between the benghazi conspiracy theory, the 37th repeal of healthcare reform, and the shitstorm over patriot groups applying for a form of charity that explicitly prohibits them from political activity its a wonder these guys can find a minute in the day to "write a letter to google" about their privacy concerns. its also kind of amazing because i didnt hear a fucking peep from most of these career policitians during the patriot act or warrantless wiretapping and im pretty fucking sure that involved a large telecommunications company. one question committee head Joe Barton is asking is:

Substitute "google glass" with "United States Law Enforcement" and you begin to see how fucking hypocritical this entire endeavor is

Sure, its fun to watch. just remember when the first coffee was brewed 30 years ago by a machine we all stood in wonderment at what appeared to be a robot future. Turns out the final product sitting in the breakroom of most offices grinds out a dull black water, comes in a box form factor, and occasionally shits cups all over the floor. its generally avoided by all but a fanatic few who pump 60 cents into it each morning and have never had a cup of starbucks. "Flair" and attractiveness are what make a bartender in many situations, same as a barista. Speaking as a former bartender, I have a few problems with this layout:

its inefficient: we move drinks, we look good doing it, we do NOT spill the product across the cup from the shaker as the machines did, for a number of reasons. 1. your inventory on the floor costs you money and customers. 2. all those sugary mixed drinks become a hellish glue to clean up eventually. 3. Fruit flies multiply inexorably with spillage and get you shut down by the health department/any competing bar that lodges a complaint very quickly. 4. customers dont want wet sticky plastic cups.
its a static load: mixes are pre-portioned, all drinks must be shaken, garnish is not provided. this is basically an electronically assembled pre-mix cocktail that will invariably piss off 2-3 customers an hour with its inability to do 'doubles' or 'sidecars' or any other kitshy stuff customers just want out of habit. a few regulars might take double lime, no lime, or float a splash of cranberry juice. ive had to do beer-mosas on sunday when normally mimosas suffice. beermosa is not in the black book where i presume the machines recipes are sourced.
account for fault conditions: what if we cant make a drink anymore? you're still selling so you need to improvise. offer other options to customers, listen to what they like, be creative and come up with something they will enjoy. "We dont do that" or "Empty" is the fastest way to lose a bar.

that having been said: where do i want this machine? I want it on saturday night at the front of the bar with a preset load of cocktails that people commonly order that, normally, i pour out of a mix. tequila sunrise, margarita, any mixed sugary shot, etc...I also might want it to make drinks that are very dangerous (check out the blue blazer sometime, it requires pouring flaming bourbon between two steel mugs to mix it.), and handle volatile liquors that some bars cannot procure insurance for (151 requires additional fire insurance for example.) im not sure i want it slinging beer. not that it cant, just that beer has a strange rate of return where ive found often customers want to "switch" because they dont like a certain new craft brew theyre trying.

Georgia Tech: Accredited educational institution, cash strapped and myred to a state that as much of the south does, thinks evolution isnt a real thing..
Udacity: guys that put education online, middlemen essentially until colleges do this themselves or states outlaw it because it cuts into sports funding and undermines tenured profs that show up in sweatsuits to mumble at lecturn.
AT&T: Major multinational telecommunications corporation....why? i mean if anything these guys will put the cost of the course significantly higher than $7000.

down goes metropolia.fi.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slashdot_effect

generally i keep my options pretty open. infrastructure servers are usually high availability and ordered from Silicon Mechanics or something. theyre cheap, my management enjoys the cost savings, and if one breaks its super simple to just order another as opposed to trying to justify the 'value.' ERP applications or databases will get the Dell/HP Treatment with the $nonferrous_metal level service support and $mm/$dd/$yyyy response SLA because management sees more value in them and theyre generally easier to get upgrades and DR stuff for. Dell for example knows this and actually ships an SAP "break-down" sheet for my manager to get the fuzzies about so he can look good in front of his management, who in turn can tout our 'core relationship with leading technology vendors' to investors and C-levels.

Ive stayed away from Cisco because of the cost, lock-in, and seriously underhanded sales tactics theyve used in the past. Things like firewalls and VPN are nearly exclusively Open Source here just because management cant justify the cost of a laptop for someone, let alone the cost of a token/license/enterprise server. Management gets their nano-yubikey (which they think is incredibly tech-savvy and sexy) and everyone is assigned a fun password from pwqgen.

and the argument in TFA from Glaser is that somehow dealerships are vital for things like recalls, malfunctions and service. Recalls and malfunctions are widely visible through Technical Service Bulletins that places like Firestone actually have a system to track. problems are fixable by any local garage, partly because the government tracks them. Taking your car to a dealership for service might happen once or twice, but the local garage is closer and likely more a part of the community than the regional chain of last-name-here car dealership. Glasers boilerplate at the end about who is going to support the YMCA and little league seems a bit far fetched. Crap like that is a write-off for dealerships, not something they do strictly out of kindness.

Macfarlane should have been passed over for this for one reason: He completely bombed the 2013 Oscars. Its not something you have to improv or give a great deal of consideration to; the entire event is scripted. The audience is known, and every variable has been populated for your consideration. Despite having a completely controlled environment, he still managed to fail miserably. His irreverant banter with Shatner, juvenile Gay Men’s Chorus of Los Angeles number that just seemed to drag on ad-nauseum, and generally sexist hosting of the Oscars with deadpan jokes and universally reviled criticism should have been a red flag for Fox. Instead you're taking the guy who made Family Guy, the Cleveland Show, Ted, and American Dad and asking him to participate in a documentary about the cosmos with Neil deGrasse Tyson. Tyson juxtaposed against Macfarlanes habitual 'coonery bafoonery' portrayal of black characters is a gut-wretching consideration.

Morgan Freeman is more qualified as an executive producer based on his experience with Nova.

seem like a gimmick. taking steps like ensuring your MTA always delivers using a TLS connection is probably the most interoperable decision, seeing as endpoint encryption requires two mta's to be using the same hardware or software to encrypt/decrypt, assuming its PKI. endpoint encryption raises big questions like at what point does the message become decrypted? where are keys stored? how do you independently verify key integrity or revoke keys that have been compromised? is there a 'barracuda back door?' and can the system be arbitrarily bypassed. These tend to be the kinds of questions that force vendors to seem standoffish or unprofessional because they dont know the answers.

if you need real crypto, then use an open standard thats auditable and verifiable. assign keys to users, and revoke them when they become compromised or the employee leaves. you might consider configuring your mailserver to reject unencrypted messages, which can be detected using spamassassin or plain regex to ensure compliance. Make sure the stakeholders on your end are well informed as to the SLA and method/type of crypto being employed (TLS tunnel vs actual message or even both.) Encrypted messages have the potential to make collaboration cumbersome if not outright impossible without defeating the crypto at some point, while encrypted gateways can cause problems in the event certificates are checked against an authority for self-signature, or expiration. its also worth nothing once again that just because an email system is encrypted, does not mean you will receive less UBE (spam) or phishing attempts (in fact a compromised key makes these attacks far more effective.) encrypted email by nature also requires you to reveal envelope headers in plaintext, and does not excuse a mail administratior from considering or employing SDF and DKIM signatures.

disclaimer: ive done email for more than a decade for search engine companies.

eggplants, in much higher quantities.

as a near-term 'water bailing' strategy for microsoft but at some point, google will either adopt smarter strategies to avoid the patents entirely, buy the patents outright, or challenge them in court. considering how microsoft has been almost worthless for more than a decade in the smart phone industry though ill have to quote the words of Tony Stark, "You're missing the point. There's no throne, there is no version of this, where you come out on top."

things like policies on "unopened" email older than 180 days. Are we talking about the 'seen' flag being set? or the file being opened? yeah, of course government law enforcement agencies want the power to snoop on this kind of stuff but it sounds like theyre doing it without a warrant to get around the fact that most judges are completely ignorant about email and electronic communication.
then again judges have ruled in the past the FBI does not have this kind of broad jurisdiction to warrantlessly read email, so maybe they really are just ignoring the rulings?

either way, its been proven by multiple school shootings and a recent bombing that spy-on-the-whole-country technology is worthless. it doesnt help anyone prevent or prove crime, it only enables precrime and thoughtcrime to be used as fodder for law enforcement careers and budget proposals.

exists to generate private profit off public institutions like UC irvine the University of Pennsylvania. in July 2012 they floated the idea of selling student data to potential employers, and to date havent really turned much of a profit. interesting statement from John Doerr, Any revenue stream will be divided, with schools receiving a small percentage of revenue and 20% of gross profits according to wikipedia.

The advertiser supported model in my opinion is a terrible idea. Studies like citizenship and immigration could just serve as vehicles for targeted advertising from the Heritage Foundation, while child nutrition and cooking are all too easily worked into the budgets of companies like Unilever and Kraft. Advertisers have a history of steering content based on their interests (Sanjay Gupta mostly exists to ensure you get your daily dose of targeted pharmaceutical advertising)

i can offer some perspective to India. At first the whole thing seems a bit absurd and draconian, you might even be outraged over it. eventually stuff like this just becomes routine enough to find its way into inane stuff like farm subsidy bills, and aside from the occaional GPS device snuck onto some college kids car you really dont notice it at all. After a while you start to actively ignore the fact that your country runs secret torture camps and foreign prisons for people who say or do the wrong things. Finally you just stop challenging it alltogether and praise it as being something, hell anything your highly factioned, ineffective government can unilaterally agree upon as passable legislation. after a few years and high profile criminal acts like shootings and bombings, you begin to look back and conclude the entire spy-on-everyone thing as being a hopelessly useless effort on the part of the government to keep no one safe.

the american military has done this crap for 40 years. Threats are received, the enemy is downplayed and underestimated, they suddenly do something wildly advanced and unpredicted. Russias Tupolev was said to be incapable of intercontinental long range flight until we saw it soaring around canada, and at nearly twice its estimated speed. Insurgents basically scrolled through drone video like it was cable TV while we insisted they were just simple sand people. Iran was a perfectly acceptable state-sanctioned boogeyman. it was just itching for 'liberation' or 'freedom' or whatever pretext we need to re-establish regional power until they managed to land our drone at their airport of choice. yet we never seem to shit any big bricks, we just keep plodding away.

now we have north korea. from TFA:

so how many more steps will have to be completed before we land a competent assessment that north korea can send a warhead to the US? are we seriously going to entertain the idea that a country capable of launching a satellite into space is just 'faking it' when it comes to missile technology? Parent posts are probably correct: you're absolutely insane to parade real missiles in a public square if the goal of those missiles is to be highly mobile and undetectable in the face of a nation thats demonstrated numerous times its willingness to violate foreign sovreignity in the pursuit of furthering its interests.

sequestration cuts are getting a little close.
Seriously, terrorism or communism. I only have enough patience for one government-sponsored boogey man at a time.
Schedule it between the mandatory monthly fiscal cliff panic and the gay marriage thing if you could...or if you can roll it into some weird freedom war that works too.