Anyone who builds a company or a product that is critically dependent on another company providing data FREELY out of the goodness of their hearts who doesn't expect that the day may come when they pay for that data is an idiot. No different than if I had a plot of land on a street and wasn't doing anything with it and allowed the local farmers to set up stands there on the weekend to sell fruit and veg. Over time the wear and tear on the land might require me to have some maintenance done so when that comes to pass, the farmers shouldn't be all put out when I pass a hat looking for $10 or $20 every weekend to defray costs.

As it stands, the way Google went about monetizing that service is very forgiving. First 25,000 access requests per day are free? They could have easily said 1,000 or even just 100 instead.

"with this attack you MUST be the next person to use the card's credentials." "the cries that people have thrown up that someone could scan an entire room full of people at once are totally off-base"

Because it's impossible to build a rig that fits in a briefcase or backpack that scans cards within a meter or two of the holder and automatically runs scripted transactions as soon as a card is detected in range, right?

Just because it's not AS bad a picture as the doomsayers are painting as a worst-case scenario doesn't mean it isn't ripe for exploitation.

"It's hard to imagine the little twit being worse than big Kim."

Unfortunately rumors would suggest that the little twit was the one who was behind the last couple of military incidents with South Korea, specifically the sinking of that SK ship and the shelling of that island. The rumors suggest he (Kim Jong Un) acted in those incidents to try and build legitimacy in his role as the successor to his father since many in the military aren't all that impressed with Un's abilities. It makes me wonder if he might try a few more "incidents" to show the local brass that he is in charge.

But reducing loiter time destroys the primary appeal of drones. One of the major reasons they're used in Afghanistan and elsewhere is that despite having a relatively low (200mph or less) top speed, once they reach station they can loiter for 12 hours or more before having to RTB. Drones aren't being used for frontline combat (yet), but rather for surveillance and calling down the occasional strike as a target of opportunity presents itself.

I'm sure that inevitably drones will be designed for strike missions and even air combat eventually, the economics of 20 drones vs 1 top of the line jet fighter just make too much sense, but they're not at that stage yet.

If possible, yes, but manned jets have the extra payload for HARMs or even send in a Wild Weasel flight first. A drone can only carry a handful of ordinance and AGM-88 HARM missiles weigh a lot more than the Hellfires they usually carry so you'd reduce their payload significantly (or entirely in some cases). That's why I figured it'd just make more sense to flush the Hellfires instead.

"That's called an act of war"

Yes, that's generally what one is engaged in when flying ARMED drones in a given airspace. The drone in the story was an unarmed surveillance drone however. I was just speculating on a useful protocol for discouraging jamming of a drone's control signals during said war.

"you stupid Americans"

Presumptive, aren't we? I'll give you a hint: I live in a NATO country that actually provides health care for all.

People have built hobby quadcopters with built-in GPS that autonomously travel from one place to the next. How difficult could it possibly be to give a drone an instruction that says "in the event of loss of contact with the base station, ascend to altitude and return to base".

Or if you wanted to discourage jammers, "in the event of a loss of contact with the base station, lock hellfire missiles onto the nearest potential targets and fire, then RTB" Then we could have the "scumbag jammers" meme. Scumbag jammers: Jam drone to prevent possible attack. Jamming causes attack.

Of course not, he said "thriving".

Depends on the complexity level required also. Stuff like Tomato and DDWRT are pretty straightforward to configure, whereas playing with Cisco IOS can be daunting. So that might be a hidden cost.

This sounds like you had a shitty IT department in an organization with poor interdepartmental communication. Not all are like that.

See my other comment

http://it.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2545868&cid=38187110

Then tell us exactly how fucked that company would be if some weird little problem with compatibility crept into a CHEMICAL MANUFACTURER's blending system.

You might think it's stupid to proceed slowly in these matters, but then again I don't think you've ever had to clean up the problems that a weird incompatibility can cause. Some places I've worked still to this day have DOS systems in place running specific applications. Because they work, and the cost of them NOT working for even 10 minutes is very bad.

"But when you're still providing us with Windows XP in 2011, you are doing it wrong."

Sigh. So, you have personally checked out all software the enterprise runs under Windows 7 and will be willing to bet your job that it all works perfectly with no hidden issues have you? Here's a hypothetical situation for you:

A company has a software package that they run on 70% of their desktops called DerpMaster 2002. This is an important software package as almost half of the company's business is recorded in it. It works fine under Windows XP. In late 2010, the company decides it's time to upgrade their desktops to Windows 7 as the company president uses it at home and wants to "move with the times". The CTO doesn't see any business reason to move the company to Windows 7 as all of the company operations work well under Windows XP and Windows 2000 Server as they have been the last several years. At the president's insistence, the migration proceeds.

After a month's operation, end users and the IT department are starting to notice that there is random corruption of records in DerpMaster 2002. The first couple of times it was encountered the corruption was considered a random happening or disk fault on the fileserver and the affected record was restored from a previous backup. But now it's happening with a frightening frequency. A random sampling of the DerpMaster database of 300,000 customer records is taken and it's determined that up to 5% of random sample shows some form of corruption. That means there could be as many as 15,000 records corrputed. A series of calls to the makers or DerpMaster 2002 reveal that on small databases their own testing of Windows 7 showed no adverse issues, but they were able to scale up testing and show in-house that on a database of the size and activity level of the company's, there does indeed seem to be a problem with the application. Of course, DerpMaster 2002 is NOT certified for use in Windows 7, but DerpMaster 2011 is, and lucky them! They're willing to provide upgrade licensing for only $500 per seat!

So that sorts out the cause of the problem, but now the company has a database where 15,000 records out of 300,000 are potentially damaged. Rollback to a database backup prior to the migration is out of the question due to the thousands of transactions per day entered into the system. The only course of action is to spend enormous manpower manually checking and correcting if needed all 300,000 records. The system has to remain operational while this check is done, and further corruption has to be prevented. DerpMaster 2011 is a brand new product, based on an entirely new database platform and as such the CTO has difficulty believing it to be a safe upgrade until its track record is proven. To address the problem of corruption, all desktops are given a Windows XP virtual machine image, to run DerpMaster 2002 in. Over the next two weeks (with the IT staff pulling an average of 3 hours of overtime a night) the corruption in the database is eliminated and operations return to relatively normal. Except now the users have another level of complexity on their desktops accessing an application through a VM interface.

Oh and by hypothetical I mean it actually happened. So that's why IT departments get annoyed when someone tells them that switching from a proven platform that works for all company functions to a new platform because an end user thinks they should get with the times or they're "doing it wrong".

That mirrors the experience in my circle of acquaintances. It's like it's accepted that if someone's going to run a hacked Xbox, then no online is part of the price one pays to do that. And many of them do have 2 Xboxes. I actually got a sweet deal on some Xbox 360 hardware a couple of years ago because of the Xbox live ban thing. I wanted to buy a couple of extra controllers and another Rock Band guitar for my 360 and I see some guy who was selling his 360 on Craigslist with a full set of rock band instruments and 2 controllers for $175. I wondered why so cheap so I called him up and apparently he was in a fit of pique because he went to work the day before and his wife accidentally went on XBL without turning on or off some software doodad and got the console banned. So before he could start thinking about what the hardware was actually worth I ran over and bought it off him. So I got my controllers, the extra guitar, re-sold the extra drums for $40, upgraded my Xbox's 20 GB HDD to a 120GB off the new machine, and got basically a free Xbox 360 that sits in my office out of the deal.

Not sure what to say about that Sony ranking. Sony (across several companies I've been at) has become a byword for "pay too much and watch it break in less than a year".