There is no need to get rid of Tor: in theory, Tor could have a "hidden service policy" mechanism not much different to the exit policy mechanism. HS Policies would allow a node operator to state that they aren't willing to act as an introduction point for a list of hidden services (or point to lists maintained elsewhere to stop fast-flux type behaviour).

Tor already accepts that not all relay operators will want to support all kinds of behaviour and that some kinds of traffic can be abusive, that's why they implement exit policies which allow exits to ban port and IP ranges. Taking this philosophy to hidden services seems like the next natural step. After all, Tor volunteers are ultimately acting as human shields for other people's anonymous behaviour. Requiring them to shield everything just restricts the number of people who would be willing to donate bandwidth to general privacy but are not interested in enabling botnets.

The only thing mainframes have that Unix/Linux Resource Managers lack is "goal mode". I can't set a TPS target and have resources automatically allocated to stay at or above the target. I *can* create minimum guarantees for CPU, memory and I/O bandwidth on Linux, BSD and the Unixes. I just have to manage the performance myself, by changing the minimums.

Not sure what you're getting at, but the Azul collector is well known for pulling off apparently magical GC performance. They do it with a lot of very clever computer science that involves, amongst other things, modifications to the kernel. I believe they also used to use custom chips with extended instruction sets designed to interop well with their custom JVM. Not sure if they still do that. The result is that they can do things like GC a 20 gigabyte heap in a handful of milliseconds. GC doesn't have to suck.

Ripple, before the name was bought by a Silicon Valley company and changed into something a bit different, was more or less exactly this.

There's a video on the original web page that explains this concept quite nicely. You could set up debt relationships between people and denominated in any currency, including ones you invent on the fly like hours of The Real Mike's time. However it never really took off in a big way, perhaps because it was rather complicated, and bootstrapping such a system from the internet (full of strangers who don't know each other, don't trust each other and may not even exist) is presumably very difficult.

However if the concept sounds interesting you could do worse than check out the original thinking by Ryan Fugger behind Ripple. Satoshi once told me that Ripple was interesting because it was the only system that does something with trust other than centralise it.

Yes the question posed is ridiculous, akin to asking how long is a piece of string.

Regardless, the submitter has created a space in which we can choose either to flame him/her (achieving nothing) or we can choose to have an interesting and useful debate on things like how companies slow down as they scale, whether there should be mandatory size limits on companies a la KSR's Red Mars trilogy, to what extent this move is an indictment of the Ballmer era, to what extent Microsoft's competitors i.e. Google might be suffering over-staffing and so on. Many interesting topics.

So. Who's first?

Both Russia and the USA have a history of supporting rebellions and shooting down passenger jets. America's was an Iranian Airbus.

"In order to ensure continued access to scarce skillsets that are key to our ability to innovate, we need to be able to draw flexibly from a global pool of professionals."

(Oh, and we also resent having to pay those scarce and valuable individuals more than $15 / hour. So we'll still need some foreign worker visas, thanks).

The problem with crazily-complex passwords is that if you can't remember them you write them down, and, at a stroke, have compromised security. One of the worst I've encountered is the U.S. Customs eAPIS web site, for sending advance information when you want to fly a private plane or sail a private boat to the U.S.

The other issue is that you risk locking out legitimate access.

My bank does the password plus security question thing. My security questions (you can make up your own) are more than a little interesting. :-)

...laura

One flaw is the lack of standards on the device level: how do light switches, dimmers, thermostats, locks, etc work together? Z-Wave defines a high level protocol for this and has a certification programme to ensure that devices work nicely together, but even so, interoperability is still hit and miss, especially for anything that goes beyond basic on/off stuff. ZigBee is starting to address this shortcoming, with the LightLink standard for instance, but there's still a long way to go.

One thing I am extremely suspicious about is the remark about the need for a central hub being a weakness. For one, you need a hub in order to add any sort of intelligence to your home automation setup. Without a hub you are not building a smart home, you're just doing remote control. Then, they mention the fact that existing technologies such as Zigbee and Z-wave are not easily married to the Internet. Well, with a hub you do not really need them to; for remote access, you tunnel into the hub or you use a gateway service that you can more or less trust.
Having/needing a hub is not a weakness, it ensures that you retain control over your local network. My fear is that for Thread there somehow will not be a local hub; it'll be in the Cloud, and subject to being raped for data 6 ways from Sunday.

An Xbox is just one firmware update from being an Android TV box.

The criteria is "the company that has the power to demand the data, has to do so if ordered by their country's courts". This probably dates back to the 16th century or earlier. Some time around the Hanseatic League...

A Canadian company with data in Outer Mongolia has to produce the data if it can. If the Outer Mongols prohibit the Canadian company from demanding it normally, the Canadians can't be ordered to produce it, because the data isn't in the Canadian company's control. If they allow it to be demanded normally, a Canadian court can get it. They have to do it via the Mongolian branch, they can't just issue court orders in Mongolia.

Your suspicion is correct: a Canadian company that controls data in the U.S. can indeed be ordered by a Canadian court to produce it .

--dave

Well, I don't know if anything in economics is provable per se, but Europe (more specifically the UK) is going through this debate right now. The EU is a giant free trade zone. How valuable is that? People who do business all think it's essential, but people are who are just employees aren't so sure. Let the debate commence.

Whatever the reason, they still boosted domestic production and economic growth.

That may have been true in the USA (hard to say given the lack of in-depth statistics back then and difficulty of knowing the impacts of such things even today) but it probably wasn't the case abroad. Sure, the USA didn't care one whit back then about the impact of tariffs on British or European manufacturers, nor did they care much if Americans couldn't afford superior foreign-made products for a while. They valued economic independence more, and given their situation that was understandable.

But putting military concerns to one side, free trade theory is correct. Those tariffs made the world as a whole economically worse off. If governments could be trusted not to use their economies as weapons of war, it'd be better for everyone if tariffs were reduced and removed, because it makes people wealthier in the long run and that's why every so often countries and trading blocs try to engage in free trade treaties.

Of course the problem is, governments do so love using economics as a weapon .... the USA more than most. So tariffs will continue to have non-economic justifications for the forseeable future, of the form "yes it makes us less wealthy, but the upsides are worth it".

Banning loss leaders (a.k.a. market dumping) seems like an inherently attractive fix to improve free markets, but it's fraught with difficulty.

The most obvious problem is R&D costs. I do market research and decide that people would be willing to pay $100 for a widget. But said widget does not yet exist, so I spend a million dollars to develop it, and then start selling it for $100 a pop. I calculate it will take several years to break even but that's OK, because I'm a businessman who thinks long term and we like those sorts of people don't we?

I think you can see where this is going - the business runs at a loss for several years, to build the market and spread out the development costs. Eventually I can reduce the price of my widget because I paid off the R&D costs. But until then I'm still in the red.

Amazon is no different. If they make no profit, it's because they choose to charge low prices, build the market and develop new products all at the same time, instead of cashing out. Though actually I think you're distorting history by saying they "muscled their way into the market". Amazon was one of the first online stores. There was no market to muscle in to, nobody else was doing what they were doing. Bezos pretty much created a new market from scratch.