If you've got physical access to the machine in the cage you can do anything you want, which includes bypassing BIOS and Bootloader passwords in about 5 minutes.
That assumes you have unlimited physical access. 5 minutes per machine * 80 in a rack * 1,000+ racks is a real world limitation.
PS: The NSA has a vary different approach to security than the average firm. To put this in perspective they have been known to refer to their computing power not by computer or rack but by the Acre.
True. But it would be unfeasible to access 16,000 machines even if there was no bootloader password. The best course of action is try to identify the management/admin server and take over that, which may have unrestricted access to every server on the VLAN (or as sometimes happens, every single server period).
(Also, what's your datacenter or machine profile that you can get 80 machines per rack and not hit overheading or overload your rack power circuits? We could only get 40 to be stable, but we were using commodity gear)
It's not a 84K airplane it's a 30k car + (84 - 30)K airplane. I bought a vary nice car even though I only drive ~5K miles a year. I could sell my car and add an extra ~800-1000$ a month to be able to fly on the weekends, but paying ~90K + hanger fees and still needing a car is much harder.
PS: Renting an airplane is still a better option if you fly less than 10 hours a month, but IMO there is a nitch for a crappy flying car.
IMO a reasonable test is: If a patent can be used to sue one company it may be patentable. If it can be used to sue 100 companies working on separate products it's probably obvious.
Basically, you can't prove 1 person did not read it. But, you can be positive 100 people did not read it. Now clearly this depends on the number of people working on the problem. So, while 100 is excessive in most fields, somewhere around 3-10 is probably a good lower bound.
That is clearly not a reasonable test. In fact it is almost certainly a great test for someone having innovated in a valuable way. If you file a worthless patent then no-one will be interested in your innovation and there will be no-one to sue. If however you file something valuable you would expect to potentially have lots of people to sue. In your example the question arises, why have so many people trespassed on this patent? We know they have an incentive - it is valuable. But why in this hypothetical case did they trespass? Did they think the patent was breakable? the patent holder weak? the market opportunity so great that they would build now pay later? Perhaps they didn't find the patent? So many questions. But as a cursory study of hindsight bias will make plain it is extremely common for something that is not at all obvious at the time of its invention of appear so later.
Or it uses replaceable nozzles which also solves that problem. Anyway, welding robots have been in use for a long time so I expect the basic mechanics to have already been worked out.
PS: how much longer it takes might be less important than how much cheaper it is per weld. If I can pay someone 12$ an hour for 8 hours to do the same work that someone making 50$ an hour does in 4 it's normally a huge net win. On to of that, it will probably become faster fairly soon.
Past performance is no indication of future performance. Looking back, buying Microsoft in 2000 with a P/E of 60 was a stupid thing to do. But, that says nothing about buying it today with a P/E of 10. IMO, Microsoft is a great value play and but nothing to write home about, however Apple (16x) is slightly over priced and Google (20x) is stupidly overpriced.
On the one hand this is sound analysis, Apple and Google do look stupidly overpriced, and MSFT does look stupidly underpriced. However, I think there is an underlying rationality to these phenomena. I am not convinced that MS will even be a major player in the industry in the next 20 years, due to failing to miss opportunity after opportunity in capturing new markets and reacting well to defend or migrate their existing high revenue products from disruptive innovation. Meanwhile, Google and Apple continue to expand their businesses at an impressive pace, in some cases creating new multi-billion dollar markets as they do so.
Given the expected substantial growth of per-capita wealth throughout parts of the developing world (e.g. much of Asia especially China, parts of India, much of South America, parts of Eastern Europe, etc.) and the consequent expansion of the population of the affluent, developed world the potential future market in the computer software/hardware/services industries is likely to be enormous. The companies that manage to cement themselves firmly into the future mainstream mechanisms for people to buy physical and digital goods online as well as the mechanisms for obtaining access to the online world will be well seated to collect substantial revenues from that expanded market. And Apple, Google, and Amazon are much better situated and seemingly much more capable of capitalizing on new forms of markets than Microsoft is. I believe all of that is, to varying extents, reflected in their respective stock prices, and I think it's a very valid view of the state of those companies.
Talking about Math as a single subject is like talking about Sports. Chess, Boxing, Baseball, Snowboarding, Curling, and Luge may have some things in common. However, suggesting that DiffEq and Fractions are equally meaningless to most people seems just as out of place as assuming a chess grandmaster is also a champion snowboarder.
"Facebook’s closest competitor is Yahoo’s network of sites, which claimed 10.1% of the market. Google, which is still relatively new to the display business, had 2.5%."
Thinking about problems don't provide new information. It's the same basic fallacy as assuming a really really powerful AI could deduce QM from a few minutes of webcam footage.
That's sort of a technical non-sequitur, no? I would imagine that a sufficiently advanced AI could deduce QM from a few seconds of real time, given that it could ask questions of any resolution. Or, equivalently, a large amount of webcam footage.
In either case, the emphasis is on conclusions being bought in the currency of experience.
I brought it up because people actually believe it. As you noticed both resolution and time are important limitations. You don't get to arbitrarily examine things at any resolution or for any length of time. Stick a AI up to a webcam at 648x480 @ 30 cycles per second pointed at a brick wall and it's not going to be able to say comment on politics in the middle east.
Or in a more down to earth example, if we stop building ever higher energy particle accelerators there are things we simply don't get to know.
I have no idea how you can measure such things, but several serial killers have terrorized large areas for fairly long periods of time. 9/11 may have been dramatic, but it was over fairly quickly so the terror was short lived, and it also took several people which hurts on the / attackers side.
PS: I watched it live on TV missed the first attack, but saw the other two get reported and personally I was never really that strongly impacted. More WTF? than run for the hills.
My favorite cheap method of terrorism is the DC sniper times ten. It requires no real coordination and very little money, yet causes a huge sustained impact.
Fortunately, it seems that the number of motivated crazy people in the world is fairly low.
> personally I was never really that strongly impacted
I'm guessing you don't live in the New York area. Events can seem a bit unreal if you have no personal stake in them. It may seem trivial next to the loss of life, but looking at that hole in the Manhattan skyline where the towers used to be is still a bit tragic.
Yea, I was thinking of the whole DC sniper thing. There was a similar indecent at an army base (fort hood), but the random nature of the targets and the length of time between attacks was far more threatening to people.
I could see a changed "Manhattan skyline" as a significant impact for many people. For a while I could see the section of the pentagon hit by the airplane outside my window, but there is little lasting visible impact on the structure. Internally, they did a fair amount of renovation for example added some glow strips on the floor pointing to the exits which seems like a good idea, and gas makes which seems less useful (and more creepy). You can even go on tours of the pentagon which seems risky, but I suspect the benefits outweighs the risks.
However, that's all fairly long term effects. As to being up close and personal, a coworker of mine was in a conference room when 1/2 the people at the table where taken yet he had no problem going back to work at the pentagon. Sure, it's a target, but numbers suggest being a truck driver to be a far more dangerous profession.
When it comes down to it terrorism is simply not that effective. Several paces have had sustained terrorist attacks for long periods of time and people don't react that much.
Meaningful amounts of Mater + antimatter produces extreme amounts of radiation, and takes ridiculous amounts of energy to produce.
To put things into perspective, 1kg (~2.2lb) of antimater + 1kg of matter = 2* (9×10^16 J/kg) of energy, TNT = 4.2×10^6 J/kg so that works out to 42,000,000,000 kg of TNT or a 100 mega ton bomb which is larger than the largest H bomb ever tested.
PS: The other issue is unlike gas which is fairly stable, any sort of containment failure = detonation.
That assumes you have unlimited physical access. 5 minutes per machine * 80 in a rack * 1,000+ racks is a real world limitation.
PS: The NSA has a vary different approach to security than the average firm. To put this in perspective they have been known to refer to their computing power not by computer or rack but by the Acre.