Posts by Yet Another Anonymous coward 26130 publicly visible posts • joined 31 Dec 2009
> Honestly what have they to gain by weighing in at all either way?
If they don't support Apple they tell a billion potential customers that an Android phone will hand over your data to the cops but an Apple one won't.
Especially interesting if you are a phone customer in China, Russia, Iran, most of Africa etc
The ultimate sacrifice would be to move Apple HQ to Switzerland and take $gazillion out of the US economy. Then have Microsoft, Google, Facebook etc follow suit when they are ordered to do the same thing.
Amazing how compliant the US government can be when you mention the recession word
> And let's say it: Fortran is totally obsolete as a language and no computer scientist uses it.
That's because computer "scientists" don't need to solve real problems.
LISP is very clever, but try modeling a thermonuclear explosion with it.
"computer science - solving yesterday's problems on tomorrow's hardware"
Wasn't blaming the HSE, I worked in mining here in Canada and the safety regs are very strict (much more so than the USA)
But claiming that the accident rate drop is due to them is like me claiming that the rate of deaths due to Viking attacks is down to the local council's new CCTV system. 1st millennium, no CCTV - lots of raids. 2nd millennium, CCTV introduced - fewer raids, 3rd massive surveillance - no vikings.
They also worked in that wonderful mini-computer pricing model, that only a former mainframe customer or cable company exec could love.
We had SCO because it was (in the late 80s) the only way of getting more than 640K or 30Mb on a PC and we had to log a lot of data. Order a C compiler for $$$, when you install it you discover you don't have a pre-processor. Oh you want the software development add-on for the compiler ? That's more $$$$
Even more bizarrely we also had Kodak unix for PCs.
They already did - there is a limit on the total number of telescopes.
The Keck interferometer mode was shut down because the small outrigger telescopes counted toward the limit as much as the two main domes.
The telescope should have been built in Chile, it was built in Hawaii to get pork barrel funding and this is the result.
Probably a bunch of early employees who had to pay tax on what the IRS claim their options were worth at the previous price but are now worth half as much - even if they could sell them.
The late round VCs that gave it the $25Bn valuation will all have exit preferences which mean they wont lose anything
> exposed the social security numbers and other private information
Social security numbers are not fsckign secret, assuming they are secret and using them as a government guaranteed form of ID is what causes all the fsckign problems.
The only government guaranteed form of ID is your secret government issued citizen number which can be founded printed in invisible ink on .... LOST CARRIER .....
But the badgers don't have to worry, because although the physical data center will appear to be in Ireland it will actually be in Applestan an imaginary country where nobody pays tax.
A bit like how all Apple stores in England are really in Ireland
I think it's a reaction to STOP the OSS projects.
Need to do a bit of design? Either pay $5-10K for Solidworks/Autocad/ProE or nothing for the OSS alternative. Then once you've learned that app you aren't likely to switch to the paid app later.
Their new pitch is, pay $99 for a month/year/special intro period - then once you're into their system you keep paying
No it's a core feature. It's like a big transformer it can only work while the field is changing.
To make it worse the more power you need to contain the faster you need to raise the field so you can make it cycle on-off over hours at low power but minutes at GW powers.
Even worse-worse, like a transformer you go through zero field switching between +/- and at that point there is no field to hold the plasma which then hits the walls and melts your machine. So you need to dump the plasma and start again every half cycle.
The big advantage of the stellarator is that the plasma generates it's own permanent containment field, the drawback is that you have an amazingly complex job to control it.
@ZSn
But Tokamaks aren't going to be the soln for continual power generation while Stellarators might be.
So is ITER a necessary engineering exercise to learn practical details or is it a giant white elephant - like a Victorian program to develop kevlar sails so tea clippers can keep beating steam ships ?
Frankly given the politics I'm amazed ITER has done anything at all. The plan was for a bunch of countries that aren't quite at war with each other to build the highest tech bit of nuclear physics on the planet. But instead of putting money into a design they each build the bit that their govt/industry feels like. So the cool bits with industrial applications are built by multiple countries all building the same part. Some bits nobody wants to build because they want it to be secret or would take years of R&D and have no other uses.
Then you try and assemble the whole thing in France, with French labor laws and to French nuclear safety inspection standards.
>So world class that it seems to have produced virtually nothing that they have made any money from!
Its job isn't to produce anything - it's to stop the people who might produce something working somewhere else.
Think how good MS's balance sheet would be if they had hired Linus Torvalds to work on some obscure internal OS project that never saw daylight.
I'm sure the Israelis are relying on it.
Fly drone over suspected terrorist training camp / wedding.
Allow US to eavesdrop on data.
US agencies confirm to politicians that Israel is under threat and so should be given some more weapons which can be purchased from suppliers in your congressional district.
And ps.our funding should be increased because of all these terrorists "we"just found
>battlefield against well-armed opponents with SAMs and AA guns?
Which is why it was generally used against unarmed villages to prevent them becoming bases for insurgents. Nothing like having your village wiped out by a gunship to convince you of who is the right side to join.
