No. To crack AES-128 the attack still requires work of the order of 2^126.1. A machine capable of cracking a 56-bit DES key in a second might be built for about US$5B, going by the price of the COPACABANA FPGA-based DES cracker (US$10,000 for a machine that can crack 56-bit keys in 6 days). Such a machine would take 140 trillion years to crack AES-128 by brute force, or 38 trillion years to crack AES-128 using the algorithm. If you had 38 trillion of these machines you could conceivably crack an AES-128 password in a year. But to give you some idea of how big 38 trillion is, if each of these 38 trillion machines could be made to fit in a 1U server box, the rack would be just over 1.672e8 km high, just a bit over one astronomical unit. You could build a bridge from the earth to the sun with that. If you spread that many machines out, they'd cover 8,892,000 square kilometers, which is more than the total area of the lower 48 states of the US, and you'd have enough machines left over to pave over just about half of Alaska. If they ran at 100 W each, the project would require 3.3288e16 kWh of energy, or 1.2e23 joules, about a thousand times more than the world's annual energy consumption.
For 256-bit keys the problem is even worse. The algorithm has a complexity of 2^254.4. The energy requirement of that staggering number, assuming a computer able to operate at the von Neumann-Landauer limit of ln(2)kT energy per bit flip, running at a temperature of 2.7 K, would require a staggering 1.24e54 J of energy, about the equivalent of 10 billion supernovas, or about a thousandth of the total mass-energy of the Milky Way Galaxy.
True, as Marvin Minsky had once said: "...any finite-state machine, if left completely to itself, will fall eventually into a perfectly periodic repetitive pattern. The duration of this repeating pattern cannot exceed the number of internal states of the machine..." Emphasis in original. BUT, don't let that statement deceive you, as the number of states available to even a computer with very modest memory is so large that even the word 'astronomical' doesn't do it justice. For instance, my first real computer, a humble Commodore 64, with only 64K of memory, can have a total of 2^524288 (65536 * 8) states, something of the order of 1e157826 (yes, 157,826 zeroes after your one!) states. To give some idea of just how big that number of states is, were you to try to cycle through all such states at the astounding rate of 1e17 states per second (a theoretical 100 petahertz machine capable of cracking 56-bit DES keys in less than one second), it would still take 1e157801 years to go through them all. The heat death of the universe will have taken place after less than a thousandth part of that time has elapsed. As such Minsky goes on to say: "...the magnitudes involved should lead one to suspect that theorems and arguments based chiefly on the mere finiteness [of] the state diagram may not carry a great deal of significance." (Marvin Minsky quotes come from Computation, Finite and Infinite Machines, 1967).
The black hole is one of those monstrous supermassive black holes at the center of active galaxies. The only known way such a black hole would disappear would be by means of Hawking radiation, however, since the black hole is so big and hence so cold (about 6.46e-17 K), it would today actually be absorbing more radiation from the cosmic microwave background (at 2.7 K) than it would be emitting from Hawking radiation, meaning that it would actually be getting bigger (slowly though) even if it were in empty space with no matter nearby getting sucked into its gravity well, as it would be absorbing the energy from the photons of the microwave background. Such a black hole would only begin evaporating once the background temperature had dropped to below its temperature (assuming the universe's eventual heat death), and as such will probably be around for about 1e100 years or more. Considering that the universe has only been around for about 1.3e10 years, that is a LONG way to go! The black hole's still somewhere out there, certainly. Can't say the same about the water though.
The MongoDB record looks no more complex to me than the insert statement. In fact, the MongoDB record looks more readable, but what do I know, I'm probably one of the "script kiddies" you like to so disparage. I like to have my column names next to the data that actually goes into them, rather than some mess like insert into users (username, address, street, city, state) values('bob','123 Main Street','Springfield','NY'); that the true equivalent SQL would have been. By the way, I wonder why SQL uses such a syntax, when the SQL UPDATE statement is much more readable, and by the way, an update statement would look not much different from the MongoDB record, with equals signs instead of columns, and a few keywords instead.
As is always in the world of software, there are some jobs for which NoSQL is in fact a very good idea, and others for which relational databases are better. If the fine folks at Google thought as you did and believed a traditional RDBMS was the only tool they could use then I doubt that Google would have grown to the size it has. They knew and understood that their problem did not map well into the concept of a standard relational database and acted accordingly. Of course, you also need to recognize when such an approach is warranted, as more often than not you'd be better off using a real RDBMS, and it would not be wise to shift to NoSQL databases just because you're driven by buzzword compliance.
No. As much as it seems fashionable to bash (non-baryonic) dark matter here on Slashdot, our current astrophysical theories put constraints on how much baryonic dark matter (MACHOs) is possible. Our current theories on Big Bang nucleosynthesis place bounds on how much baryonic matter can remain dark. If there really were enough baryonic matter to account for all the dark matter that should be there based on indirect observations, then the abundances of various isotopes produced by Big Bang nucleosynthesis would be quite different from what we observe. That could also mean that our current theory of the Big Bang is completely wrong, but that seems unlikely to say the least. These theoretical considerations imply that even if more MACHOs are found, non-baryonic WIMPs will still have to make up a large fraction of dark matter.
Linux the kernel is just as ideologically pure as the Hurd, even from the point of view of Richard M. Stallman. Every one of the millions of lines of code in Linux is still licensed under the GPL last time I checked. The reason why the Hurd is so far behind is not ideology, but largely because their development process over the last decade looks pretty much the way Duke Nukem Forever's went over the last decade. They lost focus. They shifted from Mach to L4 to Coyotos as the base microkernel over the course of the last decade, just as DNF shifted from using the Quake II engine to the Unreal Engine and so on. In other words, they lost focus. Stallman has even said that he was "not very optimistic about the GNU HURD. It makes some progress, but to be really superior it would require solving a lot of deep problems", and even added that "finishing it is not crucial" because a free kernel already exists in Linux.
They don't, not in every case at least. They do, however, know the magnitude of the output neutrino flux from the accelerator in J-PARC, and from the process that generated them, that they are supposed to be muon neutrinos. The Super-Kamiokande is designed to detect neutrinos, as well as determine the type of neutrino they are detecting, and given the magnitude of the flux directed to them from J-PARC, they have statistical models that allow them to determine the statistical increase in the number of neutrino detection events they ought to see. Presumably they detected just about the number of neutrinos that they were supposed to, except that they weren't all muon neutrinos, as they would have expected if neutrinos did not oscillate, but a certain fraction of the increase were identified as electron neutrinos.
The phenomenon of neutrino oscillations has been suspected for a long time, ever since the number of neutrinos coming from the sun was observed to be significantly less than expected, given the known models of the sun's nuclear reactions (which generate lots of neutrinos). This was before methods for detecting other neutrino types than the electron neutrino were developed, and the solar neutrino problem was a major open problem in physics for a long time. The same Super-Kamiokande was instrumental in establishing that the phenomenon of neutrino oscillation was the solution to the solar neutrino problem.
This experiment is similar, but potentially it can be more finely controlled (not dependent on the far less controllable neutrino flux from the sun), so by fine-tuning it they can determine experimentally more properties of these mysterious particles. The phenomenon of neutrino oscillations is physics that lies beyond the Standard Model, and as such is bound to be extremely interesting. I do hope that J-PARC can continue their experiments soon, as their operations were affected by the Great Touhoku Earthquake last March.
Two things. Number one: Google is the copyright holder for most of the software in question. Any community contributors presumably have copyright assignments to Google. Even if the code was released under GPLv3 (and it isn't) they would be under no obligation to release the code because they own it and can do whatever they like. The copyright holder cannot by definition, violate a license they grant. For the stuff that they aren't the copyright holder (e.g. the kernel), they have complied with the license and released the source code where required. Number two: the Apache Software License Version 2 is a non-copyleft license. Read it carefully and please tell me where it says that redistribution requires source code release.
The theory goes that in the very early universe, temperatures and pressures were so high that even small fluctuations in the density of matter would have resulted in local regions becoming dense enough to collapse into black holes. The time period considered here is long before any nucleosynthesis occurred: in fact temperatures and pressures were so high in this period that the strong nuclear force is not yet able to confine quarks into hadrons.
These tiny primordial black holes would not, contrary to popular conception, simply suck in everything around them. A typical black hole of this type would have a mass of about a billion tons (about the mass of a mid-sized asteroid), and have an event horizon smaller than the diameter of a proton. With mass that low its gravity would be correspondingly low and its interaction with normal matter very feeble. They should, however, be emitting large amounts of gamma rays if the theory of Hawking radiation is correct, and that might be one way that they'd be detected.
The GP's correct. There's a poison pill clause from Nokia's purchase of Trolltech. Basically it says that if Qt ever stops getting released as open source, the KDE Free Qt Foundation gets to release the last version of Qt under the BSD license. I don't think we need to be worried about Qt if such a contingency exists.
The real value of Windows is in the massive installed base of applications that it has. I wonder how many vendors of important Windows applications will release an ARM build. I do hope that it will be as simple (for the most part) as recompiling the same source in an ARM-based build environment, but even so I wonder how many developers would do it. Good luck getting all those legacy VB6 apps running on ARM Windows though, or any other app for which the source is gone. Without the application ecosystem one might as well be using some other platform.
It's not even the most powerful rocket since the Apollo era. The old Soviet Energia (which briefly saw service in the late 1980's, long after the Apollo era), which could send a payload of 100,000 kg into LEO, almost double the Falcon Heavy. The Space Shuttle could also do roughly the same, but since the Shuttle Orbiter is rather heavy, its maximum payload to LEO was only about 24,300 kg. There were only three super heavy lift launch vehicles built that ever had successful launches (Saturn V, Energia, and Space Shuttle), all with roughly twice the payload lift capacity as Falcon Heavy.
It will, however, hold the distinction of being the most powerful rocket in active service if all goes well when they finally launch. If their projections are correct it'll also be the cheapest way to get stuff into LEO, at only 10% of the cost of using an Ariane 5 or Proton, and half that of the Falcon 9.
As I said they have committed their share of sins but right now Google looks to be in line for canonization when compared to Microsoft. But on the other hand there also exist many even more evil companies out there who could make Microsoft look like saints too!
I do not think it means what you think it means. For a convicted monopolist with a track record of betraying their partners, subverting governments and standards bodies, and all around ruthless behavior to make the list, I wonder if the word 'ethical' means something to them other than what my dictionary says it does. Oddly enough Google, with their 'don't be evil' motto, doesn't seem to have made the list. I know they have committed their share of sins over the years, but it seems that what they have done so far does not hold a candle to even what Microsoft has done over the last decade.
We have a customer in Japan operating a data center in Tochigi Prefecture, only about 200 km or so from Sendai. They lost power after the earthquake, and were running off UPS until their data center gensets kicked in, so their servers did not experience any outage immediately after the earthquake. Our people on the scene reported that television and radio were out, and their only source of news was from the Internet: their connectivity seemed almost entirely unaffected. However, their generators only had enough gas for six hours of operation, so we still had to shut everything down before the juice ran out, and there was no power for eight more hours after that... I was surprised that there was no serious network service interruption: no major undersea cables were damaged like what happened after the earthquake in Taiwan in 2006, and their network performance seems just as it normally is: they still seem to be getting their advertised gigabit speed, at least to other sites also in Japan, so it seems that their net backbone was scarcely affected.
We'll have problems maintaining service uptime in the face of the rolling blackouts that they're experiencing, but those are the breaks...
The MIPS architecture is alive and well from the looks of things, and not just in the realm of HPC, and it is probably the most popular RISC CPU architecture in history. I carry such a processor around with me every day in the form of a CXD2962GG CPU in my Sony PlayStation Portable, which is essentially a clone of the MIPS R4000. The PSX used a MIPS R3000-family CPU that was essentially the same as what you would find inside an old SGI Indigo. Apparently the PS2's Emotion Engine was actually a MIPS III/IV architecture CPU with extra SIMD instructions similar to Intel's MMX/SSE. I imagine that MIPS-architecture processors are even more common in embedded systems.
Not outside of the USA they don't. Most places you don't buy phone handsets from the mobile carrier, but from an independent phone shop, and insert a SIM from a mobile carrier and off you go. Sure, you can get a phone from a mobile carrier with subsidies (which wind up costing more) the way it's done in the USA but that's the exception rather than the rule most everywhere else. The kind of extremely tight dependence on mobile phone handsets and mobile carriers seen in the USA is almost nonexistent elsewhere in the world. In these cases, since the phone experience and the mobile carrier experience are decoupled, there is no need for the carrier or anyone to insist on absolute control of the handset hardware. That this should be thought of as necessary is a load of nonsense promoted by American mobile telephony providers. Whether or not to exercise full control over a mobile telephone should be a choice available to the customer. The fact that this choice is frequently denied to American mobile telephony subscribers by the structure of their market is an aberration.
In any case, I doubt that the mobile carriers would do a much better job of testing such updates from Microsoft (or Google, or Apple for that matter) either. That just becomes an expense for them, as they have to test updates for every phone they have on their network.
I wonder if the guy's case is anything like the celebrated case of the railroad construction foreman Phineas Gage, who survived having a large iron rod go completely through his head. I wonder if he's experienced any changes in personality similar to Gage's case, in addition to the headaches and the strange tastes.
Given how Facebook's infamously buried 'delete my account' feature works, hacking individual accounts won't in general be sufficient to delete them. Well, with access to the account they could change the password to a random one to prevent the legitimate owner from logging in and preventing the deletion, but the account simply appears deactivated to others until that happens. Facebook cookies on the owner's computer could also conceivably cause any efforts at account deletion to be frustrated. If they "deactivate" peoples' accounts the legitimate owner still gets Facebook spam and invitations from friends so unless every account in the victim's network is also similarly compromised that only causes Facebook's power as an organizing tool to diminish only slightly. The article has almost no detail on what 'deleting Facebook accounts' means, so it's hard to say exactly what this entails.
If Algeria can really make people's accounts disappear from Facebook completely, then either Facebook is helping them do so or they've hacked into Facebook. Hacking individual accounts won't cut it.
Slashdot Mirror
No. To crack AES-128 the attack still requires work of the order of 2^126.1. A machine capable of cracking a 56-bit DES key in a second might be built for about US$5B, going by the price of the COPACABANA FPGA-based DES cracker (US$10,000 for a machine that can crack 56-bit keys in 6 days). Such a machine would take 140 trillion years to crack AES-128 by brute force, or 38 trillion years to crack AES-128 using the algorithm. If you had 38 trillion of these machines you could conceivably crack an AES-128 password in a year. But to give you some idea of how big 38 trillion is, if each of these 38 trillion machines could be made to fit in a 1U server box, the rack would be just over 1.672e8 km high, just a bit over one astronomical unit. You could build a bridge from the earth to the sun with that. If you spread that many machines out, they'd cover 8,892,000 square kilometers, which is more than the total area of the lower 48 states of the US, and you'd have enough machines left over to pave over just about half of Alaska. If they ran at 100 W each, the project would require 3.3288e16 kWh of energy, or 1.2e23 joules, about a thousand times more than the world's annual energy consumption.
For 256-bit keys the problem is even worse. The algorithm has a complexity of 2^254.4. The energy requirement of that staggering number, assuming a computer able to operate at the von Neumann-Landauer limit of ln(2)kT energy per bit flip, running at a temperature of 2.7 K, would require a staggering 1.24e54 J of energy, about the equivalent of 10 billion supernovas, or about a thousandth of the total mass-energy of the Milky Way Galaxy.
Well, Bruce Schneier doesn't put a password on his WiFi either for that matter from what I hear.
True, as Marvin Minsky had once said: "...any finite-state machine, if left completely to itself, will fall eventually into a perfectly periodic repetitive pattern. The duration of this repeating pattern cannot exceed the number of internal states of the machine..." Emphasis in original. BUT, don't let that statement deceive you, as the number of states available to even a computer with very modest memory is so large that even the word 'astronomical' doesn't do it justice. For instance, my first real computer, a humble Commodore 64, with only 64K of memory, can have a total of 2^524288 (65536 * 8) states, something of the order of 1e157826 (yes, 157,826 zeroes after your one!) states. To give some idea of just how big that number of states is, were you to try to cycle through all such states at the astounding rate of 1e17 states per second (a theoretical 100 petahertz machine capable of cracking 56-bit DES keys in less than one second), it would still take 1e157801 years to go through them all. The heat death of the universe will have taken place after less than a thousandth part of that time has elapsed. As such Minsky goes on to say: "...the magnitudes involved should lead one to suspect that theorems and arguments based chiefly on the mere finiteness [of] the state diagram may not carry a great deal of significance." (Marvin Minsky quotes come from Computation, Finite and Infinite Machines, 1967).
The black hole is one of those monstrous supermassive black holes at the center of active galaxies. The only known way such a black hole would disappear would be by means of Hawking radiation, however, since the black hole is so big and hence so cold (about 6.46e-17 K), it would today actually be absorbing more radiation from the cosmic microwave background (at 2.7 K) than it would be emitting from Hawking radiation, meaning that it would actually be getting bigger (slowly though) even if it were in empty space with no matter nearby getting sucked into its gravity well, as it would be absorbing the energy from the photons of the microwave background. Such a black hole would only begin evaporating once the background temperature had dropped to below its temperature (assuming the universe's eventual heat death), and as such will probably be around for about 1e100 years or more. Considering that the universe has only been around for about 1.3e10 years, that is a LONG way to go! The black hole's still somewhere out there, certainly. Can't say the same about the water though.
The MongoDB record looks no more complex to me than the insert statement. In fact, the MongoDB record looks more readable, but what do I know, I'm probably one of the "script kiddies" you like to so disparage. I like to have my column names next to the data that actually goes into them, rather than some mess like insert into users (username, address, street, city, state) values('bob','123 Main Street','Springfield','NY'); that the true equivalent SQL would have been. By the way, I wonder why SQL uses such a syntax, when the SQL UPDATE statement is much more readable, and by the way, an update statement would look not much different from the MongoDB record, with equals signs instead of columns, and a few keywords instead.
As is always in the world of software, there are some jobs for which NoSQL is in fact a very good idea, and others for which relational databases are better. If the fine folks at Google thought as you did and believed a traditional RDBMS was the only tool they could use then I doubt that Google would have grown to the size it has. They knew and understood that their problem did not map well into the concept of a standard relational database and acted accordingly. Of course, you also need to recognize when such an approach is warranted, as more often than not you'd be better off using a real RDBMS, and it would not be wise to shift to NoSQL databases just because you're driven by buzzword compliance.
No. As much as it seems fashionable to bash (non-baryonic) dark matter here on Slashdot, our current astrophysical theories put constraints on how much baryonic dark matter (MACHOs) is possible. Our current theories on Big Bang nucleosynthesis place bounds on how much baryonic matter can remain dark. If there really were enough baryonic matter to account for all the dark matter that should be there based on indirect observations, then the abundances of various isotopes produced by Big Bang nucleosynthesis would be quite different from what we observe. That could also mean that our current theory of the Big Bang is completely wrong, but that seems unlikely to say the least. These theoretical considerations imply that even if more MACHOs are found, non-baryonic WIMPs will still have to make up a large fraction of dark matter.
Linux the kernel is just as ideologically pure as the Hurd, even from the point of view of Richard M. Stallman. Every one of the millions of lines of code in Linux is still licensed under the GPL last time I checked. The reason why the Hurd is so far behind is not ideology, but largely because their development process over the last decade looks pretty much the way Duke Nukem Forever's went over the last decade. They lost focus. They shifted from Mach to L4 to Coyotos as the base microkernel over the course of the last decade, just as DNF shifted from using the Quake II engine to the Unreal Engine and so on. In other words, they lost focus. Stallman has even said that he was "not very optimistic about the GNU HURD. It makes some progress, but to be really superior it would require solving a lot of deep problems", and even added that "finishing it is not crucial" because a free kernel already exists in Linux.
They don't, not in every case at least. They do, however, know the magnitude of the output neutrino flux from the accelerator in J-PARC, and from the process that generated them, that they are supposed to be muon neutrinos. The Super-Kamiokande is designed to detect neutrinos, as well as determine the type of neutrino they are detecting, and given the magnitude of the flux directed to them from J-PARC, they have statistical models that allow them to determine the statistical increase in the number of neutrino detection events they ought to see. Presumably they detected just about the number of neutrinos that they were supposed to, except that they weren't all muon neutrinos, as they would have expected if neutrinos did not oscillate, but a certain fraction of the increase were identified as electron neutrinos.
The phenomenon of neutrino oscillations has been suspected for a long time, ever since the number of neutrinos coming from the sun was observed to be significantly less than expected, given the known models of the sun's nuclear reactions (which generate lots of neutrinos). This was before methods for detecting other neutrino types than the electron neutrino were developed, and the solar neutrino problem was a major open problem in physics for a long time. The same Super-Kamiokande was instrumental in establishing that the phenomenon of neutrino oscillation was the solution to the solar neutrino problem.
This experiment is similar, but potentially it can be more finely controlled (not dependent on the far less controllable neutrino flux from the sun), so by fine-tuning it they can determine experimentally more properties of these mysterious particles. The phenomenon of neutrino oscillations is physics that lies beyond the Standard Model, and as such is bound to be extremely interesting. I do hope that J-PARC can continue their experiments soon, as their operations were affected by the Great Touhoku Earthquake last March.
The illegal we do immediately. The unconstitutional takes a little longer.
Isn't this more or less the same thing that Firesheep does, and why the EFF is urging everyone to use HTTPS wherever possible?
Two things. Number one: Google is the copyright holder for most of the software in question. Any community contributors presumably have copyright assignments to Google. Even if the code was released under GPLv3 (and it isn't) they would be under no obligation to release the code because they own it and can do whatever they like. The copyright holder cannot by definition, violate a license they grant. For the stuff that they aren't the copyright holder (e.g. the kernel), they have complied with the license and released the source code where required. Number two: the Apache Software License Version 2 is a non-copyleft license. Read it carefully and please tell me where it says that redistribution requires source code release.
The theory goes that in the very early universe, temperatures and pressures were so high that even small fluctuations in the density of matter would have resulted in local regions becoming dense enough to collapse into black holes. The time period considered here is long before any nucleosynthesis occurred: in fact temperatures and pressures were so high in this period that the strong nuclear force is not yet able to confine quarks into hadrons.
These tiny primordial black holes would not, contrary to popular conception, simply suck in everything around them. A typical black hole of this type would have a mass of about a billion tons (about the mass of a mid-sized asteroid), and have an event horizon smaller than the diameter of a proton. With mass that low its gravity would be correspondingly low and its interaction with normal matter very feeble. They should, however, be emitting large amounts of gamma rays if the theory of Hawking radiation is correct, and that might be one way that they'd be detected.
The GP's correct. There's a poison pill clause from Nokia's purchase of Trolltech. Basically it says that if Qt ever stops getting released as open source, the KDE Free Qt Foundation gets to release the last version of Qt under the BSD license. I don't think we need to be worried about Qt if such a contingency exists.
The real value of Windows is in the massive installed base of applications that it has. I wonder how many vendors of important Windows applications will release an ARM build. I do hope that it will be as simple (for the most part) as recompiling the same source in an ARM-based build environment, but even so I wonder how many developers would do it. Good luck getting all those legacy VB6 apps running on ARM Windows though, or any other app for which the source is gone. Without the application ecosystem one might as well be using some other platform.
It's not even the most powerful rocket since the Apollo era. The old Soviet Energia (which briefly saw service in the late 1980's, long after the Apollo era), which could send a payload of 100,000 kg into LEO, almost double the Falcon Heavy. The Space Shuttle could also do roughly the same, but since the Shuttle Orbiter is rather heavy, its maximum payload to LEO was only about 24,300 kg. There were only three super heavy lift launch vehicles built that ever had successful launches (Saturn V, Energia, and Space Shuttle), all with roughly twice the payload lift capacity as Falcon Heavy.
It will, however, hold the distinction of being the most powerful rocket in active service if all goes well when they finally launch. If their projections are correct it'll also be the cheapest way to get stuff into LEO, at only 10% of the cost of using an Ariane 5 or Proton, and half that of the Falcon 9.
I thought we should have no fear for atomic energy, mon, cause they could not stop de time!
Tsumami also means knob, and is the word that Japanese programmers use for what we would call a handle, such as a file handle (file descriptor).
As I said they have committed their share of sins but right now Google looks to be in line for canonization when compared to Microsoft. But on the other hand there also exist many even more evil companies out there who could make Microsoft look like saints too!
I do not think it means what you think it means. For a convicted monopolist with a track record of betraying their partners, subverting governments and standards bodies, and all around ruthless behavior to make the list, I wonder if the word 'ethical' means something to them other than what my dictionary says it does. Oddly enough Google, with their 'don't be evil' motto, doesn't seem to have made the list. I know they have committed their share of sins over the years, but it seems that what they have done so far does not hold a candle to even what Microsoft has done over the last decade.
We have a customer in Japan operating a data center in Tochigi Prefecture, only about 200 km or so from Sendai. They lost power after the earthquake, and were running off UPS until their data center gensets kicked in, so their servers did not experience any outage immediately after the earthquake. Our people on the scene reported that television and radio were out, and their only source of news was from the Internet: their connectivity seemed almost entirely unaffected. However, their generators only had enough gas for six hours of operation, so we still had to shut everything down before the juice ran out, and there was no power for eight more hours after that... I was surprised that there was no serious network service interruption: no major undersea cables were damaged like what happened after the earthquake in Taiwan in 2006, and their network performance seems just as it normally is: they still seem to be getting their advertised gigabit speed, at least to other sites also in Japan, so it seems that their net backbone was scarcely affected.
We'll have problems maintaining service uptime in the face of the rolling blackouts that they're experiencing, but those are the breaks...
The difference between a Republic and a People's Republic is a lot like the difference between a jacket and a straitjacket.
The MIPS architecture is alive and well from the looks of things, and not just in the realm of HPC, and it is probably the most popular RISC CPU architecture in history. I carry such a processor around with me every day in the form of a CXD2962GG CPU in my Sony PlayStation Portable, which is essentially a clone of the MIPS R4000. The PSX used a MIPS R3000-family CPU that was essentially the same as what you would find inside an old SGI Indigo. Apparently the PS2's Emotion Engine was actually a MIPS III/IV architecture CPU with extra SIMD instructions similar to Intel's MMX/SSE. I imagine that MIPS-architecture processors are even more common in embedded systems.
Not outside of the USA they don't. Most places you don't buy phone handsets from the mobile carrier, but from an independent phone shop, and insert a SIM from a mobile carrier and off you go. Sure, you can get a phone from a mobile carrier with subsidies (which wind up costing more) the way it's done in the USA but that's the exception rather than the rule most everywhere else. The kind of extremely tight dependence on mobile phone handsets and mobile carriers seen in the USA is almost nonexistent elsewhere in the world. In these cases, since the phone experience and the mobile carrier experience are decoupled, there is no need for the carrier or anyone to insist on absolute control of the handset hardware. That this should be thought of as necessary is a load of nonsense promoted by American mobile telephony providers. Whether or not to exercise full control over a mobile telephone should be a choice available to the customer. The fact that this choice is frequently denied to American mobile telephony subscribers by the structure of their market is an aberration.
In any case, I doubt that the mobile carriers would do a much better job of testing such updates from Microsoft (or Google, or Apple for that matter) either. That just becomes an expense for them, as they have to test updates for every phone they have on their network.
I wonder if the guy's case is anything like the celebrated case of the railroad construction foreman Phineas Gage, who survived having a large iron rod go completely through his head. I wonder if he's experienced any changes in personality similar to Gage's case, in addition to the headaches and the strange tastes.
Given how Facebook's infamously buried 'delete my account' feature works, hacking individual accounts won't in general be sufficient to delete them. Well, with access to the account they could change the password to a random one to prevent the legitimate owner from logging in and preventing the deletion, but the account simply appears deactivated to others until that happens. Facebook cookies on the owner's computer could also conceivably cause any efforts at account deletion to be frustrated. If they "deactivate" peoples' accounts the legitimate owner still gets Facebook spam and invitations from friends so unless every account in the victim's network is also similarly compromised that only causes Facebook's power as an organizing tool to diminish only slightly. The article has almost no detail on what 'deleting Facebook accounts' means, so it's hard to say exactly what this entails.
If Algeria can really make people's accounts disappear from Facebook completely, then either Facebook is helping them do so or they've hacked into Facebook. Hacking individual accounts won't cut it.