The problem is not the media, but the access to data. Given the breadth of the information topics, no one below cabinet level should have been able to see it all, much less some low level clerk. This was a failure of the need to know policy, and the attempt to blame wikileaks or the clerk for the release is clearly an attempt to disguise the failure of method. I covered the technology and ethical issues at length in a blog post when it happened.

I have held DoD and DoE clearance, and have worked with information control for companies like GE and SBC (now at&t)

This comes as no surprise. In any activity which is mostly limited by CPU in user mode, not much changes, you can track that over a number of operating systems. What has gotten slower is disk io and network transfer time, and some tests, such as web serving, may be using all or mostly pages in memory, so this is not as obvious as it might be.

In addition, the test was run in a virtual machine, so to some extent the huge host memory provided more resources, and the very fast disk hides poor choices in the io scheduling and provides additional write cache and buffers. In other words, neither the tests chosen, or the environment used, were typical for small server or generous desktop.

For a meaningful test no more than four CPUs (or two with hyperthreading) should be used, and all io should go to a real rotating disk, like a $100 1TB WD or Seagate, and the filesystems should be on that, not some fancy large SSD. Then some numbers can be identified which reflect the performance on machines in the small server or fast desktop price range of a motivated home user or budget limited small business. Then the limitations of the CPU and io scheduler changes will be more evident, and perhaps the performance using the deadline scheduler should be included, since discussions on Linux-RAID mailing list indicate that many of us find the default scheduler is a bottleneck for typical loads (particularly raid-[56]).

And they let college students vote at school if they bother to register. Since the colleges are all tax exempt we now have representation without taxation.

The saving is in that he isn't starting a company. So he has no costs for inventory, advertising, shipping, distributor discounts, etc. If he is building a dozen systems he can't win on cost over the hardware lifetime, but if he is building hundreds, he says he needs that many, he probably can shave quite a bit of the cost. But how much hardware is going on those machines, to drive the cost that high? Dell sells a reasonable office machine for just under $600, without massive discounts. Companies like eMachines go lower than that, and have similar performance. There is something driving up the cost we haven't been told.

The next obvious question is how much of the cost is software, and how much of that (possibly including the OS) is required cost? The old "easier if they're all the same" argument is usually made by a salesman or lazy purchasing agent, and often doesn't match reality. Data entry jobs which are poking numbers into web forms or spreadsheets don't require proprietary software. That doesn't mean that there may not be some need for commercial software, just that there's a lot of tasks in most enterprises which don't. And the "retraining cost" FUD is just that, people doing data entry, or any activity where the browser is the computer, need to learn login and start application from a menu or icon. Just like Windows. And free software will read/write most proprietary formats, so the need for a proprietary data format doesn't mean proprietary software is necessarily needed. One size does not fit all, there is probably room for saving in software, too.

This might even be a case for thin clients and a few servers, and get the cost way down, not enough information to guess, but a possible large saving. The problem is convincing management that the best approach is finding the most cost effective solution, not in finding the best price on the "way we always did it."

Okay, I admit I don't know if the Finnish state church service is called a mass, but the term was irresistable.

Is this the same bug reported days ago and patched before it went public? And which requires being able to execute code on the machine in the first place? This one? Kind of old news if so.

I am not a lawyer, but just because there is no precedent in law, doesn't mean a new law can't be binding, does it? If there was precedent that it was not allowed, that would be a strong argument, but a law requiring a remedy for a crime which didn't exist until recently is bound to have no precedent.

Perhaps some lawyer could explain this leap of logic. There's no precedent for fining or jailing people for sending spam, posting kiddie porn, or cyberbullying, either. Does that mean there can't be? Is this a quirk of Irish law or just a poorly written story?

There are very few opaque objects, people are translucent. A small percentage of photons manages to pass through without hitting anything which will stop them. Both intensity and frequency (color) deliver information.

BTW: there's some prior art on this, Dr Jerry Tiemann had proof of concept going prior to 1993, at GE's Corporate Research Center. GE Medical Systems declined to fund development. I believe he was using an algorithm developed by Dr Glen Row for transforming fan beam data to parallel beam, to produce more resolution with less computation. Jerry was disappointed that GE was putting resources into cold fusion at the time, instead of photon imaging. Yes, that's the father of Michael Tiemann, the Redhat CTO.

"One scientist puts the travel time at 180,000 years based on current space flight technology, while another explains that it could be quite quick if we build a matter-antimatter drive, and can figure out how to bring along 530 times as much mass in fuel as is contained in the ship and cargo itself."

As this article explains, there's new science afoot, and propulsion need not require expulsion of mass any more. Note that energy would still be needed, and the technique needs to be engineered up from the current proof of concept stage to an actual ship, but the need for big mass may be gone.

Since the acceleration is based on mv=mv, accelerating low mass particles to very high velocity might offer a very high thrust to mass ratio. In other words that "530 times" is open to improvement if higher exhaust velocities are used.

The real limiting factor is how much acceleration the payload can take, and what your target top velocity (cruising speed) will be before braking starts, and of course available energy regardless of mass requirements. Assuming Vmax of .5c gets to the destination in a lifetime, but doesn't get data back. If entangled particles could be used to pass data, the requirements would no longer include return hardware, and results would be in quickly. Interesting speculation. Of course there are nearer systems, and while ideal planets haven't been seen, they could exist and would be currently undetectable.

This will make commercials harder to identify automatically, not that anyone would use that to drop commercials, of course.

However, not to worry. Note that the House and Senate passed different bills, allowing them to say "we are protecting you" at election time. If you think they will resolve the differences between the versions and actually pass any law, then you are pretty gullible. And if such a bill were passed and signed into law, the Supreme Court would probably rule that volume is part of Freedom of Speech, just like money, even though my version of the amendment doesn't include any right to make me listen.

On a related note, I see that politicians can bypass "do not call" if you ever voted, since that now counts as a "prior business relationship." I get calls from parties I never joined, and they assure me they have the right. My right to blow a whistle in their ear is protected, too.

Don't confuse "jet engines" (thrust) with gas turbines (rotary power). It certainly sounds as if the turbines deliver power to the generator(s?) and possibly the wheels. As far as I can tell this is not "jet" tech, but "turbo-prop" engineering, using the spinning turbine to drive something via gears.

Note that Chrysler built about 50 turbine cars in the 60's but buyers didn't like the engine noise.

I got started doing CLI image processing with netpbm decades ago, and the approach is still valid. It was designed to work as a CLI program, and is a great solution for batch processing. In addition, you have libraries to manipulate data in the native format, so it's possible to add some functionality which you need by just a small program doing the operation, with all the i/o and many of the transforms done for you.

If that's the secret of a stable society, it explains why we have so much trouble. The perfect stable society would be a group of atheists who practice free love. Only... what would they do about hormonal teen aged children?

To see why SSD won't make disk obsolete, look at the history of bubble memory. It was (is) fast, and highly resistant to vibration, and doesn't have the limited lifetime of flash memory. The killer problem seems to have been lack of need for the greater reliability or disk and flash, which would justify the cost and size. I hear rumors that a small quantity is still made and used for space environments, because of radiation resistance, but unless wikileaks documents this it's just rumor. In any case, disk kept getting bigger and faster, flash ate the rest of the market, and bubble... well, burst.

My thought is that before SSD becomes a real competitor with disk that one of the emerging technologies will overtake it, providing better lifetime, faster write (ie. rewrite without an erase operation), and all flash will either vanish, or remain in the 4-32GB thumb drive niche, where it now rules.