One more thing: first, consider NASA's budget which is 0.6% of the federal budget. Now consider the Department of Defense's budget, which is 19%. (Both of these numbers are straight from Wikipedia for 2010.) I can't justify spending 32 times as much on wars that will only serve to kill people and create a worldwide hatred of America as we spend on our space program. It doesn't make any sense to me.
To equate all DOD spending with only war, killing, and hatred of America is ludicrous. Yes, the US military is actively engaged in hostile actions. However it is usually among the first to respond when humanitarian relief is required- such as recent efforts in "Japan." Furthermore military technology finds it's way to civilian "non-lethal uses."Also, kind of funny slamming DOD budget as all war and killing while posting to a site that is accessible thanks in large part to DARPA funded core technology. Granted probably a tiny piece of that defense war and killing budget, but part of it nonetheless. Arguably some of the same tech could have made it's way to civilian use without DOD, but to deny that DOD funding accelerated those moves is naive beyond belief.
Back on topic -- the recent experiences with Messenger as pointed out in the article only reinforce the need to understand, detect and frankly plan for a major terrestrial disruption due to CME or other type bursts. I'm confident we'll experience a major outage in my lifetime, and as electronics become more and more interconnected the disruptions caused by that outage will have a larger and unpredictable impact on ordinary folks. Time to get our heads out of the sand.
the largest computer company in the world, and the second largest US based corporation
undermined the rest or your points. Face it, market cap is a rather arbitrary measure - certainly other US companies are larger in terms of revenue (IBM, HP, Dell, MSFT), number of employees, and overall contributions and achievements in the tech world. Sure Apple is sitting high now, but it wasn't that long ago that Cisco had a market cap of $500billion and where are they now? Market cap to my mind has little bearing on whether killing XServe is or is not a brain dead move. The tech sector is littered with companies who flew high, could do no wrong, and then collapsed. That said I did agree with most of the rest of your points and even the final point on how Apple is now branding and targeting their servers (or rather "server enough") offerings. Yet I'm left wondering from an earlier post on the wisdom of Apple abandoning the enterprise sector or even niches...
Content providers for apple MUST provide video files in Apple ProRes fileformat which is ONLY able to be encoded using apple's tools which only run in OSX. I don't know how apple expects large content producers to encode high-volumes of videos for them without the xserves. MacPros are not an option as they are not enterprise ready (single PSU, no management port, they're HUGE and must be de-"racked" in order to swap drives, etc). MacMinis are not suitable for this as they don't have enough CPU/RAM. The xserves weren't even that great, but they were the right form factor.
With no real enterprise offerings what's the migration path for that space, or is there even one? Leaving even a niche market hanging can be the type of move that spreads discontent amongst the user base. Not saying that this will necessarily happen or that if it does it means Apple falls from the top of the market cap food chain. Still we could be easily sitting here in 5 years and agree that it was the tipping point in Apple's demise - or conversely that it was the brilliant move that freed them to focus on other areas and grow exponentially larger.
Settle's back in to armchair
And only once failed. In 1972 in Kharkov region failed to block the emergency gas blowout. The explosion was mysteriously left on the surface, forming a mushroom cloud. Although the charge was minimal - just a 4 kiloton. And laid deep - for more than two kilometers.
Happily, with a track record like that, “the chances of failure in the Gulf of Mexico are 20%,” KP writes. “The Americans could certainly risk it.”
Please note, these new editors are not compatible with Gears (the technology that powers offline access), so they do not have offline support today. However, we plan to bring back offline support in the future, taking advantage of new technologies like HTML5 and advancements in modern browsers.
So you're telling me that you know for sure I won't be able to bring up Google Docs and access my Google docs when I have no internet connection? Because right now I can do that in the Chrome Browser with Google Gears and they are working on HTML5 which is supposed to natively support this "offline" functionality. But what you're telling me is that they plan on dropping this paradigm?
Yep -- at least last I heard Gears/offline editing is temporarily going bye-bye. Questionable choice at best -- why not get HTML5 working first unless they really don't care about being a viable option to traditional MS Office type editors? http://www.informationweek.com/news/storage/reviews/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=224202374
Google's other big bet is on the all-cloud environment; it's dropping for now the ability to use Docs when not connected to the Internet. Google thinks most employees don't care about offline mode, but the company knows that C-level execs--the ones who need to approve Google apps--do. They're often on airplanes without Internet connectivity, so not having offline access could be a big strike against the rewritten Docs.
Maybe your intent was to prevent loopholes for the vote tallying/tracking code being classified with the OS as non-disclosed, but you certainly didn't need to require disclosure of ALL software running on the voting machines.For a voting machine, yes, we most certainly do need disclosure of all software.
Thanks for responding, but I respectfully disagree. Use of a known OS on a closed system such as a voting kiosk is no more or less risky whether or not you have disclosure of all the source code.
As for the sections you quoted that presumably limit the scope to the OS level, why? That seems like a gapping loophole. Why couldn't someone just write an overly simplistic OS and app and hide a bunch of vote tampering code in the BIOS? On the surface, what's turned over looks legit and clean, but behind the scenes is the undisclosed "election correction" code you're so bent on preventing.
Furthermore, what about manual counting and recounting methods? Are these held to the same level of disclosure? By this, I mean what if the hand tallies are recorded or communicated electronically....you want to have the source for all systems used to record, transmit or communicate those results also available for disclosure? If not, then why not? Aren't these another avenue for tampering?
Call me cynical, but if someone really wants to muck with the system they'll find a way....voting machines or no voting machines, there are ample opportunities for vote tampering before, during and after an election. Don't kid yourselves into thinking you've really reduced the odds of vote tampering by requiring source code disclosure for the systems used to record votes.
In my mind the best bet to increase odds for a fair election is an educated and well informed citizenry. Good luck finding that in the US anymore.
Computers don't actually think. You just think they think. (We think.)
