This, absolutely this. In order to force someone to turn over information, I have to have a valid subpoena issued by a court with jurisdiction. The fact that they just punted this to "you figure it out" means Google is given arbitrary discretion on how they can fulfil this, and the recourse to disagreeing is to take them to court and sue them again.

If you're going to give someone a right enforced by the government, then you should provide the necessary process to issue a "strike-records decree"...

BTW, Google still tells employees not to talk about this stuff in public, because Google has to so carefully watch its steps. (Disclaimer, I used to be a Google employee this year)

The problem is also the consent decree that says "anything that Google says, it has to actually be doing"... which can end up really nitpicky if lawyers want to be... and "my various governments" are all looking to catch Google for something, anything... so, they are being a bit nitpicky...

(Sorry, somebody had to ask.)

If you want to run applications completely controlled and filtered by Apple, yea go with that. Apple doesnâ(TM)t like something about some app you want to run then you do without that functionality. Apple wants you to use their crappy version of some app so they kill the competing apps, which one are you gonna be using?

I am fine with the prospect of using mobile devices to do everything assuming they have peripherals and expansion, but the prospect of Apple and Google controlling all software, not so much.

Worse, the H1Bs require their employer to sponsor them to remain in the United States, which they will only do if the individual is working for them.

As a result, the employer not only holds and H1B's livelihood under a Damocles Sword, but even their residence in this country. You want to quit? Well, I hope you're prepared to move yourself back to where you came from on your own dime, which is also what happens if we fire you.

So, the employer has even more power over H1B workers, to the point where the worker is unlikely to report anything but the worst abuse...

The allusion in 451 Bradbury St is obvious to me, so now I'm wondering whether there is some significance to #941A? Have I just had my geek card revoked for not knowing it?

(Most /. readers will be aware that the allusion is to the novel "Farenheit 451" by Ray Bradbury.)

It even syncs the disks before shutting down! v_v

Such a non-news story... omg, this this is "interesting" in so far as an odd tool that has little possible use(?)

That's my thinking...

So I'm looking at the lithium price and I see that for $64M I can make a plant/mine which will give me $8M/year profit, and ROI of 12.5%. This looks pretty good. Then I consider than some bright spark might come up with an aluminium based battery technology which would make lithium ion batteries obsolete and could be in production 4 years from now. If this were to happen, in four years I've made back just $32M and now have a worthless mine. Therefore I decide not to invest in lithium production until I can get ROI of 20% because of the risk.

It seems to me that lithium is bound to be either overproduced (if new technology comes along) or underproduced (if new technology does not, but investors are wary of building facilities for fear it might.)

Congresscritter?

I for one welcome our new -hole gender-neutral name style for jobs that are essentially "lie about this in the least possible lie, so that it still puts us in a good light"

In Germany, autopay comes with an authorization limit... basically, "if the bill is over X,€ don't autopay"

I'd prefer to see this on the autopay here in the states as well... because I'm fine with authorizing autopay for any bill less than $60... but if it reaches into the thousands, or even the hundreds, then I damn well don't want to authorize the autopay!

He quickly became very unpopular with settlers due to trying to be fair to the Maori. In one notable occasion some colonists invaded Maori land in an attempt to seize it and got massacred. (They were a poorly armed militia and on the other side was Te Rauparaha, who was so scary that to this day his haka is used by the All Blacks to intimidate their opposition.) After an investigation, Fitzroy sided with the Maori.

Multiple IPs was one solution, but the other was much simpler.

The real address of the computer was its MAC, the prefix simply said how to get there. In the event of a failover, the client's computer would be notified the old prefix was now transitory and a new prefix was to be used for new connections.

At the last common router, the router would simply swap the transitory prefix for the new prefix. The packet would then go by the new path.

The server would multi-home for all prefixes it was assigned.

At both ends, the stack would handle all the detail, the applications never needed to know a thing. That's why nobody cared much about remembering IP addresses, because those weren't important except to the stack. You remembered the name and the address took care of itself.

One of the benefits was that this worked when switching ISPs. If you changed your provider, you could do so with no loss of connections and no loss of packets.

But the same was true of clients, as well. You could start a telnet session at home, move to a cyber cafe and finish up in a pub, all without breaking the connection, even if all three locations had different ISPs.

This would be great for students or staff at a university. And for the university. You don't need the network to be flat, you can remain on your Internet video session as your laptop leaps from access point to access point.

10 separate streams at only 29 Mbps... that means you could do ... 2^2... but it's 8k, so 4^2 = 16... 29/10*16... 46.4 ... so, you could still do 8k Netflix on 50Mbps...

There are many ways to 'store' electricity. Batteries are just one.

I rather like this one, a thermal storage solution. Putting air into and out of bladders under deep water is a very simple method, as is moving water up and down hills. Then there are flywheels and fixed volume compressed air storage. (The air bladders above are fixed pressure compressed air storage.) There other thermal storage possibilities, but getting good round trip efficiency is tricky.

There are non-traditional battery techniques too: flow batteries (liquid electrolytes in tanks, adding storage capacity is as easy as adding tanks full of electrolyte) and molten metal batteries (take the idea of aluminium smelting and make it reversible).

All the non-battery alternatives I can think of work at industrial scale, so if you're looking for a household/small business solution, I think that at least for now batteries are it.

You know, I always hate how my grunt work for companies makes them 4 times the money they pay you. It's just greedy theft. We should start a movement where the means of production are owned by the workers rather than investors and management!