As long as the current duopolies keep feeding legislators with money, there's not going to be any real anti-trust enforcement.

I'm pretty sure that it goes without saying that single-site redundancy means that if you lose the site, you lose everything. Though if you have a segmented datacenter, Netapp will let you separate the heads by up to 500 meters. Likewise, you can separate the disk trays so you can lose an entire datacenter segment without losing data.

If you want replication across sites, Netapp will be more than happy to help you out with a variety of synchronous and asynchronous replication options. For a price, of course.

You don't really need two separate filers, you just need a two headed filer to prevent any single point of failure. You can lose anything (even a controller on a disk shelf) and not even notice until the replacement is fedexed to you tomorrow.

The USA should have an agency (maybe call it the NSA+) that's tasked with helping companies shore up cyber defenses... Maybe even doing code reviews and penetration testing of common software to look for vulnerabilities. Instead we have an NSA that exploits vulnerabilities and creates new backdoors into software and networks with no real oversight or accountability

I like to think that I'm not in total isolation, I read online news (including Slashdot), occasionally check in to Facebook and Twitter, but I never heard this before.

I heard that all the cool kids are on Snapchat now - I suppose that's where this news broke?

As someone who works in Silicon Valley and is paid one of the insane salaries earned by tech workers here, $1K or even $5K ($600 - $3K after taxes?) of "found money" is just not that much money. I'd gladly gamble it on continued litigation just to make sure that the companies involved actually felt some pain, even if there wasn't the prospect of a 10X higher settlement in the future. $300M is barely a slap on the risk to a company that has billions in the bank.

Though I can see why the lawyers were happy to settle and get their cut of a $300M payout rather than risk years of litigation with no payout.

Somehow I don't think a multibillion dollar settlement is going to force Google or Apple into bankruptcy:

http://www.bizjournals.com/san...

Part of the reason they have these multi billion dollar cash reserves is by illegally colluding to keep employee turnover down and reduce wages.

But they are ok with the 2 lb book I'm carrying or the can of coke (or bottle of wine/whiskey) that the flight attendant just sold me knocking them in the head or the 300 lb beverage cart ending up in their lap? Airlines still let infants travel on their parent's lap, surely if they were worried about my Kindle hitting someone in the head, they'd be worried about the child becoming a projectile.

Sure, I understand that loose items are dangerous in a crash,but if that's a significant risk, the solution to that is to ban *all* of the items, not just the ones that happen to have a battery.

For that matter, requiring passengers to sit through driver training exercises on flights would do a lot more to keep them safe than making them put down an iPad during takeoff/landing given that they are *far* more likely to die in a car than a plane.

United has a new "humorous" preflight briefing, and if I hadn't already been through hundreds of preflight briefings, I'm not sure that I'd understand exactly what I'm supposed to do based on this video. I can't believe the FAA ever approved it.

I'll take my chances that even if I did brace for impact it wouldn't make a significant difference in my survival or chance of injury. And whether I'm looking at my kindle, staring out the window, even staring right at the flight attendant in the jump seat, I don't think it's going to affect my reaction time at all. Even with headphones on I can hear cabin announcements (I sure wish I couldn't, so I could sleep while the captain points out that we're crossing over the Rocky Mountains).

I don't remember ever being asked to stow a book, and my kindle is smaller and lighter than most hardcover books (even many paperbacks). Besides, I've seen the overhead compartments come unlatched during severe turbulence, so in the event of a real crash, a loose kindle is the least of anyone's worries.

Killing more birds sounds worse, unless wind turbines kill more endangered (or otherwise valuable) species.

If you know the password is made of an English phrase, you can cut down the phrase search space a lot by applying english grammar rules.

Ahh, but fossil fuels won't just suddenly 'stop', they'll just get more and more expensive as it becomes harder and harder to extract from the ground. As fossil fuels rise in price, making changes to use less fuel becomes more attractive. Of course, it's much cheaper and easier to make the switch now while fossil fuels are plentiful, but there's no reason to believe that fossil fuel production will suddenly stop and we'll all be raising animals by candlelight.

Yeah, that sounds much better than making sure that airliners are immune to common sources of RF interference (including terrestrial sources that are going to exist whether or not anyone uses Wifi on the plane). Put grandma on a no-fly list because she wanted to play angry birds and didn't know how to put her phone into airplane mode. While on other aircraft, airlines *encourage* you to use Wifi to access inflight internet and entertainment.