correction dk1 units sel for $470 dk2 are not even on ebay yet. and dk1 weren't hd capable... they were more to just test game engines.

i guess if dogs can smell memory sneakernets into dictatorships to provide outside information is doomed. i wonder can they smell a blu-ray too? cause 25 GB is a lot of storage...

mark, the oculus rift2 devkit can play a few game engines, but it is not released to the public yet! it's not about shipping a full retail model in china, it is that chinese companies are requiring their employees to buy (at $350) the one per custom limit then selling them on ebay or like sites for $470 http://www.ebay.com/itm/BRAND-NEW-Oculus-Rift-DK1-Virtual-Reality-Headset-NEVER-USED-/151342637965?pt=US_Video_Glasses&hash=item233cb9638d

$120 profit at posting time. to compound the issue the devkit includes chips that have been discontinued, and are no longer available unlike a 'retail' model which will use custom chips, from a vendor like intel or amd or someone else.

no landfills are very dry. to avoid contaminating local water they tend to have a 500 year plastic liner, and what little moisture is there from the garbage itself. i know they put off methane but that is largely from organics not plastics.
sorry i was lazy that day here is a link http://environment.about.com/od/recycling/a/biodegradable.htm

plastic can be made of corn and sugar. that does not make 'plastic' a viable food. however we have been requiring biodegradable plastics for decades now, they don't degrade in landfills but they do in the wild. also recycling has been vastly improved and that means less plastic in landfills and in the wild. scientists thought they'd see more plastic but people have suggested this is based on the amount of plastic produced, without even considering possible reasons like more recycling. also some pretty bright people have figured out where in the ocean to place nets that capture all the floating garbage, without having to use ships to 'drag' all across the ocean. perhaps that information is old, perhaps someone has been harvesting ocean plastic to recycle it.

Nice font, you turd burglar.

says someone that have never met a C level employee.

"The difficulty with anonymous cowards is knowing when one is the same person. The coward to which Chrisq was responding was appeal to Descartes. The problem with Descartes is that you can only prove your own existence to yourself. In the event of some higher power deceiving you, the only proof you have is of your own existence. So even though you and others say that there's no evidence that I'm existing in a dream or simulation there's no way for me to verify their existence."

while i can't prove that i exist to you, surely i can reference data that suggests that corporations will do almost anything to raise the bottom line, and that includes lying, cheating, and stealing.

red dwarf mocked virtual reality in it's 5th season(1993), yet it took the japanese 2 years later to build a mono-chromatic(red lcd) despite red dwarf mocking full immersion which i think there are finally ps4 vr headsets as well as the oculus rift.

technically flat screens are old tech was it in 1989 was my first handheld with a lcd was a gameboy, and my first laptop in 1997 came with a color lcd screen and technically there was no barrier to an oculus rift after lcds became reliable. other than bandwidth related to high definition signaling.

now we 'see' these bluetooth smart watches when people said we'd never have a radio watch that could be used to call people even if it's radio range is literally measured in feet.

what does all this prove? it proves that companies are greedy and have screwed people over time and time again with garbage tech designed to last fewer years.

i can also prove that laserprinters are still using 1994 processors to handle the buffers of the print queue. when a watch has a chip that can drive a low def screen and digital radio transmission 'proven' 1994 tech is still preferred over energy saving modern chips.

Doesn't sound like you've been there either.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MP3
486 computers had 'mp3' codecs and they were around in 1991 and was standardized in 1994. standardized means many people had access to working code by then.

"What he means, I think, is that most computer companies make "consumer grade" machines and "commercial grade" machines. I've not has an Asus or Lenovo, but I've had Toshiba, HP, and Dell. With respect to Dell, I've had both consumer and commercial grade machines, built to higher specifications."

i have owned and used packard bell, HP, dell, compaq(before hp bought em), and a lenovo. the first computer i bought with my own income was a packardbell 80486 dx2 75mhz. that was built like a tank, and was about as useful as a paperweight. it took the thing about 40 minutes to encode a 4 minute song to mp3. and yes i did that on that machine. anyways that was the most reliable piece of hardware i ever owned. it spent 4 years as a desktop and about 11 years as a server, though the hdds failed on it 3 times in the same timeframe. my laptop a compaq pentium 120, ran for 13 years until i hid it in a dumpster, but it had the F00F bug so was never reliable. from there on all my parts lasted less long, the quality went down. my first dell laptop lasted about 5 years less than the pentium120 and my recent alienware rig had a motherboard failure in 3 weeks and a psu issue another month later. that makes it qualify as my least reliable pc ever. alienware laptops aren't even designed by the main fab producers for dell, and still a bad MB. anyways consumer and commercial grade isn't real at dell, and i doubt it is real elsewhere. if you research parts you can build a desktop that is fast and will last a decade, and for only a little more than the 'fast enough for windows8/debianwheezy' laptop. seriously the default WM for debian wheezy is slower than windows 8 i timed them. on the same computer.

" Most recently I purchased a Dell Latitude 5000 series laptop--in Dell's explanation of this computer in comparison to the 7000 series, it gave the 5000 series a build quality of 3 out of 4 stars, it gave the 3000 series 2 out of 4 stars (still Latitude--which implies the consumer grade stuff is 1 out of 4 stars for build quality). The consumer grade machines seem to be designed to last about 2 years or less. The commercial grade machines are designed to last more like 4 years."

i have a laptop that was built like trash grade and it has been more reliable than alienware. of course its running linux with a lighter wm than the default one in wheezy... but it is going to last me another 6 years, as all it does is internet when main rig is in install/update/backup discs mode, and is used as a second layer of virus detection and removal for windows machines not all of which belong to me, and i have no say as to the os on those windows machines.

"The problem is, you have to pay a premium for the commercial grade machines."

there was a day when a computer was $5,000 and was a calculator at massive size. remember the dx2 75mhz? it was about 100 times faster than the $5000 machine i am thinking of and can't recall the specs or useful links right now.

"With Apple, there is no "consumer grade" and "commercial grade"--they're all made to high specifications."

apple products are all one grade of materials. however, they are not any more immune to faulty boards caps etc. their parts are notorious for being high profit, http://appleinsider.com/articles/13/09/24/iphone-5s-5c-teardowns-suggest-199-183-build-costs-for-apple they buy $183 worth of parts sell it for $1,000 $600 of which the cell phone has you pay over 12 months roughly. the mac lineup is in a similar situation and really if apple gets the chips for that price i doubt samsung pays higher ditto with dell. apple gets by on reputation. they wouldn't have that reputation if they hadn't been in schools or have numerous graphics stuff like photoshop, and the new ipad commercial where they make a whole symphony from one ipad. windows can't buy that reputation. they are the 'buggy, but just works and can game too even if the people you game with are hacking you' reputation that windows has earned, as well as 'benivolent dictator' cause there can be only one survivor of the os wars according to gates philosophy. glad he is gone maybe their recent attempts to be 'apple did it so we can too, almost but without the same apps, so no really its not the same we just had to follow marekting which said copy apple' kind of aura.

then there is gnu. smart people know that free software (though not necisarily $0 'free') is the only way to avoid vendor lockin, and a slew of other problems that closed source software can't address. there is a lot of interesting things going on with open hardware and open source software and custom fabs and xray verification of chips adhering to doing what they were built to look like etc. really knowing what the compiler is doing is as important as using free open knowledge to make the world a better more secure and fun place. someday soon they are going to announce the first 3d printed microchip, and from there hobbiests can build a 3d printer from the 3d printer that is capable of printing itself and all the hardware for an advanced computer, and hobby x-ray gear and a nice hardcopy of the specs for the processor and you can then in theory have a 3d printer where one person knows all the code and can audit it for making a chip in their basement or garage. all the open hardware and open software and new 3d printers make it all possible. to geniunely know that there are 0 backdoors in both the hardware and the software you are using. and still be fast enough to protect the 'rest' of your less secure equipment.

tar sands produce a vile sludge that can literally be used like agent orange.

methanol and ethanol production from municipal waste is taking trash out of the 'too dry to rot too much gas to oxidize' landfill and instead produce useful chemical some of which can be safely used to operate machinery like cars, and produce fewer noxious fumes.

if the world was run by clones in thought of you, there wouldnt be a living being on this planet for at least half a million years -- assuming that the colapse of organic life including human life by using pestacides that kill bees (after which humans would live another 4 years) and all the carbon heating the planet from all the pricks driving cars using up the worlds 200 year supply of fossile fuels at the consumption and production levels predicted for humans, based on your view that making a city 0 impact on the environment is some how wrong, and that consuming every molecule of carbon in fire until the skys rain acid like they do on venus, is the 'right thing to do' well we would never survive the consumption of all the fossil fuels, as bees would die first.

yes hydrothermal life can resist an autoclave but... "However, Strain 121 is non-infectious because it cannot grow at temperatures near 37 ÂC.[citation needed]"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strain_121
also flame throwers are considerably hotter than an autoclave, but they might be able to grow again after being flame thrown we won't know til someone tests it out.

Amazon doesn't normally do that -- they just rent the (virtual) servers, the dashboard and other software including the OS would have been installed by the customer, at most they might reboot or shutdown and restart a machine . . . but they provide a self-serve API to do that, so probably not even that.

Unless the access involved the attackers getting the AWS account credentials, I don't think there's much Amazon could do.

i believe the information is here https://aws.amazon.com/premiumsupport/ and yes i realize it's just a 'plan comparison' page, and that only 2 of the 4 tiers include a phone plan