I'd be inclined to think most of them, even if they're not really hooked up almost anything runs on ICs these days. How much is really pure mechanical/hydraulic anymore? Forget things like navigation, communication, targetting and such, how good is a tank if the engine won't run and the gun won't fire because the IC controlling the fuel injection and barrel rotation and firing mechanism all need a 128 bit "wake-up code" from the central system?

And the central system is using full disk crypto and the key to booting the whole system is held in write-only memory with a timeout circuit. Either you need to try prying the key out with an electron microscope - and they do make anti-tampering systems for that too - or you need to rip it out and replace all of it because it'll never work for you. Either way it seems pretty simple to make a good off switch, as long as you can make a reliable enough on switch.

On the other hand, I know many companies that have had huge losses on fixed bid projects because a seemingly innocent scope turned out to be a bear trap or because there's no customer incentive to ensure progress, help with clarification, dispute unspecified things such as looks or button texts or tooltips or whatever and in general avoid the most absurd and time-consuming interpretation of the requirements, not to mention all the time spent arguing over them. To compare it to the construction industry it's the difference between having a building blueprint and a few sketches to show roughly the kind of house you'd like. And then expect a fixed bid on it.

I strongly preferred time and material contracts over fixed bid projects when I was a consultant and I think my clients were generally happier about it too, basically if they figured "Hey, that's a good idea" or "Hey, I know I said X but now that I see it we should have done Y" they don't have to make a long change order process with typically inflated estimates and prices, they decide what I spend my time on but the flip side is that they only thing they can say is that they're not happy with my work and cancel my contract, there's no fixed deliverable.

I guess it's a lot harder with a big project where you can't just bail in the middle or expect someone else to take over. Besides, the government is generally not allowed to be subjective. In the private sector, if Oracle treats you like shit you can just make an executive decision to f*ck off. In the public sector you can't refuse Oracle on the next contract just because they were dicks on the last contract, you have to go with the criteria and follow the process that is to ensure your tax money isn't just funneled to their favorite partner. That's also why they can afford to be so abusive, they know this is hardly the end of government contracts in Oregon for Oracle.

It's funny how that list changed from first to second time you said it. The countries most interested in banning biological and chemical weapons are those most heavily invested in nuclear weapons. Perhaps because nukes are pretty hard to come by while even two bit dictators like Saddam and Assad have chemical weapons. Not to mention land mines, IEDs are pretty indiscriminate if civilians happen to be in the wrong place at the wrong time but they're a staple of most guerrilla warfare.

My impression is that we're getting further and further away from anything like a clean war where the military on both sides come out in the open, battle it out and leave the civilians be. Even when they're not explicitly targeted it seems human shields are more common than ever and that speculating in collateral damage is actively used as a weapon of war. That's the problem with big guns, they're so good that they "force" the other side to fight you in ways where you can't use them.

My cell phone is by far the most likely tech device I have to get broken, lost or stolen as I bring and use it almost everywhere. Pictures you take with the cell phone are the first and only copy in existence, what if you phrase "cloud" as "instant online backup", does that sound like a better idea? Yes, ideally I'd like to have them backed up on my computer instead of Apple's or Google's but very few run 24x7 boxes and sending them by email again requires a trusted third party. Unless you could integrate this all with GPG so it'd send encrypted email my home computer can pick up next time it's switched on. And hopefully avoid any attachment/mailbox size limits. But I don't know any software that does that, and the average person sure couldn't set that up. So if you don't want to lose all your photos and don't want to remember syncing all the time (because that totally happens, right?) you flip a switch and hope Apple doesn't screw it up.

I think if you actually went out and asked people, a lot of tech-inclined people use cloud sync too. It's very convenient until something like this happens.

So Earth's not hot enough for you? Guess we need more global (bed)warming.

And that fails to actually fulfill the requirements because reality doesn't conform to their model, rather than the other way around.

Would that be "fuck all" as in "buy something else", "don't buy at all" or "insist on the old version"? Tanking sales tend to have a very correcting effect on for-profit companies, assuming there's competition to speak of. Sure, I can't decide what that company will do but I can't decide what that OSS project will do either and while I can theoretically fork and maintain my own version it's not really a practical possibility 99.9% of the time. If there happens to be enough people dissatisfied with the direction it's taking to make a fork that's fortunate for me but really outside my control too.

I've been watching Gnome/KDE trying to battle Windows now for the last 15 years or so and making so little progress YotLD has become the running joke around here ever since Duke Nuke'm Forever shipped. Then I look at Android which is more cathedral than bazaar and it's gone from nothing to 85% world wide market share in 6 years. And the absolutely greatest success the Linux kernel is run like anything but a bazaar, lieutenants are from military hierarchy and it has one general on top - or benevolent dictator for life if that sounds better. Sometimes picking one direction - even if it's not the absolutely best one - beats taking no direction or pulling in ten different directions. Heresy, I know.

Sure he can. He just assumes that the West will never call him on it, or that if they do it'll be a very, very clear line like the Cuban missile crisis or when Hitler invaded Poland. He could probably nuke Kiev and occupy Ukraine and I still don't think NATO would come out and declare war on their own against the second biggest nuclear force on the planet. Don't forget that it's only a defense alliance, you can't invoke it unless a member state is under attack so there'd have to be a long and ugly political process.

Besides, even though Russia is significantly weakened compared to the Cold War when they had the Soviet Union and the East Bloc I'm fairly sure China would not like a US-led invasion party occupying Russia. If they use "the enemy of my enemy is my friend" logic they might throw their support behind Russia and then we'd all be in very deep shit. Just like WWI spiraled out of control there's really no telling how WWIII might turn out, you can't reliably estimate the cost. And people rarely mean "must be stopped at all costs".

Godwin be damned, this comparison is relevant. I think Crimea is Hitler's Sudetenland. Ukraine would be Hitler's Czechoslovakia. If he's stupid enough to touch a NATO country, that will be his Poland and ultimately his demise. Does he know when to back down? Khrushchev did, though he cut it close. Putin might too, at least the world might hope so. But we won't really know until we really draw the line and say so far, but no further. And I have the impression Ukraine is going to get fucked over before we draw that line.

If you're being shot at by a nutcase, you call the cops. If you're being shot at by an invading army, you call the military. If you're being hacked by script kiddies, you call the cops. If you're being hacked by a foreign government, you call the military. If Iran had the military muscle I would say an attack like Stuxnet is "casus belli" for declaring war. This is NATO expanding its defence treaty to include cyber attacks, launching such attacks against one member nation is like attacking all of them. And I think all nations have some form of private-government cooperation to secure critical infrastructure, whether that's physical or digital I don't see makes the big difference. You might argue it shouldn't be hooked up to the Internet, but totally isolated networks are extremely inconvenient.

Practically, all you need to do is install a non-crippled copy of ffmpeg or x264 because if you can transcode a video - that is, decode and encode it again - you can edit a video. Whether using those codecs without a patent license is legal depends on your jurisdiction, but the editing software doesn't have to deal with that as it could just use the system codecs. By default you would have Theora and H.264 would either come with your distro or be one command away. Mozilla could have done that, but they refused because they wanted HTML5 video to work out of the box, everywhere. That's not possible, but that's no excuse for why there aren't any good free video editors.

Why not? Games can actually render 4K detail, unlike the real problem with 4K TVs, there's almost zero native content. I did manage to play a bit at full 2160p and it was beautiful but also totally choking my GTX 670 so I'm currently waiting for a next-gen flagship model (GTX 880/390X probably) for a SLI/CF setup. CPU/RAM don't seem to be holding it back much though, but maybe at 4K so upgrading those too.