Fuck the kids, I would drink that stuff by the pint the next time I have to get on a plane.

Media let it die? Romney made an argument out of it and it was in the news cycle constantly.

I don't know what he hoped to prove by it, really. Romney never said that he would have done anything differently.

What changes to the retail stores? I haven't been following the news, but I'm curious. They had a pretty successful strategy and I don't know why anyone would mess with that.

"Cloud" is just market speak for hosted service.

Well, no it's not. It also means using white-box commodity servers to serve a large software application. The savings from using commodity servers is put back into the software development to make it more robust to handle the less reliable commodity servers.

If you're large enough, you develop the software yourself; if you're even larger, you design the commodity hardware yourself, which allows you to drive out cost while increasing performance in the things you get a return on. Neither of which either Dell or HP can add any value to, so there's just no reason to use them.

Google is the 5th largest server manufacturer in the world by itself. Add in the other big cloud players: Microsoft, Amazon, Facebook and a significant portion of server purchases are going to commodity hardware, whereas 10 years ago it was OEM. And it's not going to get any better. The fact is, building your own white box makes sense for more and more installations, because it's really not that hard. If you need more than about 10K cores, you can probably find it cost effective to start doing it now, and if you are any kind of software company, you already have much of the software development resources in house.

you're doing it wrong. The cloud is meant for applications you can distribute. For those that you can't, it doesn't work nearly as well or you have to sacrifice the uptime generally associated with the cloud. I can end your "cloud" of $50K machines with a backhoe or even just a power failure when the gens don't kick in. In a real cloud, you get regional or even global DR so you can survive even the total loss of an entire DC. If you can fail your application from one $50K machine in one region to another $50K machine in another, I'd warrant you could do the same locally too, and save a lot of money doing it.

Samsung clearly copied Apple's product, the evidence being a Samsung email that summarily described every valuable feature of the iPhone and how Samsung should implement those very same features themselves.

If Samsung were repackaging art that existed prior to Apple's use of it, they would have done so without reference to the way that Apple used it specifically.

They didn't say "hey, we should use pinch to zoom!"

They instead said "hey, we should use pinch to zoom because Apple does it and they're successful with it!"

That, I believe, as did the Jury, is credible evidence of patent infringement.

c.f. the wifi sniffing debacle. I'm pretty sure that what transpired was the developers of the product downloaded a public source program, like AirSnort. And then used it, probably with the intention of just collecting unencrypted SSIDs, but accidentally left on the more intrusive features as well.

They should have noticed that it was collecting data at a rate greater than SSIDs would indicate, but I can see overlooking that as well.

If you were a Chinese dissident using gmail to communicate and collaborate, you might have different priorities.

As of 10/11, Phoenix had 830K, with plans to add 160K and maybe even a million more feet later. source.

However, just one building in North Carolina has 500K of space (source), and Apple is by no means alone out there, with at least Google and others. Central Oregon and Washington are also big; Facebook has 300K in Prineville and another 300K on the way. Apple is also building in central Oregon, Google has a large facility, and yahoo and microsoft have large facilities in Central Washington.

Phoenix is a player, but by no means has "as much DC capacity as the rest of the US combined." They may have more colo space, and more individual 100k+ size units than elsewhere, to but consider all of the domestic DC capacity you are including self-builds in that statement.

You can determine who's an illegal just by looking at them, and discriminate accordingly? I don't think so. The police are empowered to ask for "papers, please" of anyone that they "suspect of being illegal". Which practically means, anyone mocha colored.

I'm actually curious to know how you're supposed to "prove citizenship". Is a driver's license enough? What if you're not driving? Are you supposed to walk around with a birth certificate at all times? Do the white folks do that too, to prove that they're not illegal from Canada?

If white folks don't feel at risk enough to carry "proof of citizenship" while not driving, because they know that they won't actually be required to show citizenship at an indiscriminate time, the police are simply racial profiling. Or, by any other name, being racist.

You don't think Facebook is "enterprise level computing"?

Teach them the language. Expose 1 gram of the substance, and make one dot. Then label the really hazardous stuff with 100 dots.

If they can't draw a conclusion from that, maybe they deserve to be irradiated.

Where are they now that BHO has topped everything Bush did in eight years? Oh right, BHO is THIEIR kind of tyrant. :-/

Your assumption reveals your ignorance, but I'll respond anyways.

As a moderate liberal that voted for Obama, I honestly don't know what to do. I'm very disappointed in Obama, but have no good alternatives:

• A. Vote Obama anyways. Maybe once he got clearance, he learned that all of this nonsense is really necessary. I think that's self serving justification nonsense, but it's what I got.
• B. Vote Romney. There's 0 chance he'll retract the federal control mechanisms, and very probably will make them worse. Maybe at least he'll balance the budget, but probably do so while increasing fed intrusion into social issues as well.
• C Vote Paul. He's a whacko, not least because of his advocating isolationism which I think is a dangerously reductionist view of the world. Quite simply, if we pull back, China and probably Russia will greatly expand their control of the world.
• D...?

I frankly think this centralization of control and partisanship ends in bloodshed, when a disenfranchised minority figures that they've had enough of the Other Guy telling them what to do, and can no longer effect their will at the ballot box or are actually suppressed as a radical element that just happens to be on the wrong side of the central control. Maybe we should prepare for it. But it's probably at least 20 years off, if ever, and running around preparing for it now seems whacko.

The problem I have with the "cyber weapons" terminology is that they are weapons which do not kill anyone. Not that that is a bad thing.

Try going without the power grid for a week across the country, especially during the winter, and see who dies.

Shut down the transportation infrastructure, for instance by disabling the fuel supply infrastructure, and see who dies. Grocery stores have, at best, enough food for 3-4 days before they're out.

Shut down the public water utilities, esp if you shut down the power grid at the same time, and see who dies.

I'm no expert, but I believe we are very vulnerable to a disruption to our infrastructure. Especially in the US; since we have never experienced much of a failure along these lines, we have little preparation for it. Imagine something like Katrina hitting every major metro in the country at once, while we are preparing for a major military engagement.

Diane Rhem is the toughest interviewer I've ever listened too. Her lack of accepting bs from liars was awesome and very welcome.