We will, of course, run all your errands for you without gathering the data for marketing and other purposes; because doing that would be just too easy...

The assorted 'laws of war' are heavily leavened by what their framers suspect that they can actually get at least some people to agree to; but the overall theoretical foundation always seems to be an attempt to steer weapons in the direction of "Kills outright, or leaves a wound that, if treated, will heal with comparatively limited permanent damage."

It's not an easy standard to maintain(both in terms of convenience, mass-maiming is a hell of a shock to morale and logistics, and engineering, something that will kill if it hits you as designed will likely cause serious tissue damage and/or amputation if it scores a sub-par hit); but it's not really a terribly strange shared desire, from the perspective of the warring European powers of the 20th century that wrote most of them.

I'm fairly out of my depth with this stuff, so this is an honest inquiry: how do the magnetic nanoparticles fit into the equation?

I realize that, once coated with a suitably tailored binding protein, the particles will collect whatever target the binding protein was specified for (presumably this could even be tailored, for any target where a suitably tame binding compound is available), and probably fairly efficiently because of the absurd surface area of nanoparticles.

What I don't understand is the necessity of using the nanoparticles. It was my understanding that, outside of seriously immunocompromised victims, T-cells(and possibly other flavors of phagocytes, I'm fuzzy on the details) are extremely adept at engulfing and destroying foreign bodies, including 'clumps' produced by targets bound to the antigens produced by B-cells. This technique appears to be using a synthetic/introduced antigen(which makes sense if the immune system isn't producing the necessary antigen, or not ramping up production fast enough); but it also introduces the nanoparticles so that the antigen clumps can be magnetically scrubbed from the bloodstream, rather than cleaned up by the T Cells.

What is the peculiarity here that would make introducing the novel clump-scrubbing mechanism necessary and worthwhile?

The Protocol contains a loophole large enough to drive a truck through, never mind some photons:

"Article 3 Blinding as an incidental or collateral effect of the legitimate military employment of laser systems, including laser systems used against optical equipment, is not covered by the prohibition of this Protocol."

As long as the blinding is a side effect (mitigated by "all feasible precautions to avoid the incidence of permanent blindness to unenhanced vision") of a non-blinding purpose(setting things on fire, destroying machine vision/optical sensor gear, 'dazzling', and basically anything else you might feel like using a laser for, it's all legal. That is not exactly fertile ground for any sort of serious arms control, even if lasers weren't comparatively cheap and trivial to build, especially at the modest powers that will really boil your eyeballs but aren't subject to the engineering challenges of aspirational air-defense and antimissile systems.

It gives me no pleasure to say so; blinding is a pretty ugly thing to do; but the Protocol as written is about as effective as forbidding murder; but making it legal to put a bullet through any hat you see, regardless of whether it contains a head or not.

I read somewhere that not only was Comcast doing their hotspot crap, but that they will also be doing javascript injection to insert ads on anyone browsing the web through it.

Obviously Comcast is sifting whatever data goes to/from their customers, not just for 'bots' but also for commercial and data broker value. Even this relatively passive activity is intolerable to me.

Does anyone even trust their DNS?

Frankly, these reported 'Tor' issues are just the tip of the iceberg, and not even all that interesting in terms of what customers should be up in arms about. It is far more likely to be related to abusing bandwidth (a legitimate concern for Comcast) than to actually running Tor.

People should be screaming about the level of monitoring that is clearly happening. But I guess consumers are mostly too stupid to understand just how badly their privacy is being trampled.

There is a solution. Run a VPN. If Comcast complains, cut the T.V. service and change to the business internet service (which actually costs less).

-Matt

The story is Apple. Something to do with Apple. Something to do with how this decision by Apple is simply amazing and could not have been arrived at by any other company under any circumstance.

It's also an overcomplicated solution. OBD can get pretty nasty if you want access to esoteric stuff or manufacturer proprietary crap; but a basic, bluetooth-capable, OBD dongle that'll report the rough outlines of how a vehicle is being used is quite cheap indeed and not especially complex. I wouldn't necessarily want to try dead-reconing with nothing but that output; but answering "Am I driving right now?" is considerably less demanding.

It's not really polite to say so that bluntly; but the difference is that measles deaths are basically optional(1st world anti-vaxxers) or just another bad thing that happens to poor people in poor and unpleasant places. By contrast, Ebola is currently just another bad thing that happens to poor people in poor and unpleasant places; but we've got basically nothing available to do about it if it spreads beyond the usual outbreak sites(yes, unlike the usual outbreak sites, we have limited supplies of high grade medical isolation gear and some interesting experimental drugs; but nobody has enough of the cool tech to deal with an outbreak of nontrivial size, especially if they want their medical and logistical systems to continue handling routine functions and care at the same time).

There are loads of places far less poor and squalid than Liberia and the other oubreak sites; but without any good options on the table it wouldn't take long to run through your supply of isolation wards and fancy positive-pressure protective suits even in the most upmarket first world locations with well regarded research hospitals and such, were the population to be affected.

Was she asleep for, oh, the past quarter century? We've put together a neat little system (really an untidy patchwork of them) such that you can't touch something Turing-complete, drive on a substantial percentage of reasonably major roads, or do just about anything involving commerce without it dropping into the gigantic database somewhere and she's freaking out about somebody's little model airplane with a gopro?

It is the case that there are quite a few values of 'somebody' where worrying might be a good idea; but as a relatively petty footnote to the Orwellian world we've already put into operation. Pretending otherwise is clueless at best and actively dishonest at worst.

Yes, apparently it is too much to ask that people be correct these days.

The summary clearly states that 512GB of memory is 1000 times more than 512MB of memory, which is patently false. If you're making comparisons, you don't make absolute statements like this. You use qualifying words like "about 1000 times" or "approximately 1000 times" to let the reader know you do not mean to be precise.

 

The OP is correct. Memory is always expressed in GiB. There is no such thing as Base-10 memory.

Why the hell are we talking about the Fahrenheit scale. And, while we're at it, memory of all kinds is always expressed in GiB, so a 512GB card is 1024 times as large as a 512MB card, not 1000 times.

It looks like a standard -25 to 85C extended commercial rating.

I can understand the interest in the existence of Eucalyptus itself (it's a more or less interface compatible implementation of a bunch of Amazon's heavily used 'cloud' services that you can run stuff on in house or at a non-Amazon 3rd party). Amazon's pricing is crazy aggressive; but sometimes you need to do things in house, want to do things in house, or want to go mixed-strategy(in-house/Amazon for overflow, spread across more than one 3rd party provider, etc, etc.) and in general it's not a good feeling to have a stack of important stuff dependent on a single vendor.

What I find much harder to understand is what HP gains from this, or what I, the hypothetical customer, as supposed to be willing to pay HP to put its name on here.

Is this just more HP flailing, or is there an angle I'm missing? Are there lots of potential customers who won't touch Amazon (perhaps because they have to keep stuff internal); but won't touch Eucalyptus without some giant company selling them a support agreement? If so, since Amazon is off the table, why would they care about Amazon API compatibility? Who is the target here, and why aren't they either DIYing it, paying Amazon's incredibly aggressive prices for the real thing, or using an architecturally different cloud/VM arrangement?

Well, it didn't help that the guy who filed that petition didn't bother to read the HIPAA laws, nor understand that HIPAA laws do not apply to ham radio operators. He was seeking a solution to a made-up problem.

Android is not free. Googls pays Microsoft a small fortune in patent licensing to be able to sell Android.