I'm more surprised they bothered to release this at all. The annual SEC report for investors is required, so they have to file something. A "transparency report" is not legally required.

But Motorola did it. (Ducks.) (Ducks 65 more times.)

But the history of Iridium tells a tale that Google appears to have listened to.

It's 66 satellites, not 77 (the actual atomic number of Iridium, the purported reason for the name) because 66 satellites are cheaper to launch and maintain than 77. And still, the company went bankrupt because they couldn't get customers willing to subscribe to the service. And the successor company depends on the US DoD as a major customer -- 23% of their 2012 revenue. That's quite a lifeline -- not one I envision Google's corporate culture rushing out to embrace.

The technical challenges aren't hard, notwithstanding the validity of the "it's rocket science" jokes. The financial and market challenges are the real ones. It's not the same as sticking a website out there and labeling it "Google Foobar (beta)". It makes money from Day One or it gets the hose again.

Not paying the settlements levied against them.

This is the crux of the current brouhaha. The Prenda weasels are blowing off settlements, claiming extreme poverty while desperately shoving huge amounts of money into wholly-owned shell companies and hidden bank accounts.

I want to ask "why are these walking cancer tumors still breathing?", but that's a little extreme. Just a little.

Why are they walking around free? In a just world, they'd be cooling their heels behind bars.

A three minute check shows they claim a power savings over having no AV installed at all. They claim 4.43 KwH/day for no AV, and 4.39 KwH/day for Abatis. Unless there is some "new math" reason that 4.43 is smaller than 4.39, it would appear to me that they are claiming to have lower power than no AV.

Yes, surprise surprise, I actually RTFA... and not just skimmed, but truly read it.

We slashdotters complain vociferously about the (lack of) quality of the editors here at Slashdot. But it could always be worse. We could have editors like the ones at that other Dice holding, who steal people's contributions and put their own labels on them, and then wrap them in malware.

It'd be like Timothy personally claiming every +1-or-higher comment made in one of the articles he "edited", leaving only Goatse and GNAA trollage for us plebians.

Chris Howden and John Plumb are the author and approver (respectively) from Lockheed..... Chris and John are lousy scientists.

The kindest way I can figure it is that the driver simply disables disk IO... hence there may be a small power savings from the lack of writes. Less kindly, they happened to measure lower power, and are reporting experimental noise as a solid result (see www-plan.cs.colorado.edu/diwan/asplos09.pdf for instance). We have no error bars (or even a # of runs), so it really isn't possible to say, but disabling disk writes could conceivably reduce power draw. The methodology section is sketchy enough to make solid conclusions impossible; the reporting of experimental details is worse.

Of course, this doesn't (and they admit it) stop me from hacking them in RAM... nor does it stop persistent firmware attacks (e.g. http://www.wired.com/2015/02/n...), nor does it stop me from trapping to ring 0, then trapping to SMM, then just ignoring their F*ING CODE BECAUSE I"'M IN SMM MODE BITCH!!! I GOTZ MY OWNZ ATA CODEZ

Or something.. I'd recommend just cutting the write-enable line on an old IDE drive, or rebooting periodically and running Tripwire from non-writable media (CD?). It's likely cheaper, and probably just as effective.

That is my only question: can I have a flying unicorn? I'm not satisfied with a mere unicorn, or a pegasus. My little girl is turning 2, and it's time she thought about both her data security and her mythical beings. For my baby girl, I won't settle for anything less than the best. Beyond a 100KB 100% effective security module, I want a horse, flying, with one horn, capable of defeating any poison, and only capable of being captured by a virgin.

And she also wants puppy.

Earth has perfected organ transplant technology, so someone with access to transplants can live for centuries. The transplants are provided by disassembling criminals, because almost every crime is capital, and execution is by disassembly for transplant stock. Because every citizen considers himself or herself law-abiding, they believe they benefit from more transplant material... and would never become transplant material themselves. They think, "I'll never murder, or embezzle, or repeatedly violate traffic laws, so make 'em all capital crimes. Get rid of the undesirables, and a longer life for me."

Earth has a unified government and a world paramilitary police force: the ARM.

The ARM has three major duties: "mother hunts" (enforcing mandatory parenthood licensing, designed so that each normal adult is allowed to be the parent of two children only -- replacement rate reproduction only), suppressing dangerous technologies (in the hands of anyone but the ARM), and combating organlegging -- black market transplant providers who source their material by kidnapping and murder.

So, the presumption that you can't deny reproductive rights is just silly. You have reproductive rights, but if you're hunted down and killed for attempting to exercise them outside the constraints of a violently enforced law, what good are they?

Oddly, 22nd Century Earth of Niven's milieu isn't generally portrayed internally as a dystopia, because humanity has been conditioned into obedience and pacifism anyway. Most Earth citizens consider the status quo wonderful.

This is in fact how the soviet union was able to compete for so long, but eventually it could not keep increasing the amount of resources that it mobilized.

I almost mentioned Russia in my comment - there was a time in the 1930s, when the US and Europe were stuck in the Depression, many Westerners thought that communism might end up totally eclipsing their (at the time) failed economies. And the USSR did grow from a nation of mostly peasants into an industrial superpower incredibly quickly. China has done much better so far, in large part because it mostly integrated with the global economy which was quick to take advantage of the cheap labor. But it is also making some of the same mistakes, as demonstrated by the "ghost cities", or the high-speed rail crash.

It is capitalism that more effectively makes better and better uses of the resources that are available, and its driven by greed.

I wouldn't say "greed", although that term certainly does apply in many cases; I would call it self interest, which isn't the same thing. The fact that our behavior (and economic activity) is greatly affected by incentives doesn't mean that we're greedy or foolish, it means we're human. It's amazing how many people on both the left and the right ignore this when it doesn't align nicely with their preferred policy goals.

These things, combined with a population advantage, guarantee China's success long-term absent any other forces.

Only up to a point. Part of the reason why China has been enjoying enormous rates of economic growth is that it had so far to go. Once their economy and standard of living starts to get much closer to that of the existing advanced industrial economies, and they lose their advantage of cheap labor, all they're left with is the population advantage. And they'll be busy strip-mining the third world in the meantime, which means they'll probably overreach sooner or later and piss everyone off as badly as the US has. (And the US at least has NATO allies, and reasonably friendly relations with neighboring countries.)

I don't think the GP was limiting the scope to science missions - instead, we should also be developing robotic missions to prepare for eventual humans. And more than just robots; even stuff as relatively trivial as 3D printers will make the difference between sustainable human presence versus short-term missions that won't last. There are many other components: better radiation shielding, genetically optimized plants, improved solar cells, and so on.

Remember, ISS is only a few hundred feet up and it's still insanely expensive to service. If we want affordable permanent settlement on the moon or Mars, we need to limit the number of supply trips.

A big part of the reason why this won't happen is that space-related technology tends to be inherently dual-use, i.e. much of it has military purposes. In fact, that's probably the single biggest reason why there was a space race at all in the 1950s/1960s. Since China is already known to be developing military capabilities specifically to counter the US navy/naval air, and has ongoing territorial disputes with at least five neighboring countries that I can think of offhand (several of which are close US allies), it would be ill-advised of the US to make it easier for them.

A perfect example of "solving the wrong problem".

"Astronaut: We want to travel faster than light."
"Scientist: Easily done! I'll just slow down light!"
"Astronaut: You missed the point."

"You're reading it the wrong way."