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Similar systems are actually being build, but with a bigger scale (like big office buildings). There is no freezing involved, just heating the office space with warm water in the winter (cooling the water to ~10°C) and cooling it in the summer (heating the water to about 40°C).
They recently shut down all the servers of a Chinese reseller with 45 servers after a lot of their servers were the target of a DDOS. It's of course understandable to disable those servers in case of a big DDOS, but the problem was that they gave the reseller 24 hours (during the weekend) to backup the data.
It's pretty much impossible to do this in the weekend without even the passwords of the customers. Imagine receiving this email when you wake up (probably some time after it was sent) and having to get new servers immediately somewhere, emailing/phoning customers for their passwords and then also having to transfer potential TB's per server in the small remaining time frame. After posting on WHT (meaning after a PR disaster), 100TB did extend the deadline.
http://www.webhostingtalk.com/showthread.php?t=1218922
I was considering them for a high-bandwidth project, but after reading these cases I changed my mind.
Flash is still installed on over 99% of desktop browsers. And the pdf viewer is way too slow (at least for me) for real world usage.
It could very well be that the only civilizations that still exist are the ones that are good at hiding. All the others (even if they are the big majority) might have been destroyed after giving a signal of life/existence.
The placebo is actually there in double-blinded tests to remove any bias and other factors related to the experiment. And no matter how good/legitimate the experiment, any measurement pretty much always causes changes.
The actual effect of the placebo is usually at most a small portion of all the factors that are measured by it. Of course this depends heavily on the experiment in question and some drugs (like psychological ones) have a higher placebo effect than others.
A lot of people seem to have the idea that the placebo effect is very big for medication outside of experiments - but most of the time it's very small to non-existing.
I think bundling makes it a lot smaller than 16MB. Rather something like 8MB (which is still a lot of course).
Are you sure this is the case? From the Adobe article it seems that after a certain date they will disable hardware rendering for flash games that use both domainMemory and stage3D.
In that case it appears to be that you would only need to sign the swf in case you use/need both of these features. If you do use them both without the signed license it will display a watermark on the debug player and disable hardware (switch to software) rendering on the normal player (an only after a certain date).
Protecting the interests of RIAA and MPAA is one thing. China, Russia and a lot of other countries want a complete different level of censorship and the current USA actions will look quite benign compared to what other countries want. Let me put it this way: things are bad, but they can become orders of magnitude worse.
We are talking about phishing here. Don't you think they have access to a lot of recently-phished credit cards they could use to buy the forms? They would probably choose for a free competitor most likely since that is easier to automate and you don't need the hassle to try out the credit cards. I'm pretty sure web hosting companies already get a lot of phishers paying for an account with a phished credit card, though.
By the way, the scammers on dating sites use a lot of paid accounts (and pay for them themselves most likely) considering they get a lot more money out of it and a paid account seems more legitimate. Just to say that making something paid does not necessarily remove all the abuse.
Although this might prevent (a bit) that the phishers get the actual data and hence protect the victims, I am pretty sure that it won't cause any drop in phishing attempts. However for the legitimate users it will probably have a huge negative impact.
It's comparable to trying to stop spam in forums/blogs by disabling url's in posts. Usually you'll get the same number of spam posts, but the url's will be plain text.
I don't understand why something either has to be totally perfect information or totally useless.
Yes, Alexa information is pretty bad. Yes, it is easily faked. Yes, it isn't representative. Yes, browser toolbar usage is probably declining.
However, that doesn't mean that Alexa information cannot be used as an indication of big traffic trends considering there is a difference between absolute traffic levels and relative changes in traffic levels.
To give a different example. Let's say that you have a website with decent traffic levels and you collect browser usage statistics (e.g. 50% IE, 40% FF, 10% Chrome). Of course those are not representative for global browser usage. But if Chrome usage doubles for that group, it can be used as an indication for a trend in global browser usage.
So they actually made you pay for a paid app that is installed on your iPad and that you updated through their system. Big deal!
That's hardly a bug of Apple, in my opinion. Installous should be hiding the cracked applications better, it's their bug. Maybe ask for a refund for Installous?
Maybe some people actually do want to keep most websites free and don't mind the Google ads and sometimes even find them interesting. (Yes, it may be hard to admit for some people but sometimes the ad is actually right what you want/need.)