You don't even have to go that far: It's perfectly possible to think that drug use is actually a bad plan, or even a socially deleterious activity; but also be of the opinion that the DEA is a 'cure' (though, as anybody with functioning senses could probably tell you, Drugs have been winning the war on drugs pretty much continually since it was declared...) worse than the disease.
I have no reason to suspect that some pillheads aren't doing themselves serious harm, or that there aren't even some dangerous ones. However, there is a massive gulf between 'Hmm, the world may be sub-optimal over there.' and 'Clearly something must be done, and the doers must be Given Powers to do it!'. And, while pillheads may be a bad idea, I'm damn well sure that DEA jackboots on a fishing expedition through my medical records is both a bad idea and worse for me than the pillheads are.
While it is always important to keep in mind that some 'crimes' are really just persecution mania gone out of hand, it's also important to remember that even the agreed-upon existence of real dangers is not an unlimited justification for response to them. (In this case, the DEA performs a hybrid function, handling both moralistic witch-hunts for relatively harmless users and dangerously overreaching in their responses to threats both real and imagined. Fine folks.)
If my understanding of history is correct, nothing happened before 1998 or so except World War II and the NES. I'm not sure what precedents you could possibly have in mind that would make this unprecedented idea precedented...
That was the idea: the DEA argues that all medical care is essentially elective. Doctors have no particular ethical obligation to undertake elective procedures, and by their own assertion all medical care that DEA agents receive is elective...
there are lots of doctors writing prescriptions which are then resold on the street. the doctors are in on the scam since they cannot possibly see all these patients.
the DEA is just trying to catch shady doctors
And this is relevant to the DEA's desire to see my medical records why exactly?
Sure, I'm so worried that some pillhead will be buying opiates or amphetamines of standardized purity and potency produced by (somewhat) law-abiding companies according to FDA industrial heigine standards, rather than getting the good shit from biker gangs or mexican cartels or whatever that I'm willing to let the DEA have a rummage through my medical records (which are, of course, totally impossible to infer with nontrivial accuracy from my prescription history).
(As it is, why don't we cut the criminal distribution networks off at the knees by referring addicts straight to the higher-quality product, and accompanying opportunity for medical care and cessation assistance, provided by medical-grade drugs?)
The DEA has become the enemy of the American people and needs to be disbanded, or at least have it's house cleaned.
Arguably, it would be more amusing to apply genetic engineering techniques to construct a virus that splices in cannaboid synthesis mechanisms when it infects and organism. Then release it into their ventilation system.
An entire department full of psychoactive DEA agents whose bodies synthesize Schedule I controlled substances would be the ultimate in zany stoner comedy.
If the DEA argues that medical care is purely voluntary, rather than necessary, and thus 'choosing' it constitutes consent, would it be entirely ethical for medical professionals to refuse 'elective procedures' to all DEA functionaries? After all, the patient himself says that the procedure is totally voluntary, so I don't see why they have any professional or ethical obligation to assist with it, not when they could be treating people with actually urgent problems....
What are his thoughts on the absolute saturation of the 2.4GHz spectrum and the increasing load on the 5GHz spectrum.
The internet of things sounds nice, but the amount of devices pointlessly WiFi enabled and broadcasting in my home is having a very negative effect on the usability of the spectrum for anything of value. Does he have any plan to mitigate this growing issue? Does he care at all about it or is he solely focused on funding and an early exit with a fleeting; 'I'm rich, bitch'?
Obviously, barring a miracle in the ISM band, more stuff chattering isn't going to help; but (some) of these 'internet of things' widgets are forced to confront the problem, albeit because they are too cheap or too power constrained to just shove a full 802.11b/g/n chip in there and scream there little hearts out.
In order to accomodate severely cheap and/or battery powered devices, Contiki provides support for 802.15.4-based networks (through 6LoWPAN), which are both much less resource intensive and rather less chatty than 802.11 devices.
Arguably, the overall effect of 'internet of things' chaff on larger computers trying to use the spectrum probably depends on adoption, with three rough possible trajectories:
1. Apathy: The perceived value of the 'internet of things' is roughly nil, so aside from a few horrid proprietary wireless meter-reader systems and things, field deployments are negligible, and thus so is RF traffic.
2. Partial adoption: This is actually the worst case: Wifi is a terrible mechanism for the purpose; but unlike the dreadful stew of incompatible and often partially or wholly proprietary low-power/low-speed links, it has the distinct virtue of being built into just about all the computing devices you already own, which creates a certain incentive for people building lightbulbs and thermostats and similar stuff to shoehorn it in; because they can't be sure that you'll be able to speak any other wireless protocol unless they provide a dongle (which won't work with your smartphone, and obligates them to be in the 'helping idiots install peripherals' business, which isn't somewhere you want to be). So, multiple-years-on-a-CR2032 type devices won't happen, or will be dongle-to-device; but there will be a whole lot of mains-connected devices abusing a high-throughput, noisy, protocol to dribble tiny amounts of data back to the mothership.
3. Ubiquity: This case is worse in terms of absolute number of devices chattering away; but imagines a sufficient interest and volume of deployment that, say, it becomes expected for home routers and the like to speak some standardized 802.15.4-based protocol, so there are indeed a great many devices; but they aren't forced to speak wifi for compatibility reasons. The ISM band continues to be a mess; but at least devices get to choose a protocol roughly commensurate with their actual throughput requirements.
As a process it is; but as a body-of-information-people-are-currently-applying-that-process-to, it isn't.
Anyone can (and the brighter and more curious flavor of children often do, more or less spontaneously) 'do science' (and they should, it's fun and interesting). If you want to catch up to where the people who do science professionally are, though, you either need to be an alarmingly fast experimenter, or willing to hit the books, possibly for some years.
Mathematics is an even more extreme example of the same general phenomenon: anybody can do math with nothing more than some axioms (which you are allowed to invent, so long as they result in useful or interesting systems) and maybe a supply of scratch paper. There aren't even any 'well, we did do that experiment; but you'll have to either get the funding to go back to Antarctica for 5 years, or just trust us on that' type situations. You don't have to take any of it on faith, (and, again more conveniently than science, there is usually room within the textbook to provide the proof, not provide a citation to the research papers); but none of that qualifies the layman to do anything remotely interesting to mathematics as a discipline without substantial preparation(all of which is available, no secrets, just hit your local library; but don't expect any but the most patient and educationally inclined mathematicians to want to put up with you before that).
The impression I get from reading the featured article is that "Internet of things" refers to giving each electrical appliance a microcontroller to connect to the Internet so that the appliance's owner can manage it remotely. This has applications in street lighting and traffic signal automation, industrial automation, and smart distribution and metering of electric power. So what's a better buzzword for that?
'The Internet of Things' is basically a polite way of saying "Hey, SCADA is so easy that it should be a consumer product!".
The slashcode itself is pretty creaky; but the conceptual structure beats the hell out of most anything I've seen.
Non-threaded boards are totally hopeless unless the number of comments per topic is tiny (Oh, sure, I want to sort through 30 pages of comments, manually parsing them to see who is quoting what... like hell); but the 'moderation is basically a presentation problem' approach( where you can, fairly easily, see whatever you want, nothing goes down the memory hole; but you can also get a quick 'best of' at +3 or so) beats either unmoderated fora, which are cesspools, or all but the most virtuous and energetic moderators (who aren't easy to find, and tend to be unequal to the tide of slime that any site with real traffic gets).
It's time for scientists to come down from there ivory towers and let the masses participate, rather than treat them as audience.
Any scientists in favor of the paywalled hellholes that are many contemporary journals has something to answer for; but how far do the scientists get to expect the masses to come to them, rather than they to the masses?
Science isn't a Holy Mystery Untouchable By The Unanointed; but it isn't exactly a series of simple, lucid, concepts accessible to the everyman; were it not held in thrall by sinister obscurantists. It is certainly possible to flimflam people with jargon just because you can; but that in no way implies that it is possible for people without (often nontrival) background knowledge to understand or usefully participate in a given subject.
"Everything, from evolution to the origins of climate change, is mistakenly up for grabs again"
And here I was under the impression that everything in science was always up for grabs. This is just the mag trying to silence dissent. I happen to agree with evolution but I have no problem debating it with people who do not. Nor do I believe evolution is settled science, we continue to learn a great deal and there is always a possibility of some groundbreaking new development to come along and rock the whole foundation.
You might want to consider re-weighting the importance of various venues. Internet comment sections are not...exactly... a notorious haven of scientific enlightenment (regardless of topic). The SNR is shit, and it's basically just psuedoanonymous people regurgitating links and copypasta at one another (like some sort of horrible combination of wikipedia and what a decadent late-imperial roman would have considered a good party).
It's perfectly possible for new developments to come along; but the probability that they'll emerge on a message board (rather than, say, during the course of archeological or gene sequencing work) is negligible.
Some people still think that video games are only for kids, regardless of the content of the game. Getting past this idea would help a lot.
Even if people never get a clue, that idea is rapidly aging itself out of existence: People don't obviously 'grow out' of gaming (many cut back since they have other things to do, some do stop entirely; but there appears to be no particular demographic cliff after which gaming plunges into nonexistence); and such gaming landmarks as the NES are old. If you were born when that thing hit US release, you are 28 now. If you were old enough to play it when it hit US release, you could easily be mid 30s to early 40s by now.
Immunity to empirical reality will always be with us; but people for whom gaming has always 'been for kids' are aging out, and people who have kids now are increasingly likely, soon to be overwhelmingly likely, to either be gamers, have been gamers, and/or know peers who are gamers.
From the perspective of the convenience of foreign workers(who don't just VPN back to home office anyway) certainly. From the perspective of the state of the Chinese citizen on the internet, nuance might actually be worse:
Consider the analogy of price discrimination:
If you have to set a single price for a good that you are selling, you will be forced to lose customers on the low end(because they can't afford it), lose money on the high end(because they'd pay ten times as much; but don't have to) or suffer some other sub-optimal tradeoff between these two. If you have a price discrimination mechanism, and can charge different customers different amounts, this problem is reduced (poorer customers can be charged less, down to whatever the minimum profitable price is, wealthier ones can be charged more, until even they say the hell with it). In a hypothetical system of perfect price discrimination, everyone gets exactly the price they are willing to put up with, and your only challenge is discerning that price correctly in order to capture all the gains from trade.
Repression is in certain ways similar: because online repression involves breaking things, it's a nuisance whenever you run into it, so the ideal system of repression (analogous to the ideal system of price discrimination) applies only as much as is needed, where it is needed, to the people who need it, while leaving everyone else free to tweet and look at cat videos and things. Not censoring a free trade zone (where outside ideas are inevitably easy to come by, a substantial percentage of the population are foreigners there on business, and employed by businesses who value continued good relations with your customs and other officials..., or comparatively well off locals involved in business there) is a partial price discrimination strategy. Not perfect; but closer than a blanket level of repression. Why block social networks to people who are going to chat, not in Mandarin, to their friends and family who don't live in China? That just annoys them and doesn't improve your control at all. Why filter the internet access, like some penny-ante dictatorship, of people who can VPN back to HQ anyway? It just makes you look repressive without stopping them. Why lean on people who are just here to make money, and won't develop any stupid ideas about local politics, no matter who runs the show, so long as they are allowed to keep doing that?
Haven't 'free trade zones' always been about the relaxation of certain local restrictions in the interest of attracting commercial activity? And isn't turning a blind eye to the activity of economically useful foreigners (so long as they aren't too tacky about it, and don't start mouthing off about local politics) a downright venerable tradition?
If anything, this looks like another aspect of China's gradual evolution toward a 'repress smarter, not harder' theory of censorship, where they've gradually relaxed assorted easy-but-grating blanket bans as their technology and techniques have allowed them to get the results they want without as many (upsetting for the user) overt and visible exercises of state power. The most effective controls are the ones you never even notice.
"It's worked for years with every other product..."
Not always. DARE, despite being only incrementally less popular than apple pie and jesus, consistently turns in effectiveness numbers somewhere between 'useless' and 'teaches impressionable children about cool drugs that they should try' whenever some killjoy stops taking its effectiveness on faith and tries studying it.
Just you hope Oracle maintains the batteries properly, especially since an emergency save-to-disk is going to take more than a few minutes...
Obviously, if you are in the market for a machine with 32TB of RAM, your problem is probably important and/or expensive enough to not skimp on (relatively) cheap details like backup power; but, so long as you were willing to stop what you were doing and dump to disk, 32TB wouldn't be too bad.
Magnetics can't do random I/O for shit; but even the cheap consumer crap plays surprisingly nicely with linear reads or writes (high areal density will do that for you).
You would never actually want to shut down such a beast (even aside from whatever the downtime costs you, pure depreciation probably costs more per hour than the team running the thing); but doing a straight linear dump to HDD would be totally doable on some fairly prosaic storage hardware.
On the one hand, we've had a lot of experience with spectroscopy, and on the other we have a rover actually there.
Depending on exactly where in the atmosphere the light used for the spectroscopy data is coming from, they might both be accurate: If you were working by telescope, Earth should show plenty of ozone; but if your ground-level sampling station is turning up any nontrival amount, that means that something is rather wrong...
Were that the case, I have no doubt that all sorts of vexing questions about how such a methane distribution could come to be would come up; but atmospheres do vary by location.
Yeah, Apple (sensibly) didn't overpromise anything; but the fan-press was talking about the thing like it was some fundamental reimagining of the concept of biometrics, which seems to have been what led to the interest in dusting off a mostly-not-news technique, tweaking it slightly, and shooting them down.
Enterprise-focused stuff gets released with fingerprint readers all the time, and nobody cares enough to do a demo because there are no fanboys talking it up.
"So how do you imagine you copy a capacitative image on a photocopier?"
You don't; but a photocopier/laser-printer is a dirt-cheap way of depositing a high precision thermoplastic structure on top of a sheet of transparency plastic(ie. creating a fingerprint mold) at which point you just brush on a layer of the actual approximately-human-capacitance material you are using to make the fake print.
That's all the photocopier does. If you can get away with very flat, low-temperature, molds, laser printing is a precise and cheap way to make them.
Pre-release hype was that Insanely Great Magic Innovation or something used OMG capacitance to magically foil the classic attacks. I don't think that Apple was dumb enough to promise any such thing; but their drooling fans certainly did.
It's a bit much for casual purposes; but it effectively demonstrates that Apple's little toy is just another fingerprint sensor (albeit a more attractive one than the usual little stripe-thing) with no more resistance to an under-a-hundred-bucks, probably a few bucks per print, in quantity, attacks than any of the others.
Still beats no passcode at all against a casual attacker; but it sounds like the CCC technique works just fine with digital reproductions (ie, you don't need the original thumbprint to use as a mold, or develop with cyanoacrylate vapor, or anything like that) so it's fuck up once, have your fingerprint on file for however long it stays roughly the same, which is never terribly encouraging.
Which is really the reminder BB doesn't need right now that their fancy secret sauce layer (while essential back when they were cramming actually-workable email into dumbphone specs, and still arguably superior to other vendors' fancy secret sauce layers), is just another thing to pay a monthly fee for, forever, and occasionally incur outages because of.
In a world where your phone can just talk to the mail/XMPP/whatever server like the real computer that it is, having a fancy extra transmogrification layer isn't necessarily a virtue. There's still a strong argument to be made if you need to integrate a bunch of Android/iOS handsets into a legacy BES system, or if the client adds some of the lockdown knobs that people feel safer being able to twiddle (though, on iOS, Apple tightly controls what knobs 3rd party vendors can touch, so all management systems are more and lessy sucky interfaces on top of the same set of options. Android is much less predictable; but if you demand the right rights at install time you could offer a genuinely differentiated management product); but otherwise it's a much harder sell.
Slashdot Mirror
You don't even have to go that far: It's perfectly possible to think that drug use is actually a bad plan, or even a socially deleterious activity; but also be of the opinion that the DEA is a 'cure' (though, as anybody with functioning senses could probably tell you, Drugs have been winning the war on drugs pretty much continually since it was declared...) worse than the disease.
I have no reason to suspect that some pillheads aren't doing themselves serious harm, or that there aren't even some dangerous ones. However, there is a massive gulf between 'Hmm, the world may be sub-optimal over there.' and 'Clearly something must be done, and the doers must be Given Powers to do it!'. And, while pillheads may be a bad idea, I'm damn well sure that DEA jackboots on a fishing expedition through my medical records is both a bad idea and worse for me than the pillheads are.
While it is always important to keep in mind that some 'crimes' are really just persecution mania gone out of hand, it's also important to remember that even the agreed-upon existence of real dangers is not an unlimited justification for response to them. (In this case, the DEA performs a hybrid function, handling both moralistic witch-hunts for relatively harmless users and dangerously overreaching in their responses to threats both real and imagined. Fine folks.)
If my understanding of history is correct, nothing happened before 1998 or so except World War II and the NES. I'm not sure what precedents you could possibly have in mind that would make this unprecedented idea precedented...
That was the idea: the DEA argues that all medical care is essentially elective. Doctors have no particular ethical obligation to undertake elective procedures, and by their own assertion all medical care that DEA agents receive is elective...
there are lots of doctors writing prescriptions which are then resold on the street. the doctors are in on the scam since they cannot possibly see all these patients.
the DEA is just trying to catch shady doctors
And this is relevant to the DEA's desire to see my medical records why exactly?
Sure, I'm so worried that some pillhead will be buying opiates or amphetamines of standardized purity and potency produced by (somewhat) law-abiding companies according to FDA industrial heigine standards, rather than getting the good shit from biker gangs or mexican cartels or whatever that I'm willing to let the DEA have a rummage through my medical records (which are, of course, totally impossible to infer with nontrivial accuracy from my prescription history).
(As it is, why don't we cut the criminal distribution networks off at the knees by referring addicts straight to the higher-quality product, and accompanying opportunity for medical care and cessation assistance, provided by medical-grade drugs?)
The DEA has become the enemy of the American people and needs to be disbanded, or at least have it's house cleaned.
Arguably, it would be more amusing to apply genetic engineering techniques to construct a virus that splices in cannaboid synthesis mechanisms when it infects and organism. Then release it into their ventilation system.
An entire department full of psychoactive DEA agents whose bodies synthesize Schedule I controlled substances would be the ultimate in zany stoner comedy.
If the DEA argues that medical care is purely voluntary, rather than necessary, and thus 'choosing' it constitutes consent, would it be entirely ethical for medical professionals to refuse 'elective procedures' to all DEA functionaries? After all, the patient himself says that the procedure is totally voluntary, so I don't see why they have any professional or ethical obligation to assist with it, not when they could be treating people with actually urgent problems....
What are his thoughts on the absolute saturation of the 2.4GHz spectrum and the increasing load on the 5GHz spectrum.
The internet of things sounds nice, but the amount of devices pointlessly WiFi enabled and broadcasting in my home is having a very negative effect on the usability of the spectrum for anything of value. Does he have any plan to mitigate this growing issue? Does he care at all about it or is he solely focused on funding and an early exit with a fleeting; 'I'm rich, bitch'?
Obviously, barring a miracle in the ISM band, more stuff chattering isn't going to help; but (some) of these 'internet of things' widgets are forced to confront the problem, albeit because they are too cheap or too power constrained to just shove a full 802.11b/g/n chip in there and scream there little hearts out.
In order to accomodate severely cheap and/or battery powered devices, Contiki provides support for 802.15.4-based networks (through 6LoWPAN), which are both much less resource intensive and rather less chatty than 802.11 devices.
Arguably, the overall effect of 'internet of things' chaff on larger computers trying to use the spectrum probably depends on adoption, with three rough possible trajectories:
1. Apathy: The perceived value of the 'internet of things' is roughly nil, so aside from a few horrid proprietary wireless meter-reader systems and things, field deployments are negligible, and thus so is RF traffic.
2. Partial adoption: This is actually the worst case: Wifi is a terrible mechanism for the purpose; but unlike the dreadful stew of incompatible and often partially or wholly proprietary low-power/low-speed links, it has the distinct virtue of being built into just about all the computing devices you already own, which creates a certain incentive for people building lightbulbs and thermostats and similar stuff to shoehorn it in; because they can't be sure that you'll be able to speak any other wireless protocol unless they provide a dongle (which won't work with your smartphone, and obligates them to be in the 'helping idiots install peripherals' business, which isn't somewhere you want to be). So, multiple-years-on-a-CR2032 type devices won't happen, or will be dongle-to-device; but there will be a whole lot of mains-connected devices abusing a high-throughput, noisy, protocol to dribble tiny amounts of data back to the mothership.
3. Ubiquity: This case is worse in terms of absolute number of devices chattering away; but imagines a sufficient interest and volume of deployment that, say, it becomes expected for home routers and the like to speak some standardized 802.15.4-based protocol, so there are indeed a great many devices; but they aren't forced to speak wifi for compatibility reasons. The ISM band continues to be a mess; but at least devices get to choose a protocol roughly commensurate with their actual throughput requirements.
As a process it is; but as a body-of-information-people-are-currently-applying-that-process-to, it isn't.
Anyone can (and the brighter and more curious flavor of children often do, more or less spontaneously) 'do science' (and they should, it's fun and interesting). If you want to catch up to where the people who do science professionally are, though, you either need to be an alarmingly fast experimenter, or willing to hit the books, possibly for some years.
Mathematics is an even more extreme example of the same general phenomenon: anybody can do math with nothing more than some axioms (which you are allowed to invent, so long as they result in useful or interesting systems) and maybe a supply of scratch paper. There aren't even any 'well, we did do that experiment; but you'll have to either get the funding to go back to Antarctica for 5 years, or just trust us on that' type situations. You don't have to take any of it on faith, (and, again more conveniently than science, there is usually room within the textbook to provide the proof, not provide a citation to the research papers); but none of that qualifies the layman to do anything remotely interesting to mathematics as a discipline without substantial preparation(all of which is available, no secrets, just hit your local library; but don't expect any but the most patient and educationally inclined mathematicians to want to put up with you before that).
How am I supposed to hack your coffeemaker if you don't put it online?
The impression I get from reading the featured article is that "Internet of things" refers to giving each electrical appliance a microcontroller to connect to the Internet so that the appliance's owner can manage it remotely. This has applications in street lighting and traffic signal automation, industrial automation, and smart distribution and metering of electric power. So what's a better buzzword for that?
'The Internet of Things' is basically a polite way of saying "Hey, SCADA is so easy that it should be a consumer product!".
The slashcode itself is pretty creaky; but the conceptual structure beats the hell out of most anything I've seen.
Non-threaded boards are totally hopeless unless the number of comments per topic is tiny (Oh, sure, I want to sort through 30 pages of comments, manually parsing them to see who is quoting what... like hell); but the 'moderation is basically a presentation problem' approach( where you can, fairly easily, see whatever you want, nothing goes down the memory hole; but you can also get a quick 'best of' at +3 or so) beats either unmoderated fora, which are cesspools, or all but the most virtuous and energetic moderators (who aren't easy to find, and tend to be unequal to the tide of slime that any site with real traffic gets).
It's time for scientists to come down from there ivory towers and let the masses participate, rather than treat them as audience.
Any scientists in favor of the paywalled hellholes that are many contemporary journals has something to answer for; but how far do the scientists get to expect the masses to come to them, rather than they to the masses?
Science isn't a Holy Mystery Untouchable By The Unanointed; but it isn't exactly a series of simple, lucid, concepts accessible to the everyman; were it not held in thrall by sinister obscurantists. It is certainly possible to flimflam people with jargon just because you can; but that in no way implies that it is possible for people without (often nontrival) background knowledge to understand or usefully participate in a given subject.
"Everything, from evolution to the origins of climate change, is mistakenly up for grabs again"
And here I was under the impression that everything in science was always up for grabs. This is just the mag trying to silence dissent. I happen to agree with evolution but I have no problem debating it with people who do not. Nor do I believe evolution is settled science, we continue to learn a great deal and there is always a possibility of some groundbreaking new development to come along and rock the whole foundation.
You might want to consider re-weighting the importance of various venues. Internet comment sections are not...exactly... a notorious haven of scientific enlightenment (regardless of topic). The SNR is shit, and it's basically just psuedoanonymous people regurgitating links and copypasta at one another (like some sort of horrible combination of wikipedia and what a decadent late-imperial roman would have considered a good party).
It's perfectly possible for new developments to come along; but the probability that they'll emerge on a message board (rather than, say, during the course of archeological or gene sequencing work) is negligible.
Some people still think that video games are only for kids, regardless of the content of the game. Getting past this idea would help a lot.
Even if people never get a clue, that idea is rapidly aging itself out of existence: People don't obviously 'grow out' of gaming (many cut back since they have other things to do, some do stop entirely; but there appears to be no particular demographic cliff after which gaming plunges into nonexistence); and such gaming landmarks as the NES are old. If you were born when that thing hit US release, you are 28 now. If you were old enough to play it when it hit US release, you could easily be mid 30s to early 40s by now.
Immunity to empirical reality will always be with us; but people for whom gaming has always 'been for kids' are aging out, and people who have kids now are increasingly likely, soon to be overwhelmingly likely, to either be gamers, have been gamers, and/or know peers who are gamers.
From the perspective of the convenience of foreign workers(who don't just VPN back to home office anyway) certainly. From the perspective of the state of the Chinese citizen on the internet, nuance might actually be worse:
Consider the analogy of price discrimination:
If you have to set a single price for a good that you are selling, you will be forced to lose customers on the low end(because they can't afford it), lose money on the high end(because they'd pay ten times as much; but don't have to) or suffer some other sub-optimal tradeoff between these two. If you have a price discrimination mechanism, and can charge different customers different amounts, this problem is reduced (poorer customers can be charged less, down to whatever the minimum profitable price is, wealthier ones can be charged more, until even they say the hell with it). In a hypothetical system of perfect price discrimination, everyone gets exactly the price they are willing to put up with, and your only challenge is discerning that price correctly in order to capture all the gains from trade.
Repression is in certain ways similar: because online repression involves breaking things, it's a nuisance whenever you run into it, so the ideal system of repression (analogous to the ideal system of price discrimination) applies only as much as is needed, where it is needed, to the people who need it, while leaving everyone else free to tweet and look at cat videos and things. Not censoring a free trade zone (where outside ideas are inevitably easy to come by, a substantial percentage of the population are foreigners there on business, and employed by businesses who value continued good relations with your customs and other officials..., or comparatively well off locals involved in business there) is a partial price discrimination strategy. Not perfect; but closer than a blanket level of repression. Why block social networks to people who are going to chat, not in Mandarin, to their friends and family who don't live in China? That just annoys them and doesn't improve your control at all. Why filter the internet access, like some penny-ante dictatorship, of people who can VPN back to HQ anyway? It just makes you look repressive without stopping them. Why lean on people who are just here to make money, and won't develop any stupid ideas about local politics, no matter who runs the show, so long as they are allowed to keep doing that?
Haven't 'free trade zones' always been about the relaxation of certain local restrictions in the interest of attracting commercial activity? And isn't turning a blind eye to the activity of economically useful foreigners (so long as they aren't too tacky about it, and don't start mouthing off about local politics) a downright venerable tradition?
If anything, this looks like another aspect of China's gradual evolution toward a 'repress smarter, not harder' theory of censorship, where they've gradually relaxed assorted easy-but-grating blanket bans as their technology and techniques have allowed them to get the results they want without as many (upsetting for the user) overt and visible exercises of state power. The most effective controls are the ones you never even notice.
"It's worked for years with every other product..."
Not always. DARE, despite being only incrementally less popular than apple pie and jesus, consistently turns in effectiveness numbers somewhere between 'useless' and 'teaches impressionable children about cool drugs that they should try' whenever some killjoy stops taking its effectiveness on faith and tries studying it.
Disgusted with the poor state of Serbia's research output, I will now also scam a Romanian science journal.
Great. Now even scientific activism has been balkanized.
I'm pretty sure that the Balkans have been balkanized more or less forever, by the standards of human history.
Just you hope Oracle maintains the batteries properly, especially since an emergency save-to-disk is going to take more than a few minutes...
Obviously, if you are in the market for a machine with 32TB of RAM, your problem is probably important and/or expensive enough to not skimp on (relatively) cheap details like backup power; but, so long as you were willing to stop what you were doing and dump to disk, 32TB wouldn't be too bad.
Magnetics can't do random I/O for shit; but even the cheap consumer crap plays surprisingly nicely with linear reads or writes (high areal density will do that for you).
You would never actually want to shut down such a beast (even aside from whatever the downtime costs you, pure depreciation probably costs more per hour than the team running the thing); but doing a straight linear dump to HDD would be totally doable on some fairly prosaic storage hardware.
On the one hand, we've had a lot of experience with spectroscopy, and on the other we have a rover actually there.
Depending on exactly where in the atmosphere the light used for the spectroscopy data is coming from, they might both be accurate: If you were working by telescope, Earth should show plenty of ozone; but if your ground-level sampling station is turning up any nontrival amount, that means that something is rather wrong...
Were that the case, I have no doubt that all sorts of vexing questions about how such a methane distribution could come to be would come up; but atmospheres do vary by location.
Yeah, Apple (sensibly) didn't overpromise anything; but the fan-press was talking about the thing like it was some fundamental reimagining of the concept of biometrics, which seems to have been what led to the interest in dusting off a mostly-not-news technique, tweaking it slightly, and shooting them down.
Enterprise-focused stuff gets released with fingerprint readers all the time, and nobody cares enough to do a demo because there are no fanboys talking it up.
"So how do you imagine you copy a capacitative image on a photocopier?"
You don't; but a photocopier/laser-printer is a dirt-cheap way of depositing a high precision thermoplastic structure on top of a sheet of transparency plastic(ie. creating a fingerprint mold) at which point you just brush on a layer of the actual approximately-human-capacitance material you are using to make the fake print.
That's all the photocopier does. If you can get away with very flat, low-temperature, molds, laser printing is a precise and cheap way to make them.
Pre-release hype was that Insanely Great Magic Innovation or something used OMG capacitance to magically foil the classic attacks. I don't think that Apple was dumb enough to promise any such thing; but their drooling fans certainly did.
It's a bit much for casual purposes; but it effectively demonstrates that Apple's little toy is just another fingerprint sensor (albeit a more attractive one than the usual little stripe-thing) with no more resistance to an under-a-hundred-bucks, probably a few bucks per print, in quantity, attacks than any of the others.
Still beats no passcode at all against a casual attacker; but it sounds like the CCC technique works just fine with digital reproductions (ie, you don't need the original thumbprint to use as a mold, or develop with cyanoacrylate vapor, or anything like that) so it's fuck up once, have your fingerprint on file for however long it stays roughly the same, which is never terribly encouraging.
Which is really the reminder BB doesn't need right now that their fancy secret sauce layer (while essential back when they were cramming actually-workable email into dumbphone specs, and still arguably superior to other vendors' fancy secret sauce layers), is just another thing to pay a monthly fee for, forever, and occasionally incur outages because of.
In a world where your phone can just talk to the mail/XMPP/whatever server like the real computer that it is, having a fancy extra transmogrification layer isn't necessarily a virtue. There's still a strong argument to be made if you need to integrate a bunch of Android/iOS handsets into a legacy BES system, or if the client adds some of the lockdown knobs that people feel safer being able to twiddle (though, on iOS, Apple tightly controls what knobs 3rd party vendors can touch, so all management systems are more and lessy sucky interfaces on top of the same set of options. Android is much less predictable; but if you demand the right rights at install time you could offer a genuinely differentiated management product); but otherwise it's a much harder sell.