You could make the same argument about MANY functions within your body. There are many different mechanisms in cells that work to prevent uncontrolled cell growth. There are many controls on the cell cycle which have to fail. The tumor needs to create demand for more blood vessels to sustain growth. The tumor has to evade the immune system, etc.

It seems like cancer is the flip-side of multicellular life, and as a result humans have many different mechanisms for preventing it. Only when they all fail do cancers form. The problem is that you have billions of cells independently dividing and every time they do there is an opportunity for more mutations to creep in. Sooner or later any level of redundancy is bound to fail.

Agree. Think about it - in 1999 a modem was a pretty common way of accessing web data.

Forbes article last month explored some of the potentially darker sides of open data â" from ... to making an argument in favor of privatizing certain government services.

What's "darker" about privatizing government services?

Government is FORCE. When it "provides a service" it uses that force to make everybody using that sort of service use THEIR service, which they do THEIR way, and prevent anyone from providing the equivalent service in a possibly better and/or less expensive way.

We're seeig this now with Obamacare. But this has been going on since there have been governments. One of the earliest examples with THIS government was the suppression of alternative mail services.

Now there MAY be a FEW services where privatizing them are an issue. But we can discuss those on a case-by-case basis. For the bulk of them, why should the government even be involved?

I'll agree with this. I don't like the way Google is handling the whole Play Services thing.

I like the idea of having an auto-updated component of the API that works across OS versions. That is what is causing everybody to use it.

What I don't like is that this is closed-source and bundled with all the Google-specific stuff.

They really should have two pre-installed apps. One is called Google Play Services and it is EXACTLY that - APIs related to the Play store, or maybe some other Google-specific APIs as well (ones that don't fit into a specific app, like authentication and so on). That app can be closed service.

The other app should be some kind of Android Extensions app which is purely FOSS, and this provides stuff like webviews and all the logic you want to be easy to update. It shouldn't be tied to Google at all, other than Google being the main contributor. Being FOSS everybody could of course use it.

The only functionality it is missing is the stuff that yandex is complaining about Google bundling.

No, you don't get the automatic Google account provisioning in AOSP. Or Google Play. Or GMail. Or Google Calendar. etc.

Just what do you think a Google-less android would look like?

I don't get the complaint. The non-Google parts of Android are FOSS. Other companies even have made competing forks of it as a result. If MS had done the same thing with Windows back in the 90s there would have been no need for an antitrust lawsuit. If you wanted Windows without IE you could just recompile it yourself, and even sell it if you wanted to.

incredibly secure

I think that qualifier demands you back this claim with some sort of source..

Nah. Just use the literal meaning of "incredible". B-)

It was news to me that anybody was doing this, but liquid nitrogen costs about 20 cents per liter as far as I can tell online (probably cheaper in bulk). You would need about 1.4 l per cubic meter of air you want to displace.

Usually the only network interface UBoot is configured to use is on the local network side, on a wired interface and the IP address used is non-routable.

Which means if they compromised a machine on your LAN you're hosed. They now have your router firmware firmly under their control.

Who needs an intercept in the ISP, lawful or otherwise, when they can have your router send them copies of whatever they want. (Not to mention using it to attack any other devices behind it and cooperate with malware on them.)

Sure. I don't really see a future for the traditional battleship. I think that if it does have a role that it makes more sense to have a fairly generic ship with a big stack of guns on it at far lower cost. The ship is going to sink if anything hits it regardless, so it doesn't need 18" of steel armor and all that nonsense.

Not being well-versed in either Rust or C++11, any chance that you could elaborate? Does C++11 not address the issues of data/thread ownership?

Just a minor nit with the whole Millennium Challenge. Is there any kind of cite for the whole "cheating" business?

I'm aware that the scenario was restarted and run to a US victory. That doesn't necessarily mean that lessons were not learned.

What is the alternative? Send everybody home on day 1 and not practice any of the other stuff planned out for the rest of the week? My sense was that things were restarted so that everybody could still get the planned objectives out of the event, even if an unplanned lesson was learned on day 1.

But, I'm sure the military industrial complex is still more than happy to promote expensive solutions that won't work all the same.

Well, the failure mode seems likely to have included the crew, which is a failure mode that is almost impossible for a manufacturer to guard against, and US-operated aircraft tend to run satellite telemetry which would have avoided the disappearance bit of this as well.

Of course it would be better if the thing were found and the questions were answered. It just seems a bit much to blame the US for not doing anything about it. I wouldn't be surprised if the US snooped around with subs or whatever just as an exercise, but of course they're not going to talk about that if they did, and if they had found something then most likely the US would have let people know about it somehow (maybe a US surface ship might just happen to pick up something on sonar in the area or whatever).

If the macrophages do this with tattoo ink, they no doubt do it with other things, as well.

I wonder if using this cream to remove ALL the dead-macrophages-loaded-with-junk from the skin will result in effectively "younger" skin?

While computerized and radar-based fire control is a wonderful thing, they don't address variability in muzzle velocity.

The computer can instantly calculate exactly where to point the gun so that the shell hits given a muzzle velocity of 2500 m/s The problem is that when the gun is fired that the muzzle velocity might turn out to be 2450 m/s, and it is a bit too late at that point to modify the elevation.

If the shell-to-shell variability were low the computer could of course correct for the next shot, but if the next one comes out at 2570 m/s then you're stuck.