Don't you know? Terrorists are super smart completely invincible secret agents that can escape any jail and break into any nuclear fuel processing facility in the world and take whatever they want and they can't be stopped by anything known to man. Therefore we can't recycle it otherwise we're putting America's children, or something...at risk. Also because Jesus.

This is a civil case, where most of the time the defendant is assumed guilty and needs to prove themselves innocent. I can file a civil lawsuit saying "Harold Halloway stole my car, burned down my house, and raped my dog and I want $1,000,000,000 from him in restitution", and it is up to you to prove that you didn't do any of those things.

Step 1: Structured query databases exist for four decades, show they are perfectly capable of scaling, load balancing, and anything else you want them to do.

Step 2: Microsoft writes a structured query database, it can hardly do any of these.

Step 3: "Rararara structured query sucks lets support some half-baked DB idea and as soon as there is a breakthrough buy it up."

Step 4: ???

Step 5: Profit!

Too late. Viacom has already stooped to that level of desperation.

Glad to see our money was put to such good use as a permanent base for scientific research for many generations to come, and totally was not a big fat trough of pork for contractors to chow down on. Then again, with costs that ballooned from $4 billion to $12 billion due to contractor greed from poor management and oversight, I guess the other choice was the same exact thing. ( For anyone who doesn't have a damn clue what I am talking about)

Moral of the story: You just can't do science in the United States anymore, because knowledge for the better of humankind simply isn't profitable.

I'll agree with this. I remember being in high school and having a math teacher that was bad. I mean really bad, to the point where there were endless complaints pouring in to the school about how ineffective of a teacher this man was. The school responded by making him an assistant principal.

I also remember a member of the school board who threw a whole lot of money into the election and got himself elected just solely so he could defund a project to construct light towers for the school's football field, because he was afraid that the potential for light pollution would cause the value of his property to drop.

Can we stop with the Diaspora nonsense already? It was vaporware pure and simple, and a bunch of really dumb investors got trolled out of a couple hundred thousand dollars. It wasn't even that nice, you needed a fuckton of gem dependencies just to get it to kinda sorta function, and it won't even run on Apache.

It'll come out on the same day that Microsoft finally releases a good version of Microsoft Bob.

Because it seems like the equivalent of being booked, fingerprinted, and mugshot every time you get pulled over for a traffic violation. If you don't like the picture and the information on my ID, then go fuck yourself.

Telling the cop that he's gonna need a warrant to use it on you will get you slapped with an obstruction of justice and resisting arrest charge, right? That's usually the crime given to those rouge renegades that dare try to use their rights.

Those are some pretty contradicting words for someone whose sig says "Free Julian Assange."

"He who is willing to sacrifice essential liberty for a little bit of temporary safety deserves neither liberty nor safety."
-- Benjamin Franklin

It's all about bandwidth and latency. Roads don't need to worry about it, they're piles of asphalt flattened to the dirt, the bandwidth and latency come from how much stuff you can put in your car and how fast you can drive over it. Same goes for mail and parcels.

Electricity doesn't care about latency by the nature of how it works. It doesn't have to go from generating point all the way to consumer due to the nature of alternating current, so it arrives at precisely 60 Hz every single time.

POTS doesn't really need much bandwidth to run, it only needs about 3 KHz to function perfectly.

Now you want to send broadband data service out to the sticks, which requires exponentially higer bandwidths to transmit data correctly. This is where the real challenge lies, since you just simply can't send that thick of a data transit medium that far without incurring phenomenial expenses to keep the signal in good condition. To put it into perspective, the 3 KHz of POTS bandwidth frequencies that are truly reliable over long distances is good enough to modulate and send ~6 kilobytes of data per second, hence the common modem transit speed 56Kbps. (The additional 20 KHz used for DSL service distorts and fades and becomes unreliable after relatively short distances, if anyone who has ever lived far from the DSL office knows all too well)

Moved all of my machines that weren't already CentOS to CentOS from Fedora over the last two months. I used Fedora 15 for all of about ten minutes before I got tired of Fedora's attempt to pretend that they are the Ubuntu project.

"Well we can go with Internets Explorer 9 or Mozzarella Foxfire 5 and 9 is a bigger number than 5 so therefore that means it must be better right?"

Footnote: I actually have heard an executive refer to Firefox as "Mozzarella Foxfire"

So, they want to shut down the PSTN in favor of cellular service?

What the FUCK do these dimwit politicians think is the mechanism that actually transmits their cellular call after it leaves the NSS? Magic and unicorn farts?? Or are they just in bed with the broadband/cable television companies who want to see even more critical consumer data pushed across their cheap last mile infrastructure so they can append it to people's data caps?

"Oh, you're being robbed and need to call out to 911? Sorry, but you have exceeded your monthly data cap and can't do that."

The big three social networks are quickly getting themselves into a war over control of personal information. One can only hope that once the dust clears from the social network wars we are quickly barrelling towards that there will have been no survivors. I really hope we will look back upon this period of internet history afterwards and say to ourselves "Well, turns out you can't trust advertising companies with personal data...what the hell were we thinking?"