Oracle: hey, rent this hardware for 10x the capex+opex.

Seriously, Amazon is making a killing from cloud, so how surprising is it that other companies want some of that honey?

This server costs about $12k, and would cost the standard 10%/year to power and cool.
Yet over a 3-year rental life, Oracle is charging $142k.

Why are we criticizing good IT practice? There is no logic to the "if you have nothing to hide, you will perform IT poorly". In fact, this implies that Clinton's email server might have actually been secure, assuming they paid as much attention to best practice back then, too.

basically it would upset the muggles. look at the responses here: all of them are based on vacuous analogies to ancient systems, dredge up irrelevant issues like voter intimidation, or praise politicians (who would certainly still exist, as would parties) or that less indirect democracy would somehow eliminate the constitution. or worse: suggest that voting security would be a problem.

the main issue is that muggles are used to the dysfunctional system we have now, and the vested interests are comfortable with how they can keep things under control. or to put it another way: the voters who are unhappy with the current system are getting some catharsis through Bernie and Trump, and the latter group will probably spend their load well before the election.

What's the issue here? When you're in public, you have no expectation of privacy. We might have gotten used to being anonymous most of the time, but there's nothing inherent or ethical about that...

What a shock to find an anti-science editorial in WSJ - surely by any measure the paper of record for plutocrats.

basic science gives rise to tech opportunities. isn't this obvious? the article actually claims that science is the result of tech, which I just cannot.

Java was never that great, and Sun/Oracle tried their best to monetize it, maximize the leverage they had over their network-effect monopoly. So boo-hoo that reality didn't go their way.

The courts are not a valid way to fix your competitive failures.

manufacturability is what drives the industry, not exotic physics. this project was an interesting demo of tricks you can play with an STM, but it offers nothing towards actual transistors or circuits.

Isn't it obvious that most of the problem is when people learn GUI procedurally? Rather than learning the GUI concept and visual language? Yes, the visual language changes somewhat, but not dramatically (a little flatter, etc).

Accessibility is important, but it pertains to issues of icon size, readability. Sanity of UI matters too (whether normal workflow requires a lot of click-sequences). But the main issue here is that no one should ever use a computer procedurally. Letting them do so may seem effective, but none of our systems are appliance-like (in the sense of fixed-function/interface). Yes, if someone only ever uses a computer for one thing, it may seem pointless to explain the concept of GUIs, but it's also necessary.

we need to find a way to talk about the price of science projects. there are many examples: the top of top500, LHC, Iter, etc. we don't seem to discuss them rationally: to estimate the practical payoff in order to evaluate the cost of building them.

Finally the security offenders are forced to pay. It's weird how coverage gets all hung up about finding and punishing the perps.

It's also weird how we're very comfortable with self-regulating systems like The Market or Evolution, but don't seem to think that these systems require feedback. How many security breaches would be avoided if there was consistent (negative) feedback?

win3 was important, mainly politically, though. after all, the windows of today is not decended from win3 - it's the not-love child of the OS/2 project, really. remember that around the time of your fabled 3.0 release, OS/2 was at the milestone version 2.0 which took advantage of 32b flat mode for the first time. and OS/2 was really just a sort of wet-nurse for NT OS/2, which became Windows NT and all recent versions...

According to Wikipedia, the widely-known 1.0 SPM constant was first proposed sometime in the mid-late 1800s, usually attributed to PT Barnum, but apparently falsely. Perhaps the murky origins of the constant explain why it has been forgotten by physics, or perhaps it's just that modern commerce has made it much easier to measure with accuracy.

To make it more SI, I propose we switch to Suckers Per Second, and that SPS should be updated from 60 (in the Barnum era) to a lower bound of 395 (ref: Apple Watch, "sport" edition) and upper bound of SBP=17,000.

The point of BTC is disintermediation. If you scratch the surface, you'll learn that everyone hates conventional banks, CC, etc - mainly because the intermediaries are extracting such a high toll. Yes, they are convenient enough to use, but just barely. The prospect of a secure, trust-free and cost-efficient way to buy directly, that's BTC's niche.

Thanks, but the review's text could use a little editing...

Most of these tax avoidance schemes depend on the fact that corps pay tax only on excess profits. They don't pay tax on income, like, you know, *people* do. Notice that it's always unambiguous where revenue from, so a corporate *income* tax would be relatively loophole-free. Yeah, yeah, we'd have to drop the rates substantially, since corps pay such a low effective tax (relative to revenue) today.