Well you don't have to be a psychic to know what he's thinking: "How can we get our hands on some more metadata so we show users photos they want to remember?" Do you know what marketers did when they started getting too good at recognizing changes in shopping patterns like women being pregnant and consumers felt it was creepy? They made coupons with anti-offers, like next to the baby gear they were trying to sell you they'd put a lawn mower. That way users felt it was random and then it was okay. Besides that'd probably tie in well with their advertising, what mood you're in is probably very related to what ads you're susceptible to at the moment.

Ah, you need VPN? Our 'Business Connectivity' package is right over here. I'm sure you'll find it to be an attractive value...

The only thing you really need to know is - do you think they actually make them in mixed colors? Nah... they make a batch of a gazillion red beads, then blue beads, then green beads, then yellow beads... the tub is just their mix to maximize sales, they know that you'll end up with leftovers and will buy more expensive pure color packs to round it out. It's like how there's a silent conspiracy between hot dog sausages and hot dog bun makers, they avoid matching numbers so you'll always go out shopping more to make use of the leftovers. It's not exactly a coincidence when you end up with a tub full of colors you don't want.

It might be news to you, but capitalism - at least in the Russian variety and I wouldn't hold my breath on the US variety as of late - means a lot of the wealth has been accumulated on a few hands. I'm not sure that people are worse off on an absolute scale, but there's actually quite many feeling that they're worse off compared to everybody else. In Greece for example SYRIZA - the "Coalition of the Radical Left" - has been up to 27% in the polls lately. That's the birthplace of democracy, not some shithole that's never known anything different. Which I suppose is nicer than the way Germans reacted in the 1930s to the economic buttfucking of the Allies, I guess. In a dysfunctional economy most everything will seem like it's worth trying and they can be very productive in unconventional ways. Like the German war machine that nearly broke Europe's back in WWII was build by a country allegedely on the brink of bankruptcy. But money is money and guns in guns and what the lacked in the former they got plenty in the latter. Don't underestimate Russia and China just because they're not western.

Were they having trouble getting warrants for those sorts of investigations? Even a judiciary that isn't effectively a rubber stamp usually pays attention to that kind of thing.

I wonder how the law treats having all your cheap Romanian labor work via thin clients, so the data never actually reside in Romania?

True; but it's all in the same state of free-fall, so the gravity is effectively irrelevant for the purposes of stress on the structure. The amount of atmosphere that it is travelling through, on the other hand, might be enough to make itself felt.

Pretty much identical to what happened to 'Polaroid'. Every corpse has its maggots, I suppose.

I don't know what barges think of 'blue water navy' work; but that's the sort of thing I had in mind: skip classy, skip seriously intimidating looking, stick a bunch of standardized modules together into a big floating airfield, with the aim of providing a lot of flight deck and very, very, deep stores of fuel and munitions for the 'yeah, we want another strike going out every half hour or so until further notice' style of air support/pounding that seems to crop up.

We've probably outsourced worse( at least assuming that any more modernized systems, ECM, radar, etc. are stripped from the hulk first); but yeah, I'm guessing that the breakers offering the best rates don't exactly have security clearances, in addition to their atrocious environmental record, nonexistent occupational safety, and so on.

I don't actually know, and so would be interested to, is there anything considered 'sensitive' about something as old as a (presumably modernized here and there) Forrestal class? I assume that, for economic as well as security reasons, you'd rip out all the modern electronics, CIWS, radar, air-traffic-control systems, etc.; but is the remainder of the ship itself still considered a bit touchy, or old news?

On the plus side, space construction probably doesn't demand a whole lot of really heroic fastener work(but the gloves make 'finger tight' pretty clumsy if you are outside). In absence of gravity, all sorts of comparatively feeble joints become acceptable, so long as you don't damage things trying to put them together("Yeah, I um, stripped the mounting hole for the habitat module...") and the assembly keeps things from floating away.

If anything, I'd imagine that space tools are more likely to emphasize being able to set maximum torque, to keep people from screwing up delicate, lightweight, functionally irreplaceable, parts, rather than emphasizing the sort of power you want when fighting with a rusted assembly or something binding under stress.

I'd be the first to make snide comments about some of the 3d printing hype (some of it, the sort that fails to answer "and we wouldn't do this with machine tools why exactly?", there are a number of genuinely impressive applications, albeit mostly involve additional finishing steps or the really expensive printers); but 'earth orbit' is one of those places where I can imagine being willing to wait for printing rather than ordering from harbor freight and waiting for shipping.

A problem better solved by standardizing fasteners, of course; but if somebody has already opened that can of worms for you, and you need an oddball tool in a space and shipping constrained environment, I can think of worse fates than using a plastic one.

I suspect that a ~60 year old ship is probably a horrible mess in a number of respects, and might well not be the best starting point for the job; but given what we actually send aircraft carriers out to do at present(and to a substantial degree, have since WWII), it would be interesting to know if there's any room for a variant carrier design that emphasizes sheer capacity per unit cost, for all our aerial bombardment of stuff that can't really do much about it needs.

I understand the navy's enthusiasm for aircraft carriers that might not immediately become the involuntary flagships of the submarine navy upon contact with actual opposition; but they sure are expensive for situations where we are just beating on people with minimal retaliatory capabilities.

Isn't 'outage includes other gaming-related servers' ambiguous at best(an attacker hitting XBL and PSN wouldn't need to be a rocket surgeon to add a few other high profile gaming related services to the list, unlike an attacker hitting a single service using some tailored vulnerability) and actively evidence in favor of 'not really DDoS, just all the legitimate paying customers having a lot of new consoles and games and extra free time right now' at worst?

If the problem is under-provisioning, the expected symptoms would be broad-based DDoS-like outages among all popular gaming related infrastructure. If the problem is DDoS attacks, the expected symptoms would be comparatively dramatic havoc on targeted systems, no disruption elsewhere, with the number of targeted systems limited by the attacker's resources(and by how close to failure those target systems were running under holiday load).

That's crazy talk. We'll probably never master the time-machine technology required to go back a couple of decades and obtain samples of such systems for study!