Watch out, the "ends justify the means" crowd will be here shortly talking about how magnificent the pyramids are and how long they have lasted.

The graveyards of bodies are a small price to pay for such greatness!

There are, but the feature doesn't work as a theft deterrent unless almost everybody has it.

Every iPhone in use has this feature. iPhones are still the most-stolen phones.

Are you saying Android phones all have to have the feature to protect iPhone users? Because my understanding is that iPhone thieves turn off the phones immediately and keep them in RF-shielded bags/rooms until they're reprogrammed for the illicit market.

And I still don't get how you validate this feature if you're going to rely on it for security.

Yet I have not heard of a pandemic of hacker-led mass bricking of iPhones.

There are some psychopathic blackhats who just destroy for the sake of destroying. Fortunately these are few - evidenced by the near total lack of PC malware that destroys the computer.

Then there are hacktivists who would do something like bricking a million phones at once the first month after this bill's required new phones are on the market to prove the point that government mandates come with unintended consequences.

It will be interesting to see if they do that. It would be very unfortunate for the owners of those phones. They would argue that society will be better off for it in the long run. Not satyagraha enough for me, but I can see the thought process.

a libertarian country would be 100% toll roads

Uh, every road in America is a toll road. Have you ever heard about gasoline taxes? Does pre-paying your road fees at the pump make you happier for some reason (would love to hear what that reason could be) than paying the fees as you use the roads (ala EZPass et. al. - let's assume you can use them anonymously).

The difference is that now the gas taxes are not all spent on the roads (they get diverted to police pensions and political cronies' boondoggles) and the money that is spent on the roads does not go through a true competitive bidding process (again with the cronies), making the costs higher and quality lower than they ought to be.

I abandoned that stupid philosophy that day.

It sounds like you did so without understanding how roads are paid for. Look, it's hard to know how everything works, but the more people do know how things work the more likely they are to be libertarians. Because people suck, especially those who seek power.

I don't want to live in an ideologically pure world; I want to live in a good world, and libertarianism wouldn't lead to a good world.

It's an ideologically-driven stance to accept more expensive, lower quality roads and political corruption and waste for the sake of a particular revenue model. Also one that necessarily supports a worse world.

I guess if you stick it in your pocket Bambuser becomes audio-only. ;)

The whole premise is stupid. If they're 30 days from being in stores, then the media have already gone to press and the boxes are being loaded and shrink-wrapped and loaded onto cargo ships as I type this.

There's no mystery entry of a new operating system that's also going to be released at the same time. Microsoft doesn't do that. Heck, even Apple doesn't do that.

Somebody could speculate that Microsoft will be releasing Windows 9 with a free AI-enhanced Teddy Ruxpin, and find a Chinese leaker to "confirm" it, but that's also a stupid premise for anybody to accept.

Seeing the headline I almost skipped this one since IBM has such a tendency to build expectation and then under-deliver.

But since x86 is gone to Lenovo, I figured this one might be interesting. They might finally put out something I might need to know about - they might leverage their non-IBM-PC-encumbered mainboard designs to make something really compelling for disposable cloud computing and hire a few guys to make sure, say CentOS 7, is easy to deploy on it. I was reminded of the talk c. 1999 when IBM was going to setup Linux as an 'LPAR' (IIRC) and you could run 256 instances on one of their big-iron machines (this was when nobody was virtualizing anything and VMWare was still at Cornell).

I thought, "they might actually be coming out with a 4-U box with sixteen processors in it that a cloud provider could cost-justify vs. whitebox x86 pizza boxes and offer management advantages, or maybe a blade system that would make it easy to deploy a compute cluster with 96 processors on a shelf and a tuned-assembly library for HPC." IBM has the means to do all of those things and there's a tremendous market for them. Finally, without the x86 albatross, it's POWER's time to shine.

"2-socket system".

IBM POWER - disappointing the industry since 1989.

So all that "slippery slope" shit from 10 years ago doesn't seem so stupid now, does it?

The biggest lesson learned is that when Congress passes a law, to kill a program like Total Information Awareness, all NSA will do is change code-names and reassign the workers to a different team.

When NSA says "we have not done X in program Y", it means they have done X in program Z. When it says it has not conducted illegal activity under Authority Z, it has done it anyway, under some other contrived interpretation of a different authority.

To quote Robin Koerner on every new NSA disclosure: "Of course they did."

Now then, who thinks we still live in a functional Republic?

Also, it challanges a lot of sacred cows that people hold dear to them. You see kind of a religeous attachment to certain ideas, that is tough to give up, even when presented with a system that provides a different model of working

Very well put. In any group of humans you have the conservatives and the liberals (in the true political sense, not the f*ed up media representations). The conservatives protect us from going off half-cocked and the liberals prevent us from stagnating.

The thing is, people have been trying to replace SYSV init for twenty years. Upstart, Makefile-based systems, etc. - it's not a very new idea. The big distro maintainers feel systemd has finally become more viable than SYSV init.

I bemoan some of the loss in flexibility (I still run an rc.local almost everywhere, even under systemd) but since nobody ever succeeded in making SYSV init fast, it's probably a case of the pendulum swinging just a little bit too far the other way.

Somebody will graft node.js or go or [that redhat thing that's almost a good scripting language] to systemd and then we'll be back towards the middle but better off.

Last time I was at the Princeton lab, the thing that impressed me even more than the fusion reactor (it just goes "phht") was the flywheel room. Imagine an indoor soccer field that's just rows and rows of massive 12' flywheels, all spinning up with grid power until they're suddenly all magnetically braked, to get enough juice to force two hydrogen atoms together.

Steampunk authors can't dream up anything as cool as physicists and mechanical engineers working on big problems.

I can't help but think of the "New York is open for business" commercials flooded on the TV news channels

States that are truly that don't have to run ads, so proclaiming.

I'm glad Princeton is getting back in the game, but everything I hear says there won't be enough funding to actually get the staffing they need.

Sad to say, but the People support blowing up unwitting brown people in the Middle East, not real energy solutions.

For the cost of one Iraq Occupation, we'd have clean energy already. But War is the health of the State, not real solutions to human problems. Now if the humans would just realize that it's the State that enhances their suffering (whose electric rates are going down here?) then we'd start making some real progress.

Make helium, not war.

Anyway I don't know why they had an alert - surely it would take many hours for the lava to burn through the ice, so ther would be plenty of time to divert planes before it went boom and blocked the flight path with ash.

It's probably better to set flight plans before take-off and not change them at the last possible moment except in the event of a unpredictable emergency. You don't want to be one radio failure away from an engine full of ash.

He may have assumed the normal distribution.

It's OK - the poor guy has obviously never been exposed to elementary statistics or he would have recognized what a sigma refers to. I do think it's fair to assume a certain base level of education on Slashdot - it is a nerd site after all. But what a great example of the Dunning-Kruger effect in action!

But why do they like different career paths?

I'm going to posit that women are smarter about accepting abusive work conditions than men are. 90-hour weeks where you sleep at your desk and get free Mountain Dew and a game of pinball in a few times during a death march is an abusive situation.

What I really don't get is why some women want so badly to put other women in these situations when they're already winning. I guess what we need is more women entrepreneurs, to run companies sanely. Or men to grow a pair and tell their masters to kiss off so that tech work environments can become places where women would feel welcome.

Yeah, smoke on that one - when you work unpaid overtime you're being hostile towards women.