That swatting is a thing. How can it be that a single, anonymous phone call is all it takes to deploy a militarized police team to your front door? It blows my mind. That it keeps happening over and over ... ugh.

In my opinion, it really isn't at all positive or a success. I commented earlier about the vast cultural differences between German (& Danish & Scandinavian) unions and American unions; the Hostess story is a good example. Compare what happened with Hostess to this explanation (that does a much better job than I would do): http://www.remappingdebate.org... Given the political situation in the US, I think that to see the American system shift the US unions need to buy the companies that they staff.

Ford, Chrysler and GM's management obviously thought (and by most indications, still think) that they've got the US Government wrapped around their little finger. Why improve quality or reduce unneeded costs when you don't believe that lack of competitive offerings will ever truly be the end of you? Their testimony in Congress at the time of this article was ... impressive. http://www.cnn.com/2008/US/11/...

To play Devil's Advocate (just a little bit) - there are cultural differences (sometimes huge) between the USA and Germany, and a HUGE cultural difference between their respective labor unions. There may be more to a German car being built well than whether or not a Union was involved.

Surprisingly enough, I've got those failure calculations (estimated using prior internal failures rates) included in my own measurements. The SLA thing is where things really turned south - for the expense cloud providers who would guarantee uptime the way you describe AND reimburse for outages outside of the SLA, I could have doubled my staff size.

I'd like to take your question "Is it really a good trade off?" and toss out an example set of numbers to summarize it. Let's say there are 250 business days in a year. Operations run from 8am until 6pm, not counting after-hours processing and maintenance. Revenue is $100 million. Gross profit percentage is 20%. This gives per hour revenue of $40,000, per hour profit is $8,000. A day of lost revenue is $400,000, or a loss of $80,000 of profit opportunity (assuming that opportunity costs are not recoverable). My own calculations for my department are somewhat similar, except I've also included the additional benefit my employees bring in for the work they do when they aren't working on maintaining/improving uptime. Avoiding the cloud is almost a no-brainer in our circumstances, except for very specific & limited services.

Answering your post got me thinking about another point of curiosity - the whole Lacrosse thing from a few years ago appeared to me as if Duke has a faculty full of people who think the worst of their students and/or hate them. In this CS incident, if they don't have any actual proof here this would seem to be in keeping with my prior perception. Are witch hunts common at Duke?

Just saying ... if the relevant professor is reading here, and then you turn around and do what you say you're going to do (and are unique in your meticulous development) the fact that you posted as AC really isn't going to matter. I'm guessing that 2 + 2 will equal 4.

Yes, there are explicit laws that govern trade secrets. These laws are separate from employment contracts and vendor agreements. Start here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uniform_Trade_Secrets_Act

Correction: Germany is much closer to the size of Montana, than it is to Texas. Germany has 82 million people, versus roughly 1 million for Montana and 26 million for Texas.

We had this solution in 1994. Sen. John Kerry spearheaded the push to kill it. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integral_fast_reactor

Belief versus non-belief is rendered MOOT by evidence. THAT'S why this is awesome for NASA - because they are scientists.

Yes please - I'd love to see this in a modern engine. The game was fun! The graphics were workable even if they used a heavily upgraded Wolf3d engine (still limited to squares!). They made it look and work pretty well. I think even something like a mod into Serious Sam would be about right for this.

As for the technical side of this, it seems to me something like Replaygain would work well. Especially since commercials are known before hand (no live broadcasting) - the program establishes a baseline sound level that audio is measured against. Depending on track or album gain settings, I think that this would be made to work.

http://wiki.hydrogenaudio.org/index.php?title=Replaygain

As far as congress goes? I'm so glad they can get this bill passed, when everything else is punted down the road until the lame duck session or beyond. Lord knows we don't pay them nearly enough to think about anything harder than freakin' TVs being too loud ...

My old boss had a 4 different Treo 650's, followed by a 700. I used to spend about an hour every other day resetting his phone. An acknowledged bug in Palm's software kept corrupting his filesystem, causing it to reboot whenever the currently flawed file(s) were accessed. We had the newest firmware, always. Numerous hours were spent on the phone with support, or back at the store. No relief, until I quit working there.

I know what happened to Palm. They stopped caring about quality, and the market noticed. Let them reap what they have sown.