It's really very vexing: you can find biological examples of sensitivity to basically anything from far-IR, for thermal imaging in snakes, all the way through what we can see, and up into UV-sensitive bees and such. Plus things like polarization which (aside from a few clever tricks that will show limited polarization effects) we don't even address. But no luck for us, just crazy-expensive FLIRcams and UV film.
Being able to detect electrical fields, shark style, would be pretty cool as well(and just think of the diagnostic utiity in circuit debugging!).
I'm not a tropical medicine expert or anything (and even if I claimed to be, would you trust a guy who impersonates an opinionated fungus on the internet recreationally?); but according to Our Wiki Overlords, corroborated by assorted googling, the current treatements of choice appear to be a number of antiprotozoal drugs found to work against this organism; but nothing particularly specific to it, and definitely nothing that targets the specific genetic and chemical pathways the ameoba exploits to achieve the 'nibbling' attack. Again, nonexpert here; but the use of a grab-bag of nonspecifics suggest that it hasn't (yet) done anything brutally clever in terms of drug resistance; but that existing understanding of the organism probably hadn't provided any really elegant attacks against this organism in particular, leaving 'probably best to use stuff that works on protozoa, since it is one.' as the standard.
The researchers did experimentally disrupt this process(once with a drug, in a second case with a genetically crippled ameoba strain) as part of demonstrating that the 'nibbling' was the mechanism behind human cell death(which can apparently cause some ghastly intestinal trouble), so presumably there is some hope that we'll be able to weaponize the mode of attack they used, and get an elegant, selective, unlikely-to-interfere-with-other-eukaryotes-like-the-patient, drug that will prevent the horrible-death-by-intestinal-nibbling; but nothing in pill form just yet, certainly not that you could just go shoving into patients without killing some little fuzzy animals first.
(Also, if Malaria is anything to go by, the statistical answer to 'how do you treat it?' is 'On average, you don't. Protozoa are tough motherfuckers and it mostly just kills poor people in ghastly countries anyway. Let's go find a cure for hair loss and midlife limp-dick syndrome...')
I mean seriously. There is no down side to going from not hearing to hearing except for having to listen to contemporary "music".
The technology is neither that good, nor that cheap, so 'no downsides' is a bit much; but I do find the notion that lacking access to useful world-state information would ever be a good thing rather baffling. If anything, I am always a bit disappointed that the 'visible spectrum' is as small as it is, that humans appear to lack the magnetic sensors some other species have, and so forth.
As for the cultural aspects, it seems like it's the usual battle: somewhere between most and all cultures have an interest in continuity(or at least some new people because being the last few survivors dying off alone would pretty much suck); but continuity demands that a steady supply of children be given to the culture(and while people can achieve some degree of fluency in multiple ones, you can't be 'native' in more than a small number, given that being 'native' is pretty much a full-time job) and, by so doing, denied some or all of whatever other cultures are on hand.
Even if you wish to assert that having an additional sense is 'different' rather than 'better, you still have the fact that 'culture' is something where network effects count. There are certainly niche cultures with interesting and unique features; but unless something about a specific culture turns standard humans into fantastic superhumans at abnormal rates, the bigger ones are going to tend to have better opportunities on tap.
I'm certainly sympathetic to the people who get the sense that they are probably going to enjoy the notable nonpleasures of being the dwindling survivors of a dying breed; that has to suck; but I'm much less sympathetic to the notion that this entitles them to a replacement-or-better supply of new members.
I'm not exactly certain what this hypothetical 'fair shake' is; but the obvious elephant in the room, when considering 'free to play' games, is that they aren't free to make, or free to run(and are almost always online, so they are 'not free to run' as in 'will die the moment the hosting bill goes unpaid') so you do always have to keep an eye on your wallet.
Nothing precludes 'traditional' games from also using assorted 'freemium' tricks as well as costing money (Hi there, Dead Space 3! I was totally jazzed about buying crafting components from EA in a game that costs $60!); but when you can see the transaction ahead of time (I give you $x, you give me the game or massively-multiplayer-something-something costs $y/month), there is economic room for products where you can relax and stop watching your wallet. There can, and will, be bad actors, bad deals, overhyped games sold pre-release, etc. but you are freed from the fundamental, nagging, "He obviously needs to make money, and I haven't given him any yet, so when and how does the other shoe drop?" question that dogs 'free-to-play' titles.
As for the 'protect irrational people who obviously can't like these games on their own merits' dig, same basic elephant: we know that the game costs money to make and run, and that the maker ideally wants to actually profit. We also know that monetization rates are comparatively low (something that the inevitable 'Well, $GAME$ gets called 'pay to win'; but I'm just good enough to get by on pure skill. In fact, I actually make money!' brigade exists to remind us of), so we have pretty good reason to suspect the existence of 'Whales'(just like in the casino business) who keep the average income/player high enough for the game to stay in the black.
None of this is proof that any specific operator is running a notably shady deal; but there is a reason why this business model gets special scrutiny: If a 'free to play' game is actually free-to-play, on average, it's either burning VC cash or bleeding out. So, any given title is either dying or on average not free. Similarly, if a game has a lousy monetization rate, with many players actually playing for free, it must clearly be the case that the game is either dying or really bleeding some customers. At that point, you either stick your fingers in your ears and shout "FREE WILL! I can't hear you! RATIONAL ACTORS!" or you must at least consider whether the best customers happen to be children making in-app purchases with somebody else's payment information(not that that, um, actually happened, a lot, or anything. Definitely not enough that it went to court.) or Facebook's equivalent of pathalogical gamblers.
Anything that helps isolate Yahoo from currently uninfected sectors is good by me. If I never see that virulent purple abomination again it'll be too soon.
Latency counts: People were happily fragging cyberdemons back in the Doom days; and you could practically cut your wrists on pixels that size; but a nontrivial portion of the population can't, even with nontrivial effort of will, suppress the nausea and sometimes vomiting associated with mismatches between motion perceived by the inner ear and motion inferred visually.
More resolution is better, and with smartphone screens locked in an arms race it can't be all that expensive to provide; but the product that doesn't make you want to vomit will have a certain edge.
There's also the question of what, exactly, the 'mobile' use case for something even harder on your situational awareness than a bag over your head...
Having lived through the era of 21+ inch CRTs, I certainly want any VR headset to be relatively lightweight(especially the part I attach to my face) and nobody likes dealing with devices that require three dongles, an external PSU, a processor box, and a couple of line lumps to operate, so my (perhaps naive) assumption would be that 'non-mobile' would still mean 'fairly lightweight thing you put on your head, probably with a smallish support box that takes the video inputs, handles the motion-tracking camera, if any, and either houses or is connected to the power supply'.
So, um, even the non-mobile units are going to be easy enough to toss into a (suitably protective) laptop bag, which makes them pretty 'mobile' for something that's dangerously useless when actually walking around.
I'm also a trifle baffled about the 'Android' element. What is based on Android? Did they drag a gratuitous smartphone/tablet interface into the firmware that handles location tracking and such because, um, some reason? Is this VR system tied directly to the output of yet another probably-doomed niche Android Gaming Product? I hope it has video-in for when that flops.
It often is a disaster waiting to happen, though depending on how common the part/parts were in life, used spares can be pretty easy to come by for a while.
Sometimes they do have another plan, it just hurts/costs much more than doing whatever it is you are doing now while hoping for the best. Sometimes, well, life just sucks like that. In some intermediate cases, your obscure legacy need is common enough that vendors exist who specialize in meeting it. (You can, for instance, get brand-shiny-new systems at the mid/late P4 performance level specifically designed and marketed to run assorted legacy OSes and hideous ISA cards.)
It doesn't have the passive convenience of heatpipes, so you don't see it in computers (much, there is or was some outfit selling them at one point); but systems that use phase-change refrigerants can have hoses of basically any length your tube-fu lets you get away with. Extremely common in buildings with AC and external heat exchangers and the like. Heatpipes are great because they get you better results than solid copper, with less copper than solid copper; but are only the most basic application of phase change. Once you add pumps and compressors back into the system, though, the laptop is so difficult to get screwed shut again...
This should be a golden age for the antivirus companies.
I still have a machine from 2002 that I sometimes use that has XP Pro on it. 900MHz and 512MB of RAM. Enough said.
I suspect that it won't actually help them much (except in that the XP-bots will presumably make spewing malware even cheaper, as if that is what we needed...)
Anybody still running XP now is either some sort of cheapskate/eccentric (unlikely to be a good customer), or running a special-purpose application (more likely to airgap/firewall/deepfreeze than to introduce a new variable on a probably antiquated machine), or running some sort of ghastly legacy mess where keeping everything exactly as it was is worth a fortune and any change is so expensive that, were they to touch it at all they could afford to move to any platform.
And they all sold out instantly and the Litecoin difficulty went up...
Are there any dual-chip cards that cryptominers actually buy? (honest question, I don't know). Back in my youthful gaming-nut days, dual GPU cards, because of some mixture of worse economies of scale and 'people who absolutely must have the bleeding edge will pay, so why not?', always commanded rather more than twice the price of two equivalent single-GPU cards (and sometimes clocked worse, as well, just to keep the heat down).
Now that everything is PCIe, and the low bandwidth requirements of mining allow you to stuff even x1 slots with GPU cards, I'd have to imagine that your miner would be willing to pay only a very small premium to conserve slots.
The main point of enthusiasm is that liquid cooling is easier to do than phase change cooling with hobbyist fabrication (heatpipes do pretty much dominate all but the smallest heatsinks, and have substantially increased the size of air-coolers since the days of solid-copper by making more distant fins actually do something vaguely useful); but building custom heatpipes at home, while doable, isn't wildly pleasant.
Liquid is substantially less elegant; but it's just simple plumbing to set up and it still allows you to use an impractically gigantic radiator, of a size you couldn't bolt onto the CPU.
Now, as for the idiots who introduce the cost and complexity of a liquid loop, all so they can use a radiator no larger than a simple heatpipe-based aircooler... Those guys are just idiots.
A generous dash of alcohol(generally the denatured stuff, no reason to not drink the other kind) can be useful to keep the lifeforms at bay. Damn microorganisms appear to be capable of living in/on anything they want.
Thermal conductivity of water: approx 0.58
Thermal conductivity of copper: approx 401
The only reason to have water cooling in anything is to brag to your friends that you have water cooling. In reality, metal cooling works better.
The water (.58) replaces the air (.024) in the cooling setup, not the metal. Watercooling systems tend to have markedly smaller heatsinks, since they just don't need the same surface area(at the low end, just a copper plate with a flow chamber on top of it, some more complex designs use something more or less similar to a small air-cooled heatsink; but sealed for water to flow through.
Now, I think that there have been a few nutty-and-exotic liquid-metal cooling systems; but those are hampered by the fact that they just aren't better-enough than water for the money (the delta T of the CPU's package and the waterblock is still the same), pumping the (substantially denser) liquid metal is more energy intensive, and most candidates are either unpleasant or expensive, or both.
If you want something that won't go all hazmat on you if the system leaks; but won't harden in the cooler parts of the loop, 'Galinstan' is probably the best bet; but you sure don't make things cheap by making them ~ 20% indium.
If you are...aggressively risk tolerant... a nice Cesium/Potassium/Sodium alloy will stay liquid to almost -80 (celsius); but, um, not a good plan, OK. Straight Mercury works fine down to almost -60; but that stuff is dense and not particularly pleasant(plus, it amalgamates with a number of metals quite readily. You did check your waterblock, radiator, pump, and all other contact surfaces for compatibility, right?). If you aren't the kind of coward whose dishonor makes him cry about things like "my cooling system catching fire on exposure to air or water vapor", NaK is a lovely coolant.
Basically, for something that is such a pain in the ass, you'd better be getting results substantially superior to normal air or water cooling, which you'll only get with active heat pumps that can actually pull the CPU below room temperature. At that point, the rather low freezing points of any available metal alloy become an insurmountable problem. Other materials don't have quite the same thermal conductivity; but they'll be happy enough keeping things well below the -100.
All the residents capable of retaining counsel and fighting a decade-long war of attrition with a superior force can simply achieve redress for this tort through the courts! (until we tort-reform that away). Any of the sickies who 'die' before 'the lawsuit even finishes 250,000 pages of discovery' clearly just didn't care enough about righting the wrongs done to them, so they probably deserve them.
He might mean assorted welfare-state constructs, or even private sector arrangements like pensions(Hahaha! remember those?) or 'a sufficient combination of financial and services-market development that you can actually save money in a form other than chests of gold, and that you can actually use money to buy care.'
In addition to the fact that the world isn't divided between Galt's Gulch and Soviet Russia, it's important to remember that some sort of relatively high functioning market availability of care-type services is neither as old nor as universal as one might expect. For a great many people throughout history, including fairly recent history, non-perishable wealth storage was an extreme anomaly, and the state of the labor and services markets, such as they were, were sufficiently primitive that if you wanted to be fed, kept warm, and have your wrinkly ass wiped in old age, it was basically your kin group or (possibly) some sort of religious institution. You had little or no fungible and nonperishable wealth during your life, even if prosperous, nor necessarily a 'labor market' from which to use the money you mostly didn't have to buy service.
I don't know if he 'invented' as in 'was the guy who looked least busy when Netscape needed some means of doing basic in-browser twiddling, and they needed it by yesterday so he hacked something out' or as in 'actually committed, in cold blood, many of the design choices that made it what it is today'; but he definitely had a hand in it.
Do 32bit micros have enough punch for handling a TLS-ed SIP call or the like these days? I must admit I have only the vaguest sense of their capabilities, though they would otherwise be perfectly capable of handling audio in/out, enough screen, keypad, serial link to cell modem (at least some of which still rock a very, very, extended Hayes command set, after all this time...)
Probably so that people can use the Android compatibility to load it up with privacy compromising shit. Real answer? I have no reason to think that it is, except possibly for the outfit undertaking it, who can take advantage of the fact that getting phones that are ready to run basically any Android you want, off the shelf, in quantities starting at one, is cheap and easy, while other approaches are likely to be at very least more difficult (the state of graphics drivers, say, for non-Android graphics systems is pretty dire in ARM SoC land, and you can't even fall back to VGA mode like a PC.) And if you feel like dragging something smaller than an entire Linux distribution along, (bionic or libc) prepare to enjoy the...robust ecosystem... of board support for more obscure OSes that aren't deeply proprietary.
So, fully agreed that starting with a screaming heap of complexity whose development cycle has been driven largely by competitive pressures and which runs on hardware platforms generally larded with proprietary blobs and then trying to bolt on some security and privacy is the painfully wrong way to do it. However, if you want a half-assed cash-in at relatively low risk, released quickly enough to beat any competitors to the punch, and hit the market while Snowden is still hot news, 'cook an Android ROM with some of the obviously fucked stuff removed, ship.' is an eminently logical plan, if perhaps a rather cynical one.
$350 million (not counting the cost of the S3s or whatever is included in the '2 years of service') to harden one of the mobile tracking and advertising OSes into something actually secure probably isn't wildly out of the ballpark (and probably far less than a proper actually-verified-with-proofs-and-stuff Secure System OS of that complexity).
On the other hand, I would be shocked, shocked to hear that their security claims are...inflated... and there's a good deal of profit margin in there.
I'm pretty sure that it's actually that way in the US as well(except that the various 'civil union' bills advanced at the state level almost always propose that the state shall issue 'marriages' to straights and 'civil unions' to gays, rather than just having a 'state does civil unions, religions can do whatever amuses them in their capacity as private assemblies of interested members" policy, so some people seem specifically hung up on the fact that 'marriage', even when handled by a justice of the peace or Elvis impersonator, be straight only). For sake of convenience, ordained clergy of more or less anything (there is some amount of procedure, I can't just declare my own church in my basement and do a marriage the same day, but first amendment concerns leave the state with limited recourse or interest in fighting virtually anything's allegation that it is a religion), along with some state agents and a smattering of others for which I'm sure there are colorful backstories can all perform marriages.
I'm not sure exactly how much of the animosity is based on the (historically nonsensical) theory that 'marriage' has always been a specific thing, and how much is based on the (legally implausible; but emotionally salient) belief that if the list of people the state will marry is expanded, the state will then send its jackbooted thugs into churches and force them to officiate all types of marriages that the state would. Given that churches quite freely deny marriages to non members, members in bad standing, or basically anyone else they fancy, and there has never been a peep about that, I'm not quite sure why this story has any traction; but it apparently does.
Well, 'invented javascript' may not be something to talk about too loudly; but I'm perfectly willing to suspect that he was a good CTO, and (in absence of personal knowledge one way or the other) give him, and Mozilla, the benefit of the doubt and asume that he was still making a strong and ongoing technical contribution, rather than being somebody who was pretty hot stuff in the Netscape days and they haven't been able to get rid of for legacy reasons.
What I'd be less certain about is the notion that 'CTO', even 'really good CTO' is necessarily a particularly good indicator of 'good CEO'. My suspicion, in this particular case, is heightened by the board-level resignations that allegedly had nothing to do with Prop8; but with his selection as CEO, and the fact that his Prop8 donation was a matter of public knowledge during at least a couple of years of his tenure as CTO and nobody did anything with that.
I don't have any useful inside information or anything; but based on the public information, this situation sounds to me like a techie(either one who is still sharp, one who is absolutely untouchable on historical grounds, or both) attempted to take the helm, either based on his own (mis)understanding of how 'inherited' the CEO position is or at the urging of an overconfident faction within the company, and then learned the hard way that 'CEO' has different job requirements, that there was a faction on the board opposed to him, and that anything goes in high-profile spats while things might be handled with a semblance of dignity and process further down.
There really isn't much to go on, at this point. We do know that the Prop8 issue made him a toxic pick from the perspective of some of the groups that Mozilla's message might ordinarily work well with(except that they are cryptographically incapable of supporting iPads; but so it goes); but organizations have soft-pedaled all sorts of stuff, including much more serious matters, without serious incident before, and there appear to be confounding factors here (eg. half the board resigning over the choice, allegedly because they didn't think he was a good choice for 'mobile' or something; but something irrelevant to Prop8. If anything, that faction probably is wildly annoyed that their disagreement with 'sure, the CTO seems like a good CEO to me' got sidetracked into a culture war, especially if they want their mobile strategy in emerging markets to not pick up a potential liability.)
There similarly seems to be no available report that he was overtly pushed, though reports vary on whether he 'left' or whether he was 'given the opportunity to leave', so we don't really know if he was told privately that he could go the easy way or the hard way, or whether he was personally butthurt about the whole affair. We just don't know.
This is the root of the problem. The fact that marriages are a legal concern at all.
The fact that the state issues something called 'marriage', which many churches consider to be their trademark is something of a problem; but the big reason that the state can't really get out of the business(at least not until they come up with a relatively-easy-to-use contractual instrument with similar characteristics) is that all sorts of legally relevant and enforced stuff is modified by 'marriage'. Child custody, default assumptions about visitation and medical proxy in the case of somebody being unexpectedly unavailable to be asked directly, spousal benefits in loads of compensation packages, lots of bits and pieces scattered across a patchwork of statute, private contracts that make use of the concept by reference, etc, etc.
At the present time, you simply couldn't get a contract lawyer, be it an arbitrarily skillful one, to write you a 'contractual instrument tantamount to marriage' that actually has the same effects; and you definitely couldn't even get close if you had limited means, limited experience, or just plain mediocre cognitive capacity (like, say, a substantial majority of everyone who has ever been married throughout history. Even if some tweaks to contract law made it so that well-off midlifers with lawyers on retainer could do things entirely contractually, 'marriage' has often been the means by which dumb, naive, kids get their initiation into adulthood.)
Personally, I'd be happy to see a separation between the 'state instrument with approximately marital effects neutrally named' and 'Church X's Marriage! legally irrelevant and administered only at their discretion', with people free to pick up the one from the state if they want the legal effects, and any or none from the provider of their choice if they want the cultural and/or theological effects.
Just 'getting the state out of the business', though, is a nontrivial bit of legal rewriting. The fact that you can't run it through a compiler doesn't mean that the code(s) of law aren't a brutal mass of legacy code, with all the vices thereof.
Even if he's perfectly able to get along (which he may well be, this is the natural time for any juicy stories of abusive behavior and problematic statements of position to come out of the woodwork, and they haven't), 'CEO', particularly for an entity with limited direct profit (Mozilla aren't quite fully at the 'Charity' end of the spectrum, where the CEO is essentially the head fundraiser; but they aren't far off), is a job description that includes a certain amount of organizational image work. If his positions, however tactful in person, damage their PR position, that means he isn't good at the job, however unfair one might think that is.
It's not really all that unusual, lots of partially/wholly public-facing jobs are even more capricious about what qualities are included in the job description. You can be bad at plenty of jobs just by being unattractive, or having an unappealing voice, or what have you. If he were being purged from a position that had no relevance to organizational image-tweaking, I'd be concerned: witch-hunting employees based on irrelevant characteristics is a not a good path to go down; but 'CEO' is, in part, the high end of the PR food chain. If you are bad for PR, that makes you worse at that particular job.
Slashdot Mirror
It's really very vexing: you can find biological examples of sensitivity to basically anything from far-IR, for thermal imaging in snakes, all the way through what we can see, and up into UV-sensitive bees and such. Plus things like polarization which (aside from a few clever tricks that will show limited polarization effects) we don't even address. But no luck for us, just crazy-expensive FLIRcams and UV film.
Being able to detect electrical fields, shark style, would be pretty cool as well(and just think of the diagnostic utiity in circuit debugging!).
I'm not a tropical medicine expert or anything (and even if I claimed to be, would you trust a guy who impersonates an opinionated fungus on the internet recreationally?); but according to Our Wiki Overlords, corroborated by assorted googling, the current treatements of choice appear to be a number of antiprotozoal drugs found to work against this organism; but nothing particularly specific to it, and definitely nothing that targets the specific genetic and chemical pathways the ameoba exploits to achieve the 'nibbling' attack. Again, nonexpert here; but the use of a grab-bag of nonspecifics suggest that it hasn't (yet) done anything brutally clever in terms of drug resistance; but that existing understanding of the organism probably hadn't provided any really elegant attacks against this organism in particular, leaving 'probably best to use stuff that works on protozoa, since it is one.' as the standard.
The researchers did experimentally disrupt this process(once with a drug, in a second case with a genetically crippled ameoba strain) as part of demonstrating that the 'nibbling' was the mechanism behind human cell death(which can apparently cause some ghastly intestinal trouble), so presumably there is some hope that we'll be able to weaponize the mode of attack they used, and get an elegant, selective, unlikely-to-interfere-with-other-eukaryotes-like-the-patient, drug that will prevent the horrible-death-by-intestinal-nibbling; but nothing in pill form just yet, certainly not that you could just go shoving into patients without killing some little fuzzy animals first.
(Also, if Malaria is anything to go by, the statistical answer to 'how do you treat it?' is 'On average, you don't. Protozoa are tough motherfuckers and it mostly just kills poor people in ghastly countries anyway. Let's go find a cure for hair loss and midlife limp-dick syndrome...')
I mean seriously. There is no down side to going from not hearing to hearing except for having to listen to contemporary "music".
The technology is neither that good, nor that cheap, so 'no downsides' is a bit much; but I do find the notion that lacking access to useful world-state information would ever be a good thing rather baffling. If anything, I am always a bit disappointed that the 'visible spectrum' is as small as it is, that humans appear to lack the magnetic sensors some other species have, and so forth.
As for the cultural aspects, it seems like it's the usual battle: somewhere between most and all cultures have an interest in continuity(or at least some new people because being the last few survivors dying off alone would pretty much suck); but continuity demands that a steady supply of children be given to the culture(and while people can achieve some degree of fluency in multiple ones, you can't be 'native' in more than a small number, given that being 'native' is pretty much a full-time job) and, by so doing, denied some or all of whatever other cultures are on hand.
Even if you wish to assert that having an additional sense is 'different' rather than 'better, you still have the fact that 'culture' is something where network effects count. There are certainly niche cultures with interesting and unique features; but unless something about a specific culture turns standard humans into fantastic superhumans at abnormal rates, the bigger ones are going to tend to have better opportunities on tap.
I'm certainly sympathetic to the people who get the sense that they are probably going to enjoy the notable nonpleasures of being the dwindling survivors of a dying breed; that has to suck; but I'm much less sympathetic to the notion that this entitles them to a replacement-or-better supply of new members.
I'm not exactly certain what this hypothetical 'fair shake' is; but the obvious elephant in the room, when considering 'free to play' games, is that they aren't free to make, or free to run(and are almost always online, so they are 'not free to run' as in 'will die the moment the hosting bill goes unpaid') so you do always have to keep an eye on your wallet.
Nothing precludes 'traditional' games from also using assorted 'freemium' tricks as well as costing money (Hi there, Dead Space 3! I was totally jazzed about buying crafting components from EA in a game that costs $60!); but when you can see the transaction ahead of time (I give you $x, you give me the game or massively-multiplayer-something-something costs $y/month), there is economic room for products where you can relax and stop watching your wallet. There can, and will, be bad actors, bad deals, overhyped games sold pre-release, etc. but you are freed from the fundamental, nagging, "He obviously needs to make money, and I haven't given him any yet, so when and how does the other shoe drop?" question that dogs 'free-to-play' titles.
As for the 'protect irrational people who obviously can't like these games on their own merits' dig, same basic elephant: we know that the game costs money to make and run, and that the maker ideally wants to actually profit. We also know that monetization rates are comparatively low (something that the inevitable 'Well, $GAME$ gets called 'pay to win'; but I'm just good enough to get by on pure skill. In fact, I actually make money!' brigade exists to remind us of), so we have pretty good reason to suspect the existence of 'Whales'(just like in the casino business) who keep the average income/player high enough for the game to stay in the black.
None of this is proof that any specific operator is running a notably shady deal; but there is a reason why this business model gets special scrutiny: If a 'free to play' game is actually free-to-play, on average, it's either burning VC cash or bleeding out. So, any given title is either dying or on average not free. Similarly, if a game has a lousy monetization rate, with many players actually playing for free, it must clearly be the case that the game is either dying or really bleeding some customers. At that point, you either stick your fingers in your ears and shout "FREE WILL! I can't hear you! RATIONAL ACTORS!" or you must at least consider whether the best customers happen to be children making in-app purchases with somebody else's payment information(not that that, um, actually happened, a lot, or anything. Definitely not enough that it went to court.) or Facebook's equivalent of pathalogical gamblers.
Anything that helps isolate Yahoo from currently uninfected sectors is good by me. If I never see that virulent purple abomination again it'll be too soon.
Latency counts: People were happily fragging cyberdemons back in the Doom days; and you could practically cut your wrists on pixels that size; but a nontrivial portion of the population can't, even with nontrivial effort of will, suppress the nausea and sometimes vomiting associated with mismatches between motion perceived by the inner ear and motion inferred visually.
More resolution is better, and with smartphone screens locked in an arms race it can't be all that expensive to provide; but the product that doesn't make you want to vomit will have a certain edge.
There's also the question of what, exactly, the 'mobile' use case for something even harder on your situational awareness than a bag over your head...
Having lived through the era of 21+ inch CRTs, I certainly want any VR headset to be relatively lightweight(especially the part I attach to my face) and nobody likes dealing with devices that require three dongles, an external PSU, a processor box, and a couple of line lumps to operate, so my (perhaps naive) assumption would be that 'non-mobile' would still mean 'fairly lightweight thing you put on your head, probably with a smallish support box that takes the video inputs, handles the motion-tracking camera, if any, and either houses or is connected to the power supply'.
So, um, even the non-mobile units are going to be easy enough to toss into a (suitably protective) laptop bag, which makes them pretty 'mobile' for something that's dangerously useless when actually walking around.
I'm also a trifle baffled about the 'Android' element. What is based on Android? Did they drag a gratuitous smartphone/tablet interface into the firmware that handles location tracking and such because, um, some reason? Is this VR system tied directly to the output of yet another probably-doomed niche Android Gaming Product? I hope it has video-in for when that flops.
It often is a disaster waiting to happen, though depending on how common the part/parts were in life, used spares can be pretty easy to come by for a while.
Sometimes they do have another plan, it just hurts/costs much more than doing whatever it is you are doing now while hoping for the best. Sometimes, well, life just sucks like that. In some intermediate cases, your obscure legacy need is common enough that vendors exist who specialize in meeting it. (You can, for instance, get brand-shiny-new systems at the mid/late P4 performance level specifically designed and marketed to run assorted legacy OSes and hideous ISA cards.)
It doesn't have the passive convenience of heatpipes, so you don't see it in computers (much, there is or was some outfit selling them at one point); but systems that use phase-change refrigerants can have hoses of basically any length your tube-fu lets you get away with. Extremely common in buildings with AC and external heat exchangers and the like. Heatpipes are great because they get you better results than solid copper, with less copper than solid copper; but are only the most basic application of phase change. Once you add pumps and compressors back into the system, though, the laptop is so difficult to get screwed shut again...
This should be a golden age for the antivirus companies.
I still have a machine from 2002 that I sometimes use that has XP Pro on it. 900MHz and 512MB of RAM. Enough said.
I suspect that it won't actually help them much (except in that the XP-bots will presumably make spewing malware even cheaper, as if that is what we needed...)
Anybody still running XP now is either some sort of cheapskate/eccentric (unlikely to be a good customer), or running a special-purpose application (more likely to airgap/firewall/deepfreeze than to introduce a new variable on a probably antiquated machine), or running some sort of ghastly legacy mess where keeping everything exactly as it was is worth a fortune and any change is so expensive that, were they to touch it at all they could afford to move to any platform.
And they all sold out instantly and the Litecoin difficulty went up ...
Are there any dual-chip cards that cryptominers actually buy? (honest question, I don't know). Back in my youthful gaming-nut days, dual GPU cards, because of some mixture of worse economies of scale and 'people who absolutely must have the bleeding edge will pay, so why not?', always commanded rather more than twice the price of two equivalent single-GPU cards (and sometimes clocked worse, as well, just to keep the heat down).
Now that everything is PCIe, and the low bandwidth requirements of mining allow you to stuff even x1 slots with GPU cards, I'd have to imagine that your miner would be willing to pay only a very small premium to conserve slots.
The main point of enthusiasm is that liquid cooling is easier to do than phase change cooling with hobbyist fabrication (heatpipes do pretty much dominate all but the smallest heatsinks, and have substantially increased the size of air-coolers since the days of solid-copper by making more distant fins actually do something vaguely useful); but building custom heatpipes at home, while doable, isn't wildly pleasant.
Liquid is substantially less elegant; but it's just simple plumbing to set up and it still allows you to use an impractically gigantic radiator, of a size you couldn't bolt onto the CPU.
Now, as for the idiots who introduce the cost and complexity of a liquid loop, all so they can use a radiator no larger than a simple heatpipe-based aircooler... Those guys are just idiots.
A generous dash of alcohol(generally the denatured stuff, no reason to not drink the other kind) can be useful to keep the lifeforms at bay. Damn microorganisms appear to be capable of living in/on anything they want.
Thermal conductivity of water: approx 0.58 Thermal conductivity of copper: approx 401 The only reason to have water cooling in anything is to brag to your friends that you have water cooling. In reality, metal cooling works better.
The water (.58) replaces the air (.024) in the cooling setup, not the metal. Watercooling systems tend to have markedly smaller heatsinks, since they just don't need the same surface area(at the low end, just a copper plate with a flow chamber on top of it, some more complex designs use something more or less similar to a small air-cooled heatsink; but sealed for water to flow through.
Now, I think that there have been a few nutty-and-exotic liquid-metal cooling systems; but those are hampered by the fact that they just aren't better-enough than water for the money (the delta T of the CPU's package and the waterblock is still the same), pumping the (substantially denser) liquid metal is more energy intensive, and most candidates are either unpleasant or expensive, or both.
If you want something that won't go all hazmat on you if the system leaks; but won't harden in the cooler parts of the loop, 'Galinstan' is probably the best bet; but you sure don't make things cheap by making them ~ 20% indium.
If you are...aggressively risk tolerant... a nice Cesium/Potassium/Sodium alloy will stay liquid to almost -80 (celsius); but, um, not a good plan, OK. Straight Mercury works fine down to almost -60; but that stuff is dense and not particularly pleasant(plus, it amalgamates with a number of metals quite readily. You did check your waterblock, radiator, pump, and all other contact surfaces for compatibility, right?). If you aren't the kind of coward whose dishonor makes him cry about things like "my cooling system catching fire on exposure to air or water vapor", NaK is a lovely coolant.
Basically, for something that is such a pain in the ass, you'd better be getting results substantially superior to normal air or water cooling, which you'll only get with active heat pumps that can actually pull the CPU below room temperature. At that point, the rather low freezing points of any available metal alloy become an insurmountable problem. Other materials don't have quite the same thermal conductivity; but they'll be happy enough keeping things well below the -100.
All the residents capable of retaining counsel and fighting a decade-long war of attrition with a superior force can simply achieve redress for this tort through the courts! (until we tort-reform that away). Any of the sickies who 'die' before 'the lawsuit even finishes 250,000 pages of discovery' clearly just didn't care enough about righting the wrongs done to them, so they probably deserve them.
He might mean assorted welfare-state constructs, or even private sector arrangements like pensions(Hahaha! remember those?) or 'a sufficient combination of financial and services-market development that you can actually save money in a form other than chests of gold, and that you can actually use money to buy care.'
In addition to the fact that the world isn't divided between Galt's Gulch and Soviet Russia, it's important to remember that some sort of relatively high functioning market availability of care-type services is neither as old nor as universal as one might expect. For a great many people throughout history, including fairly recent history, non-perishable wealth storage was an extreme anomaly, and the state of the labor and services markets, such as they were, were sufficiently primitive that if you wanted to be fed, kept warm, and have your wrinkly ass wiped in old age, it was basically your kin group or (possibly) some sort of religious institution. You had little or no fungible and nonperishable wealth during your life, even if prosperous, nor necessarily a 'labor market' from which to use the money you mostly didn't have to buy service.
I don't know if he 'invented' as in 'was the guy who looked least busy when Netscape needed some means of doing basic in-browser twiddling, and they needed it by yesterday so he hacked something out' or as in 'actually committed, in cold blood, many of the design choices that made it what it is today'; but he definitely had a hand in it.
Do 32bit micros have enough punch for handling a TLS-ed SIP call or the like these days? I must admit I have only the vaguest sense of their capabilities, though they would otherwise be perfectly capable of handling audio in/out, enough screen, keypad, serial link to cell modem (at least some of which still rock a very, very, extended Hayes command set, after all this time...)
Probably so that people can use the Android compatibility to load it up with privacy compromising shit. Real answer? I have no reason to think that it is, except possibly for the outfit undertaking it, who can take advantage of the fact that getting phones that are ready to run basically any Android you want, off the shelf, in quantities starting at one, is cheap and easy, while other approaches are likely to be at very least more difficult (the state of graphics drivers, say, for non-Android graphics systems is pretty dire in ARM SoC land, and you can't even fall back to VGA mode like a PC.) And if you feel like dragging something smaller than an entire Linux distribution along, (bionic or libc) prepare to enjoy the...robust ecosystem... of board support for more obscure OSes that aren't deeply proprietary.
So, fully agreed that starting with a screaming heap of complexity whose development cycle has been driven largely by competitive pressures and which runs on hardware platforms generally larded with proprietary blobs and then trying to bolt on some security and privacy is the painfully wrong way to do it. However, if you want a half-assed cash-in at relatively low risk, released quickly enough to beat any competitors to the punch, and hit the market while Snowden is still hot news, 'cook an Android ROM with some of the obviously fucked stuff removed, ship.' is an eminently logical plan, if perhaps a rather cynical one.
$3500 is a lot to spend on software
$350 million (not counting the cost of the S3s or whatever is included in the '2 years of service') to harden one of the mobile tracking and advertising OSes into something actually secure probably isn't wildly out of the ballpark (and probably far less than a proper actually-verified-with-proofs-and-stuff Secure System OS of that complexity).
On the other hand, I would be shocked, shocked to hear that their security claims are...inflated... and there's a good deal of profit margin in there.
I'm pretty sure that it's actually that way in the US as well(except that the various 'civil union' bills advanced at the state level almost always propose that the state shall issue 'marriages' to straights and 'civil unions' to gays, rather than just having a 'state does civil unions, religions can do whatever amuses them in their capacity as private assemblies of interested members" policy, so some people seem specifically hung up on the fact that 'marriage', even when handled by a justice of the peace or Elvis impersonator, be straight only). For sake of convenience, ordained clergy of more or less anything (there is some amount of procedure, I can't just declare my own church in my basement and do a marriage the same day, but first amendment concerns leave the state with limited recourse or interest in fighting virtually anything's allegation that it is a religion), along with some state agents and a smattering of others for which I'm sure there are colorful backstories can all perform marriages.
I'm not sure exactly how much of the animosity is based on the (historically nonsensical) theory that 'marriage' has always been a specific thing, and how much is based on the (legally implausible; but emotionally salient) belief that if the list of people the state will marry is expanded, the state will then send its jackbooted thugs into churches and force them to officiate all types of marriages that the state would. Given that churches quite freely deny marriages to non members, members in bad standing, or basically anyone else they fancy, and there has never been a peep about that, I'm not quite sure why this story has any traction; but it apparently does.
Well, 'invented javascript' may not be something to talk about too loudly; but I'm perfectly willing to suspect that he was a good CTO, and (in absence of personal knowledge one way or the other) give him, and Mozilla, the benefit of the doubt and asume that he was still making a strong and ongoing technical contribution, rather than being somebody who was pretty hot stuff in the Netscape days and they haven't been able to get rid of for legacy reasons.
What I'd be less certain about is the notion that 'CTO', even 'really good CTO' is necessarily a particularly good indicator of 'good CEO'. My suspicion, in this particular case, is heightened by the board-level resignations that allegedly had nothing to do with Prop8; but with his selection as CEO, and the fact that his Prop8 donation was a matter of public knowledge during at least a couple of years of his tenure as CTO and nobody did anything with that.
I don't have any useful inside information or anything; but based on the public information, this situation sounds to me like a techie(either one who is still sharp, one who is absolutely untouchable on historical grounds, or both) attempted to take the helm, either based on his own (mis)understanding of how 'inherited' the CEO position is or at the urging of an overconfident faction within the company, and then learned the hard way that 'CEO' has different job requirements, that there was a faction on the board opposed to him, and that anything goes in high-profile spats while things might be handled with a semblance of dignity and process further down.
There really isn't much to go on, at this point. We do know that the Prop8 issue made him a toxic pick from the perspective of some of the groups that Mozilla's message might ordinarily work well with(except that they are cryptographically incapable of supporting iPads; but so it goes); but organizations have soft-pedaled all sorts of stuff, including much more serious matters, without serious incident before, and there appear to be confounding factors here (eg. half the board resigning over the choice, allegedly because they didn't think he was a good choice for 'mobile' or something; but something irrelevant to Prop8. If anything, that faction probably is wildly annoyed that their disagreement with 'sure, the CTO seems like a good CEO to me' got sidetracked into a culture war, especially if they want their mobile strategy in emerging markets to not pick up a potential liability.)
There similarly seems to be no available report that he was overtly pushed, though reports vary on whether he 'left' or whether he was 'given the opportunity to leave', so we don't really know if he was told privately that he could go the easy way or the hard way, or whether he was personally butthurt about the whole affair. We just don't know.
This is the root of the problem. The fact that marriages are a legal concern at all.
The fact that the state issues something called 'marriage', which many churches consider to be their trademark is something of a problem; but the big reason that the state can't really get out of the business(at least not until they come up with a relatively-easy-to-use contractual instrument with similar characteristics) is that all sorts of legally relevant and enforced stuff is modified by 'marriage'. Child custody, default assumptions about visitation and medical proxy in the case of somebody being unexpectedly unavailable to be asked directly, spousal benefits in loads of compensation packages, lots of bits and pieces scattered across a patchwork of statute, private contracts that make use of the concept by reference, etc, etc.
At the present time, you simply couldn't get a contract lawyer, be it an arbitrarily skillful one, to write you a 'contractual instrument tantamount to marriage' that actually has the same effects; and you definitely couldn't even get close if you had limited means, limited experience, or just plain mediocre cognitive capacity (like, say, a substantial majority of everyone who has ever been married throughout history. Even if some tweaks to contract law made it so that well-off midlifers with lawyers on retainer could do things entirely contractually, 'marriage' has often been the means by which dumb, naive, kids get their initiation into adulthood.)
Personally, I'd be happy to see a separation between the 'state instrument with approximately marital effects neutrally named' and 'Church X's Marriage! legally irrelevant and administered only at their discretion', with people free to pick up the one from the state if they want the legal effects, and any or none from the provider of their choice if they want the cultural and/or theological effects.
Just 'getting the state out of the business', though, is a nontrivial bit of legal rewriting. The fact that you can't run it through a compiler doesn't mean that the code(s) of law aren't a brutal mass of legacy code, with all the vices thereof.
Even if he's perfectly able to get along (which he may well be, this is the natural time for any juicy stories of abusive behavior and problematic statements of position to come out of the woodwork, and they haven't), 'CEO', particularly for an entity with limited direct profit (Mozilla aren't quite fully at the 'Charity' end of the spectrum, where the CEO is essentially the head fundraiser; but they aren't far off), is a job description that includes a certain amount of organizational image work. If his positions, however tactful in person, damage their PR position, that means he isn't good at the job, however unfair one might think that is.
It's not really all that unusual, lots of partially/wholly public-facing jobs are even more capricious about what qualities are included in the job description. You can be bad at plenty of jobs just by being unattractive, or having an unappealing voice, or what have you. If he were being purged from a position that had no relevance to organizational image-tweaking, I'd be concerned: witch-hunting employees based on irrelevant characteristics is a not a good path to go down; but 'CEO' is, in part, the high end of the PR food chain. If you are bad for PR, that makes you worse at that particular job.