Thanks for the link. I care not for Apple, but seeing that Cycles will get proper OpenCL support was almost enough to make me squee. Almost. Good to know, anyway :)

Probably, though I wouldn't know. I hadn't looked into mining until Bitcoins got so difficult to mine that graphics cards were completely irrelevant already. It's all ASICs now, and if you try to buy one you won't get it until it's become worthless. Expect to be scammed. That's mostly why Scrypt was made, afaik: to put power back in the users' hands, by making it difficult to mine by graphics card (failed) and by ASIC (hasn't failed yet; might later)

Apparently, Radeons have an instruction that's really important for Scrypt mining, which nVidia cards lack. That's why Radeons of the same price generally reach perhaps 10 times as many hashes per second.

I was going to post a similar comment to harrkev's, except I had to log in first to be able to actually post it. So I'll just add to that.

The printer used by Defense Distributed, as far as I know, is an FDM printer, much like the RepRaps. This would mean that I could easily print a plastic gun that's just as good as the ones made by DD. Making such a printer is easy to the point that anyone can make one from scratch with some technical knowledge and programming skills, now that we've seen them and know how they work. There is absolutely no way anyone could prevent a dedicated individual from 3D printing one of these guns.

I'm speaking from experience here, I've got a homemade Mendel90 and I've looked into the related software and firmware.

Can you imagine the fucked-up settings after a nice night with the boyfriend/girlfriend? Twenty apps open, desktop rearranged into total chaos, and you're about to send a mail containing "afaguhiho;agehgisuaffgasf butts" to the CEO of Microsoft.

To add to Errol's reply.. Basically, our minister of security and justice, Ivo Opstelten, loves to act like a rabid fanboy of the book 1984, and of the things the UK and USA are already doing. We're just lagging behind a year or two on the field of "massive disregard for citizens' rights".

Not an ideal choice, in other words.

Source: dutch citizen. Annoyed dutch citizen.

You think he was handing her a few dollars' worth of pennies? Ahem, maybe not "handing"...

I struggle to find out how SuricouRaven was being homophobic. Maybe pedophobic, if that's a word?

Information security and adhering to all manner of certification, both in terms of physical security and compliance to information management regulation, is usually a lot more stringent in a decent (professional) cloud environment than in people's own data center.

I'd be inclined to disagree with your assessment of hosted infrastructure, although quite honestly I am apprehensive about going to the cloud myself.

Maybe it's a psychological thing.

Sorry to burst your bubble there.

I'm afraid to say I've been bleeding blue (HP Blue, not Dell, IBM, eh... never mind) since the dawn of time.

Yes they are. I work in the Information Management software division as a pre-sales, and I'm pretty much paid to tell subsets of the above to customers.

- We are our own reference customer for Connected backup for end-points.
- We are our own reference customer for TRIM, now known as HP Records Manager 8.0
- We are our own reference customer for Database Archiving, now known as HP Application Information Optimiser

So all of that is publicly available in white-papers and case-studies.

The fact that we're building a public cloud infrastructure per country in Europe is also very much not a secret. If we want to get or retain EU based cloud customers, we need to be able to guarantee that their data remains their data and that it won't fall prey to third parties, chiefly amongst which the US government.

In terms of data center consolidation and cost savings associated with that, the strategy internal IT is following is largely in line with the Data Center concept we sell as Converged Infrastructure, Cloud System Matrix and Cloud System One.

Moreover our external web presence is run on the newly launched project Moonshot, in which you can currently cram some 45 servers in 5U rack space, which will soon get uplifted to 180 servers in 5U rack space.

All of this is a clean cut case of eating your own cooking, and then using that fact to market the underlying technologies.

So yes, I am very much convinced HP is comfortable with me sharing this publicly.

We've consolidate all office application servers to 5 data centers, one per continent. Then we've rolled out end-point backup for some 80.000 laptops in the field and some 150.000 more PC's around offices across the world which includes legal hold capabilities. Each country in which we're active has a number of mobile device options for telephony, most of them being Android and Win8 based nowadays since WebOS got killed.

Then we're in the process of building a European infrastructure where we have data centers for managed customer environments in every major market in Europe. I am currently not aware of what's going on in APJ or South America. This is important in Europe however, because managed European customers don't want to see their data end up in the States, and the same goes for those that use our cloud offerings.

physical local IT staff presence in all countries has been minimized to a skeleton crew, not only because of data center consolidation but also because of the formation of a global IT helpdesk in low cost countries, and the rise of self-service portals.

The plethora of databases we had internally has been Archived using Application Information Optimizer for structured data archiving. We are our own biggest reference customer in this regard. On top of that we've beefed up our VPN access portals across the world so as to accommodate road warriors logging in from diverse locations.

Lastly, we use our own Records Management software suite to generate 8.000.000. unique records per day. These are archived for a particular retention period (7 years I believe) for auditing purposes.

The protocol this site uses, thought up apparently two decades ago, would prevent people from falsely claiming to have killed the target. Read up on it. It's scarily effective.

I agree. It'd be good if any form of tracking that gets applied to more than 0.01% of the public in a year, first gets applied to the police force.

Why not Luxemburg? Liechtenstein? Andorra? Monaco? Tonga?

Personally I wouldn't mind being spied on intensively by Ancilla Tilia, but that just makes me sound sexist and / or desperate. Plus she's not into that kind of thing.