We have something similar in my house actually. That's not the problem - the problem is the asymmetry. Cloud services generally have to presume an upload component when it comes to using them to do work - and you're not going to be able to do that to any appreciable degree stuck on a 1 mbps upload speed.

The US has a wide variety of plans, but the most important thing is that a lot of people have access to upload speeds in excess of 1 megabyte per second, which is about the minimum you'd want for serious remote server use. Where in Australia it is just impossible to get anything with a better upload then ADSL2 for less then many hundreds of dollars a month. Even Annex M isn't very common, and that isn't very good.

Oooh I live in Australia: no!

Seriously, how anyone uses any of the cloud-based services I know about was a mystery still I started realizing what type of internet you could get for $70 a month in the US.

No one working in IT or nanotech is innocent. Killing them is protecting the masses from future slavery!

Presumably if you knew this existed, then you might be able to predict the types of circuits it's tied into and figure out if the function could be activated remotely. After all, causing a microprocessor to lock up in debug mode, even if it would be watchdog-timer reset every few seconds, would be more then enough to effectively inactivate military hardware if you could do it continuously (or on demand).

But it does highlight the dangers in outsourcing production of something as sensitive as military hardware, when there's very few ways to actually verify on-chip silicon as being what you ordered, with no extraneous functionality.

Any particular chip can be reasonably expected to have it's application reverse engineered by an intelligence agency if you know the schematics and an idea of the intended use. If you can't make sure the chip won't do any more then you want it to, then how hard would be it be, really, to slip in backdoor code which reacts to certain inputs? i.e. if you're manufacturing a microwave amplifier IC to be used in a radar system, then something as simple as allowing a certain key of radar pulses to cause the thing to fuzz it's output for a second, or mimic a failure condition, would be disastrous if the chip was ultimately used in a radar guided missile or an F-22. China just issues the appropriate pulse-codes and suddenly there's a mysteriously high failure rate, or greatly reduced combat effectiveness because no one can get a missile lock.

Seriously.

Isn't military production capability the one thing you specifically never ever want to outsource, especially when it's to the people you keep simulating wars with.

Well Americans have one that seems to come down to it every 4 years.

More importantly though, that's got pretty much nothing to do with "capitalism" and seeing as how Ayn Rand couldn't but help contradict her own half-baked philosophy within the very text in which she instantiated, it should tell you something about it's connections to any serious theory of economics.

Agreeing with an AC on this.

Profit is still profit.

In-car LCD systems are pretty overpriced really. For my upgrade of my system I've been considering figuring out how the iPad drives it's display and then adapting something like that.