At worst, modern medicine just slows the pace of evolution by reducing competitive pressures. However, by keeping a larger population alive, there are more chances for useful mutations to appear in the gene pool, so humanity may be able to make up for any losses due to sub-optimal recombination.
Hardware acceleration on ATI and NVidia chips isn't an issue - they're programmable enough these days to handle basically any codec. The real issue is whether it will be possible to accelerate the decoding on with a PowerVR chip like what powers smartphones.
While the two aren't 100% mutually exclusive, (a) requires there to be a fair amount of crap in the code. The prior standardization of ODF was far from the only reason people were opposed to the standardization of Microsoft's formats. Even their new XML-based format is a steaming mess, and you can only polish a turd so far...
Google gave users a CAPTCHA to let them proceed, and for somebody not searching for Michael Jackson news, the site worked normally. That's very different from a complete outage that affects even the non-sheeple users, or even the reduction in features that services like Twitter used to handle the load.
I've seen it reported many places that Google was one of the websites that was overwhelmed by traffic resulting from Jackson's death. The fact that this is not true, and that the traffic merely activated Google's self defense mechanisms, is rather enlightening - it reveals just how much more serious Google is. However, we should hope that Google's self defense mechanisms stay this benign, else we may be in trouble when McCartney finally kicks the bucket.
Most of the people who would want to patch a system without rebooting aren't upgrading to get new features - they're applying security fixes, which seldom break binary compatibility. That makes it pretty safe to replace an in-use library. Once the update has been installed, you can restart the affected services on a schedule of your choosing, rather than have several minutes of complete downtime. I would expect that the reason this isn't attempted as often under Windows is that DLLs don't follow any system-wide rigorous versioning system like what most Linux package managers impose. This, and the presence of closed-source software, makes it much harder to do this with confidence under Windows.
In normal times, a tax like this would probably be motivated by greed as you say. However, basically every state in the union is struggling to make ends meet in this economy. The NC legislature would rather enact new taxes on currently untaxed potential revenue streams than make hard and unpopular decisions to do things like close schools or parks.
While I agree that the Model S is not likely to become a fleet car for any government or publicly owned corporation, the expected maintenance requirements do make it very attractive for fleet usage. The successor to the Model S, currently codenamed "BlueStar" and targeted at $30k, could end up being a popular fleet car if it really needs as little maintenance as predicted for the Model S.
Do you honestly think that California will excessively tax and regulate a company like Tesla? Tesla is exactly the company they've been trying to create with their environmental and automotive regulations! I would expect the California government to go out of their way to ensure that Tesla can afford to do business in their state, perhaps even at the expense of other companies.
If you tried to put an electric drivetrain into a Miata, you would almost certainly end up with a car that had lower performance, lower range, higher weight and higher costs than a real Miata. At least with the more expensive Model S, Tesla can ensure that the only big shortcoming is the range.
$33k in 1996 dollars is now worth about $45k due to inflation. So, the Tesla Model S won't be significantly more expensive than the EV1 was, but it will be a full-size sedan rather than a small coupe, and it will have much higher performance over the 160mi range than the EV1 had. Clearly, the Model S will get you a lot more car for your money than the EV1, and in a more stylish package. I'd say that is probably all due to technological advances, given the relative health of the economy in 1996 as compared with today.
The patent status of NiMH batteries is largely irrelevant today, because the Li-Ion batteries used by Tesla (and every other high-tech device today) have a much higher power density and energy/weight ratios, and are clearly worth the extra expense for use in an all-electric vehicle.
The technology does not exist yet to make a $25k electric car that can succeed in the American market. Tesla is right to start with the high-price, high-profit end of the market and work their way down to the high-volume mainstream as the technology matures and the supply chain scales up. Trying to start out by making a capable electric car for the mainstream American market is a much riskier move, and requires much more up-front money - hence the much larger handouts that have gone to the more established automakers. Tesla, on the other hand, has already established their electric vehicle business as profitable, and can use their profits and experience from the Roadster to help subsidize the development of the Model S.
Which is totally why they just released a new iPhone who's main claim to fame is better performance. If the looks were enough to make people ignore performance, Apple wouldn't have spent so much to upgrade the phone. They would just have put the new camera and digital compass into a phone using the same old CPU and GPU, without doubling the RAM or increasing the battery capacity. That way, they could have made more of a profit off the people upgrading for the sake of having the latest and greatest.
The modern suburban lifestyle, with long school days, long bus rides home from school, and too much homework doesn't leave enough daylight for today's fat kids to be able to bike a few miles to a friend's house, have some fun, and bike home for dinner.
Does windows tell you which process is holding open a file on your USB drive and preventing you from "safely removing" it? That always seems to be something I have to fix with third-party software. (erm, well, it appears that Microsoft bought the company that created Process Explorer, so I guess it isn't technically third-party software anymore. Still, it isn't part of the OS yet.)
I've always heard from highway engineers that the damage caused by cars is negligible compared to that from large trucks and weather. It would seem that on interstate-quality highways, the worst cars can do is further erode existing potholes.
Waging a vast settlement/extortion scheme against people you lack the evidence to successfully prosecute is the kind of thing that competent lawyers shy away from, not because it is wrong, but because it probably won't go over well with the bar association when your bluffs start getting called.
From the sounds of it, this hack isn't based off any information that can't be had with trivial USB sniffing. As others have put it, this is no more complex than changing the useragent string for your web browser.
Then it will be possible to identify the IP addresses of devout Scientologists based on the edit patterns. Not something they would want to do if they were internet-smart.
How seriously are you actually using Vista x64? I was forced to upgrade from XP because I actually needed a 64-bit OS. (I do scientific computation, but some of my apps are windows-only, like SolidWorks.) When stressed like that, Vista has proven to be slower and less stable for the things that could actually be done within the confines of 32-bit XP. I used to be able to run simulations for at least a week without crashes. On vista, I'm lucky if my computer is still on in the morning when I let things run overnight. And to top it off, it's power management on my laptop is worse than most linux distros (although this is more of a driver situation than a windows problem).
I've no doubt that Vista x64 can be better as a casual desktop system due to the increased headroom of a 64-bit platform, the re-written drivers, and better security, but I've yet to figure out how to tune it for heavy-duty work.
Cooperating with the police is never illegal (if it was, that would be entrapment). Without a court order or warrant, it is seldom illegal to not comply, either. However, many jurisdictions have Good Samaritan laws that protect those who choose to help, and in some places, provide for penalties for those who refuse to help. It wouldn't be a stretch for a company or it's employees to be held to those laws. One would also have expected the corporation to have tried to minimize exposure to lawsuits, and wrongful death would seem to be more of a risk than breach of privacy (particularly given how often corporations can get away with losing laptops full of customer data).
Preventing this kind of thing from happening again doesn't have to result in too much more power for police. It just shows that we need a few more rules restricting what powerful companies like cellular providers can do. They're already required to provide 911 service to a phone that has no active plan. We just need a law to ensure that things can go in reverse (preferably with a warrant).
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At worst, modern medicine just slows the pace of evolution by reducing competitive pressures. However, by keeping a larger population alive, there are more chances for useful mutations to appear in the gene pool, so humanity may be able to make up for any losses due to sub-optimal recombination.
We, the people, who are getting tired of Microsoft's evil and illegal behavior.
Hardware acceleration on ATI and NVidia chips isn't an issue - they're programmable enough these days to handle basically any codec. The real issue is whether it will be possible to accelerate the decoding on with a PowerVR chip like what powers smartphones.
While the two aren't 100% mutually exclusive, (a) requires there to be a fair amount of crap in the code. The prior standardization of ODF was far from the only reason people were opposed to the standardization of Microsoft's formats. Even their new XML-based format is a steaming mess, and you can only polish a turd so far...
Yes, because a Toronto newspaper website and the BBC are definitely going to get hit hard when an American pop star dies in LA...
Google gave users a CAPTCHA to let them proceed, and for somebody not searching for Michael Jackson news, the site worked normally. That's very different from a complete outage that affects even the non-sheeple users, or even the reduction in features that services like Twitter used to handle the load.
I've seen it reported many places that Google was one of the websites that was overwhelmed by traffic resulting from Jackson's death. The fact that this is not true, and that the traffic merely activated Google's self defense mechanisms, is rather enlightening - it reveals just how much more serious Google is. However, we should hope that Google's self defense mechanisms stay this benign, else we may be in trouble when McCartney finally kicks the bucket.
Most of the people who would want to patch a system without rebooting aren't upgrading to get new features - they're applying security fixes, which seldom break binary compatibility. That makes it pretty safe to replace an in-use library. Once the update has been installed, you can restart the affected services on a schedule of your choosing, rather than have several minutes of complete downtime. I would expect that the reason this isn't attempted as often under Windows is that DLLs don't follow any system-wide rigorous versioning system like what most Linux package managers impose. This, and the presence of closed-source software, makes it much harder to do this with confidence under Windows.
In normal times, a tax like this would probably be motivated by greed as you say. However, basically every state in the union is struggling to make ends meet in this economy. The NC legislature would rather enact new taxes on currently untaxed potential revenue streams than make hard and unpopular decisions to do things like close schools or parks.
While I agree that the Model S is not likely to become a fleet car for any government or publicly owned corporation, the expected maintenance requirements do make it very attractive for fleet usage. The successor to the Model S, currently codenamed "BlueStar" and targeted at $30k, could end up being a popular fleet car if it really needs as little maintenance as predicted for the Model S.
Do you honestly think that California will excessively tax and regulate a company like Tesla? Tesla is exactly the company they've been trying to create with their environmental and automotive regulations! I would expect the California government to go out of their way to ensure that Tesla can afford to do business in their state, perhaps even at the expense of other companies.
If you tried to put an electric drivetrain into a Miata, you would almost certainly end up with a car that had lower performance, lower range, higher weight and higher costs than a real Miata. At least with the more expensive Model S, Tesla can ensure that the only big shortcoming is the range.
$33k in 1996 dollars is now worth about $45k due to inflation. So, the Tesla Model S won't be significantly more expensive than the EV1 was, but it will be a full-size sedan rather than a small coupe, and it will have much higher performance over the 160mi range than the EV1 had. Clearly, the Model S will get you a lot more car for your money than the EV1, and in a more stylish package. I'd say that is probably all due to technological advances, given the relative health of the economy in 1996 as compared with today.
The patent status of NiMH batteries is largely irrelevant today, because the Li-Ion batteries used by Tesla (and every other high-tech device today) have a much higher power density and energy/weight ratios, and are clearly worth the extra expense for use in an all-electric vehicle.
The technology does not exist yet to make a $25k electric car that can succeed in the American market. Tesla is right to start with the high-price, high-profit end of the market and work their way down to the high-volume mainstream as the technology matures and the supply chain scales up. Trying to start out by making a capable electric car for the mainstream American market is a much riskier move, and requires much more up-front money - hence the much larger handouts that have gone to the more established automakers. Tesla, on the other hand, has already established their electric vehicle business as profitable, and can use their profits and experience from the Roadster to help subsidize the development of the Model S.
For bookmarks (and history, etc.), I've found Mozilla Weave to be a great replacement for the abandoned Google Browser Sync.
Which is totally why they just released a new iPhone who's main claim to fame is better performance. If the looks were enough to make people ignore performance, Apple wouldn't have spent so much to upgrade the phone. They would just have put the new camera and digital compass into a phone using the same old CPU and GPU, without doubling the RAM or increasing the battery capacity. That way, they could have made more of a profit off the people upgrading for the sake of having the latest and greatest.
The modern suburban lifestyle, with long school days, long bus rides home from school, and too much homework doesn't leave enough daylight for today's fat kids to be able to bike a few miles to a friend's house, have some fun, and bike home for dinner.
Does windows tell you which process is holding open a file on your USB drive and preventing you from "safely removing" it? That always seems to be something I have to fix with third-party software. (erm, well, it appears that Microsoft bought the company that created Process Explorer, so I guess it isn't technically third-party software anymore. Still, it isn't part of the OS yet.)
I've always heard from highway engineers that the damage caused by cars is negligible compared to that from large trucks and weather. It would seem that on interstate-quality highways, the worst cars can do is further erode existing potholes.
Waging a vast settlement/extortion scheme against people you lack the evidence to successfully prosecute is the kind of thing that competent lawyers shy away from, not because it is wrong, but because it probably won't go over well with the bar association when your bluffs start getting called.
From the sounds of it, this hack isn't based off any information that can't be had with trivial USB sniffing. As others have put it, this is no more complex than changing the useragent string for your web browser.
Then it will be possible to identify the IP addresses of devout Scientologists based on the edit patterns. Not something they would want to do if they were internet-smart.
How seriously are you actually using Vista x64? I was forced to upgrade from XP because I actually needed a 64-bit OS. (I do scientific computation, but some of my apps are windows-only, like SolidWorks.) When stressed like that, Vista has proven to be slower and less stable for the things that could actually be done within the confines of 32-bit XP. I used to be able to run simulations for at least a week without crashes. On vista, I'm lucky if my computer is still on in the morning when I let things run overnight. And to top it off, it's power management on my laptop is worse than most linux distros (although this is more of a driver situation than a windows problem).
I've no doubt that Vista x64 can be better as a casual desktop system due to the increased headroom of a 64-bit platform, the re-written drivers, and better security, but I've yet to figure out how to tune it for heavy-duty work.
Cooperating with the police is never illegal (if it was, that would be entrapment). Without a court order or warrant, it is seldom illegal to not comply, either. However, many jurisdictions have Good Samaritan laws that protect those who choose to help, and in some places, provide for penalties for those who refuse to help. It wouldn't be a stretch for a company or it's employees to be held to those laws. One would also have expected the corporation to have tried to minimize exposure to lawsuits, and wrongful death would seem to be more of a risk than breach of privacy (particularly given how often corporations can get away with losing laptops full of customer data).
Preventing this kind of thing from happening again doesn't have to result in too much more power for police. It just shows that we need a few more rules restricting what powerful companies like cellular providers can do. They're already required to provide 911 service to a phone that has no active plan. We just need a law to ensure that things can go in reverse (preferably with a warrant).