"It works in Israel because there is a fraction of the linear border distance to fence and patrol and maintain. Israel has less than 760 kilometers of fence,"

So what you're saying is a country with a population of 10 million people can look after a 760 KM fence properly, but a country with 35x that population can't find the manpower to guard and maintain a fence 4x longer? Interesting....

"The fix is to research and vote with your conscience. Which is why I haven't voted (D) or (R) in years"

The fix you propose would be valid if you could get the majority of the voting populace to do so. Since they won't, all you're doing is throwing your already insignificant vote into a probably-hopeless candidate and devaluing it more. Two party systems make this practically impossible to overcome.

IPMI is a management interface that allows you to do some neat remote administration tasks on these servers up to and including remote console so you can even install an OS on them over the network. They are a separate network interface with this running. I have several of these boxes deployed in my datacenters and firstly, the IPMI interface is configured with a non-public IP address, and secondly, the box is behind a firewall blocking all traffic that is not explicitly allowed, so while this is some sloppy-ass stuff on Supermicro's part, I am personally not that concerned. I am sure that there are many who are not nearly as cautious as I am though who might need to be concerned. Although if they are also that careless, chances are they might not have bothered to set up the IPMI interface as well or even plugged it in.

Exactly. Supermicro definitely screwed the pooch on this one, but so is anyone deploying these systems without a firewall in front of them. It's just common sense.

Japan was not "tapped out". It's well documented that their backs were against the wall and they were prepared to throw the bodies of every last fighting man, woman and child into the expected land invasion by the allies, and it would have been a horrific bloody mess. So many casualties were anticipated from the planned allied invasion that the US started pumping out Purple Heart medals in advance of the action and so many were manufactured that those same medals are still being awarded today.

Hell, even AFTER the nukes were dropped some of the more rabid Japanese commanders still wanted to continue the fight and nearly mutinied. If the bombs hadn't been dropped to show overwhelming tactical advantage, their collective spirit wouldn't have broken, and the deaths, casualties and mass suicides during the Okinawa invasion would have been repeated on a far larger scale.

Seriously? They're offering a free service, with certain rules and requirements for certain types of videos to be hosted there. Don't want to agree to those terms, fine. Go put your video somewhere else. There's Vimeo, Vevo (who actually focuses on music content...) Veoh, Metacafe, etc. etc.

How is that evil? That's like having a farm where there's a gun range and letting everyone in town can use it for free, but if you want to use certain rifles, you have to use the ammo they freely provide. "OMG, I have to use your free ammo at your free gun range instead of my own? STOP OPPRESSING ME!"

"Google has confirmed that it will remove the music videos of independent artists unless they sign up to its upcoming subscription music service. Many independent musicians and labels have refused to do so, claiming that the contracts offer significantly worse deals than the likes of Spotify and Pandora."

Here's a thought... why not both? Sign up for Youtube as well as Spotify and Pandora.

I think you need to have another look at VPS. It's been the case for several years now that you sign up for an account, pay for what you want and then an automated deployment system allows you to spin up a brand new VPS with your choice of sizing and OS all in about 60 seconds. Digital Ocean even lets you just throw some cash in your balance and then charges you per day so you can spin up and shut down as many VPSs as you like with whatever capacity you have the credit for on that day.

>You get what you pay for.

If this is supposed to be some dig against going with little cloud services and then being surprised by outages, please share your thoughts on Amazon's EBS outages that have taken many of the highest trafficked services online out 3 times in the last 2 years. Or Microsoft's multple cloud service failures that have dragged things to a halt at many businesses using Office online. Or look to Slashdot's own front page yesterday and today to see coverage of Adobe's Creative Cloud service being offline for 28 hours.

> I don't think VPS fits directly into the cloud conversation

VPS's are considered cloud, you're virtualizing hardware and paying someone else to maintain those VMs on their infrastructure with (supposedly) no need to concern yourself with the maintenance of that underlying hardware or network infrastructure. How is that not cloud? I brought my experience with one provider up because it falls into those parameters.

>This would be no different then a collocation getting DOS'd

Ah, but it is. Firstly, most cloud providers are co-locating within another facility themselves instead of owning the place. Secondly and most importantly, if my co-location provider has a spectacular failure of some sort, I still have the option of going down to the datacenter with my truck and loading all *my* servers into the back then going across the street to another co-lo. With cloud providers, they're hundreds or thousands of kilometers away and you don't own anything in their facilities so you have no recourse unless you have local backups of everything to start elsewhere (which you should). And even if you have backups, I would be willing to bet you don't have bare-metal VM copies so you'll be provisioning new VMs and installing your application(s) and then restoring backups, which is a far more involved process than re-racking and assigning new IPs to a machine.

> However being it is suppose to be the cloud company key job to keep it running.

Yes, supposed to be, and actually do are two different things. And most of the time you don't find out about the cloud host's deficiencies until far too late. One cloud company I had a personal linux server with got hit with a DOS attack and their response was to ignore their customer service email and phone for almost a week while trying to clean it up. Needless to say I bought another VPS elsewhere, restored by backups and cancelled my account at the original place as soon as their systems settled down enough. I couldn't possibly imagine leaving my business systems vulnerable to those kind of shenanigans.

> also with a proper contract you can squarely blame them for any mistake

Are you truly that naive? If you have an SLA with *your* client to uphold it doesn't matter if you have someone to blame or not. Your client will blame *you*. It's your decision to go with a service company that has caused you to miss your SLA so it is your fault. Period. Say that SLA violation costs you $100,000. I can bet you your annual paycheck that the agreement you signed with the cloud provider will only see you getting refunded hosting costs during the outage and not a nickel toward your actual losses. So yeah, you lost $100K on the SLA violation but good news! You're getting $250 off your cloud bill. Sweet! Er. wait...

Every single thing on your list has one major difference. Fishing? Resource consumed. Wildflowers? Resource consumed. Videotape, resource (potential sales) consumed. FM broadcasting, resource consumed (spectrum. Your little micro FM might block someone else who paid for the spectrum). All of these are a thing because if a lot of people do it, the resources will be gone or severely degraded.

Now, if I fly a drone and photograph me some tornado carnage and then post it on youtube vs selling it to a TV station would you please point out where that resource I consumed was? Hell, even if there were 500 microdrones in the air at the same time taking footage, how is that a problem? As long as they abide by the same regulations of amateur use with regard to altitude and line of sight, who cares?

This is a classic example of the regulations not catching up to reality.

I couldn't agree more. Things fail, you cannot rely on electrical/power assist functions in all cases so as a responsible motor vehicle operator you should be required to know what to do in the event that one or more of these systems fails. In fact, it should be mandatory to receive a driver's license. A pilot has to demonstrate the ability to handle an engine failure before receiving their license, and a motorcyclist has to demonstrate the ability to handle the bike with the front tire locked up in a panic stop before getting theirs, so why not car drivers having the same requirements?

In addition, it saddens me to see manual gearboxes being nearly nonexistent in North America, as that also gives you far better control over your vehicle in a situation like this. Something weird going on with your engine? Step 1, put in the clutch. Step 2, put it in neutral (which many automatics won't let you do at highway speeds any more), step 3, sort it out on the shoulder. Works for both an engine that dies unexpectedly, as well as those alleged reports of stuck throttles.

save $4000 and get a solowheel

http://inventist.com/soloindex.php

"No gaming control pad should have a touchscreen. It was absolutely ridiculous on the Wii U"

I strongly disagree. Used properly, the touchpad and second display can be a great addition. Just look at some of the DS or 3DS games for how it should be done. In fact, if Nintendo would release a WiiU addon that would allow me to use my 3DS cartridges on it, I'd buy it in a heartbeat and airmail them a thank you cake.

Really? We're equating phones, ipods and tablets to PCs now? Walk into an office with an iPad and tell your boss you don't need a computer any more. See how far that gets you. By the same token, there are more bikes than cars, I guess Detroit better hang it up and call the liquidators, bikes won.

"devices" aren't even in the same area code as PCs and laptops, capability and *usability* wise. Trying to equate one to the other is ludicrous. One observation that stuck with me about tablets vs computers is that someone remarked "Tablets are information and media consumption devices, while computers are information and media creation devices". And it's true. I have a tablet. I love my tablet. It's great for looking shit up or watching a video in bed or or reading email on the train on the way to work. But if I have to type a paragraph on the thing I want to hurl it down the hallway by the time I finish. And if someone told me I HAD to do my job on it, I'd put it on the desk, walk out and become a farmer, garbageman, mechanic, or anything else that wouldn't force me to use a tablet to do tech work.

Doesn't matter. The NSA already knows who it is. The rest is just paperwork.