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.
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.
Your ignoring the obvious case where someone got a patent for an obvious solution. The US patent office has long ignored that test and billions have been wasted as a direct result of this. If you patent pushing email to a portable device and I patent pulling email from a portable device there are not a lot of options left to auto populate email on a cellphone.
The basic issue is computing is a rapidly evolving filed and while the obvious mouse traps have been patented the obvious ways of using a database or the internet have not.
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.
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.
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%."
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The general assumption with SSD is you have both a SSD and a traditional HDD. As long as you only have program and temp files on a SSD it's loss can have fairly minimal impact. Especially, if you schedule a full disk backup of your SSD weekly. Worst, case you lose a few OS/browser patches ship back the SSD for a replacement drive and move on.
PS: If you want to get fancy you can set up a bootable partition on your HDD and then backup the SSD to that partition.
Just a FYI. I have personally read a lot of negative things about soy heavy diets. Not that I know what I am talking about, but if you do eat a lot of soy it's worth looking into.
PS: The human body can cope with horrible diets for reasonably long periods of time. Also, trying to balance everything correctly every day is vary hard and probably less useful than focusing on what you eat over a week/month.
Take an existing project find all the places that link to each section of code and you have some idea how reusable things are. Tell people your doing this ahead of time and you promote spaghetti code. Ask people how difficult an objective is and you get a wide range of biases based on how you use the information etc.
The secret is not how to get the most reliable data, it's how to get the best outcomes including they way people try to game the system.
What your missing is the concept that RGB colors are based not around the physical property's of light but the eyes ability to detect light using Rods and cones. In the real world there is a difference between 390 nm light and 390.00001nm light all the way up to749.9999 nm. However all of that is abstracted away and the eye only really cares about the relative intensity of RGB when there is enough light or just B and W in really low light conditions.
So, to fool a machine you might need to exactly match all the individual wavelengths relative intensity but with a human you get to ignore most of that and just look at 3 numbers per pixel.
PS: A small number of people can detect 4 colors but the net effect of this is almost meaningless for various reasons.
Once you get into the world networks with multiple OC192 connections all it takes is a little math to show Verizon still makes money from most heavy users. The marginal cost of your 5 to 25MB/s slice of bandwidth you use is just not that expensive especially if they are also selling you cable and or phone service.
PS: For a huge ISP peaking 10mb for 2.4 hours at the worse time of the day is much more costly than a constant 1mb connection 24/7. But, you are not going to see this inter the debate.
Which would be rewarded in your situation, building 30 really simple pages by hand or spending 1/2 that much time to code something which generated those pages automatically?
Once again, the best programers write as little code as possible which allows them to focus on quality over quantity. It's easy to turn 10 lines of code into 20 classes and gain nothing, it's much harder to see those 10 lines of code once someone has written the 20 classes.
International trade tends to drift to the most stable currency's which is why things are moving the the EURO. Then again the EU is the worlds largest economy so there could be some truth in your assumptions.
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.