I went to a dealer to buy a car in cash (well, a cashier's check). They had a touch-screen computer with all their forms for me to fill out. It came to a credit approval/application form, and I refused to fill it out because I wasn't opening a loan. The lady assured me it was "standard" and that it wouldn't be used for anything, because I didn't need the loan/credit. I kept refusing, and she kept insisting they only needed it because the software required it to continue. After this impasse, I stood to walk out, and she suddenly changed her tune and somehow "figured out" how to bypass the form. Classy.
I just listened to Dan Carlin's "Destroyer of Worlds" [1] podcast episode, and it was very enlightening. I was modestly familiar with nuclear history, but still learned a lot from this episode.
Apparently a NY Times reporter was live tweeting the meeting
> The discussions became tense when Google's leaders discovered that someone attending the meeting or listening in remotely was supplying live information to Conger, the Times reporter. Brin said he would not continue discussing China because of the leaks, according to the sources who spoke with Business Insider.
> The sources said images of Conger's tweets were displayed on a large screen in the room with Pichai and Brin. One Google employee who had stood to ask a question suddenly addressed whoever was surreptitiously leaking information.
> "F--- you," he said. He then demanded that the person leave.
> The sources said the epithet received some applause.
I'm going to speculate (Occam's razor) that the majority of their server portfolio are 32GB servers in those 400 datacenters, and so this is what they need, and so they documented it as a requirement. For data center migrations, this is fairly typical.
> The issue became public when the client, Beijing Qingbo Data Control Technology, on Sunday posted a statement on Weibo, a Twitter-like social platform in China, saying that it had suffered a data loss on Tencent Cloud on July 20 after using the platform for eight months, and that all of the company’s data – including backup files – were lost and could not be recovered.
The fact that both the production and backup files were affected is really concerning for others using their services.
Wow, did you downvote me for adding to the conversation? Here are sources that disagree with you and align with my previous comment. You should provide sources next time.
> A judge does not have to approve the NSL or an accompanying gag order.
> The letters come with a life-long gag order, so businesses that receive such letters are prohibited from revealing to anyone, including customers who may be under investigation, that the government has requested records of transactions.
> NSLs are almost exclusively served in secret alongside an indefinite gag order, which prevents anyone from disclosing the contents of the letter to anyone.
> Since the first national security letter (NSL) statute was passed in 1986 and then dramatically expanded under the USA PATRIOT Act, the FBI has issued hundreds of thousands of such letters seeking the private telecommunications and financial records of Americans without any prior approval from courts. In addition to this immense investigatory power, NSL statutes also permit the FBI to unilaterally gag recipients and prevent them from criticizing such actions publicly. This combination of powers — to investigate and to silence — has coalesced to permit the FBI to wield enormous power and to operate without meaningful checks, far from the watchful eyes of the judicial branch. Not surprisingly, this lack of checks has contributed to a dramatic expansion in the use of these tools across the country. Indeed, for the period between 2003 and 2006 alone, almost 200,000 requests for private customer information were sought pursuant to various NSL statutes.
I search for a specific item in my history all the time, but it can sometimes be difficult to find what I'm looking for via Chrome's itemized list search, especially when the <title> tags are all the same. I think this would help me find it, in relation to my other activity and time.
> Glanzman’s experiments — ... — involved giving mild electrical shocks to the marine snail Aplysia californica. Shocked snails learn to withdraw their delicate siphons and gills for nearly a minute as a defense when they subsequently receive a weak touch; snails that have not been shocked withdraw only briefly.
> Ryan knows Glanzman and trusts his work. He said he believes the data in the new paper. But he doesn’t think the behavior of the snails, or the cells, proves that RNA is transferring memories. He said he doesn’t understand how RNA, which works on a time scale of minutes to hours, could be causing memory recall that is almost instantaneous, or how RNA could connect numerous parts of the brain, like the auditory and visual systems, that are involved in more complex memories.
It sounds less like the standard definition of "memory", and more like RNA stores/caches the response mechanism of a pain receptor. Thoughts on that interpretation (I'm a layman on these subjects)?
> It turns out, a couple giant companies — IBM and Halliburton — have been working for years to patent what patent trolls do.
[1] https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2012/08/01/157743897/can-...