A lot like the greedy slashdot beta programmers who in turn took the bid from the greedy Dice who are also in the business of extracting the most money they can.

Days like this I'm glad I shop around to find old-school paper-using doctors.

All of my doctors currently make a point that they stick with paper records, and also make it a point to use the most generic diagnostic codes possible to the insurance companies. Blood test results are faxed (I know, right?) and everyone on the staff claims to support medical privacy.

I don't know what it would take to break their security, but it is better than the companies that share everything with anybody who asks. Hooray for freedom of choice.

And how does this differ from the Bluetooth ODB-II connector I use to stream car data to my cell phone? That is wireless and also requires being plugged into the diagnostic port on the car.

I can pull all sorts of data from that. If I spend a little more, I can get a full CAN-bus connection and actually *send* information and control things.

This isn't hacking. It is a product demo for VW.

Oh, I get it! This question for Ask Slashdot must come from the Slashdot beta team.

Now, I understand that as a Slashdot beta developer you don't know how to program. We can all see that.

Web site development is more difficult than the programs you are used to where you drag a picture of a shape onto another picture of the shape, or how when a large colored shape is presented you click on the corresponding color image.

All of that "cryptic jargon" is important to computers. Just like all that "cryptic jargon" in legal agreements is important to judges.

Since you must be on the Slashdot beta development team, I'll point out that people sometimes don't like it when you make changes. Try some of these:

* Go to the Louvre with a paintbrush and some oil paints. Attempt to fix the eyebrows on the Mona Lisa, because they have faded off. Tell me how people like your slight changes.
* Go to the Royal Academy of Arts and slightly modify DaVinci's Last Supper. Maybe stand the salt shaker back up and paint over some of the damage that was done after people cut an arch through it for a doorway, or after the WW2 bombing damage. See how well people respond.
* Pay a visit to the Sistine Chapel, that thing has lots of cracks on it. Tell me what happens after you climb up to the ceiling with your bucket off plaster to fix the cracks.
* The White House lawn looks nice, but it could be changed to allow more foot traffic. Tell me what happens when you take your backhoe up to the presidential mansion and being excavating for new footpaths.

Any change, no matter how tiny, has the potential to destroy the essence of the item. You got that, Slashdot beta team?

would be around 10,000 metric tons or tens of billions of dollars just in launch costs.
Or a rounding error in the US and Chinese annual defense budget, it's not that we can't do ambitious things, it's that we choose not to.

Hell, even Intel is putting off equipping Fab 42 due to slack global demand and the huge $5B+ cost.

Have they recently acquired new executives that are hellbent on selling absolutely everything that isn't mainframes and $$$$$/hour consultants?

Yes, their previous CEO made a stupid goal of $20 operating EPS by 2015 and the new CEO seems to be hell bent on hitting that target, whether that's from an incentive program or ego talking I'm not sure.

Yes, some people feel that way: The site is a collection of stories, links, and comments.

In many respects that is true. If you were forced to describe the site in ten words or less, that would work.

However, real life is more nuanced than the condensed summary.

It is not just about a color palate, or a style of expression, or white space, or the color of the background.

I could ask artists to draw a seated woman with folded hands sitting before a landscape and to use a specific color palette, or a table with thirteen men seated before a feast, with perhaps a few other guides. It is unlikely the artists would produce anything like the Mona Lisa or The Last Supper.

The design of slashdot is also complex and nuanced. With a brief summary you may explain the superficial aspects of the site, but the essense of the site -- which has grown into millions of accounts -- is not so easily expressed or duplicated. Even minor changes can completely destroy that essense.

Agreed, I went to beta on day one after being a mobile beta participant and what I saw horrified me. I wrote a very detailed writeup about what was wrong with the design and even gave them the tweaks I had made to their CSS using Tampermonkey to make the site less annoying, and yet absolutely nothing of substance changed between when I wrote them and when they foisted it on the larger population. Why the hell am I being asked to give feedback if you're not going to take any of it seriously?

No need to be a millionaire, you should be able to buy it for a couple bucks since they already wrote down the value to zero.

Yes, but Intel is an American corporation which only manufactures outside of the USA

Pure B.S.

Perhaps you missed the first part of my post. Fortune 500 data center.

If you are talking about consumer devices and even common office server room equipment that is quite true. We had lots of commodity stuff lying around. We also kept a bit of less common stuff around, such as spare UPS racks; the $30,000 price tag is low enough cost that we could keep a few of them around when equipment shuffles.

Note that some critical equipment gets mighty expensive. You can find a good deal on low latency, high volume interconnect that can handle ten million concurrent connections for around $250K, but you'll probably want to pay around $350K for the better ones. It would be insane to just keep a few of EVERYTHING lying around, just in case. Far cheaper for the Cisco contract that will get us any replacement we need, quickly.

Meh, all that crap will take to long. In just a few short years our species will consume more energy than we can produce with all of those combined. So not only is the sum of them insufficient, the pollution involved in mining and harvesting the resources, construction of the facilities, all the infrastructure, and so on will destroy the planet just as part of the opportunity cost.

We need to cut our losses, start researching and building generational spaceships, and roll out the lottery to find the lucky few humans who will get off the rock and hopefully go find (and eventually destroy) another one.

Nah, I've gladly paid more money for HP hardware and support over Dell for the last 10 years, but if HP is actually going to make my life more difficult by putting their crappy website behind a paywall so I can't find the updates I need then I'll take my money elsewhere. I know I'm not alone either because anyone shopping on price alone has been going Dell/Supermicro all along.

On the other hand...

When working in a Fortune 500 company there were some mighty expensive premium contracts with Cisco. Among them was an agreement I learned about when we had an outage late in the afternoon that affected about 15 people. We have hardware that could have affected hundreds of people, but in this case the outage only affected a few.

Cisco found the closest duplicate replacement part in another state, chartered a flight to a nearby airport, had a taxi driver on standby when the plane arrived, and delivered it to our door within about four hours of reporting the fairly minor problem.

I understand the contract is in place because we had hardware that affects hundreds of thousands of people. The Cisco crew was adamant that the contract had a clause that required a six-hour turnaround on any of that class of hardware. If it had been a major device at a major data center those same four hours could have felt like an eternity, so for those people where an outage can cost thousands of dollars every second in lost productivity and sales I can certainly understand the need for the contract with the devil.