How will it be leaked, is the question. Usable energy is money, pure and simple, and a disruption will get people with trillions of dollars at their disposal to hide the info, especially anyone in any energy industry. Someone who doesn't get it out far and wide will be 86-ed quickly, similar to the guy back in the Roman times who discovered aluminum, and was promptly killed for it, making a metal too good for mankind to have.

I'd probably say, it would be impossible, once the device gets past the first person. Someone comes up with a working free energy [1] source, as soon as they show it to someone, the inventor is pretty much dead.

[1]: Realistically working... like in the kilowatt to megawatt range. Some gewgaw powering a millivolt LED for a few seconds doesn't count.

A patent will just be violated, and completely ignored. Keeping it secret is the way to go, similar to Heinlein's Shipstones. Place a tamper-resistant box at the client's location, set a meter to charge by the watt-hour, and be done with it. Someone tries breaking into the box, it completely obliterates anything inside showing how it works, or just does a big kaboom, Outer Limits, "Final Exam" style.

On a large scale, build it right on top of a natural gas well. Even though the well is completely empty, nobody will know that and power is power. Done right, one can just use an electric resistance heater to blow hot air out a smokestack so it looks like some combustion is happening. Another option is to use a decommissioned nuclear reactor, pump out some heat to make it look like something is going on, and nobody would even know or care that the electricity came from atoms squeezed together as opposed to blown apart.

I'm reminded of a contraption I've seen used to restore batteries to a usable state via short, high voltage sparks (basically a crude desulfation cycle.) It was called the Bedini SSG... essentially a spinning wheel of whatever size one wants, some magnets around it, and supposedly gave more energy than it took in.

It is just a crude way to try to spark crud off of the plates in a battery, or offering "free" energy? I lean towards the former, but it is an interesting experiment, and apparently does work to get batteries usable again.

Problem is that the Safety Check assumes FB knows where you are. I have that switched off, either via iOS's allow/deny access to the GPS, or on Android since permissions are all or nothing, XPrivacy feeds it a random place each time.

For example, One of three things will happen if I eat a twister while RV-ing:

1: I'm dead.
2: I'm injured (hopefully the SPOT device or phone works.)
3: I'm OK enough to start sending texts and FB posts out with pics of the mess.

If I'm dead, it won't be that long before it is found out. Injured, similar. The benefits of getting asked if I'm OK don't outweigh the fact of being being tracked via location 24/7 and having that info handed to whomever feels like buying it.

Going on a limb here, why not replace the national ID system with a bunch of decentralized CAs that sign certificates with a piece of data. For example, a user would have some cryptographic token. This could be a smartphone, a card, a USB keyfob, a SIM card, or something similar.

Then, the state would add a signed entry with the person's name and photo to the key as a certificate. The actual public key is not affected. It just gets a cert attached that can be deleted by the user just like a PGP/gpg cert.

With this in place, the state can add a series of certs if they are true:

User is a citizen.
User is 18+ years of age.
User is 21+ years of age.
etc.

This way, when a cardholder goes to a bar, the bar has a reader that shows a signed picture, perhaps the name of the user, and the signed fact that the user is of legal age. No other information needs to be shared. Not citizenship, not anything... just who the user is, and that they are legal (doesn't matter what their age is as long as it is above the drinking age). No cert, no booze.

Another example is a NGO use. A university signs a certificate that the key's owner has a diploma from them. When getting vetted for a job, this means that the employer knows that the applicant has a degree, but other info isn't given.

Done this way, here is what the criminals can attack:

1: The CA. If it is a distributed service, damage done can be minimized, as opposed to having everything in one basket.

2: The actual card or token. This is a solved problem. SIM card hacking on LTE networks is minimal, satellite piracy is nonexistant, and there isn't any such thing as pirated software on the XBox One. Even things like CAC/PIV cards are very rarely broken.

3: The user (yes, xkcd.com/538 applies.) However, this can be dealt with through means in place.

4: The PKI. Using different algorithms (so a document is signed by multiple keys of RSA, ECC, and something quantum-factoring resistant, and hashed with multiple algorithms) will bring some robustness.

So, there can be a national ID system, but if it is based on a PGP-like web of trust that is decentralized, it can be quite secure, but yet extremely protecting of privacy.

We have the same thing here in the US, but good luck getting a new SSN if it gets compromised.

At this rate, lets just check systemd into the Linux kernel tree itself and call it done.

It really depends on the blades and 1U machines. Without exact machines, it can be a tossup, as a blade chassis takes up a ton of rack units. If comparing HP G8 blades to HP G8 1Us, the blades will edge out if they are just being use as compute nodes with the onboard storage used to load the hypervisor, then they hit the SAN for everything else. However, stacking a bunch of 1U machines can be just as good, and the advantage of 1U boxes is that you don't have to worry about the server maker discontinuing the enclosure the blades are in.

If HP can get the Moonshot environment with 45 blades in a fairly skinny enclosure going, then things will change big time, but for now, I personally lead towards a rack/blades, but there isn't anything wrong with stacking the 1Us, provides there is a decent storage and network fabric [1] that is available.

[1]: One can use the same fabric for both. Toss in some Isilon heads and a subnet for NFS or iSCSI access, call it done.

Other than the flat UI, I've been using it as a beta for a few months now. Not much really different from previous releases except some new gewgaws under the hood and some better SeatBelt like security policies. If you have debug mode in your Mac's NVRAM set, there are a few new things like a cache that gets rebuilt on bootup.

Couple new features, a new coat of paint. For the cost of the upgrade ($0), I cannot complain, and I'm pretty sure it brings to the table a number of security updates as well.

As for Windows 8, that also is a solved problem. Even without Classic Shell, it is not hard to get around.

Now, if I get a version of OS X that only allowed signed executables, didn't have a command line (or didn't have sudo/root access), wouldn't allow ssh-ing in, only allowed one program to run at a time, there is much higher chance that I booted up System 6.x on my Mac SE than OS X's userland being absolutely gutted.

Personally, that principle of having many swappable self-contained bits is one of the worst qualities on UNIX.

I've been using GNU/Linux for over a decade. I know my way around most distros, and I can usually figure out what I need to do to accomplish any task... usually. The biggest problem I face now is that distros have so many small components doing their small tasks that figuring out exactly which component is responsible for a given task is no small feat.

I understand and appreciate the programming simplicity that a small component brings, but from a user's (or admin's) perspective, the operating environment is now more cluttered. As distros pick and choose their preferred swappable components, the view gets worse. Sure, I know exactly what the "finger" command does, but it's not obvious that "pinky" is an alternative, because having a lightweight finger command is apparently an important thing. Some distros will even create symlinks or scripts to provide alternative common names for their chosen packages, but there's seldom a guarantee that the input or output will be the same. This is why the first step of many build processes is to examine the environment and figure out exactly what is available on the system, often using methods that uncomfortably remind me of browser-detecting JavaScript.

I'm not saying that systemd is the solution we need, or even that it is a solution. I've just dealt with far too many poorly-named packages to have excessive reverence for this archaic principle.

We should also keep in mind that Linux itself, as a monolithic kernel, defies the concept. By design, the kernel's one job is to interface with every piece of hardware on the machine. Is it really so far out of line to define systemd's one job as interfacing with every service provider in the OS?

Of course, there is the fact that the VM running with VMWare's fault tolerance can only have one vCPU... so this means that you can't really use it for high-availability database apps. Even a Splunk instance will set off high CPU alarms.

There are other restrictions as well. VMWare's high availability is somewhat useful (lose a running VM, it will restart the instance)... but there is the downtime waiting for the VM to come up, load its stuff, and start taking requests.

All and all, it is better than nothing, but it isn't a silver bullet.

I personally would like to see it (and its evil compatriot, firewalld) as options.

In RHEL 7 and downstreams, you can choose between LVM2, standard partitioning, or btrfs as ways to carve up your disks. It would be nice to have systemd as an option, so for laptops where parallel starting of daemons makes a nice speed increase, it is useful. For a server where one doesn't want many changes to the underlying OS unless it is something to be tested, it can be an option. If one is using containers, maybe systemd might be useful to have.

There are changes to Linux like SELinux and AppArmor which are must haves. These add significantly to the security of the OS. systemd does add security... but not really that much. One can specify that a program run with ulimits and possibly in a container, but a wrapper can do the same thing, and one thing that I get concerned about is one program having so many moving parts that touch everything on the system, even perhaps the TTY functions.

I have a strange idea. If overcrowding is not a concern, why not have the jail construction bonds go through and have it go to the usual private contractors.

A jail or prison consists of a school, dorm, library, kitchen, cafeteria, chapel, gym, infirmary, and so on. Why not just call a facility corrections related (because it does help prevent crime), and build a multipurpose building? A school, perhaps. Maybe a public library? An indoor playground for an urban area? Keep the contracts, but build things that are useful to the populace and lump them in under "corrections".

The problem is that once in prison, always in prison. With NCIC records public of both arrest and convictions, even an arrest for PI in college can keep someone from getting meaningful employment.

I know at least a few companies who ask for -arrest- (not conviction) records. The people I asked said that someone can buy their way out of a conviction, but if the cop thinks they are guilty enough to pull out the cuffs, they are guilty.

Felonies are also ridiculously easy to get. In the '80s, if two people were caught racing in their cars, it would be a $111 fine. Now, here in Texas, that is a felony.

Of course, once a felony is on a record, a person is pretty much hosed for life. For insurance reasons, few employers other than call centers will hire felons. They are not part of the voting bloc. They are prey to other felons. They cannot get apartments for the most part. Any brushes with the law will almost certainly result in an arrest. In society, they are persona non grata; the untouchables. This pretty much means that without a solid family support structure, there is no future. Good luck moving to another country. Nobody will take US felons.

So, because there isn't any real way to make income, crime is always available... which usually means arrest and another, longer sentence. Great for private prison profit margins, but a cost center until the person dies... all paid for on the US taxpayers nickel.

Swift must be really in demand. In the past few weeks, I've gotten at least five recruiters with positions open, but with requirements of at least five years work with the language.