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?

Am I the only one who read this initially thinking that "supercharger" meant a pump that forces compressed air into an internal combustion engine?

Not my choice, we got them in a deal with a VC. And I will tell you from experience that they're not all great programmers. A *few* of them were very good programmers, most of them were OK, and a few were very *bad* programmers. Just like everyone else. The idea that the H1B program just brings in technical giants is pure fantasy. This isn't 1980; if a CS genius living in Bangalore wants to work he doesn't have to come to the US anymore, there are good opportunities for him at home..

H1B brings in a cross section of inexperienced programmers and kicks them out of the country once they've gained some experience. I have nothing against bringing more foreign talent into the US, but it should be with an eye to encouraging permanent residency. I think if you sponsor an H1B and he goes home, you should have to wait a couple years before you replace him. Then companies will be pickier about who they bring over.

I have to say, managing a team of H1Bs was very rewarding, not necessarily from a technical standpoint but from a cultural standpoint. Because I had to learn about each programmer on my team and the way things are done in his culture, I think I became closer to a lot of them than I would have to a team of Americans.

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!

There's probably a substantial amount of decent scrap metal to be had; but a ship of that age(and presumably designed with a particular eye to avoiding things like 'catching fire just because our job is to be covered in jet fuel and munitions near a war zone') is probably one hell of a party in terms of asbestos, lead, PCBs, and who knows what else.

There might be some additional cost because, unlike a lower-profile commercial contract, it will be at least somewhat harder to just beach it on some especially unscenic chunk of Chittagong or Alang and then shrug in innocent ignorance as impoverished locals with hand tools attempt to break the ship before it breaks them. There is a reason why much of the industry is located in places with effectively nonexistent environmental controls and expendable workforces; but it would certainly be embarrassing, and might be illegal for one reason or another, for a particularly iconic ex-military vessel to make an appearance in such a place(based on what happened when the French tried it with the Clemenceau a few years back I would certainly be nervous about trying it).

Apple are assholes, not cowards. They probably didn't approve the movie because something is the wrong color, or because it competes with their own movie, or because it has product-placement ads but Sony hasn't yet agreed to give Apple 30% of the ad revenue.