They reduce the salary costs of every other department, by making employees more efficient for their salary. It's not much different from the idea that IT departments make other areas more efficient.

Funny thing... people tend to be do better work when they feel they're respected. Management can achieve that either by actually respecting them, or by dumping salary money on the employees and hoping it buys productivity.

I have a $150 mini-PC hooked up to my TV. It can stream video decently enough, but anything 3D chokes after a few frames. For a few bucks a month, I can play the latest greatest games from my living room couch, and basically never need to upgrade my little terminal. It'd probably pay for itself in one upgrade cycle, which is about every 3-5 years for me...

Now, granted I don't actually have time to play video games these days... but I would have been a big fan of this a few years ago. In fact I was, having quite a bit of interest in the similar OnLive service's technology, but no interest in the games they offered at the time. Being able to bring your own library is a feature.

Under normal circumstances, risky activity can simply be conducted on a DMZ within the FBI's network, and it will have no impact on the investigation.

These aren't normal circumstances. WikiLeaks has spent decades trying to undermine the US government. Identifying every incoming connection to impede an investigation is exactly the kind of stunt they'd pull. They aren't just a passive website somewhere hosting an ISIS propaganda video. They're actively hostile toward US agencies, and appropriate caution would be warranted.

Also, it's not a false dichotomy. It's hyperbole. You expect dedicated assets, without considering the cost to have those appropriate assets. The choice is in handling the cost in-house to have dedicated assets, or in outsourcing the device operations and network management. Starbucks is the cost-effective option.

Since the drive would be known to contain classified information, it would actually be destroyed by a $4000 to $10000 tool. Sure, it's pricey, but it meets all safety requirements and ensures that the drive is completely unreadable.

A $5 hammer might break the laptop's screen and case, but then someone could take it out of the dumpster, pull the perfectly-intact drive, and enjoy open access to not just the CIA's tools, but any of the FBI's analysis or notes that happened to be stored alongside.

Yes, the FBI could have a bank of computer assets ready for such inspection tasks, with a full complement of support staff (making a minimum of $50K/year each) to ensure those assets are prepped and available as soon as they're needed. To handle the network side of things, they'll need a few network engineers operating a secret network of VPN endpoints under shell companies (which themselves need accountants and paper-pushers) to ensure the connection can't be identified as being an FBI asset (and thus served different data).

On the other hand, they could just go buy a cheap laptop, drop a bare-minimum set of tools on it, and spend a few hours acting exactly like any non-FBI person would in a non-FBI location doing non-FBI things.

Since it's my tax dollars paying for this, I'd prefer the simple and effective option. There's no need to have a dedicated solution for a rare problem.

I had assumed the TPS would see temperatures in the 10,000 F ballpark... this is much lower than that, and is within reasonable ability to test here on Earth.

Of course, the hard part of thermal control in space is there's no atmosphere to sink heat into, so cooling is only achieved through radiation or mass ejection. Even being in a more reasonable temperature range than I thought does not make the problem easy, by any stretch.

Maybe, maybe not... I haven't heard of anyone actually suggesting eternal sequestering, but I have heard of efforts to match carbon-releasing processes to sequestering processes, so the active amount is controllable.

...Which will mean approximately nothing without a sustainable ecology. When our society collapses, so does our knowledge.

It's not just cities being submerged that is problematic. It's the collapse of the corn industry due to rain, so we'll have to find a new industrial-scale source of starch for our chemical needs. It's the infrastructure expense as we have to adapt our inland cities to accommodate the billions of displaced people from the flooded coasts. It's the disaster relief efforts as storms become more energetic. It's the economic calamity as major shipping ports shut down and new ones have to be built, rerouting entire regions of supply chains.

Sure, we can adapt to that... but it's going to be a long, hard, and expensive road to travel. There will be tremendous amounts of human suffering, not lust in hardship and death for those who can't adapt, but in extra work for those that have to carry the bulk of the "adapting" load.

A poignant thought, but far outside our grasp at the moment. There is no other planet in the solar system that we can colonize with current technology, and we definitely don't have the technology to survive as an "interstellar species". The most we can do right now is to fling ourselves off of this planet, and promptly (within a generation or two) die.

We will never come into balance with the earth because the earth was never in balance to begin with. Every era has brought change to the earth, and that won't stop. ... We aren't stupid enough to try is change the earth to keep it constant to the moment of our awakening.

No, we aren't stupid, and that's not the point. Those of us who fight climate change aren't trying to restore any perfect "balance with the earth", or stop the change the next era will bring. We're trying to keep this era, with breathable air and a functioning 4000-year-old society, going for as long as we can. Yes, someday the era will end, and New Orleans will sink, and we'll have to seek refuge among the stars... but our goal is to hold that off as long as possible, and to avoid the high cost of adapting to such catastrophe, as our "literate scientific civilization" continues to advance our technology. If we're successful, then by the time the Florida becomes a reef, we'll already have mature technology allowing our society to easily adapt to the new life.

We aren't hiding in a box. We're facing our species' ongoing battle with death, and we plan to cheat.

Google Docs.

For anyone with a Gmail account, Google Docs is free (like Wordpad is free to anyone with a Windows OS), and offers all the editing capabilities of Wordpad, and then some.

As someone who has had to actually plan for such a disaster, I can assure you this opinion is utterly ridiculous, and makes an unfortunate incident into a life-changing catastrophe.

After a disaster of any size or severity, minutes matter. Even if it's only your home office that burned, you're facing hours or days on the phone with customer support reps trying to prove that you are who you claim, without having access to the normal channels to validate your connected identity. Sure, you can reset your password, if you can prove you control the account's email address. You can get access to your email address, if you can provide a code sent to your phone. Sure, you can port your phone number to a new device, if you can just confirm the PIN you set up a decade ago and wrote down in your precious notebook.

In time, everything can probably be recovered... but meanwhile, you're locked out of your email, your banking, and your online shopping... right as you're trying to recover from a house fire, which would be much easier if you had access to those modern conveniences.

For what it's worth, Mr. Han is a newcomer to the CEO role at Frontier. The previous CEO, Daniel J. McCarthy, apparently jumped ship in December.

In 2018, McCarthy made $7.1 million on paper, including almost $2.5 million in salary and bonuses.

2% of the company's debt sure isn't much, but it sure doesn't look too good for a company to be sinking in debt while paying out bonuses of 146% someone's salary.

I think it was around 2000 when I started reading here, but found the comments to be silly in-jokes and goatse... Certainly no reason to associate with this absurd community. I would read /. for the articles, I swear.

In early 2009, I was unemployed and found myself in rural Africa (which was surprisingly helpful to my budget) with Slashdot as my most useful resource to follow tech news. When I returned to the US, I made an account, and apparently posted my first comment on July 4th.

Make of that what you will. My comments usually reflect my mood at the time far more than how many years ago I last opened a textbook.

In hindsight, yep.

When I first read ShanghaiBill's post, I was still thinking about transmissions, and those having no redundancy, and remembering positioning a directional dish on a short building on the north side of a tall building... If the direct path's obscured, there's no other satellite to talk to.

Then that got me thinking about the issue of having a single satellite, and the problem with those being less reliable, and the orbital mechanics involved with maintaining a tiny constellation. Then I wrote my comment, and didn't reinterpret #4 until just now.

5. Single point of failure

6. Failures result in days (moving a standby satellite into place) to years (building & launching a replacement) of service interruption

Extremely so... not only is the latency going to be extreme due to the high altitudes, but having limited hardware (using what's essentially a shared medium) means that clients will be fighting for communication time. Having a high latency and high collision rate means you'll also have high retransmission rates, further increasing the demand for time.

Those conflicts can be mitigated somewhat with modern radio technology, but that raises the cost significantly for even modest performance improvements, and still leaves harsh limits on what a single multi-million-dollar satellite can handle.

TFS omits the very next line from TFA, that explains exactly how the perpetrators cheated: