Could be an albatross for Microsoft. Amazon not having control over wired munitions is goodwill outside the US, and especially outside NATO.
Microsoft Wins Pentagon’s $10B Contract
201–210 of 466 posts
Re: Microsoft Wins Pentagon’s $10B Contract
#202Earlier quoted context omitted.
>> And he considers Post political stance against him a directive from Bezos himself. Which, to be fair, it very likely is. I just can't see Jeff _not_ exercising any editorial control. Post also doesn't shit on Amazon ever since he bought it, even when it's deserved.
I really doubt that, because any journalist with integrity would quit and make a stink about it, which would tank the Post's reputation. I would cancel my subscription the same day, and I imagine so would a lot of other people. Also, I've seen plenty of negative stories about Amazon in the past months. I remember them because they always have a disclaimer about Bezos owning the post in the article. Here's one from ju…
"journalist with integrity"
Is there such a thing? Media landscape in the US is a sad view these days.
Re: Microsoft Wins Pentagon’s $10B Contract
#203Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Texas has a separate electrical grid from the rest of the US. This is interesting. The Wikipedia article has this gem: "The Texas Interconnection is maintained as a separate grid for political, rather than technical reasons" https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2003/08/why-texas-has-it...
> Core to many Texans identity is a belief that someday Texas is going to secede from the Union again and become its own independent country. This is an overstatement.
It’s not that we will, it’s that we have the option.
Re: Microsoft Wins Pentagon’s $10B Contract
#204Earlier quoted context omitted.
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>> And he considers Post political stance against him a directive from Bezos himself. Which, to be fair, it very likely is. I just can't see Jeff _not_ exercising any editorial control. Post also doesn't shit on Amazon ever since he bought it, even when it's deserved.
The Post runs the same stories seen in essentially all papers in the world. A lot of them implicate the president negatively. But how does precluding the pentagon from it's first choice on these grounds good for the country?
In a free and uncorrupt country, you don't allow leaders to intervene in national security issues because they are embarrassed by a paper's coverage. Thus few people are directly saying that amazon should loose the bid because their CEO has a paper the president doesn't like.
More common and to be consistent with the notion of a corruption free democracy, the defense for this is the claim that, despite significant pressure, this surprising turn of events would have happened anyway. This is the story being promoted more but it does require a improbably interpretation of events that only supporters could really ever internalize. Especially since Trump's own secretary of defense flatly said the goal was to screw Amazon over the Post.
Re: Microsoft Wins Pentagon’s $10B Contract
#205Earlier quoted context omitted.
The monetary benefit is one big thing but in the B2B scheme of things , a big success story like this would be very easy to convince other government organisations and government in other countries to adopt Azure if they haven’t moved to the cloud already. It’s the new “No one ever got fired for suggesting IBM”.
Really? Why would a foreign country trust a firm deeply engrained with the US military? Then again, there are only a few military in the world that need this kind of service, and those countries are highly unlikely to go with foreign entities as provider.
Agree that not all countries would do this. But Allies? Also don’t other countries use AWS Gov ( or whatever it is called ) even though it AWS is “deeply embedded” in the US gov scheme of things?
Re: Microsoft Wins Pentagon’s $10B Contract
#206What do the military need 10 billion US dollars in cloud computing for ? Are they going to fork Bitcoin? DDOS attack? If they are for example going to archive video footage, it's probably much cheaper to print it to film.
Real-time surveillance of the world. Who said what when where to whom. Was that a threat. What were the consequences. Feeds for video, sound, https streams from billions of Internet devices. ML to extract salient features, at multiple levels of resolution. $10B is a drop in the bucket. This is heading into trillions territory. I wouldn't be surprised that in 10 years half the Pentagon budget will be spent on the clou…
distributed Vietnam lmao.
I think most of your description is coming form a high-ranking general's wet dream though. When it comes to actual engineering, it would be between the simple solution that works - or complex solution that doesn't work.
Having worked in a predictive analytics role before, I can guarantee that '1000 individuals most threatening to our strategic position' would consist of 500 innocent villagers, 30 kids playing around and 1 hospital.
Re: Microsoft Wins Pentagon’s $10B Contract
#207Earlier quoted context omitted.
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He's not anti war as much as he's anti policy that pushes up against Russian spheres of influence. You see no issue with, and in fact a lot of funding and support increase to, Saudi Arabia. Where as Obama had put a pause on things during the initial outbreak. Didn't condemn things outright in public, but the Obama administration was definitely taking a step back during the Yemen war. The trump administration also has…
>He's not anti war as much as he's anti policy that pushes up against Russian spheres of influence.
At the moment Russia is extending its sphere of influence by opportunistically exploiting American mistakes in the middle East. Those mistakes were started by Trump predecessors including Bush, Clinton & Clinton, Obama, etc.
Re: Microsoft Wins Pentagon’s $10B Contract
#208Does anyone else think it's disappointing that an organisation as evil as the Pentagon used the acronym JEDI? Perhaps this proposal should have been called Synchronised Information Technology Holdings.
The Pentagon is not evil, from my point of view the JEDI are evil.
Re: Microsoft Wins Pentagon’s $10B Contract
#209Earlier quoted context omitted.
As a native Texan, it's weird for a few reasons: a) Pragmatically, separating from the rest of the United States would be devastating to our economy. Much like the United Kingdom from the EU, but on a much larger scale, because the vast majority of our trade, people, and connectedness come from being part of the U.S. Texans like to trot out the factoid that relatively little land in Texas is owned by the federal gove…
As a non-Texan, I would like to ask more about point B. I myself am increasingly of the opinion that while government, national and State (I’m a Californian) has a role, it has unfortunately carved out too big of a chunk and allocated itself too many roles, often on the most specious of arguments. The idea of a legislature that meets infrequently, and where politician is a hat, not a job title, actually looks pretty…
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Re: Microsoft Wins Pentagon’s $10B Contract
#210Earlier quoted context omitted.
As a native Texan, it's weird for a few reasons: a) Pragmatically, separating from the rest of the United States would be devastating to our economy. Much like the United Kingdom from the EU, but on a much larger scale, because the vast majority of our trade, people, and connectedness come from being part of the U.S. Texans like to trot out the factoid that relatively little land in Texas is owned by the federal gove…
As a non-Texan, I would like to ask more about point B. I myself am increasingly of the opinion that while government, national and State (I’m a Californian) has a role, it has unfortunately carved out too big of a chunk and allocated itself too many roles, often on the most specious of arguments. The idea of a legislature that meets infrequently, and where politician is a hat, not a job title, actually looks pretty…
I'd say 'being' a politician is a stupid thing as-is, but regarding the 'hat' or 'part-time' thing; that seems to be counterproductive as it probably means people will not be able to specialise as much and people will not be able to keep their multiple 'hats' from interfering with each other.
The only reason we have those nice modern things like phones and the internet is specialisation; it makes it possible for people to pursue things other than basic needs to survive. Sadly, that also means that people can pursue things that many people might find useless or repulsive, like being a professional liar as some 'full-time politicians' seem to be called by the various journalistic outlets. (let alone the opinionated internet - look, it's us!)
If we were to leave out the 'politician' and just say "person assigned by people who are busy doing other things, to govern those people that choose them". The politician part that would normally be in there would ideally only be scoped to the candidate phase of things and the interaction between different governing persons/positions to get stuff done. If you put it that way, it suddenly makes much more sense to have someone do a governing job full time as you'd want such a person to actually get stuff done.