I've been looking into (just a bit) the most annoying of the ones that gets to me -- the fake "CARD SERVICES" calls. These are the ones that robocall numbers, ignoring the donotcall lists, play the recording calling themselves "card services" and offer a lower rate. Pressing to be removed does no good. If you do hold or press to talk to an operator, if you try to ask for a supervisor, a company name, a call back number, or to be removed from the list, they hang up (often cursing at you first).

If you do play along, they will pre-screen you and eventually pass you on to some kind of debt consolidation company. I don't yet know if it's one company or a group of them, but I do know that the telemarketers are not employees of that company. I believe they get paid either based on the number of successful transfers, or more standard "lead generation" once they capture your information.

The problem with playing along to find out who is ultimately making the money from the scam, is that to get to that group of people requires you to turn over too much private information to be worth the risk.

The company which profits from this kind of activity should, IMCO, but subject to RICO forfeitures.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Racketeer_Influenced_and_Corrupt_Organizations_Act

You have to go after whoever profits from the calls, and do it aggressively.

I don't know if the Tata is the right way to go, but I do think there is a market for commuter car that's small and safe enough for surface roads, may be prohibited on highways (like a moped) but is enclosed and heated. I think there are plenty of in-town commuters who would opt for such a high mileage vehicle if it were done well enough and still stay cheap.

You nailed it. I wish I had mod points today to mod you up.

It's far too much detail on the surface. TheSteve wouldn't like it. They should simple do a wax image of a black turtleneck folded, on a pair of folded jeans, with a pair of thin glasses neatly folded on top.

It's great for the very small number of home consumers able to make real use of the programming oriented amazon api. More likely you (or your less tech neighbor) will be looking at a few bucks a month to a middle man company that builds a nice UI front end to Amazon's glacier tools.

I think this opens the possibility for a middle-man company to provide long term archival tools for end users. This firm would spend its energy focused on front end tools for the end user and make use of Amazon's back end long term storage for the actual infrastructure.

There are many amateur and even professional photographers, for example, with almost no alternatives for very long term storage. Home writable media is nearly all flawed in terms of true long term storage. I'm sure there are many use cases in this space.

In terms of mid-size and larger companies, I think a critical feature will need to be a simple interface that encrypts at the client side prior to sending the data using a private key only available on the client side. I cannot think a responsible I.T. professional would store company critical or customer data on a third party site like that without such protections in place.

This seems like the kind of problem made by one of those "super-bright" children that got hired for way too much money in the late 90's and were given offices with dog beds and room for their skateboards while they ignored all the great original standards that made the internet possible, and built insanely over-engineered new ones in the hope of making a fortune.

I'm mildly fascinated (by mildly, I mean if someone here has a good answer, I'll read it, but that's as far as I'm going) -- I have a few linux servers and they are apparently either too old or updated enough to have not had the problem, because they didn't crash.

My first question was, "How the hell would my servers even KNOW that someone had inserted a "Leap Second" into the time unless they happened to do their ntp updates at exactly that time?" That of course would be followed by "why would they care?"

As far as I knew, NTP just says "Hey, server, what time is it" and gets back "It's f*****ing 3 o'clock, exactly 1 hour since the last time you asked. Now go away and quit bothering me!" (only it says it really fast using a single big number) At which point the software makes sure my server knows it's 3 o'clock.

The IBM engineers will be a sort of "Traffic Ring" in which the major roads are used IN TURN, so that all of the lanes go the same direction. Each building will await it's turn, then all the traffic from that building will go out at once for a specific period of time. During that period of time, traffic from that building will have complete use of the roads until the turn passes and it becomes the next building's turn.

To enable this, there will be a Token passed from building to building. Whichever building has the token will control all traffic on the ring. :-)

...for cars, and move further toward electric motors (powered by fuel cell, battery, supercapacitor, or f'ing rubber bands and string) we won't need the huge amounts of platinum used in catalytic converters.

Along with water, isn't there quite a bit of heat produced as part of the fuel cell process? It would seem to me that this may take away some of the stealth benefits, no?

They're not using Pentium III based parallel processing machines.... :-)

It's good advice (your golden rule). There are only two levels of paranoia, to a computer security person. Absolute, and insufficient.

Agree completely. I've installed it and found it unworkable.

You think there won't be after market programming for these cars? They can't stop you from rooting your iPhone or Android. New root kits are available within hours of a new "fix" to prevent them.

On the other hand, self driving cars would help in interesting ways. It could drop you off in front of your destination in a big city while you tell it "go park somewhere". Parking would be assigned based on availability and expected duration -- it sure would make airports easier to deal with.

You could take public transportation most days, and if you needed your car for an alternative destination after work or had to leave early, you could have it meet you at the office, or some half way point train station.

Long drive cross-country? Why stop? Just go to sleep and let the car take over for a while.

These are just a few that come time mind.