Having your military supply chain depend on countries that you might be fighting against is a terrible plan. It's also in the national interest for the US to retain engineering and manufacturing capabilities. And, of course there's the possibility that they embed controls into the devices that they sell us, the way the NSA pre-hacked hardware being sold by US companies only in the other direction.

So really, it kinda does matter.

The parachute that brought the latest rover to Mars also disintegrated during testing. However NASA proceeded with the design knowing that the atmosphere on Mars is not nearly as dense as it is on Earth.

They got it working in testing after that initial failure - and even that failure provided extremely useful high-speed video of its deployment.

Note the colossal wind tunnel. This latest, flying saucer tested parachute is way larger than that Curiosity parachute - so they've figured out a whole new testing regime. One that helpfully more closely matches conditions in the Martian atmosphere, too.

There's plenty of legal p2p traffic. Almost all large videogames, particularly MMORPGs, use p2p to deliver installers and updates. At Pando, what we found was that not only were the economics much better, but the successful download percentage for managed p2p downloads, measured by people completing the download and getting the game installed and running, was MUCH higher for p2p downloads than HTTP downloads. It's pretty easy to see why - p2p protocols detect and correct for errors, and are quite persistent at getting people correct data, and are engineered to move huge files, while HTTP was never really intended to move single files the size of a modern MMORPG.

Perhaps I should explain - the Pando P2P network delivered guaranteed throughput by using both traditional CDN and P2P networking. For example, if a video stream has a target of 1 mbps rate, and it's getting 700 kbps from peers, it'll pull the remaining 300 kbps from a CDN. This reduces the CDN deliver volume (and cost) by 70%. And it turns out that when peers can pull from thousands of other peers, the comulative delivery rate can often exceed the traditional CDN delivery rate, and it's generally more resilient to networking issues, because an issue that might throttle or stall a single stream, such as a congested router, often won't affect other streams in parallel because they're independent routes.

The 80% was actually measured in a test run in partnership with a number of major ISPs (Verizon, Comcast, Telefonica, AT&T, etc.). We captured all p2p data transfer volumes, then analyzed them to analyze the network data flows, and compared a number of different peer allocation algorithms. Peer assignment that is aware of network topology did, in fact, reduce inter-ISP traffic volumes by 80%. And by rather more on the ISPs that provide symmetric bandwidth, because peers within an ISPs network can exchange data faster than with peers outside the ISP network.

More details at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P... .

IMO, it's Verizon (finally) getting smart and taking advantage of their superior fiber network, giving their customers symmetric bandwidth that cable providers can't provide. Cable companies built a cheaper infrastructure, that physically can't provide as much uplink as downlink. So if Verizon can get people to value symmetric bandwidth, instead of just downlink, suddenly they have the winning network!

Start watching movies in HD (Apple TV, Netflix, Amazon Instant Video) and it'll consume any connection. Then have each of your kids watch their own video streams in their rooms...

I built that network (Pando Networks) a few years ago. The content companies were generally pretty slow to adopt p2p technology, but game companies are all over it. One pleasant aspect was that the advantage of p2p wasn't just economics, though those were great, it was performance. Because downloading from dozens of sources is much more resilient, and on good networks more performant, than downloading from one source. And, with an intelligent network, it could connect you with peers that are close to you in the network, reducing network congestion at the interconnects by 80%. When we ran a large scale test across all the major ISPs, we in fact saw that p2p clients were able to reduce inter-ISP data exchanges (for the p2p network) by 80%, simply through intelligent peer selection, which ISPs loved, and download performance was better, which downloaders loved.

And symmetric fiber networks are awesome at p2p.

Newton's philosophical point was that thinking that there must be a model that is absolutely "right" and all others are "wrong" isn't useful for evaluating scientific theories, because that kind of absolutist thinking kept humanity in the dark ages with competing cults of faith in ancient texts, and he proposed a more enlightened approach as being required to make progress. So, the more constructive question is not "who is right", it is whether a theory makes accurate predictions or not. If a theory makes accurate predictions, verified by independent testing, then it's useful. If a theory fails that test, it's not useful. But models are only useful in a specific domain, and only until there's some cast where it doesn't work, and a new or more refined theory takes its place and extends it. And, for the domain where it applies (i.e. the conditions we all live in normally), Newton's laws of motion work well and are quite useful.

It's true that Einstein's Theory of Relativity refined Newton's Laws of Motion to cover additional domains (e.g. near the speed of light). And numerous others have come up with additional refinements to address other specific domains. But none of those make Newton's Laws of Motion "wrong" in any useful sense. They build on Newton's Laws of Motion and extend them, which is (IMO) the opposite of disproving them!

The "debate about climate change" is about whether it's going on and is affected by human behavior.

In scientific terms there's no debate on that topic - it's settled.

In political terms, there's lots of debate, disconnected from scientific facts.

It all reminds me of the decades where medical science knew that smoking killed people, but cigarette companies tried to present the illusion of a debate, through paid fake "research" and massive marketing campaigns, "donations" to politicians, etc., and it took a long time for the political situation to acknowledge reality. This was a clever business tactic, because it let the cigarette companies sell billions more cigarettes, while the people that they killed didn't cost them anything. Not ethical, or good for the country as a whole, of course, but highly profitable for a few companies.

Lenovo is a manufacturing company that makes laptops and servers. They don't make software or do systems integration or mobile devices.

Why would IBM partner with them to integrate mobile devices into the enterprise?

Yeah, Apple's products are too successful, so now they're not cool enough for you? And the people that buy Apple products are the "hipsters"? Weird.

How about - Apple's better at figuring out what people need and giving it to them in a high quality product than most tech companies, and they sell and support them better than most tech companies' distribution and support channels, so people really like using Apple products and their products sell extremely well, and people are willing to pay a premium for them over the competition.

Why do some companies spend so much time worrying about phones. People have all sorts of devices from the company that can't be locked out if people just use the device "out of the box". Laptop, desktop, USB stick, hard drive, tablet, car, etc. Companies get people to return company property when they leave the company, with all sorts of traditional mechanisms. Salespeople have company cars fairly often, and companies don't have a remote lock on the car to make sure that they get it back. Why get worked up about being able to lock people out of their phone? Sure, it's nice to have that ability, I suppose, but why do you care about the phone so much more than the other devices, which cost more and/or contain more data?

And really, who has company phones any more - hasn't everyone moved to "bring your own device" where people buy whatever (approved) device they like, and configure it to get company mail, etc. Then when they leave, the data is locked or deleted (that's been a solved problem for many years, on all major platforms) and they keep their phone.

A microphone has already been landed on Mars - unfortunately there was a risk of data corruption if the camera hardware it was attached to was turned on, so the microphone itself never got switched on...

It depends on your application space. If you're making a monitor to alert you when plants need to be watered, you're going to want to use a controller that can run on AA batteries for months, and costs a few dollars. That's not anything that Intel sells - that's more like an Arduino Atemel chip. So yes, compared to a high end CPU, a low end Intel CPU is cheap and low power, but compared to a $3 controller that can run on an AA battery for months, it's expensive and power hungry.

I travelled with a large external hard disk as well, once - which also got taken to one side and swabbed for stuff. Internal monologue: OH NO MY PRECIOUS DATA ... Oh, it's just the possibility of it being a bomb they're worried about.

On another occasion, I had fun with my home-made, Arduino-powered dSLR timelapse gadget - it got thoroughly inspected by the TSA. I'd already opted out of the backscatter X-ray whatsit, only for a swab-for-explosives test to give a (false-)positive. Eek. Cue being taken to one side, where they looked in my bag and found the timelapse-o-tron...

To give the screeners their due, they let me go after a few minutes - after I'd heard their complaints about the potential radiation doses they and the passengers were receiving from the backscatter X-ray thingers, and after I'd provided advice on what sort of camera to look into buying for a budding photographer.

Security fun elsewhere: carrying a plastic bag of loose change through the Eurostar security in Brussels (it basically looked like an amorphous, completely opaque lump on the X-ray) - and a random customs check at a UK airport giving a (false-)positive swab for some sort of illicit drugs. Eek.