Given that we have a relatively well developed mathematical articulation of 'random', and the likelihood of various outcomes arising from a random distribution, it should presumably be possible to determine that a given observed outcome is more or less probable as the result of a random distribution. That doesn't necessarily supply any causal suspicion of having arisen other than randomly; but it's still measurable.
"Structure" seems like a poor word, given the heavy connotations of purposeful design or systemic interaction; but choosing a statistical cut-off and taking particular interest in outcomes less probable than that, given the assumptions about the underlying distribution, is in principle sound enough(though it may simply mean that an improbable outcome happened, rather than that the assumptions about the underlying distribution were wrong).
It's like watching the payouts of N slot machines over the course of an evening: If you know, or have a hypothesis, about the odds of the game, you can tell how far a given outcome deviates from the expected distribution, though even observing an extraordinarily unlikely one cannot prove that the game was being rigged, though it can suggest it strongly enough to send you looking for clues in that direction.
It is true that robots will have even fewer scruples than riot cops. On the plus side, what machines lack in virtue, they also lack in vice. Unless so instructed, I'd expect minimal recreational killing of civilians, raping, looting, or other eminently human behavior that a machine wouldn't really be interested in. They would also have the advantage (or disadvantage, if you prefer to hide behind 'fog of war' inevitability arguments) of obeying instructions about risk aversion vs. collateral damage avoidance.
All sensors, human or machine, are imperfect, and will generate false negatives and false positives; but, if a human gets nervous enough, or loses a few squadmates, or similar, it will be very difficult indeed to keep is aversion to false negatives from overriding any concern about false positives. Robots, given the present state of machine vision, aren't as accurate as humans; but they know neither fear, nor loss, nor hate, and will obediently accept any level of risk aversion: from 'return fire only, and only against hostiles unaccompanied by neutral or unknown parties, self preservation is secondary.' to 'If it moves, kill it until it stops.'
The unpleasant truth is that, the occasional moral hero aside, getting usefully high levels of brutality out of humans just isn't wildly difficult, and we've been refining our technique since the dawn of recorded history. The major advantage that robots do bring to the field is that, should the situation start to turn against you, they aren't going to revolt like unpaid and underfed soldiers tend to, they'll just break down from lack of maintenance, rather than marching on your palace and delivering your head to the angry mob outside.
So far, we're pretty much using them as cameras. It's a bit of a jump to say they will start replacing soldiers.
catcha: Replacer
they must plan these things
How sophisticated does a guidance system have to be before it qualifies as a (rather suicidal) robotic soldier?
While there seems to be a bit of a taboo about handing a robot a gun and telling it 'yeah, just frag anything that looks particularly infrared in that direction', heat-seeking missiles, with no human terminal guidance, have been available for years.
We don't have anything that makes broader strategic decisions; but if you count robots attached to their munitions, we've been letting robots make kill decisions, within a confined search space, autonomously for some time. They just don't get to come back afterward.
Our duty is clear: we must capture and kill as many clams as possible to locate an even older clam, thus obviating any guilt about having killed the oldest clam!
"Well, sonny, since my API is billed per PVU per hour, let me tell you a story that my grandaddy told me:
Once upon a time, when men were men and bought their calculatin' machines from IBM, folks who were too poor to lease a calculating machine of their own would lease part of somebody elses. Then minicomputers came, and destroyed the good old days with fire and sword. Then microcomputers came, and slaughtered the minicomputers for their sins. But the minicomputers sucked, and had neither reliability, nor redundancy, nor Administrators to lead them. And Lo, the 'freedom' of the users turned to mere license, and became as ashes in their mouths."
Now, sonny, the minicomputers and users have repented and look to 'the cloud' to restore the glory of the old order, where man leased, and owned not, and Administrators watched over the users, and guided them.
Oh, I don't doubt that it'd be a cost and inventory nightmare; but somebody would probably love to have a propellant load whose burn rate changes continuously throughout, based on distance from the point of ignition, so that the properties are optimal for the expected volume of the barrel at that point in the shell's progress out of it...
I've definitely known more than a few sole proprietors and small outfits where the single pickup truck delivered both the gear and the guy or guys who were going to be using it. Not going very far after they got out unless one of them made a run for a second load.
(Also, it's polite of you to ignore the number of 'haha, we'd call it white collar if there were a salary or benefits; because it happens inside an office park or equivalent' shit jobs that you can do in our 'post-industrial service economy' and just accuse me of being a trust-fund asshole...)
Anything not covered by single-link DVI has that nasty smell of 'not enough people bought this to bother testing it properly, and unless you have a workstation card and an approved screen, we can't be bothered to validate your configuration'. Dual-link...usually...works. Never had a problem with Displayport or HDMI (though older HDMI versions are simply too bandwidth limited to hit higher resolutions, period.) VGA is the one that always amazes me. Some crap DE-15 connector from 1987, specced to carry 640x480, and it just doesn't give up, even at resolutions that single-link DVI can't handle. Fuzzy, though.
You silly optimist. You'd just get "Delivery Status: Exception" and have to hammer customer support for details, unless you've shelled out for Heroic Platinum NSA Tracking, in which case they might have a more detailed error code.
You probably won't sell them on green-meadows-and-chirping-birds; but (based on the number of insufferable 'our truck uses Butch Power Technology, just like the Hoover Dam, and is made of Steel, just like Big Submarines' advertisements I've endured recently) people who buy trucks like power.
And, if there is one thing electric motors do very, very, very, well, it is torque. Especially if starting a heavy load from a dead stop, the comparison is hardly fair.
It probably doesn't hurt that (particularly among vocational users of pickups), more than a few of them are called upon to deliver a fair amount of cargo, than sit there, potentially charging, while the occupants do construction things or such with the cargo.
I suspect that we...won't see them widely on the civilian market... but makers of larger explosives and munitions might actually have some very interesting ideas about 3d printing.
In principle, as long as there is some 3d printing process that it doesn't react violently with, a propellant charge or warhead could be printed, with very precise control of shape and composition throughout the entire piece: one or more explosive varieties, binders/fillers, etc. deposited where you want them, in the combinations you want them, without the constraints of standard casting or pressing.
It wouldn't be cheap; but if it renders the armor on the T-XY series battle tank substantially less survivable, somebody'll stump up for it.
I don't doubt that getting a real person to accept a blank, white, cheap 'n nasty 'n barely ISO 7813-compliant card as a "real credit card" would be a difficult task; but what I don't know is what history, backed by legal or contractual force, there is (if any) concerning not-otherwise-criminal use of cloned cards.
Do merchant contracts also require Visa/Amex logos/trademarks on accepted cards? Do the feds or any states consider cloned cards to be presumptively instruments of fraud? That sort of thing.
I ought to have clarified: There is no 4k media shot in the real world that you can actually get.
At present, Blu-Ray video is limited, by spec to 54Mb/s(and 1920x1080, even if you felt like taking 4k and crunching it good and hard). OTA and cable/satellite generally less (ATSC/DVB are largely ossified at this point, cable/satellite could upgrade if they felt like swapping out a lot of gear; but have shown no interest as yet), and IP streaming typically lower still, in practical applications(though this is one area where if you have the patience, there aren't any standards getting in your way.)
Having high resolution starting footage to work with is valuable, and getting a great deal cheaper; but getting something that was shot in the field to your house in 4k? Almost 100% unavailable.
What I don't know, and a secondary question to what I was asking about the history of non-fraud card cloning, would be "Will Visa/AMEX see this thing as a threat, or an ally?"
They likely have the power to seriously derail it(at least the software side); but if they are more worried about non-CC-based competitors cutting in on their action, with phone-based payments, or paypal QR code scanning, or some such nonsense, a different variant seems to pop up about once a week, they might actually welcome somebody stepping up to make mag-stripe cards more pleasant and convenient at no cost or risk to them.
If they are in a purely defensive/reactionary mode, for its own sake, or suspect that this is just step 1 to the creation of some alternate payment scheme that cuts them out of the equation but is backwards compatible with mag stripe hardware, they might decide to play hardball, and if they do, the PCI compliance guy for this company had better stock up on vodka and valium now; because he'll need them. If not, though, these guys aren't obviously more dangerous, just more sophisticated, than leather companies that produce wallets with lots of little card pockets.
I wouldn't be surprised if TV EDID values are still shot all to hell, or if certain TV models do horrible 'processing' to digital signals that don't need it, thus sending you into the hell that is overscan compensation and so on; but barring that sort of exciting catastrophe, plugging a TV into a computer is about as easy as plugging a monitor into one at this point. Worst case, you might need to buy a DVI->HDMI adapter for the TV but not for the monitor(though more than a few monitors are HDMI native these days); but that's about it.
The remaining issues are mostly the 'ten foot UI', and peripherals that don't look totally foolish in the living room, or desk space if you try to put a 40+ incher on your desk(incidentally, I normally avoid TVs-as-monitors; because I like my pixels tiny and numerous; but 30-ish inch LCDTVs can be good monitors for people who need their text big if OS-provided scaling isn't entirely there yet. Crazy cheap, compared to a proper 30 inch monitor and everything is enormous since the resolution is comparatively low. A number of older users have been quite pleased with that arrangement)...
Is there any established precedent(either in law or in contract dickery that has come to light) about using cloned cards for transactions?
Obviously, cloned cards can be a fraud tool, and fraud is illegal; and obviously most people have neither the tech nor the interest to clone mag stripe cards; but does Visa give a damn if I clone my card and swipe the clone, instead of the one they mailed me, at the point of sale? Do they claim some sort of 'despite all appearances to the contrary, card remains property of issuer, etc, etc, yadda, just shut up and swipe' clause? Have they ever been tried on that point?
There has never been anything magic (aside from convenience, getting a full-color printed, shiny holograms, embossed characters, encoded mag stripe, card in quantity 1 costs a hell of a lot more than quantity 1 zillion) about the card itself, nor do mag-stripe cards have any secrets embedded (unlike chip-and-pin, which theoretically, like a SIM, contains values that should never leave the IC under any circumstances short of silicon-level attack), and a lot of transactions occur with nothing more than the card number, since they go over the web.
I assume that if they do care, their easiest point of attack would just be to be enormous rules-lawyering dickheads about every last detail of PCI compliance, which would likely make the server/app side of things virtually impossible; but would the card-cloning itself, if not used for already illegal fraud of some kind, be an issue?
Cramming a UI and the electromagnetics required to spoof a mag stripe into something small enough to make it through a card reader is pretty impressive; but I just don't see the point.
I need another intermediary in my payment system like I need a hole in the head(and I certainly don't need any credit card details stashed in yet another OMGTOTALLY SECURE!!! server or app), and I'd need a hell of a lot of plastic infesting my wallet before a $100 piece of hardware, and BTLE-compatible smartphone become the lower-hassle alternative.
Along with a card reader, it'd probably be great fun as a tool for duplicating low security cards(eg. copier stored value cards, which commonly actually store their value in the stripe, rather than just encoding an ID that gets looked up by the payment processor), and generally fucking around with mag stripe readers; but for actual real-world financial transactions? How many credit cards do you carry on a daily basis?
With rare, mutually beneficial, exceptions, it seems to generally be the case that if I can get paid for putting an 'offer' in front of a user, no matter how transparent and not-spyware and whatnot, that's a good sign that the value to the user is negative.
Gosh, yes, I'd love to receive offers from your carefully selected content partners!
Obviously, a continuum exists, from pure drive-by malware to the-box-isn't-even-checked-by-default opt-in stuff; with various levels of 'all the boxes start checked; but you can uncheck them if you can find them' and 'sure, just go down the stairs, take a left at the sign that says "beware of the leopard", pick the lock on the third door on your right, and choose the 'advanced install' package from the bottom drawer of the filing cabinet'; but just because sleaze occupies a continuum doesn't mean you want to get any on you...
No part of a computer 'deals with' a Model M. They are suffered to exist, by its grace; for it was forged in the ages before they were conceived of, and shall persist in the ages when they have been reduced to scrap.
I think those parallel green things are circuit boards boiling the coolant furiously. You can see the twisted wiring bundles running along the bottom edge of the picture, and what look like either interconnect headers or brass standoffs between the boards.
The copper pipes are obviously involved in circulation in some way; but show absolutely no condensation, nor any fins or other surface-area-increasing features, so I'd be surprised if they are chillers.
I think that that might be a shot of their FPGA array (since it's clearly a circuit board setup; but lacks any sign of standard PC or server features.)
There is no 4k media shot in the real world. Any decent contemporary rendering engine should happily enough render 4k output of whatever virtual world strikes your fancy. Even in real time, if you have the cash for a good GPU.
theres no point in buying a 3dtv or a 4k ultra resolution tv when you cant watch anything on it with either...
televesion is at best 1080p, and you can only get fake 3d tv. if you want to watch a 3d movie, you have to pay extra. if you want to stream movies, dont even think you will get 4k resolution any time soon. even if you could find something online with 4k resolution, you wouldnt be able to stream it without a gigabit internet connection.
I'm 100% with you on '3d TV' being total bullshit (barring substantial advances in technology, to the point where no goofy glasses are required, and anywhere in the room I sit I can't tell that I'm not looking out some creepy window to another dimension).
However, I couldn't agree less about resolution: Yes, as you say, there is absolutely nothing except a couple of tech demos to watch at greater than 1080p, and more pixels aren't even visible at social TV viewing distances. This much is true. However, TVs and monitors are largely converged at this point (A 'TV' is a monitor with big pixels and a TV tuner, possibly shitty speakers built in, a 'monitor' lacks a TV tuner and has smaller pixels and maybe a DVI connector) and the PCs of the world (well, the world that might consider a 4k TV) have no problem spitting that many pixels across the screen. Possibly even several screens.
Basically the lousiest GPU you can buy, so long as it supports HDMI 1.4 or Displayport, can at least drive a 4k screen, probably even with basic-Windows-acceleration-effects, and screaming gamer gear should be able to even run relatively modern games at that resolution.
That is why I care about '4k'. Given the NTSC/ATSC switchover, broadcast TV could be at a standstill for another couple of decades, and Cable and Satellite seem to be competing to see who can deliver more channels of painfully compressed crap, and (necessarily low res/high compression) streaming might well doom superior-but-inconvenient optical media before Blu-ray 2.0 ever comes out; but that barely matters. All the 1080p material will still look good at 4k, assuming your upscaler doesn't suck, and even a modest PC will be pumping out sweet, sweet, pixels.
Slashdot Mirror
Given that we have a relatively well developed mathematical articulation of 'random', and the likelihood of various outcomes arising from a random distribution, it should presumably be possible to determine that a given observed outcome is more or less probable as the result of a random distribution. That doesn't necessarily supply any causal suspicion of having arisen other than randomly; but it's still measurable.
"Structure" seems like a poor word, given the heavy connotations of purposeful design or systemic interaction; but choosing a statistical cut-off and taking particular interest in outcomes less probable than that, given the assumptions about the underlying distribution, is in principle sound enough(though it may simply mean that an improbable outcome happened, rather than that the assumptions about the underlying distribution were wrong).
It's like watching the payouts of N slot machines over the course of an evening: If you know, or have a hypothesis, about the odds of the game, you can tell how far a given outcome deviates from the expected distribution, though even observing an extraordinarily unlikely one cannot prove that the game was being rigged, though it can suggest it strongly enough to send you looking for clues in that direction.
It is true that robots will have even fewer scruples than riot cops. On the plus side, what machines lack in virtue, they also lack in vice. Unless so instructed, I'd expect minimal recreational killing of civilians, raping, looting, or other eminently human behavior that a machine wouldn't really be interested in. They would also have the advantage (or disadvantage, if you prefer to hide behind 'fog of war' inevitability arguments) of obeying instructions about risk aversion vs. collateral damage avoidance.
All sensors, human or machine, are imperfect, and will generate false negatives and false positives; but, if a human gets nervous enough, or loses a few squadmates, or similar, it will be very difficult indeed to keep is aversion to false negatives from overriding any concern about false positives. Robots, given the present state of machine vision, aren't as accurate as humans; but they know neither fear, nor loss, nor hate, and will obediently accept any level of risk aversion: from 'return fire only, and only against hostiles unaccompanied by neutral or unknown parties, self preservation is secondary.' to 'If it moves, kill it until it stops.'
The unpleasant truth is that, the occasional moral hero aside, getting usefully high levels of brutality out of humans just isn't wildly difficult, and we've been refining our technique since the dawn of recorded history. The major advantage that robots do bring to the field is that, should the situation start to turn against you, they aren't going to revolt like unpaid and underfed soldiers tend to, they'll just break down from lack of maintenance, rather than marching on your palace and delivering your head to the angry mob outside.
So far, we're pretty much using them as cameras. It's a bit of a jump to say they will start replacing soldiers.
catcha: Replacer they must plan these things
How sophisticated does a guidance system have to be before it qualifies as a (rather suicidal) robotic soldier?
While there seems to be a bit of a taboo about handing a robot a gun and telling it 'yeah, just frag anything that looks particularly infrared in that direction', heat-seeking missiles, with no human terminal guidance, have been available for years.
We don't have anything that makes broader strategic decisions; but if you count robots attached to their munitions, we've been letting robots make kill decisions, within a confined search space, autonomously for some time. They just don't get to come back afterward.
One does not 'simply' walk into Mordor...
Probably because 'HP fucks up' isn't really news, and people have lower expectations of a $280 laptop than they do of a $1500 one?
Our duty is clear: we must capture and kill as many clams as possible to locate an even older clam, thus obviating any guilt about having killed the oldest clam!
"Watson, what exactly is cloud computing?"
"Well, sonny, since my API is billed per PVU per hour, let me tell you a story that my grandaddy told me:
Once upon a time, when men were men and bought their calculatin' machines from IBM, folks who were too poor to lease a calculating machine of their own would lease part of somebody elses. Then minicomputers came, and destroyed the good old days with fire and sword. Then microcomputers came, and slaughtered the minicomputers for their sins. But the minicomputers sucked, and had neither reliability, nor redundancy, nor Administrators to lead them. And Lo, the 'freedom' of the users turned to mere license, and became as ashes in their mouths."
Now, sonny, the minicomputers and users have repented and look to 'the cloud' to restore the glory of the old order, where man leased, and owned not, and Administrators watched over the users, and guided them.
Sure, 3d printing will revolutionize explosives. But it's also going to revolutionize reactive armor.
So you're saying that it'll help expand two product lines? Score!
-General Dynamics
Oh, I don't doubt that it'd be a cost and inventory nightmare; but somebody would probably love to have a propellant load whose burn rate changes continuously throughout, based on distance from the point of ignition, so that the properties are optimal for the expected volume of the barrel at that point in the shell's progress out of it...
I've definitely known more than a few sole proprietors and small outfits where the single pickup truck delivered both the gear and the guy or guys who were going to be using it. Not going very far after they got out unless one of them made a run for a second load.
(Also, it's polite of you to ignore the number of 'haha, we'd call it white collar if there were a salary or benefits; because it happens inside an office park or equivalent' shit jobs that you can do in our 'post-industrial service economy' and just accuse me of being a trust-fund asshole...)
Anything not covered by single-link DVI has that nasty smell of 'not enough people bought this to bother testing it properly, and unless you have a workstation card and an approved screen, we can't be bothered to validate your configuration'. Dual-link...usually...works. Never had a problem with Displayport or HDMI (though older HDMI versions are simply too bandwidth limited to hit higher resolutions, period.) VGA is the one that always amazes me. Some crap DE-15 connector from 1987, specced to carry 640x480, and it just doesn't give up, even at resolutions that single-link DVI can't handle. Fuzzy, though.
You silly optimist. You'd just get "Delivery Status: Exception" and have to hammer customer support for details, unless you've shelled out for Heroic Platinum NSA Tracking, in which case they might have a more detailed error code.
You probably won't sell them on green-meadows-and-chirping-birds; but (based on the number of insufferable 'our truck uses Butch Power Technology, just like the Hoover Dam, and is made of Steel, just like Big Submarines' advertisements I've endured recently) people who buy trucks like power.
And, if there is one thing electric motors do very, very, very, well, it is torque. Especially if starting a heavy load from a dead stop, the comparison is hardly fair.
It probably doesn't hurt that (particularly among vocational users of pickups), more than a few of them are called upon to deliver a fair amount of cargo, than sit there, potentially charging, while the occupants do construction things or such with the cargo.
I suspect that we...won't see them widely on the civilian market... but makers of larger explosives and munitions might actually have some very interesting ideas about 3d printing.
In principle, as long as there is some 3d printing process that it doesn't react violently with, a propellant charge or warhead could be printed, with very precise control of shape and composition throughout the entire piece: one or more explosive varieties, binders/fillers, etc. deposited where you want them, in the combinations you want them, without the constraints of standard casting or pressing.
It wouldn't be cheap; but if it renders the armor on the T-XY series battle tank substantially less survivable, somebody'll stump up for it.
What if it were a signed clone?
I don't doubt that getting a real person to accept a blank, white, cheap 'n nasty 'n barely ISO 7813-compliant card as a "real credit card" would be a difficult task; but what I don't know is what history, backed by legal or contractual force, there is (if any) concerning not-otherwise-criminal use of cloned cards.
Do merchant contracts also require Visa/Amex logos/trademarks on accepted cards? Do the feds or any states consider cloned cards to be presumptively instruments of fraud? That sort of thing.
I ought to have clarified: There is no 4k media shot in the real world that you can actually get.
At present, Blu-Ray video is limited, by spec to 54Mb/s(and 1920x1080, even if you felt like taking 4k and crunching it good and hard). OTA and cable/satellite generally less (ATSC/DVB are largely ossified at this point, cable/satellite could upgrade if they felt like swapping out a lot of gear; but have shown no interest as yet), and IP streaming typically lower still, in practical applications(though this is one area where if you have the patience, there aren't any standards getting in your way.)
Having high resolution starting footage to work with is valuable, and getting a great deal cheaper; but getting something that was shot in the field to your house in 4k? Almost 100% unavailable.
What I don't know, and a secondary question to what I was asking about the history of non-fraud card cloning, would be "Will Visa/AMEX see this thing as a threat, or an ally?"
They likely have the power to seriously derail it(at least the software side); but if they are more worried about non-CC-based competitors cutting in on their action, with phone-based payments, or paypal QR code scanning, or some such nonsense, a different variant seems to pop up about once a week, they might actually welcome somebody stepping up to make mag-stripe cards more pleasant and convenient at no cost or risk to them.
If they are in a purely defensive/reactionary mode, for its own sake, or suspect that this is just step 1 to the creation of some alternate payment scheme that cuts them out of the equation but is backwards compatible with mag stripe hardware, they might decide to play hardball, and if they do, the PCI compliance guy for this company had better stock up on vodka and valium now; because he'll need them. If not, though, these guys aren't obviously more dangerous, just more sophisticated, than leather companies that produce wallets with lots of little card pockets.
I wouldn't be surprised if TV EDID values are still shot all to hell, or if certain TV models do horrible 'processing' to digital signals that don't need it, thus sending you into the hell that is overscan compensation and so on; but barring that sort of exciting catastrophe, plugging a TV into a computer is about as easy as plugging a monitor into one at this point. Worst case, you might need to buy a DVI->HDMI adapter for the TV but not for the monitor(though more than a few monitors are HDMI native these days); but that's about it.
...
The remaining issues are mostly the 'ten foot UI', and peripherals that don't look totally foolish in the living room, or desk space if you try to put a 40+ incher on your desk(incidentally, I normally avoid TVs-as-monitors; because I like my pixels tiny and numerous; but 30-ish inch LCDTVs can be good monitors for people who need their text big if OS-provided scaling isn't entirely there yet. Crazy cheap, compared to a proper 30 inch monitor and everything is enormous since the resolution is comparatively low. A number of older users have been quite pleased with that arrangement)
Is there any established precedent(either in law or in contract dickery that has come to light) about using cloned cards for transactions?
Obviously, cloned cards can be a fraud tool, and fraud is illegal; and obviously most people have neither the tech nor the interest to clone mag stripe cards; but does Visa give a damn if I clone my card and swipe the clone, instead of the one they mailed me, at the point of sale? Do they claim some sort of 'despite all appearances to the contrary, card remains property of issuer, etc, etc, yadda, just shut up and swipe' clause? Have they ever been tried on that point?
There has never been anything magic (aside from convenience, getting a full-color printed, shiny holograms, embossed characters, encoded mag stripe, card in quantity 1 costs a hell of a lot more than quantity 1 zillion) about the card itself, nor do mag-stripe cards have any secrets embedded (unlike chip-and-pin, which theoretically, like a SIM, contains values that should never leave the IC under any circumstances short of silicon-level attack), and a lot of transactions occur with nothing more than the card number, since they go over the web.
I assume that if they do care, their easiest point of attack would just be to be enormous rules-lawyering dickheads about every last detail of PCI compliance, which would likely make the server/app side of things virtually impossible; but would the card-cloning itself, if not used for already illegal fraud of some kind, be an issue?
Cramming a UI and the electromagnetics required to spoof a mag stripe into something small enough to make it through a card reader is pretty impressive; but I just don't see the point.
I need another intermediary in my payment system like I need a hole in the head(and I certainly don't need any credit card details stashed in yet another OMGTOTALLY SECURE!!! server or app), and I'd need a hell of a lot of plastic infesting my wallet before a $100 piece of hardware, and BTLE-compatible smartphone become the lower-hassle alternative.
Along with a card reader, it'd probably be great fun as a tool for duplicating low security cards(eg. copier stored value cards, which commonly actually store their value in the stripe, rather than just encoding an ID that gets looked up by the payment processor), and generally fucking around with mag stripe readers; but for actual real-world financial transactions? How many credit cards do you carry on a daily basis?
With rare, mutually beneficial, exceptions, it seems to generally be the case that if I can get paid for putting an 'offer' in front of a user, no matter how transparent and not-spyware and whatnot, that's a good sign that the value to the user is negative.
Gosh, yes, I'd love to receive offers from your carefully selected content partners!
Obviously, a continuum exists, from pure drive-by malware to the-box-isn't-even-checked-by-default opt-in stuff; with various levels of 'all the boxes start checked; but you can uncheck them if you can find them' and 'sure, just go down the stairs, take a left at the sign that says "beware of the leopard", pick the lock on the third door on your right, and choose the 'advanced install' package from the bottom drawer of the filing cabinet'; but just because sleaze occupies a continuum doesn't mean you want to get any on you...
No part of a computer 'deals with' a Model M. They are suffered to exist, by its grace; for it was forged in the ages before they were conceived of, and shall persist in the ages when they have been reduced to scrap.
I think those parallel green things are circuit boards boiling the coolant furiously. You can see the twisted wiring bundles running along the bottom edge of the picture, and what look like either interconnect headers or brass standoffs between the boards.
The copper pipes are obviously involved in circulation in some way; but show absolutely no condensation, nor any fins or other surface-area-increasing features, so I'd be surprised if they are chillers.
I think that that might be a shot of their FPGA array (since it's clearly a circuit board setup; but lacks any sign of standard PC or server features.)
this is true, but there is no 4K media yet
There is no 4k media shot in the real world. Any decent contemporary rendering engine should happily enough render 4k output of whatever virtual world strikes your fancy. Even in real time, if you have the cash for a good GPU.
theres no point in buying a 3dtv or a 4k ultra resolution tv when you cant watch anything on it with either... televesion is at best 1080p, and you can only get fake 3d tv. if you want to watch a 3d movie, you have to pay extra. if you want to stream movies, dont even think you will get 4k resolution any time soon. even if you could find something online with 4k resolution, you wouldnt be able to stream it without a gigabit internet connection.
I'm 100% with you on '3d TV' being total bullshit (barring substantial advances in technology, to the point where no goofy glasses are required, and anywhere in the room I sit I can't tell that I'm not looking out some creepy window to another dimension).
However, I couldn't agree less about resolution: Yes, as you say, there is absolutely nothing except a couple of tech demos to watch at greater than 1080p, and more pixels aren't even visible at social TV viewing distances. This much is true. However, TVs and monitors are largely converged at this point (A 'TV' is a monitor with big pixels and a TV tuner, possibly shitty speakers built in, a 'monitor' lacks a TV tuner and has smaller pixels and maybe a DVI connector) and the PCs of the world (well, the world that might consider a 4k TV) have no problem spitting that many pixels across the screen. Possibly even several screens.
Basically the lousiest GPU you can buy, so long as it supports HDMI 1.4 or Displayport, can at least drive a 4k screen, probably even with basic-Windows-acceleration-effects, and screaming gamer gear should be able to even run relatively modern games at that resolution.
That is why I care about '4k'. Given the NTSC/ATSC switchover, broadcast TV could be at a standstill for another couple of decades, and Cable and Satellite seem to be competing to see who can deliver more channels of painfully compressed crap, and (necessarily low res/high compression) streaming might well doom superior-but-inconvenient optical media before Blu-ray 2.0 ever comes out; but that barely matters. All the 1080p material will still look good at 4k, assuming your upscaler doesn't suck, and even a modest PC will be pumping out sweet, sweet, pixels.