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Comment Re:Underwhelming picture (Score 1) 81

maybe this will make up for it.

http://www.wired.com/2013/02/t...

When 20-year-old web designer Erick Reis left a friend’s house on Sunday, he saw what looked like thousands of spiders overhead, reported G1, a Brazilian news site, on Feb. 8. The large, sturdy spiders were hanging from power lines and poles, and crawling around on a vast network of silk strands spun over the town of Santo Antonio da Platina.

Comment Command and Control (Score 1) 176

https://www.goodreads.com/book...

A groundbreaking account of accidents, near misses, extraordinary heroism, and technological breakthroughs, Command and Control explores the dilemma that has existed since the dawn of the nuclear age: How do you deploy weapons of mass destruction without being destroyed by them?

Comment Re:IBM no longer a tech company? (Score 2) 283

so?

S3 - competes with akamai, and azure - cloud services
fire/kindle- compete with sammy, goog, apple - hardware (nevermind all the amazon basics branded accessories)
amazon locker, next day delivery - distribution/logistics- FedEx/UPS
the dome - major studios, netflix - content
amazon fresh - safeway, albertsons - food
music/video streaming - apple, netflix, google, MS - digital distribution (and don't forget the game studio they bought)
and with a "store" coming to Manhattan - retail.
what's next, cars? oh, wait... http://www.autoblog.com/2014/0...

amazon is fighting a multi-sided war
look what happened to the Nazis when they decided to take on the Allies in the West, and the Russians in the East - Germany got crushed in the middle

if you spread yourself too thin, you risk losing all the battles. (Fire phone anyone?) - a little dramatic perhaps, but
Wall Street just set a shot over the bow.. the "jack of all trades, master of none" philosophy is going to come back and bite them

you invest in a company to make money... sooner or later, your investors will bail if they don't see a return.

what kind of business likes to see their investors bail?

Comment Re:Eh (Score 2) 200

i don't doubt sexism was part of it, but let's face it.. if a woman was killed the space program would have been in serious jeopardy.

let's not forget that while SHE may have been qualified, WE really had no idea what we were doing.. making it up as we went a long. waaaay more risk back then - Mercury was our first foray into manned spaceflight... lots of unknowns

if she was, say, killed in Apollo 1, we may have never gotten to the moon. Mondale almost got the program cancelled after White, Grissom and Chaffee were killed, a woman on that crew may have been enough to kill Apollo on the spot.

I don't think the American public had the stomach for a female (CIVILIAN) casualty..

Comment Re:Bullshit (Score 3, Informative) 221

yup.

what would people be saying if the Secret Service popped that guy's melon with a sniper bullet.. in front of all the tourists. body would sit there for hours with a yellow tarp over it while the press broadcast that image all over the world.. and the "why did you have to shoot that guy" crowd would come out of the woodwork.. or, they were ready to shoot, but there were too many innocents on the OTHER side of the target... this will blow over in a couple days.. had they wounded or killed an innocent, there'd probably be Congressional hearings.

you will give up some security when you balance it with the appearance of bing civilized.

they COULD put razor wire on the fence, but they don't
they COULD build gun towers with searchlights, but they don't
POTUS could cruise around in an (actual) armored vehicle, but they made it look like a Caddy (that can't possibly be a safe as one of those EOD trucks - or Bradley with reactive armor)
the USSS could wear SWAT gear while they're flanking POTUS when he's walking the rope line shaking hands, but they keep their weapons hidden and wear suits.

you know the Secret Service wants to keep POTUS in a box and only let him out for TV.. but they let him get danger close to the public.. all for appearances sake- and this DESPITE Squeaky Fromme, John Hinkley Jr. and whoever actually got a shot off at Ford in SF.

i'm thinking the only publicly visible change to protocol is no more convertibles (see Kennedy)

Comment Re:Expert:Ebola Vaccine At Least 50 White People A (Score 1) 390

true if you're talking about AIDS.

no big Pharma is researching Ebola because hardly anyone has it (compared to erectile disfunction, HIV, high blood pressure, cholesterol and sleep disorders).

How many universities in this country even have BSH4 facilities to study these kinds of things? Are they even allowed to have these pathogens - think physical security - not Chemturion suits (brand name for http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P...).. but armed response for the perimeter. USAMRIID certainly has guns close by if not onsite, and I'm sure CDC can have tanks parked out front in minutes if necessary... what if the bad guys get the smallpox stored at the CDC?

the WHO only officially allows 2 facilities in the WORLD to store live smallpox.. so if you can't get your hands on the material. you can't study it.

of course you could always find some in a cardboard box at the FDA. http://www.nytimes.com/2014/07...

Comment Re:Expert:Ebola Vaccine At Least 50 White People A (Score 1) 390

How many of these African countries have consistent electricity and running water.. and you're talking about medical research?

  the current outbreak is the worst in about 40 years.. BUT the mortality this time is 50-60% vs. 90% in previous outbreaks. it appears that progress is being made and there's no indication of direct US assistance in that effort (but I'm sure there are American doctors and American dollars going to the WHO to bolster the effort.

USAMRIID is part of the Army - they research infectious diseases and try to find vaccines/cures in case someone weaponizes something like smallpox (very real possibility since it just loves humans and is transmitted through the air.)

I'm sure if the Pfizers and Mercks of the world put their heads together, they could find a solution, but with only a couple thousand cases, it's not profitable.

Bottom line is the only people interested are government entities - with very large military budgets - there aren't a lot of those in the world.

read Hot Zone and Demon in The Freezer - both non fiction. Hot Zone is about Ebola, Demon is about how the US Responds to biological threats (this is covered http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R...)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T...

interesting and terrifying at the same time.

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