you just...answered why it wouldn't work. If that much garbage is actually coming into the conditioned power, it will kill the system in very little time.

It's a good thing the US government hasn't done anything like that to Google, eh? Moral high ground, and all...

err...uhhh...well, ok, yeah - any gov with a "few billion on hand" (short list of govs these days) could, sure - except how does that make the clause dumb? The point was to encourage private enterprise to do it before that very thing happened. And yes, anyone could cut the time short by spending even more, but why would a gov do that? Also, sure - put the pirate bay servers up there. The servers themselves rarely if ever go down - the overwhelmingly vast blocking of traffic to/from piratebay is done via IP, not at layer1. So sure - put it on the moon - where there is only one single feed to/from, so that everyone has a much smaller IP space to block. See if that makes the problem better.

Uh, there was never a time in the history of mankind that Microsoft was able to just sell whatever they want at whatever price...in China. That has never, ever, occurred. China is simply officially saying that this is still the case, as it has always been the case.

the SNI extension to TLS is one of the biggest differences... The argument from China seems odd though. Microsoft's options are a) no one buys anything (since they already own it, or already know how to generate keys) or B) they use pirated versions of Windows...in neither option, does Microsoft make any money.

my mother had a pacemaker at age 18.

it's not just an engine outage - it's an engine outage coupled with distractions right before and during the outage. Your dash, lights, radio, cell phone, etc all suddenly start going nuts...and oh btw your engine died too. Or worse, your engine didn't die, but you still got all the distractions, and the guy driving a manual transmission in front of you /did/ get a dead engine, so he's slowing down rapidly. Or perhaps you were merely doing something other than cruising in a straight line - maybe you were in the middle of a sharp turn, or you were slowing down, or you needed to speed up rapidly to miss something... But as a motorcyclist, I say kudos to you that you cannot be distracted while driving, and that you can always react perfectly to every situation. I wish the prius being driven by a teenager whose mother was yelling at him had been a little less distracted when he suddenly crossed over the double yellow and into my path, from which I had no place to dodge and had to just eat his car with my face...I agree, he shouldn't have been driving. Most people probably shouldn't be. But they are, and making it worse is a horrible idea.

even despite whether one exists, steering has been assisted ("power" steering) for quite a long while now - some cars are nearly impossible to steer without it. As an example, when in highschool I worked rodeos and baled hay for my off-school activities, and I was a linebacker on my school team. I had, at the time, a truck and a car - the car was a 1979 mercedes 280sel. I had the good fortune of having a sudden engine failure while going about 60mpg on a very curvy road (2222 near Austin) and had a *really* hard time, despite being a pretty buff fellow, keeping the car on the road. I've been in other cars where the power steering made quite a lot of difference (but none quite as much as that mercedes...). That car also had an electro-mechanical fuel injection system, as well as electronic controlled braking system. And, it weighed almost 3 tons. So whether or not an actual mechanical failsafe exists for the steering wheel on a 2013/2014 vehicle, A) there are other vehicles on the road too, and B) non-assisted steering is very difficult on many cars, even new ones

With so many people predicting the death of laptops, servers, and workstations, to tablets and smartphones...despite how stupid such a claim is...I'd imagine that over the medium term the stock is substantially undervalued. If he did steps to revive things, stocks might go up, then he'd have to pay more. Now he can take bigger risks, change things more dramatically/dynamically, etc. Being in corporate america I just cannot see how anyone who does real work would ever try to do something on a tablet. They're great for taking notes during a meeting, but beyond that...such devices are for content consumption, not content production. There will still be servers, workstations, and yes - even laptops, for years to come. Windows8 may have farked some stuff up, but all the better to maybe partner closely with Ubuntu and make a mac-like integration suite, or...?

the problem with your sarcasm is that the entire law, as someone else said, is completely garbage (I'm just being a bit more verbose). There is nothing to salvage in the "patriot" act, nothing at all. The Affordable Care Act, on the other hand...well, the items which were serious process problems have already been worked through or that money has already been spent. If they didn't do something in the ideal way but the non-ideal way is already done, well, fark it - move forward ($635M for the portal and backend interfaces, I'm looking at you).

"Nationalism is an infantile disease. It is the measles of mankind." - Albert Einstein.

Don't get caught up so much on thinking the people of one particular area are worth more than the people of another area. That's what wars are made of.

wait, really? So you consider coal mines and conventional power plants to be what, tourist attractions?

I don't even want to say apples to oranges, because in such a case both are at least still fruit. Facebook is a site where if some little thing goes missing, is out of order, some text is wrong, etc - no worries. People sign away their privacy, and they had no real need to protect it - not now, and especially not during the first 5 years. Facebook tied in with ad places, but that was only for ads...nothing major. The obamacare site on the other hand has PHI/PII issues to deal with, HIPAA, and various other security concerns. It has to share, in a secure manner, this PHI/PII information with third parties - which means designing interfaces with those 3rd parties. It has to be able to connect with various data points to get info about you. It has to be able to make accurate recommendations about very important life decisions. Was it done poorly? Yes. Is comparing it to the operating costs of facebook fair? No, not at all. Is $634M way, way more than it should have cost for something at the quality level as what we got? ......yes, definitely.

yeah, I'm a bit confused by his comment too. Is he suggesting the ext4 support is not available? Because umm...wtf does the kernel (otherwise) have to do with what formatting is "default?"

"The partnership will also work on ways to lower the amount of data necessary to power most apps and Internet experiences..."

IOW, they want a larger base of people who have fewer rights and who can't easily sue, upon which to experiment with more sophisticated tracking methods. Getting an identifying code from your phone shouldn't be too hard, after all - linking that to the facebook account logged into with the phone allows facebook to then link to what ever other sites you visit (again with your phone serial number). Notice the phone chip manufacturers on the list? Between Nokia, Qualcomm, and Samsung...what portion of the cell phone chip market is that? If the US gov would be interested in stopping a thing, they still couldn't - not when it's not happening here. But with the recent happenings here and in Europe, we know our "first world" governments are doing quite the opposite of such privacy and anti-tracking interests...