I did not read anything in TFA that even implied that there were no future plans to support other platforms. Could this not be a proof of concept exercise?

I get the paper delivered daily. Often I will read an article that I would like to quote or reference online. Unfortunately, when I go to the publisher's online venue, the article is hard to find and often not the same.

IFF this is truly equivalent to a normal newspaper, and IFF the articles are easy to quote or reference, my hardcopy newspaper subscription will become part of history.

PS - $52 per year is less than the cost of a normal newspaper.

PSS - My paper, with the sucky website is the S.J. Mercury News -- which advertises itself as the Silicon Valley paper. Too bad they don't know how to use the technology they write about.

All they need to do is bring back the draft. Then it is no longer someone else's kid, who volunteered, but "my" kid. It is no longer the kid down the street, but ME, who is going overseas to die. I suspect that will change the dynamics a wee bit.

And what is to prevent Big Daddy from sitting on your head, while reviewing your votes, to ensure that you give all the right answers. After all, Big Daddy doesn't want you to hurt yourself by voting for the wrong people. He'll even escort you to the polling place, to ensure that no one bothers you. Big Daddy cares deeply for you ... and your vote.

Which is why I am constantly arguing against the current move to get everyone to vote by mail.

And this is different from today's massive push for voting by mail in what way?

1) Request Vote By Mail ballot
2) Hand signed VBM paperwork to evil boss
3) After review it is mailed in to be counted
* * *
4) Evil boss profits

I loved your proposed signature... so I stole it.

> we have a VPN between the console and Siemens directly. No full internet access required.

Hmmm... Correctly me if I am wrong, but that implies an internet gateway with some level of access to the internet. If one application can find a route out that gateway, then there is always the possibility that other applications will also "escape".

There is a problem currently with laws that were written with humans in mind, being interpreted to cover corporations.

For example; California's property tax reform a few decades back, was written to protect older citizen's from being taxed out of their family homes. It limits the amount your property tax can go up, unless you sell your property or perform a major upgrade. Now, however, there is a problem. Corporations also own property, but quite often they never sell it or transfer it... and they don't die of old age. There is simply no mechanism in place to allow Corporations to have the value of their property reassessed on a periodic basis to adjust their property tax to reflect current value.

Whether this is good or bad is not the point. The point I am making is that corporations are not human beings and thus laws written for human beings might not work as intended when applied to corporations.

Not all planes are where they are supposed to be 100% of the time.
Not all planes carry equipment that is fully functional 100% of the time.

Relying on GPS means relying on the aircraft's equipment.
Relying on Radar means relying on your own equipment.

And, don't forget, UFOs won't have their GPS enabled ... and not all UFOs are from outer space.

Yes, but there are infringement proceedings against some member states because they don't apply the directive, there are other constitutional courts which rejected it, so a simple recast of the directive is required by the Commission anyway because the directive is wrecked.

ACTA certainly deserves more attention but there are other FTA with such provisions as well.

(And why on earth would you trust some random guy on the internet in the first place?)

Why do you think there's a trust issue in the first place? It's open source. If you're that paranoid go look under the hood, see if you can find anything objectionable.

Can you step back and look at the big picture?

1) Going to the moon has what tangible short _or_ long term benefit to human kind that you can articulate now?

I'd argue you can't really. The science learned will be invaluable to certain fields, but right now it's a gamble at best. Yes, something good will come of it, granted, but what and when? Noone knows. I'm not saying it's not worth it, I'm suggesting there are more tangible things that can be done with money, now.

2) "Spreading the wealth around" is exactly what we need to do.

Bill Gates is doing a good thing for humanity and helping out in fields such as medicine (malaria), he even donates money to PBS, etc for education among other things. Can you say the same for the other billionaires on the planet? Probably not.

Look, the truth of the matter is, we have enough problems here at home (both in the US and in the world) that need to be addressed and fixed before we spend billions upon billions of dollars on building things on other planets.

Healthcare in the US is an absolute mess. I have friends that are downright uninsureable. One, due to cancer while he wasn't covered, he's absolutely boned. Noone will touch him with a stick let alone their money.

If that means my taxes go up 5%, so be it. If something happens to me, my wife, kids, parents, etc, I want to know they will be taken care of and not just looked at in terms of profitability.

Capitalism works to a certain extent. Human health is _not_ one of them.

The short of it is, I'm a science guy and I can see the benefit in taking money from pure science and potentially moving it to the health of our citizens.

I'm pretty well off as I live quite comfortably but I know many who aren't and they should have the same health care as I do. End of story.

* Yes, I took the healthcare "socialist" stance with this post. It is something I believe in and can articulate with personal experience.

I was posting photos taken at events run by an organization where I was a volunteer for 16 years. I couldn't remember the name of the bands in a couple of the photos, so I went back to the web site. Only, the new management had completely deleted all the detailed band information!

It wasn't captured in the Wayback machine either.

That is why I would support an archive, but given how sites are built today, that may be difficult to do.

Not a new idea. Google is working actively to stop this kind of abuse, which they do by forcing you to go through a captcha if you try to search for terms that are related to malware. I have taken apart a few "evil" programs that did google searches, and each time I found that the search terms had a captcha block.

State of the art for malware is to use a generator function (typically a hash) to generate random domain names. If it loses contact with the C&C servers it will use this generator to try domain names until it finds a new configuration file (propperly encrypted and signed). For the controller they only need to register one of the domain names generated by the hash and eventually the bots will all reconnect.