Also correct. Reporter B:... so you want to be Windows? *Shuttleworth lets out a long drawn-out sigh, massages his forehead and takes a drink from his glass of water* Shuttleworth: *holds up two pieces of fruit* In my left hand I hold an apple. In my right hand I hold an orange. Although both are round, the two taste different and have different colors and subtle shapes... Reporter C: Hold on, an "Apple"? I'm not following you, are you saying you're trying to "be" OS X? Shuttleworth: This press conference is over!
On the Shoulders of Giants was a book I picked up on the cheap... a weighty tome assembled by Stephen Hawking of classic books of science (some of which you listed).
I think I got the hardcover for ~$8 at a used bookstore. Amazon seems to indicate it's not available on the kindle but here's what's in it:
1. Nicolaus Copernicus "On the Revolutions of [the] Heavenly Spheres" (1543)
2. Galileo Galilei "Dialogues [or Discourses and Mathematical Demonstrations] Concerning Two [New] Sciences" (1638)
3. Johannes Kepler Book Five of "Harmonies of the World" (1618)
4. Sir Isaac Newton "The Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy" (1687)
5. Albert Einstein "The Principles of Relativity: A Collection of Original Papers on the Special Theory of Relativity" (1922)
No one cares about a new search engine. Really, Google suits all my needs.
I would claim that's a dangerous mentality. I was using Metacrawler until Google came along. Even though Google is included in Metacrawler, its simplicity and speed won me over. Is that to say no one can compete with Google? Not at all.
I used to dig holes with my hands which was painful and time consuming. When it became clear this wouldn't work, I discovered a spade did the job much better. And I used it for everything. Though one day I was putting up fences and lamented the width of my spade's blade... the posts weren't sitting firmly. A man offered to lend me his post hole digger which did that specific task better. No, I wasn't using the post hole digger to dig a trench for a sewage line but adding it to my collection of tools made me more effective at my tasks--so long as I used it for what it was best at.
The hype machine has worked, I will try out Wolfram Alpha and see if it is better than Google or can replace some of the capabilities I use Google to accomplish.
While you may claim it prevents the self-fulfilling "tipping point" of everyone switching to it because everyone else is using it, I have no complaints with Microsoft and Apple thinking that they have nothing to worry about from Linux until it's too late. What do big dogs do when small dogs start to threaten their dominance? They try to kill them. I actually prefer the "slowly but surely until it's too late" scenario.
The phrasing "gone missing" makes him sound like he's from somewhere in the United Kingdom...
Yes, but the phrase "Now I hear tell" indicates Virginia! What a conundrum! This case will never be cracked! The full note text for those too lazy to click through wikileaks:
ATTENTION VIRGINIA
I have your shit! In *my* possession, right now, are 8,257,378 patient records and a total of 35,548,087 prescriptions. Also, I made an encrypted backup and deleted the original. Unfortunately for Virginia, their backups seem to have gone missing, too. Uhoh:(
For $10 million, I will gladly send along the password. You have 7 days to decide. If by the end of 7 days, you decide not to pony up, I'll go ahead and put this baby out on the market and accept the highest bid. Now I don't know what all this shit is worth or who would pay for it, but I'm bettin' someone will. Hell, if I can't move the prescription data at the very least I can find a buyer for the personal data (name,age,address,social security #, driver's license #).
Now I hear tell the Fucking Bunch of Idiots ain't fond of payin out, but I suggest that policy be turned right the fuck around. When you boys get your act together, drop me a line at hackingforprofit@yahoo.com and we can discuss the details such as account number, etc.
as many others type this in at the same time - but it sounds like it pretty much runs like all other netbooks - regardless of the OS.
I agree except for one quote:
Once I had loaded Microsoft Office 2007 the 1GB of RAM became insufficient and the computer started page faulting.
I don't know if 1GB of RAM should be too little for an OS and MS Word. I will say that my 5 year old laptop has no problem running Office 2000 on Windows XP... with 512MB of very very slow ram. The same laptop has no problems running a simplified Linux with Open Office either. I say "simplified" because, yes, the default Ubuntu graphics shitfest causes it to be a bit unstable at times.
I'm not sure which piece of the equation is making a glorified word processing program page fault on 1GB of RAM but I think that's a bit ridiculous.
Aw, that's a shame. Where's the book with the story of young Gogol who starts in his garage trying to find a single sacred shard to save his father, Sir Adword, so the kingdom can prosper again. It lies somewhere in the several million other shards across many distant lands. There is only one way to identify the shard. He must first discover the fastest path to a land that may or may not have it and alert all the other lands if he finds it...
I would have said murder but I'm not interested in a hardware flame war. I mean, I know Fujitsu and some lesser known companies are using it but I'm not sure in what capacity. Is this the end of SPARC?
Can any hardware experts comment on whether or not this is the end of this architecture? Or does it have some niche market/capability like PowerPC?
I guess OS support could have been a cue that it was on the way out but is there any reason to be concerned that it's apparently done?
And all this time I was almost certain that it was based on sound scientific research proving that 160 characters was the maximum amount of text a cell phone user could read before completely losing interest.
The real story behind all this is that the terrorists weren't using sophisticated methods to avoid detection or monitoring â" which tells us just how crappy SIGINT really is right now. If the NSA needs to wiretap the whole of the US because they can't break into a Hotmail account, you know they've got problems.
No, no I don't know that they have problems. You have presented little to no proof they have problems. So your suggestion is that they not only wiretap the whole US but also break into every e-mail account they suspect of terrorist activity?
Yes, sometimes the simplest precautions can thwart the greatest and most expensive intelligence gathering equipment and teams. You have to live with that. I am not defending their actions to wiretap all or even part of the United States but, please, tell us how they were supposed to know that this was the Hotmail account they wanted to crack without doing anything illegal to get this information. I mean, hindsight is 20/20 but you apparently have some gift so tell us how you would have known which e-mail account to crack into. Boy, it sure must be easy to criticize a case when you know just enough details to make you a genius investigator.
I guess I didn't expect to find the kind of stupidity on the front page of Slashdot complaining that the National Security Agency's civilian e-mail surveillance isn't up to snuff while sneaking in a jab about their phone surveillance being too pervasive.
Well, that's unfortunate but with the massive failure of Virtual Case File (and at extreme taxpayer expense), you can understand why you have to mail to every field office.
In fact most of my FOIA requests have been with the FBI. To date, I've filed 57 requests with them. Of these, 8 have resulted in documents, 18 were "no records"...
I would consider your story a success story. It seems you don't but you recieved what documents they could provide to you.
Here's my own anecdotal worthless history of FOIA. I was a junior in high school and was dissatisfied with lunch prices of Aramark (the same people who rape you at arenas and stadia) in our cafeteria. Every month they would systematically increase prices on all products by five or ten cents and it got to be ridiculous not long after. Then they "locked down" the campus so we couldn't leave for lunch. Which really really pissed me off. Yes I could have brought my own lunch but I didn't really like doing that.
So I asked my friend to ask his dad (lawyer) for a template FOIA and filled it out with three other kids. We signed our names requesting the public high school release all details on their contract with Aramark. Instead, they brought us into an office room and gave us everything. I think that was an attempt to dissuade us but instead we were there late into the night. We had records on everything. What ever teacher was paid, what every contract had been made with an external business, everything. So we looked into the lunch provider history. The school had made some sort of several year contract with Aramark (not uncommon I guess) but that made them the only purchasable food.
The rest of the story is pretty offtopic. But I found that to be a highly successful and satisfying use of the FOIA on the local level. I'm sorry Federal cases don't sound as profitable and I don't mean to sound naive but it is the Federal Government. You have to expect bullshit bureaucracy there--I'm sure field offices requesting documents from other field office experience the same problems.
'We won't be actually selling [Windows 7] a day before the 23rd October.'
I hate to break it to you but that merely means the earliest possible date they could get Windows 7 is October 23rd. I'll bet that if everything goes on track perfectly according to schedule with the release candidate from now until October 23rd, that will be the release date. I'm going to bet--like with 90% of multi-million lines of code projects--that there will be at least some slipping in the schedule.
It's simply too far out there to be a solid date. I'm not sold, I feel this is a good hint but still just speculation. Vendors asked Microsoft when the earliest possible date is and they mistakenly relayed that to customers setting an expectation for their product.
... (And yes, apparently the product in that particular case was for cybersex -- did you have to ask?)...
Wow! They've productized cybersex? I thought it was a service! Is it over-the-counter yet? Does it come in a gel or powder that I apply to my genitals? I have so many questions on how it works. Can I get it delivered to my house discretely? Brilliant move but the physics are still a little confusing to me.
<Ray Kurzweil> Oh well, it'll just be a few more years before they develop stem cells to adjust the effects of lead on the human body. Singularity, here we come! </Ray Kurzweil>
Could you approach Google and ask them to license their ideas on server and data 'pod' technology for your sharded databases? I'm not saying build the whole thing like this but with $500 million, you could probably have a large section to search and sharded databases that mimics Google. I don't think there's anything wrong with following the leader in that department. This probably isn't the best solution for relational databases so I would think another architecture would be in place for your MySQL and Postgres traditional database layouts. And that would be just huge centralized servers running virtualized instances of Linux with MySQL or Postgres.
Slashdot Mirror
If the graph is a straight line with the value $0 when nobody else installs anti-virus software, and $10 when everybody else installs anti-virus software, then each additional user installing anti-virus software creates an additional benefit to me of 1/100,000th of a penny (so 1/100,000th of a penny, times 100 million, comes out to $10).
I have four living grandparents non of which own or use a computer much less the internet. While you may claim that it benefits them in some way, they don't give a damn. I think you have a good argument but why not tax internet connections from ISPs instead? You know, like there are home owner taxes there could be internet users taxes that tax specific people. Sure, now you're paying $12.50 instead of $10.00 but at least my retired grandfather isn't paying for your Slashdot habit.
I'm certain there are people my age who are working yet chose not to have internet and that is their right and I do not think they should be paying for our virus problems.
It's a lot less cost-effective to go tomb raiding than to make your own fakes, especially since selling fake artifacts isn't really illegal.
May not be illegal but certainly misrepresentation is a thorn in eBay's side.
The auction depicted in the article reads "100% Guaranteed Authentic" and:
Origin: North Coast Peru
Culture: Moche
Culture Date: 50 A.D. to 750 A.D. Approx.
Notice how they said "culture date" and not actual date of the mask. The phrase "Pre-Columbian" is as misleading as "100% Guaranteed Authentic" and I think I would have a problem if I purchased this as it is a pretty misleading posting.
Bill Would Declare Your Blog a Weapon
Sweet, the right to a blog would be protected by both the first and second amendments!
Setting: The older boys are playing outside with a ball and the younger boy, Amazon, approaches them ... ... ... ... probably even sued.
Microsoft: Well well well, if it isn't Amazon. Heard you finally got an e-book patent.
Sony: Oh god, that is so 1998. Did your mommy get you that patent or did your dead beat dad finally do something for you?
Amazon: Leave me alone guys, my Kindle is really popular.
IBM: *snort* Yeah, don't remind us. You're the only one stupid enough to manufacture a million little lawsuits without a freaking patent to back it up. You probably don't even have a patent warchest. Hell, even the loser companies like Discovery cable TV network have e-book patents.
Discovery cable TV network: Ha! Yeah, you're even more of a loser than me! More loser than sharkweek, more loser than sharkweek, more loser than
Amazon: Cut it out, guys, maybe you haven't heard but I own the one click patent
Microsoft: Aw Christ, here we go again. The one trick pony decides it's time to lord about and hang that piece of contested trash over our heads. I'm sick of it. Probably wouldn't even hold up in court.
Amazon: Try it, tough guy.
*MySpace pulls up in a brand new NewsCorp convertible*
MySpace: Hey, guys, got my dad's mustang for the weekend, wanna go hawk eggs at Facebook's house?
*everyone starts to pile into the vehicle*
MySpace: Oh, not you, Amazon, I'm not interested in being seen with such a patentless loser. I mean, that kinda shit gets you defriended pretty fast these days
*the gang hi fives MySpace as they drive off leaving Amazon alone*
Setting: press conference room. Shuttleworth is standing behind a podium with disheveled hair and sweat stains spreading underneath his arms. Reporters sit in chairs before him. ... Ubuntu is trying to ... "be" Windows? ... so you want to be Windows? ...
Reporter A: So
Shuttleworth: Ok, for the last time, I am going to go over this very very slowly.
*Shuttleworth writes Ubuntu and Windows on the chalkboard and puts a massive "does not equal" sign in between them.*
Shuttleworth: Ubuntu cannot and will not ever "be" Windows. I've been over this for the past two hours, can we move away from Windows/Ubuntu comparisons here?
Reporter B: But you want to be a widely used operating system?
Shuttleworth: That is correct.
Reporter B: And Windows is the most widely user operating system?
Shuttleworth: Also correct.
Reporter B:
*Shuttleworth lets out a long drawn-out sigh, massages his forehead and takes a drink from his glass of water*
Shuttleworth: *holds up two pieces of fruit* In my left hand I hold an apple. In my right hand I hold an orange. Although both are round, the two taste different and have different colors and subtle shapes
Reporter C: Hold on, an "Apple"? I'm not following you, are you saying you're trying to "be" OS X?
Shuttleworth: This press conference is over!
1. Nicolaus Copernicus "On the Revolutions of [the] Heavenly Spheres" (1543)
2. Galileo Galilei "Dialogues [or Discourses and Mathematical Demonstrations] Concerning Two [New] Sciences" (1638)
3. Johannes Kepler Book Five of "Harmonies of the World" (1618)
4. Sir Isaac Newton "The Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy" (1687)
5. Albert Einstein "The Principles of Relativity: A Collection of Original Papers on the Special Theory of Relativity" (1922)
I am not certain how easy it is to "capture" HTML to read on the Kindle later but here are some decent translations in English if you want them.
On the Shoulders of Giants was a book I picked up on the cheap ... a weighty tome assembled by Stephen Hawking of classic books of science (some of which you listed).
I think I got the hardcover for ~$8 at a used bookstore. Amazon seems to indicate it's not available on the kindle but here's what's in it:
1. Nicolaus Copernicus "On the Revolutions of [the] Heavenly Spheres" (1543)
2. Galileo Galilei "Dialogues [or Discourses and Mathematical Demonstrations] Concerning Two [New] Sciences" (1638)
3. Johannes Kepler Book Five of "Harmonies of the World" (1618)
4. Sir Isaac Newton "The Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy" (1687)
5. Albert Einstein "The Principles of Relativity: A Collection of Original Papers on the Special Theory of Relativity" (1922)
Karma be damned, but..
No one cares about a new search engine. Really, Google suits all my needs.
I would claim that's a dangerous mentality. I was using Metacrawler until Google came along. Even though Google is included in Metacrawler, its simplicity and speed won me over. Is that to say no one can compete with Google? Not at all.
... the posts weren't sitting firmly. A man offered to lend me his post hole digger which did that specific task better. No, I wasn't using the post hole digger to dig a trench for a sewage line but adding it to my collection of tools made me more effective at my tasks--so long as I used it for what it was best at.
I used to dig holes with my hands which was painful and time consuming. When it became clear this wouldn't work, I discovered a spade did the job much better. And I used it for everything. Though one day I was putting up fences and lamented the width of my spade's blade
The hype machine has worked, I will try out Wolfram Alpha and see if it is better than Google or can replace some of the capabilities I use Google to accomplish.
While you may claim it prevents the self-fulfilling "tipping point" of everyone switching to it because everyone else is using it, I have no complaints with Microsoft and Apple thinking that they have nothing to worry about from Linux until it's too late. What do big dogs do when small dogs start to threaten their dominance? They try to kill them. I actually prefer the "slowly but surely until it's too late" scenario.
Why would the "cyber-terrorist" post an email address as the ransom contact? Isn't he/she just going to get spammed now?
I don't know, why don't you send hackingforprofit@yahoo.com an e-mail and ask them?
Oops, did I just post hackingforprofit@yahoo.com without obfuscating it? Here, let me fix that:
hackingforprofit(at)yahoo(dot)com
My apologies to hackingforprofit@yahoo.com if this results in an increase of SPAM.
The phrasing "gone missing" makes him sound like he's from somewhere in the United Kingdom...
Yes, but the phrase "Now I hear tell" indicates Virginia! What a conundrum! This case will never be cracked! The full note text for those too lazy to click through wikileaks:
ATTENTION VIRGINIA
:(
;)
I have your shit! In *my* possession, right now, are 8,257,378 patient records and a total of 35,548,087 prescriptions. Also, I made an encrypted backup and deleted the original. Unfortunately for Virginia, their backups seem to have gone missing, too. Uhoh
For $10 million, I will gladly send along the password. You have 7 days to decide. If by the end of 7 days, you decide not to pony up, I'll go ahead and put this baby out on the market and accept the highest bid. Now I don't know what all this shit is worth or who would pay for it, but I'm bettin' someone will. Hell, if I can't move the prescription data at the very least I can find a buyer for the personal data (name,age,address,social security #, driver's license #).
Now I hear tell the Fucking Bunch of Idiots ain't fond of payin out, but I suggest that policy be turned right the fuck around. When you boys get your act together, drop me a line at hackingforprofit@yahoo.com and we can discuss the details such as account number, etc.
Until then, have a wonderful day, I know I will
as many others type this in at the same time - but it sounds like it pretty much runs like all other netbooks - regardless of the OS.
I agree except for one quote:
Once I had loaded Microsoft Office 2007 the 1GB of RAM became insufficient and the computer started page faulting.
I don't know if 1GB of RAM should be too little for an OS and MS Word. I will say that my 5 year old laptop has no problem running Office 2000 on Windows XP ... with 512MB of very very slow ram. The same laptop has no problems running a simplified Linux with Open Office either. I say "simplified" because, yes, the default Ubuntu graphics shitfest causes it to be a bit unstable at times.
I'm not sure which piece of the equation is making a glorified word processing program page fault on 1GB of RAM but I think that's a bit ridiculous.
There may be an inside goat.
Aw, that's a shame. Where's the book with the story of young Gogol who starts in his garage trying to find a single sacred shard to save his father, Sir Adword, so the kingdom can prosper again. It lies somewhere in the several million other shards across many distant lands. There is only one way to identify the shard. He must first discover the fastest path to a land that may or may not have it and alert all the other lands if he finds it ...
Is this the death of SPARC?
I would have said murder but I'm not interested in a hardware flame war. I mean, I know Fujitsu and some lesser known companies are using it but I'm not sure in what capacity. Is this the end of SPARC?
Can any hardware experts comment on whether or not this is the end of this architecture? Or does it have some niche market/capability like PowerPC?
I guess OS support could have been a cue that it was on the way out but is there any reason to be concerned that it's apparently done?
And all this time I was almost certain that it was based on sound scientific research proving that 160 characters was the maximum amount of text a cell phone user could read before completely losing interest.
The real story behind all this is that the terrorists weren't using sophisticated methods to avoid detection or monitoring â" which tells us just how crappy SIGINT really is right now. If the NSA needs to wiretap the whole of the US because they can't break into a Hotmail account, you know they've got problems.
No, no I don't know that they have problems. You have presented little to no proof they have problems. So your suggestion is that they not only wiretap the whole US but also break into every e-mail account they suspect of terrorist activity?
Yes, sometimes the simplest precautions can thwart the greatest and most expensive intelligence gathering equipment and teams. You have to live with that. I am not defending their actions to wiretap all or even part of the United States but, please, tell us how they were supposed to know that this was the Hotmail account they wanted to crack without doing anything illegal to get this information. I mean, hindsight is 20/20 but you apparently have some gift so tell us how you would have known which e-mail account to crack into. Boy, it sure must be easy to criticize a case when you know just enough details to make you a genius investigator.
I guess I didn't expect to find the kind of stupidity on the front page of Slashdot complaining that the National Security Agency's civilian e-mail surveillance isn't up to snuff while sneaking in a jab about their phone surveillance being too pervasive.
In fact most of my FOIA requests have been with the FBI. To date, I've filed 57 requests with them. Of these, 8 have resulted in documents, 18 were "no records" ...
I would consider your story a success story. It seems you don't but you recieved what documents they could provide to you.
Here's my own anecdotal worthless history of FOIA. I was a junior in high school and was dissatisfied with lunch prices of Aramark (the same people who rape you at arenas and stadia) in our cafeteria. Every month they would systematically increase prices on all products by five or ten cents and it got to be ridiculous not long after. Then they "locked down" the campus so we couldn't leave for lunch. Which really really pissed me off. Yes I could have brought my own lunch but I didn't really like doing that.
So I asked my friend to ask his dad (lawyer) for a template FOIA and filled it out with three other kids. We signed our names requesting the public high school release all details on their contract with Aramark. Instead, they brought us into an office room and gave us everything. I think that was an attempt to dissuade us but instead we were there late into the night. We had records on everything. What ever teacher was paid, what every contract had been made with an external business, everything. So we looked into the lunch provider history. The school had made some sort of several year contract with Aramark (not uncommon I guess) but that made them the only purchasable food.
The rest of the story is pretty offtopic. But I found that to be a highly successful and satisfying use of the FOIA on the local level. I'm sorry Federal cases don't sound as profitable and I don't mean to sound naive but it is the Federal Government. You have to expect bullshit bureaucracy there--I'm sure field offices requesting documents from other field office experience the same problems.
Well, I'm glad someone out there with lawyers is taking advantage of the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA). To see how the EFF has taken advantage of it, their main FOIA with the subpage on this entire DOJ Investigative Data Warehouse topic and all the documents they've collected (some are linked in main story).
If you are a US citizen, you yourself are able to make a FOIA request.
'We won't be actually selling [Windows 7] a day before the 23rd October.'
I hate to break it to you but that merely means the earliest possible date they could get Windows 7 is October 23rd. I'll bet that if everything goes on track perfectly according to schedule with the release candidate from now until October 23rd, that will be the release date. I'm going to bet--like with 90% of multi-million lines of code projects--that there will be at least some slipping in the schedule.
It's simply too far out there to be a solid date. I'm not sold, I feel this is a good hint but still just speculation. Vendors asked Microsoft when the earliest possible date is and they mistakenly relayed that to customers setting an expectation for their product.
Wow! They've productized cybersex? I thought it was a service! Is it over-the-counter yet? Does it come in a gel or powder that I apply to my genitals? I have so many questions on how it works. Can I get it delivered to my house discretely? Brilliant move but the physics are still a little confusing to me.
They have lead in them...
<Ray Kurzweil>
Oh well, it'll just be a few more years before they develop stem cells to adjust the effects of lead on the human body. Singularity, here we come!
</Ray Kurzweil>
I guess it's going to be a true test of ideals as Republican conservatives move to block stem cell research ... as they approach age 75.
With this development in China, suddenly playing god might not sound so bad.
"Web analytics databases are getting every larger. eBay now has a 6 1/2 petabyte ...
Um, was there a major development in the English language while I was sleeping last night?
Could you approach Google and ask them to license their ideas on server and data 'pod' technology for your sharded databases? I'm not saying build the whole thing like this but with $500 million, you could probably have a large section to search and sharded databases that mimics Google. I don't think there's anything wrong with following the leader in that department. This probably isn't the best solution for relational databases so I would think another architecture would be in place for your MySQL and Postgres traditional database layouts. And that would be just huge centralized servers running virtualized instances of Linux with MySQL or Postgres.