Did you ever see Christopher Walken in "Pulp Fiction"? ;-)

I've been saying this from the get-go, Sony should not be coddled like they are the victim. This hack went on for months and probably for years they've been hiring the cheapest sysadmins overseas and buying 'solutions' from companies "well reviewed" in NetworkWorld (or whatever sponsored magazines middle management gets) to implement on their network that in the end didn't do squat.

Instead of being coddled, they should be fined for aiding and abetting and breaking privacy laws.

As the article suggests, during the industrial revolution there was not a true loss of employment opportunities. Employment shifted, weavers became machine technicians, horse buggy drivers became taxi drivers and car mechanics. Government regulations on mass production created an entire workforce artificially (inspectors and enforcement). In more recent times you have seen how farmers' children didn't remain farmers once industrial farms came about, they became agricultural and machine engineers, programmers etc.

Both the industrial agricultural growth in the West and reduced work week experiments In Europe caused a great deal of benefit. Farmers no longer had to work 16h days for 7 days/week and the children no longer had to help. All of a sudden there was a greater need for entertainment; the movie, music and video game industry exploded in the 90's (contrary to their own statements).

As AI grows (and it hasn't, AI is currently very rudimentary and task specific), the same effect will have to happen. People will be able to work less (30h/week, 20h/week) but people will have to understand the AI's and the ways it can fail which means more programmers, engineers and researchers. Also the entertainment industry will grow and as it grows, so do employment opportunities. People will always want to see people perform whether that is in sports, video games, music or movies, you will not be able to replace those for at least another century and at that point, current economies will have adapted or failed.

Information wants to be free. Sony demands. Anthropomorphism requires.

Q: If entropy is increasing, where is it coming from?

TOM!

"Uh, Tom... Tom... Actually, from now on, we're the comedy team of Ahjnudpippibod and Davis."

They've outgrown the confines of Guantanamo Bay.

OK that could certainly be a problem. Time to shoot a few software patent lawyers and nail the bodies in the Reception rooms of computing science departments everywhere. Un-refridgerated. "To encourage the others"

What have licenses got to do with it? Unless you saw something in TFA which I didn't, it's Open Source, and Bellard has a solid history of liberal software licensing. Your images are yours. Other people's images, yes may be a problem. For user - submitted content, change your T&Cs to tell the users that all new content will be automatically converted into the new format. Make or get a tool to convert (incoming) JPEG images to the new format and tell your users to use it because the new format will load faster. Fairly rapidly - a few years there will only be a few hold outs. And they're your rump problem.

If you're running an archive site or service, then yes you've probably got a more complex problem.

Images from external tools. May be more of a question. But if this is a genuinely useful tool then your normal patching and upgrading should cover it before you're down to the rump of users.

For instance, many ICs are manufactured with depleted boron as a semiconductor dopant and in the borophosphosilicate glass insulating layer.

Since you're talking about isotopically purifying a material, that's going to be a damned sight more expensive than normal-isotope-mix boron. You've got the relatively large mass difference working on your side - 7.7% mass difference (borane) compared to (238+6*19)/(235+6*19) = 0.08% difference (UF6) - but you're still looking at a pretty big job. Even simple heavy water is thousands of times more expensive than normal reagent grade water (11.8% mass difference for D2O versus H2O).

I hadn't thought about the (relative) reactivity of 10B from a radiation-sensitivity point of view. But we've been using it to date the exposure of rock surfaces to the sky for a couple of decades now, and a damned useful tool for archaeological and geomorphological studies it is too. It's up there with thermoluminescence for dating fire damage.

We have near 100 of these in the field and while I've bench-powerfailed them to no avail, out in the real world they die due to fs corruption.

Hang on, let's get that straight : if you pull the power when they're on the bench, then they don't fail, but if they suffer a power fail in the field they do suffer corruption and freeze/ hang/ fail to boot?

Obviously you've tried this, but are you sure that you're pulling the power on the bench while they're in mid-write? Because if you're doing ostensibly the same thing in two circumstances, but with different results, then I'd have to wonder if you're actually doing THE SAME THING both on the bench and in the field.

The way you've described it, it shouldn't do that.

Are the field and lab conditions - e.g. temperature - also the same. I could see temperature having a significant effect on write speeds on (flash) memory. It sounds perplexing. And quite worrying if your troubleshooting isn't replicating something that seems so simple. I know that troubleshooting can be a real time-sink, but if you're getting lots of these fails then the time to service the fialed field modules must add up too.

Are the Pis also under the same load conditions - data-logging, streaming, whatever - on the bench as in the field?

Planned by beancounters, themselves hired by luvvies ; funded by sand-jockeys ; built on the Plains of Englandshire.

I'd rather boil my own head.

I for one want to meet Mrs. Bucket, ulp, sorry Bouquet ...

He's a builder and excellent folk-singer who lives and works in North Yorkshire. Answers to "Pete".

No, I'm not joking.

I had to have the programme explained to me, never having watched more than 30 seconds of the repellent waste of electrons, but once I'd seen enough to recognise the character traits of Bucket-gob (the original) and Mrs Bouquet (the fictional derivative), the comparison was obvious. One or other of the (original) script-writers lives in the same street.

Some regulation is necessary but the regulation should be effective. The FDA and similar agencies are doing a relatively good job in most instances but they are corrupted to the core. So are the BBB, Consumer Reports and UL. Anywhere regulation or oversight is being paid for by the inspected is just a plain bad idea but few consumers would voluntarily pay a 'tax' on everything they buy to the BBB/UL/FDA.

Mwahhhahaahaaahaaaa!
-- Eric Schmidt

The documents DEMAND that the the press DESTROY SONY!