Unfortunately, the US's first major "nation building" failure might be said to have occurred after the civil war... We defeated the insurgency; but never really managed to rebuild a functional society in the southern provinces. If subsequent events are any guide, we may just suck at dealing with religious zealots with shitty human rights records.
Hopefully the open source phones catch up, because right now carrying around a general purpose computing device you have no control over thanks to the carriers strikes me as an astoundingly bad idea.
Having a phone whose OS is either compromised or deliberately acting against you is obviously unhelpful; but unless you control the baseband you are pretty much fucked regardless of the OS. Cell networks are fundamentally pretty hostile in terms of how much control is held by the network or at very low levels in the baseband, rather than where you can actually see it.
What? GPS receivers don't transmit. How do you track a GPS receiver?
You don't(well, somebody with an indistinguishable-from-magic antenna array and a truck full of DSPs might be able to pick up some effect of your antenna and RF circuitry against background; but it'd be dubiously practical at best); but a great many GPS receivers are connected to cellphones that are delightfully cooperative about providing those data for you. Now, even without GPS, cell tower triangulation would provide rough data; but GPS neatens it up nicely.
"The question is regarding the set of controls over how and when this is done."
Yes, about those... The secret ones, that you'd need access to secret information to verify compliance with, based on a classified interpretation of a massive hodgepodge of assorted laws, executive orders, and precedents, as interpreted by a secret court that doesn't release opinions and hears only testimony from the state agents requesting authorization? Those ones... Forgive me if I'm... less than 100% reassured.
Internal regulation and discipline can't even keep the officers of Hickville PD from periodic abuses that end up drawing big civil suits, and those guys are both nearly powerless and highly vulnerable to 3rd party scrutiny. Why would anyone expect 'controls' on an agency that can just stamp 'Double Top Secret' on anything embarassing and bury it forever to be more than a joke for the break room?
It makes you wonder how much it would have cost MS to purchase some sort of specialty 'embedded/fixed function' license to, say, Dragon...
A full copy, without academic pricing or anything, (and get your checkbook ready if you need the supplements for a specific jargon set like law or medicine...) is pretty pricey; but you'd think that they'd be willing to license the same core for substantially less so long as they were assured that it would be useful only for providing voice commands to games and such, rather than competing with the rest of their product line. NIH, perhaps.
" Toying with 8-10% GPU consumption is insignificant in the big picture."
I suspect that MS (and Sony) have no expectation of pulling a miracle out of their hat, or doing anything about the fact that consoles always become increasingly unimpressive vs. PCs as their release period drags on. However, given that MS is currently facing a modest; but somewhat embarrassing, graphical prettiness gap vs. Sony, they have a certain incentive to free up what they can to ensure that any comparisons are as flattering as hardware choices far too late to change will allow them to be.
A fair few spacecraft are nuclear powered... Spirit and Opportunity were solar; but Curiosity is rocking an MMRTG around the Martian surface as we speak.
I don't know why the Chinese decided to go solar, possibly weight, possibly difficulty in sourcing RTG fuel; but certainly neither the US nor the Russians have been squeamish about nuclear power in space when the mission called for it.
For perspective's sake, Spirit got stuck in a reboot loop on January 21, 2004, and was down until February 6th when they finished debugging what turned out to be a problem with the flash filesystem.
If their fault turns out to be more serious, or their system lacks the failsafe systems that would allow recovery from a modestly serious bug, then some snarking may be in order; but they are still within the 'scrambling for a fix' window.
I suspect that Google is going to be deeply unconcerned by anything that doesn't beat them to the punch on 'battery life' and 'What exactly does having this thing attached to my face do to make up for having this thing attached to my face?'
Inconveniently, it's not confusion so much as disagreement that you are encountering on that one. People just can't get enough of the intoxicating feeling of having society and the power of the state united behind their personal tastes. Worse, some of them think that this feeling is objectively good, as well as pleasurable.
We embrace that notion; but if being a non-genius leaves you unemployed or receiving advice from HR about how to apply for food stamps to supplement your paycheck, we embrace the notion of telling you to go get some skills or fuck off and die...
But it just isn't the same without the lawyers, and the obstructionism, and all those black highlighters. Kids these days, they'll never know the joy of being spitefully shipped boxes of badly photocopied documents tangentially related to your inquiry and seemingly intended to defeat it by sheer volume and unsearchability!
Isn't tying funding for education in a given field directly to the number of laborers imported to make work in that field cheaper just a trifle perverse?
At best, I could see it being saved by virtue of sheer lag (unless going directly into the data mines out of high school, the K-12 students affected by year X's funding level are anywhere from 2 to 16+ years away from the workforce); but that same lag would also lead to fluctuating and potentially nonsensical funding levels under basically any circumstances other than 'high, stable, levels of H1-B demand that mysteriously don't translate into lower incentives to enter the field', a condition that seems potentially unrealistic.
If we are treating CS as a foundational subject, some combination of a new part of the math curriculum and a valuable skill for all, we are going to need a more stable funding level (regardless of how high or low you think it should be, oscillating is stupid: you'll just get a lot of staff churn, 'fat year' infrastructure expenditures that rot because you can't do upkeep during lean years, and similar wastes of money).
If we are treating CS as largely vocational, producing students whose educational quality depended on the demand levels of the job market starting over a decade before they enter the field seems like it could go poorly...
So, 'documents associated with law enforcement inquiries' seem like something of interest to two classes of people:
(A): Anyone curious about how shocked, shocked, Microsoft actually is about massive electronic eavesdropping by the feds.
(B): Technically sophisticated targets or likely targets of some law enforcement operation looking for information pertaining to their own case.
Any guesses? One of those botnet groups that Microsoft periodically tries to disrupt checking to see if they need to start retaining a lawyer, or coming soon to wikileaks?
Aside from the (rare, mostly found in spacecraft or from the golden age of 'soviets + radioisotopes = even crazier party than americans + radioisotopes') radiothermal generators, the sealed sources of the type being fretted about are pretty much entirely unrelated to nuclear power generation...
There is periodic fretting about security at nuclear generating facilities; but those are relatively scarce, relatively centralized, and, while they do deal in pretty large amounts of radioactive material compared to most other users, need stuff shipped hither and yon only infrequently.
The industrial, scientific, and medical emitters are comparatively puny; but there are lots and lots of them, scattered all over the place, and relatively frequently shipped around.
Essentially unrelated applications with only minimal overlap in risk.
And the bits about cross-company wage scale sharing, and the preference for recruited vs. applying employees...
More generally, if this agreement were not of value to the collaborators(and to the detriment of employees) why would they have bothered to take the time and legal exposure to hammer it out?
Easy target? Tell us when one gets hit. In the mean time, where would you like to launch your drones from if there's not base nearby? Some drones are rather large.
Has anybody actually had a vaguely serious go at an aircraft carrier since WWII? I couldn't think of any; but I could definitely be forgetting something.
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Unfortunately, the US's first major "nation building" failure might be said to have occurred after the civil war... We defeated the insurgency; but never really managed to rebuild a functional society in the southern provinces. If subsequent events are any guide, we may just suck at dealing with religious zealots with shitty human rights records.
If they want to go fucking with the establishment clause, no, I can't. Otherwise, no problem.
Hopefully the open source phones catch up, because right now carrying around a general purpose computing device you have no control over thanks to the carriers strikes me as an astoundingly bad idea.
Having a phone whose OS is either compromised or deliberately acting against you is obviously unhelpful; but unless you control the baseband you are pretty much fucked regardless of the OS. Cell networks are fundamentally pretty hostile in terms of how much control is held by the network or at very low levels in the baseband, rather than where you can actually see it.
What? GPS receivers don't transmit. How do you track a GPS receiver?
You don't(well, somebody with an indistinguishable-from-magic antenna array and a truck full of DSPs might be able to pick up some effect of your antenna and RF circuitry against background; but it'd be dubiously practical at best); but a great many GPS receivers are connected to cellphones that are delightfully cooperative about providing those data for you. Now, even without GPS, cell tower triangulation would provide rough data; but GPS neatens it up nicely.
"The question is regarding the set of controls over how and when this is done."
Yes, about those... The secret ones, that you'd need access to secret information to verify compliance with, based on a classified interpretation of a massive hodgepodge of assorted laws, executive orders, and precedents, as interpreted by a secret court that doesn't release opinions and hears only testimony from the state agents requesting authorization? Those ones... Forgive me if I'm... less than 100% reassured.
Internal regulation and discipline can't even keep the officers of Hickville PD from periodic abuses that end up drawing big civil suits, and those guys are both nearly powerless and highly vulnerable to 3rd party scrutiny. Why would anyone expect 'controls' on an agency that can just stamp 'Double Top Secret' on anything embarassing and bury it forever to be more than a joke for the break room?
It might have something to do with the ability of GPUs to crank through FFTs like nobody's business...
It makes you wonder how much it would have cost MS to purchase some sort of specialty 'embedded/fixed function' license to, say, Dragon...
A full copy, without academic pricing or anything, (and get your checkbook ready if you need the supplements for a specific jargon set like law or medicine...) is pretty pricey; but you'd think that they'd be willing to license the same core for substantially less so long as they were assured that it would be useful only for providing voice commands to games and such, rather than competing with the rest of their product line. NIH, perhaps.
Wasn't that IBM's "Golden Screwdriver" upgrade model, in the before times when big iron ruled the earth?
" Toying with 8-10% GPU consumption is insignificant in the big picture."
I suspect that MS (and Sony) have no expectation of pulling a miracle out of their hat, or doing anything about the fact that consoles always become increasingly unimpressive vs. PCs as their release period drags on. However, given that MS is currently facing a modest; but somewhat embarrassing, graphical prettiness gap vs. Sony, they have a certain incentive to free up what they can to ensure that any comparisons are as flattering as hardware choices far too late to change will allow them to be.
A fair few spacecraft are nuclear powered... Spirit and Opportunity were solar; but Curiosity is rocking an MMRTG around the Martian surface as we speak.
I don't know why the Chinese decided to go solar, possibly weight, possibly difficulty in sourcing RTG fuel; but certainly neither the US nor the Russians have been squeamish about nuclear power in space when the mission called for it.
For perspective's sake, Spirit got stuck in a reboot loop on January 21, 2004, and was down until February 6th when they finished debugging what turned out to be a problem with the flash filesystem.
If their fault turns out to be more serious, or their system lacks the failsafe systems that would allow recovery from a modestly serious bug, then some snarking may be in order; but they are still within the 'scrambling for a fix' window.
Are you saying that passing your PCI compliance testing isn't all the computer security you need to do?
I suspect that Google is going to be deeply unconcerned by anything that doesn't beat them to the punch on 'battery life' and 'What exactly does having this thing attached to my face do to make up for having this thing attached to my face?'
Inconveniently, it's not confusion so much as disagreement that you are encountering on that one. People just can't get enough of the intoxicating feeling of having society and the power of the state united behind their personal tastes. Worse, some of them think that this feeling is objectively good, as well as pleasurable.
We embrace that notion; but if being a non-genius leaves you unemployed or receiving advice from HR about how to apply for food stamps to supplement your paycheck, we embrace the notion of telling you to go get some skills or fuck off and die...
But it just isn't the same without the lawyers, and the obstructionism, and all those black highlighters. Kids these days, they'll never know the joy of being spitefully shipped boxes of badly photocopied documents tangentially related to your inquiry and seemingly intended to defeat it by sheer volume and unsearchability!
Isn't tying funding for education in a given field directly to the number of laborers imported to make work in that field cheaper just a trifle perverse?
At best, I could see it being saved by virtue of sheer lag (unless going directly into the data mines out of high school, the K-12 students affected by year X's funding level are anywhere from 2 to 16+ years away from the workforce); but that same lag would also lead to fluctuating and potentially nonsensical funding levels under basically any circumstances other than 'high, stable, levels of H1-B demand that mysteriously don't translate into lower incentives to enter the field', a condition that seems potentially unrealistic.
If we are treating CS as a foundational subject, some combination of a new part of the math curriculum and a valuable skill for all, we are going to need a more stable funding level (regardless of how high or low you think it should be, oscillating is stupid: you'll just get a lot of staff churn, 'fat year' infrastructure expenditures that rot because you can't do upkeep during lean years, and similar wastes of money).
If we are treating CS as largely vocational, producing students whose educational quality depended on the demand levels of the job market starting over a decade before they enter the field seems like it could go poorly...
So, 'documents associated with law enforcement inquiries' seem like something of interest to two classes of people:
(A): Anyone curious about how shocked, shocked, Microsoft actually is about massive electronic eavesdropping by the feds.
(B): Technically sophisticated targets or likely targets of some law enforcement operation looking for information pertaining to their own case.
Any guesses? One of those botnet groups that Microsoft periodically tries to disrupt checking to see if they need to start retaining a lawyer, or coming soon to wikileaks?
I hope that they were keeping the staff who didn't know about sealed-source radiotherapy away from the patients...
Aside from the (rare, mostly found in spacecraft or from the golden age of 'soviets + radioisotopes = even crazier party than americans + radioisotopes') radiothermal generators, the sealed sources of the type being fretted about are pretty much entirely unrelated to nuclear power generation...
There is periodic fretting about security at nuclear generating facilities; but those are relatively scarce, relatively centralized, and, while they do deal in pretty large amounts of radioactive material compared to most other users, need stuff shipped hither and yon only infrequently.
The industrial, scientific, and medical emitters are comparatively puny; but there are lots and lots of them, scattered all over the place, and relatively frequently shipped around.
Essentially unrelated applications with only minimal overlap in risk.
Have we at least considered the possibility that treating serial lines as physically vulnerable isn't the dark path to fascist totalitarianism?
Perfectly spherical merchants, on a frictionless planar surface.
Silly worker. Everyone knows that there is no 'class warfare'. Also, you're losing.
And the bits about cross-company wage scale sharing, and the preference for recruited vs. applying employees...
More generally, if this agreement were not of value to the collaborators(and to the detriment of employees) why would they have bothered to take the time and legal exposure to hammer it out?
Easy target? Tell us when one gets hit. In the mean time, where would you like to launch your drones from if there's not base nearby? Some drones are rather large.
Has anybody actually had a vaguely serious go at an aircraft carrier since WWII? I couldn't think of any; but I could definitely be forgetting something.