I agree, and I am a big proponent of service architectures, and yes, I force myself to use the term "microservices" because it seems to be the popular one these days.

There isn't anything new about service architecture. You put a network call in between two pieces of code and suddenly you need a queue for the interface to be robust. Once you put a queue in front of code, you're handling messages, and in particular, you're handling messages that can arrive more than once. So you need to ensure your handlers are idempotent. Then you need to stitch together a reporting database of some kind to serve queries that supply the data for the UI. Which should mean that your services publish events -- pub sub is another pattern that has been around for a while. All of that work wins you the ability to compose a large, complex system out of very loosely coupled, autonomous pieces. When it works, it's great. It usually doesn't, however, because teams don't have the maturity, habits, or expertise on hand to see such a project through to completion.

Nothing about it is "new," except to the inexperienced web programmers I coach who don't really understand service architecture -- who also usually believe that you can achieve microservices just by taking parts of your existing system and putting a web interface around them. Sigh.

All that to say, there are some definite benefits to service architecture that shouldn't be discounted just because "microservices" is yet another tech trend to have been fed through the meme machine.

>Do you believe rehabilitation is impossible or do you want revenge?

I don't believe that someone who commits mass murder can be rehabilitated, no. It isn't about revenge; it's about public safety.

Someone once pointed out that hoping a rapist gets raped in prison isn't a victory for his victim(s), because it somehow gives him what he had coming to him, but it's actually a victory for rape and violence. I wish I could remember who said that, because they are right. The score doesn't go Rapist: 1 World: 1. It goes Rape: 2.

What this man did is unspeakable, and he absolutely deserves to spend the rest of his life in prison. If he needs to be kept away from other prisoners as a safety issue, there are ways to do that without keeping him in solitary confinement, which has been shown conclusively to be profoundly cruel and harmful.

Putting him in solitary confinement, as a punitive measure, is not a victory for the good people in the world. It's a victory for inhumane treatment of human beings. This ruling is, in my opinion, very good and very strong for human rights, *precisely* because it was brought by such a despicable and horrible person. It affirms that all of us have basic human rights, even the absolute worst of us on this planet.

This is precisely why I lost all interest in Oculus the instant I heard that it had been acquired by Facebook.

Likely what they are seeing is diabetics expel extra sugar in their urine. A lot of bacteria feed on sugars so we're probably seeing certain species taking advantage of the free lunch.

First: In-Q-Tel is the venture capital arm of all of the U.S. intelligence services, including DHS, FBI, etc; not just CIA. DHS, for example, will be blamed for any big security disaster; you should not presume that the motives of the agencies are uniform. Nor is all of what those agencies do bad.... It's the pervasive surveillance we *must* stop, and compromising our security standards. See: https://www.iqt.org/about-iqt/ for In-Q-Tel rather than the Wikipedia entry for Dan.

Second: Dan has never taken a security clearance, over his entire career.

Third: He's actually not a In-Q-Tel employee, but a consultant (full time) for them. This is so that he does *not* have to sign a employee agreement, but can remain able to speak freely. Which he does regularly: See http://geer.tinho.net/pubs for some of his publications. One I sparked him to write recently is: http://geer.tinho.net/geer.lawfare.15iv14.txt in reaction to the information I cover in my Berkman Center talk you can find at: https://cyber.law.harvard.edu/events/luncheon/2014/06/gettys

Fourth: people who know Dan, who is really one of the founders of the computer security field, hold him in very high regard and trust, as I do.

If you look at Dan Geer's career, rather than jumping to unfounded, ill informed presumptions based on news reports that don't bother to go beyond reading the Wikipedia entry, you will find:
    1) he managed the development of Kerberous at Project Athena (where I got to know him)
    2) he co-authored the famous Microsoft is a dangerous monoculture paper a bit over a decade ago (which Microsoft hated so much they
          got @Stake to fire him.
    3) he is a holder of the USENEX Flame award https://www.usenix.org/about/flame

In short, guys, he's one of "us"....

Don't be ill-informed slashdotters....

The value of something isn't tied to it's ease of duplication, at all. Property is not the only lens by which to view value. For example, property rights are not in play if I hire someone to clean my garage.

I don't know if you can. In the real world, duplicating objects is impossible. However, duplicating information in computers is essentially free. Therefore, I'm not sure that simulating the notion of "property rights" on a computer even makes sense. It certainly doesn't make sense if it costs DRM to achieve it.

The means by which they revoke permissions after the time limit must be transparent. DRM fails to meet this criteria.

Building a business model around time limits requires you to take rights away from the consumer. You can't justify online video "rentals" if they cannot be built transparently.

I'd say the killer feature is pure remote management. You don't need to physically manage your systems anymore.

I'm the opposite. I can't stand lacking the ability to dig in and change software when I don't like the way it works. It's rare that I actually do, but there's a huge freedom I get from knowing that when I need to extend the software, I can.

It's common for commercial software to not do what I want it to, either. I'd love to have a working amazon instant video client for my Android phone.

I think the alternative minimum tax kicks in at some point and imposes a (hefty) flat tax structure.