Oh, and 'leave not one stone upon another' and 'salt the ashes so nothing will ever grow again', did I forget those? Probably best to mount their heads on spikes as a warning to others, as well.
In that case; I propose 'purge them with fire and sword' as the minimum appropriate response.
"Receive FM Radio" is a task for which you'd need a damn good reason to even request network access at all; much less have a credible excuse to spatter ads all over the place.
If the FM receiver hardware exists, making it available is still good; but an FM receiver is essentially just an audio input that needs to support being fed a target frequency. I hope whoever wrote the firmware for that got paid; but even if you buy into the 'ad-supported' model of application distribution, there's just not enough on the application side to justify the ongoing nuisance and intrusion.
Given that psychostimulants are typically prescribed for enhanced focus(and are banned in 'e-sports' specifically because they are performance enhancing); you'd think that a sane employer would be more likely to tacitly encourage use, rather than flipping out about it.
You'd probably want to avoid hardcore methheads in the office(not that you necessarily need drug tests to notice those); but ADHD-prescription doses of methylphenidate or amphetamines are classic performance enhancers for cognitively demanding tasks.
My contention is not that the ISS has done no science; just that it's done an awfully mediocre amount of science for its price. Yes, they haven't wasted all the time they've spent up there; but for something that ranks as one of the most expensive research devices ever constructed, the ISS' list of accomplishments is kind of thin. I'm all for research funding; but I'm also all for spending it on the projects that deliver more science for your dollar. $100 billion worth of space station hasn't done a terribly encouraging job.
I certainly don't doubt that FM broadcasters are...looking kindly and charitably... on this oh-so-grassroots campaign(and possibly doing some direct assisting); but it seems like a situation where it isn't an either/or: As a handset owner I'm clearly better off if the FM tuner I already have is decrippled(even if I don't end up using it, I've already paid whatever pittance it costs to implement FM reception with modern hardware, so I'm no worse off for actually having the option to use it; and if I do feel like using it I'm obviously better off); and FM broadcasters are certainly in a much better position if they are a roughly equal option, relative to streaming services, when I pick up my phone and choose an audio player application to use. Merely being present won't save them if they suck; but being able to tune in as easily as I can start whatever streaming app makes me a lot more likely to bother than needing a separate radio to do so.
There are some situation where the lobbying is an ugly business of two or more industries fighting over the right to screw the customer; but this seems like a case where, even if the free-our-phones side is largely a shill for broadcasters, it's still the shill acting in the interests of users.
Now, if they were pushing to make FM support legally mandatory (probably for some BS 'safety' reason) or playing the support-local-culture card to demand that the FM tuner app be given a suitably prominent and impossible-to-delete position in order to save Canadianness from the internet, or similar nonsense, that would be a serious problem; but if it just so happens that a nontrivially powerful industry pressure group also wants your phone's firmware to suck less? That sounds like a bonus.
Well, um, they just produced some promotional fluff for snapchat... And before that there was that astronaut who did a David Bowie cover and some youtube videos: In Space!
The whole describing-distance-traveled-in-round-trips-to-mars strategy gets much more pathetic when you realize that all that glorious travel is occurring in an orbit so low it barely clears the atmosphere; rather than actually going anywhere interesting. br.
If we just want to mash numbers together; it's be about as meaningful to add up the distance covered by American commuters over the last decade and describe that in terms of the most appropriate interplanetary voyage.
Most of the driver-related stuff is in modules by the time it makes it to being installed on your system; but those drivers that are developed in cooperation with the rest of the kernel development process are referred to as 'in-kernel'. There are devices for which the drivers are handled out-of-kernel; but that's usually a world of pain.
I suspect that part of the concern is that 7zip is sometimes found in program installers, which typically do run with elevated permissions. Those are also the places where obsolete versions are probably going to remain embedded forever unless the vendor cares atypically much about fixing them.
It'll be harder to trick an installer to chew on a suitably malformed file, compared to a user just using 7zip; but if you can manage it, you get a nice, handy, elevated context.
I wonder how much of this is about attempting to 'break into the Chinese market' and how much of it is simply the fact that the time to get in 'on the ground floor' with Uber is long past, so Apple couldn't realistically expect nearly as much growth or control-over-future-direction-of-the-company if they'd made an equivalent purchase in Uber or Lyft? Either of those two might(or might not, I don't know and it isn't terribly relevant to this post) still be a perfectly viable buy if one is merely looking to make an adequate return on investment; but presumably Apple wants either some sort of strategic gain or the possibility of substantial return on investment if the bet pays off if they are actively buying a large stake in a specific company.
After all, Apple's "cash" assets aren't really just sitting in a Scrooge McDuck money vault somewhere, at that size "cash" means "reasonably conservative and liquid investments that can be cashed out as needed", so Apple's default investment strategy for their spare cash is, already, 'aim for reasonable returns', so 'aim for reasonable returns; but with a massive decrease in portfolio diversity!' would be an idiotic plan.
I'd be curious to know(I'm not doing doubt-in-the-form-of-a-question, I honestly don't know) how much freight goes by truck rather than by rail because of deficiencies in the rail network; and how much does because the itinerary or the cargo don't mesh well with rail transport(eg. a truck doing a long haul on the highway is probably less efficient than putting the same container on the train track running the same route; but the truck can get off the highway and drive all the way to the loading dock barring any especially low bridges or strict regulations on vehicle size in certain neighborhoods; trucks are also fairly 'granular' in that you can get one sent out for basically any cargo too large for a van, assuming you are willing to pay for mileage on a somewhat underfilled vehicle; while trains offer comparatively static times and routes; but enormous capacity).
Identifying routes where no better reason than our 'highways aren't socialist infrastructure spending but railways are!' approach is the cause of a lot of unnecessary trucking seems like an obvious win; but dealing with the cases where the goods go by road because it's substantially cheaper or faster to go from loading dock to loading dock seems like a trickier problem.
That is, though, one thing that might be a virtue about passenger-focused development efforts: passengers tend to demand reasonably convenient terminal locations, schedules, frequent service, etc. which are all virtues that could also be attractive to cargo uses that are too small(per load, we certainly run zillions of them every year) or time sensitive or the like to want to deal with conventional freight trains.
Given the cost of a giant hamster tube pumped down to low pressure, 'hyperloop' cargo would probably be closer to air freight than train freight in price; but assuming that the hyperloop designers aren't complete idiots, they could presumably make switching a given car between passengers and freight relatively quick and seamless based on demand(whether that's by swapping out a passenger car for a freight car, or by having the passenger-amenities module be a freight container that gets loaded into one of the all-cars-are-freight-cars hyperloop cars if sufficient passengers are present to justify it), which would allow the same sort of high speed and flexibility that air freight offers.
Not an obvious choice for shipping 10 zillion tons of coal or iron ore or what have you; but the greater flexibility might make it viable for cargo that doesn't fit as well with conventional freight rail.
Isn't the nigh-omnipotent master-control-computer kind of a sci-fi staple? A government of zero; but one that effectively inhabits every automated system in the society? Those stories are usually dystopias. Technology also, arguably, makes it much easier to govern without at least the tacit consent of a sufficient percentage of the population: It's often an ugly surprise just what your neighbors are happy to assist in doing; and if the secret police are competent one loyalist can definitely repress multiple dissidents; so it's hardly an absolute bulwark against tyranny; but so long as you need thugs to wear your jackboots even the most tyrannical regimes face a de-facto popularity test because below a certain level they'll simply lack manpower or have only the (not very efficient and somewhat risky) assistance-compelled-at-gunpoint. The fewer people it takes to run a state, the fewer people you need to like you at least enough to help you run your state.
Aside from the fact that such fancy techniques are only possible if you have a lot of tech to throw at the problem; the government 'size' and the tech level seem to be largely unrelated(with the possible exception of certain technologies having a strong bias toward 'bigger government': things like infrastructure, where establishing a competitive marketplace is hard, tend to be treated as state matters, albeit possibly ones that the state should only handle the billing for and hire contractors to actually build; and new technologies make possible more flavors of infrastructure. Paved roads, sewers, piped water, telephone lines, power, fiber, assembler-nanite-pump?).
He's a "libertarian" in the weak sense that he combines an enthusiasm for 'seasteading' and similar probably-lost-causes with a conventional dislike of paying taxes; but that's not saying much.
There seems to be a fundamental misconception behind this story: namely that 'big' refers to number of employees; rather than size of role.
It's obvious to the point of trivial that certain technological advances will reduce the number of people required to do a given job; but that doesn't change whether or not the job is considered to be within the state's mandate or whether it is a private sector matter.
That's what size-of-government fights are really about(sure, there's some skirmishing about shrinking or expanding specific workforces to either save money or address a perceived deficiency in service): "What should the government do? What should it not do? What is acceptable to contract out? What is best handled internally?"
Given that technology has tended to result in labor savings, I'd certainly expect a lower headcount in government in the future; but that's irrelevant to whether it is 'big' or not. Running a welfare state, say, would probably be more efficient if you could just have a single AI do it; but it'd be just as much a 'big government' proposal, just one with fewer people pushing paper around.
It's true that there is minimal advantage to 64-bit Windows on a 1-2GB system(it might even be slightly worse since 64-bit binaries are a little larger); but it is a bit of a dealbreaker if the program you are trying to run is no longer provided in 32-bit form, which chipschap said was happening with Chrome at some point in the relatively near future.
We aren't yet at the point where many(if any) programs you'd actually want to try to run on an Atom with 2GB or less of RAM are 64-bit only; but it is unlikely to become less common as time goes on.
Out of curiosity, does anyone know how much(or how little) electric vehicles are able to take advantage of 'regenerative braking' and/or the ability of electric motors to switch between forward and reverse extremely quickly in order to reduce the use of brake pads?
I'd assume that, for regulatory reasons if nothing else, there's just no way that a vehicle without reasonably conventional brakes is going to get approved for highway use; but, in practice, do hybrid or fully electric systems actually end up using their brake pads to slow down very often, or are they typically able to partially or wholly handle the matter within the motor?
I wouldn't necessarily want to rely on it against a radar-guided missile; but an IR and/or machine-vision guided missile will almost certainly not have its homing capabilities improved by a laser strike. Scoring an actual kill would take substantially more energy; but it should be substantially less dangerous once flying blind.
An opaque cockpit will save your eyes in the event of a laser strike; but unless we make some fundamental breakthroughs in ultra-high-dynamic-range cameras; you'll still probably end up flying blind if the opponent can hit the cameras that are supposed to be providing your super-advanced augmented reality feed.
They'll probably disrupt more than communication: It's obviously impolite to mention this, much less suggest that it's a feature rather than a tragic side-effect of trying to score a good, honest, shooting-down of an opposition aircraft; but a laser powerful enough to be useful against an airframe at nontrivial distance is definitely in the 'do not look into with remaining eye' category. At great distances, it will merely be dazzling(if in the visible band), since being illuminated will expose every tiny scratch and imperfection in the cockpit windows; and closer in it'll definitely be powerful enough to cook your retinas well before it reaches the power levels needed to cut through aircraft materials.
The Protocol on Blinding Laser Weapons forbids such weapons when designed for that purpose; but "Blinding as an incidental or collateral effect of the legitimate military employment of laser systems, including laser systems used against optical equipment, is not covered by the prohibition of this protocol." so Team Legal shouldn't have too much trouble justifying anything unpleasant that happens.
I'd imagine that, while the US is among the relatively few capable of miniaturizing a laser powerful enough to actually cause aircraft damage on a fighter plane, just about anyone operating aerial surveillance aircraft should be nervous about the prospect of high powered lasers as well: on the ground the challenges of portability and minaturization are lower; and when you've got a fancy lens system specifically designed to gather light and focus it on a delicate chunk of silicon sensor, it takes good aim; but not a terribly dramatic amount of power, to blind the camera.
I can understand the desire to drop 32-bit support(aside from reducing the amount of work they need to do, browsers are one piece of software that gets a real hammering from every piece of malice out there, and things like ASLR work better when you have a much larger address space); but it does seem pretty optimistic on their part.
On the Wintel side, a lot of the cheapie Atom-based systems, even pretty new ones with 64-bit CPUs, shipped with 32-bit UEFI until quite recently(some still might, if so the OEMs need a brutal beating); so they will never, ever, support 64-bit Windows. Quite a few Win8/8.1 devices are in this boat and even some that shipped with Win10.
On Google's own 'ChromeOS', all the Samsung Exynos 5-based devices are 32-bit only(the oldest of those are late 2012; but the most recent was introduced in 2014); as are the RK3288 cheapies, which all came out in 2015 at various times. Terminating support for hardware released less than a year ago seems like a bit of a dick move. All the intel-based Chromebooks appear to be 64-bit, though I don't know if any were crippled by lousy firmware.
On Android, of course, 32-bit is the rule with only the newer models even based on SoCs that support 64 bit operation, and more than a few of those shipping with 32-bit firmware.
It's been some time since a desktop limited to 32-bit operation showed up; but that's not as big a slice of the market as it used to be.
They aren't dropping 32-bit x86, just 486/586-level CPUs. AMD's K5 and K6, Intel's original Pentium and the MMX version; plus a few of the oddballs you don't hear much about these days, SiS, Cyrix, IDT Winchip, and VIA(C3, I don't know if they updated their newer parts).
Probably not zero impact; but those are some ancient devices; and Debian Stable will still support them until either 2018 or 2020 depending on whether they make it into LTS or not.
It's particularly weird given how genuinely common some fairly unpleasant things are. Population-wide, an American has a ~40% chance of developing some flavor of cancer at some point in their life. And you want to worry about ISIS?
At least 'cyber attacks' are(in their mild form) actually pretty plausible, since low-level account hackery and financially motivated crime happen more or less continually; but people seem to have a bizarre fixation on mediagenic risks that are absurdly tiny compared to the ones that will be much more likely to kill them, make them suffer, drive them to bankruptcy, etc.
If you are looking to sell financial services more or less everything on that list is a virtue. Volatility keeps boring 'buy and hold' investors away and transaction volumes high; ease of loss encourages the users to leave actually handling the stuff to you, in exchange for some IOUs on their accounts; and utililty for...regulatory arbitrage...is of self-evident value.
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Oh, and 'leave not one stone upon another' and 'salt the ashes so nothing will ever grow again', did I forget those? Probably best to mount their heads on spikes as a warning to others, as well.
In that case; I propose 'purge them with fire and sword' as the minimum appropriate response.
"Receive FM Radio" is a task for which you'd need a damn good reason to even request network access at all; much less have a credible excuse to spatter ads all over the place.
If the FM receiver hardware exists, making it available is still good; but an FM receiver is essentially just an audio input that needs to support being fed a target frequency. I hope whoever wrote the firmware for that got paid; but even if you buy into the 'ad-supported' model of application distribution, there's just not enough on the application side to justify the ongoing nuisance and intrusion.
Given that psychostimulants are typically prescribed for enhanced focus(and are banned in 'e-sports' specifically because they are performance enhancing); you'd think that a sane employer would be more likely to tacitly encourage use, rather than flipping out about it.
You'd probably want to avoid hardcore methheads in the office(not that you necessarily need drug tests to notice those); but ADHD-prescription doses of methylphenidate or amphetamines are classic performance enhancers for cognitively demanding tasks.
My contention is not that the ISS has done no science; just that it's done an awfully mediocre amount of science for its price. Yes, they haven't wasted all the time they've spent up there; but for something that ranks as one of the most expensive research devices ever constructed, the ISS' list of accomplishments is kind of thin. I'm all for research funding; but I'm also all for spending it on the projects that deliver more science for your dollar. $100 billion worth of space station hasn't done a terribly encouraging job.
I certainly don't doubt that FM broadcasters are...looking kindly and charitably... on this oh-so-grassroots campaign(and possibly doing some direct assisting); but it seems like a situation where it isn't an either/or: As a handset owner I'm clearly better off if the FM tuner I already have is decrippled(even if I don't end up using it, I've already paid whatever pittance it costs to implement FM reception with modern hardware, so I'm no worse off for actually having the option to use it; and if I do feel like using it I'm obviously better off); and FM broadcasters are certainly in a much better position if they are a roughly equal option, relative to streaming services, when I pick up my phone and choose an audio player application to use. Merely being present won't save them if they suck; but being able to tune in as easily as I can start whatever streaming app makes me a lot more likely to bother than needing a separate radio to do so.
There are some situation where the lobbying is an ugly business of two or more industries fighting over the right to screw the customer; but this seems like a case where, even if the free-our-phones side is largely a shill for broadcasters, it's still the shill acting in the interests of users.
Now, if they were pushing to make FM support legally mandatory (probably for some BS 'safety' reason) or playing the support-local-culture card to demand that the FM tuner app be given a suitably prominent and impossible-to-delete position in order to save Canadianness from the internet, or similar nonsense, that would be a serious problem; but if it just so happens that a nontrivially powerful industry pressure group also wants your phone's firmware to suck less? That sounds like a bonus.
Well, um, they just produced some promotional fluff for snapchat... And before that there was that astronaut who did a David Bowie cover and some youtube videos: In Space!
Clearly a worthy investment.
The whole describing-distance-traveled-in-round-trips-to-mars strategy gets much more pathetic when you realize that all that glorious travel is occurring in an orbit so low it barely clears the atmosphere; rather than actually going anywhere interesting.
br. If we just want to mash numbers together; it's be about as meaningful to add up the distance covered by American commuters over the last decade and describe that in terms of the most appropriate interplanetary voyage.
Most of the driver-related stuff is in modules by the time it makes it to being installed on your system; but those drivers that are developed in cooperation with the rest of the kernel development process are referred to as 'in-kernel'. There are devices for which the drivers are handled out-of-kernel; but that's usually a world of pain.
I suspect that part of the concern is that 7zip is sometimes found in program installers, which typically do run with elevated permissions. Those are also the places where obsolete versions are probably going to remain embedded forever unless the vendor cares atypically much about fixing them.
It'll be harder to trick an installer to chew on a suitably malformed file, compared to a user just using 7zip; but if you can manage it, you get a nice, handy, elevated context.
I wonder how much of this is about attempting to 'break into the Chinese market' and how much of it is simply the fact that the time to get in 'on the ground floor' with Uber is long past, so Apple couldn't realistically expect nearly as much growth or control-over-future-direction-of-the-company if they'd made an equivalent purchase in Uber or Lyft? Either of those two might(or might not, I don't know and it isn't terribly relevant to this post) still be a perfectly viable buy if one is merely looking to make an adequate return on investment; but presumably Apple wants either some sort of strategic gain or the possibility of substantial return on investment if the bet pays off if they are actively buying a large stake in a specific company.
After all, Apple's "cash" assets aren't really just sitting in a Scrooge McDuck money vault somewhere, at that size "cash" means "reasonably conservative and liquid investments that can be cashed out as needed", so Apple's default investment strategy for their spare cash is, already, 'aim for reasonable returns', so 'aim for reasonable returns; but with a massive decrease in portfolio diversity!' would be an idiotic plan.
I'd be curious to know(I'm not doing doubt-in-the-form-of-a-question, I honestly don't know) how much freight goes by truck rather than by rail because of deficiencies in the rail network; and how much does because the itinerary or the cargo don't mesh well with rail transport(eg. a truck doing a long haul on the highway is probably less efficient than putting the same container on the train track running the same route; but the truck can get off the highway and drive all the way to the loading dock barring any especially low bridges or strict regulations on vehicle size in certain neighborhoods; trucks are also fairly 'granular' in that you can get one sent out for basically any cargo too large for a van, assuming you are willing to pay for mileage on a somewhat underfilled vehicle; while trains offer comparatively static times and routes; but enormous capacity).
Identifying routes where no better reason than our 'highways aren't socialist infrastructure spending but railways are!' approach is the cause of a lot of unnecessary trucking seems like an obvious win; but dealing with the cases where the goods go by road because it's substantially cheaper or faster to go from loading dock to loading dock seems like a trickier problem.
That is, though, one thing that might be a virtue about passenger-focused development efforts: passengers tend to demand reasonably convenient terminal locations, schedules, frequent service, etc. which are all virtues that could also be attractive to cargo uses that are too small(per load, we certainly run zillions of them every year) or time sensitive or the like to want to deal with conventional freight trains.
Given the cost of a giant hamster tube pumped down to low pressure, 'hyperloop' cargo would probably be closer to air freight than train freight in price; but assuming that the hyperloop designers aren't complete idiots, they could presumably make switching a given car between passengers and freight relatively quick and seamless based on demand(whether that's by swapping out a passenger car for a freight car, or by having the passenger-amenities module be a freight container that gets loaded into one of the all-cars-are-freight-cars hyperloop cars if sufficient passengers are present to justify it), which would allow the same sort of high speed and flexibility that air freight offers.
Not an obvious choice for shipping 10 zillion tons of coal or iron ore or what have you; but the greater flexibility might make it viable for cargo that doesn't fit as well with conventional freight rail.
Isn't the nigh-omnipotent master-control-computer kind of a sci-fi staple? A government of zero; but one that effectively inhabits every automated system in the society? Those stories are usually dystopias. Technology also, arguably, makes it much easier to govern without at least the tacit consent of a sufficient percentage of the population: It's often an ugly surprise just what your neighbors are happy to assist in doing; and if the secret police are competent one loyalist can definitely repress multiple dissidents; so it's hardly an absolute bulwark against tyranny; but so long as you need thugs to wear your jackboots even the most tyrannical regimes face a de-facto popularity test because below a certain level they'll simply lack manpower or have only the (not very efficient and somewhat risky) assistance-compelled-at-gunpoint. The fewer people it takes to run a state, the fewer people you need to like you at least enough to help you run your state.
Aside from the fact that such fancy techniques are only possible if you have a lot of tech to throw at the problem; the government 'size' and the tech level seem to be largely unrelated(with the possible exception of certain technologies having a strong bias toward 'bigger government': things like infrastructure, where establishing a competitive marketplace is hard, tend to be treated as state matters, albeit possibly ones that the state should only handle the billing for and hire contractors to actually build; and new technologies make possible more flavors of infrastructure. Paved roads, sewers, piped water, telephone lines, power, fiber, assembler-nanite-pump?).
He's a "libertarian" in the weak sense that he combines an enthusiasm for 'seasteading' and similar probably-lost-causes with a conventional dislike of paying taxes; but that's not saying much.
There seems to be a fundamental misconception behind this story: namely that 'big' refers to number of employees; rather than size of role.
It's obvious to the point of trivial that certain technological advances will reduce the number of people required to do a given job; but that doesn't change whether or not the job is considered to be within the state's mandate or whether it is a private sector matter.
That's what size-of-government fights are really about(sure, there's some skirmishing about shrinking or expanding specific workforces to either save money or address a perceived deficiency in service): "What should the government do? What should it not do? What is acceptable to contract out? What is best handled internally?"
Given that technology has tended to result in labor savings, I'd certainly expect a lower headcount in government in the future; but that's irrelevant to whether it is 'big' or not. Running a welfare state, say, would probably be more efficient if you could just have a single AI do it; but it'd be just as much a 'big government' proposal, just one with fewer people pushing paper around.
It's true that there is minimal advantage to 64-bit Windows on a 1-2GB system(it might even be slightly worse since 64-bit binaries are a little larger); but it is a bit of a dealbreaker if the program you are trying to run is no longer provided in 32-bit form, which chipschap said was happening with Chrome at some point in the relatively near future.
We aren't yet at the point where many(if any) programs you'd actually want to try to run on an Atom with 2GB or less of RAM are 64-bit only; but it is unlikely to become less common as time goes on.
Out of curiosity, does anyone know how much(or how little) electric vehicles are able to take advantage of 'regenerative braking' and/or the ability of electric motors to switch between forward and reverse extremely quickly in order to reduce the use of brake pads?
I'd assume that, for regulatory reasons if nothing else, there's just no way that a vehicle without reasonably conventional brakes is going to get approved for highway use; but, in practice, do hybrid or fully electric systems actually end up using their brake pads to slow down very often, or are they typically able to partially or wholly handle the matter within the motor?
I wouldn't necessarily want to rely on it against a radar-guided missile; but an IR and/or machine-vision guided missile will almost certainly not have its homing capabilities improved by a laser strike. Scoring an actual kill would take substantially more energy; but it should be substantially less dangerous once flying blind.
An opaque cockpit will save your eyes in the event of a laser strike; but unless we make some fundamental breakthroughs in ultra-high-dynamic-range cameras; you'll still probably end up flying blind if the opponent can hit the cameras that are supposed to be providing your super-advanced augmented reality feed.
They'll probably disrupt more than communication: It's obviously impolite to mention this, much less suggest that it's a feature rather than a tragic side-effect of trying to score a good, honest, shooting-down of an opposition aircraft; but a laser powerful enough to be useful against an airframe at nontrivial distance is definitely in the 'do not look into with remaining eye' category. At great distances, it will merely be dazzling(if in the visible band), since being illuminated will expose every tiny scratch and imperfection in the cockpit windows; and closer in it'll definitely be powerful enough to cook your retinas well before it reaches the power levels needed to cut through aircraft materials.
The Protocol on Blinding Laser Weapons forbids such weapons when designed for that purpose; but "Blinding as an incidental or collateral effect of the legitimate military employment of laser systems, including laser systems used against optical equipment, is not covered by the prohibition of this protocol." so Team Legal shouldn't have too much trouble justifying anything unpleasant that happens.
I'd imagine that, while the US is among the relatively few capable of miniaturizing a laser powerful enough to actually cause aircraft damage on a fighter plane, just about anyone operating aerial surveillance aircraft should be nervous about the prospect of high powered lasers as well: on the ground the challenges of portability and minaturization are lower; and when you've got a fancy lens system specifically designed to gather light and focus it on a delicate chunk of silicon sensor, it takes good aim; but not a terribly dramatic amount of power, to blind the camera.
I can understand the desire to drop 32-bit support(aside from reducing the amount of work they need to do, browsers are one piece of software that gets a real hammering from every piece of malice out there, and things like ASLR work better when you have a much larger address space); but it does seem pretty optimistic on their part.
On the Wintel side, a lot of the cheapie Atom-based systems, even pretty new ones with 64-bit CPUs, shipped with 32-bit UEFI until quite recently(some still might, if so the OEMs need a brutal beating); so they will never, ever, support 64-bit Windows. Quite a few Win8/8.1 devices are in this boat and even some that shipped with Win10.
On Google's own 'ChromeOS', all the Samsung Exynos 5-based devices are 32-bit only(the oldest of those are late 2012; but the most recent was introduced in 2014); as are the RK3288 cheapies, which all came out in 2015 at various times. Terminating support for hardware released less than a year ago seems like a bit of a dick move. All the intel-based Chromebooks appear to be 64-bit, though I don't know if any were crippled by lousy firmware.
On Android, of course, 32-bit is the rule with only the newer models even based on SoCs that support 64 bit operation, and more than a few of those shipping with 32-bit firmware.
It's been some time since a desktop limited to 32-bit operation showed up; but that's not as big a slice of the market as it used to be.
They aren't dropping 32-bit x86, just 486/586-level CPUs. AMD's K5 and K6, Intel's original Pentium and the MMX version; plus a few of the oddballs you don't hear much about these days, SiS, Cyrix, IDT Winchip, and VIA(C3, I don't know if they updated their newer parts).
Probably not zero impact; but those are some ancient devices; and Debian Stable will still support them until either 2018 or 2020 depending on whether they make it into LTS or not.
It's particularly weird given how genuinely common some fairly unpleasant things are. Population-wide, an American has a ~40% chance of developing some flavor of cancer at some point in their life. And you want to worry about ISIS?
At least 'cyber attacks' are(in their mild form) actually pretty plausible, since low-level account hackery and financially motivated crime happen more or less continually; but people seem to have a bizarre fixation on mediagenic risks that are absurdly tiny compared to the ones that will be much more likely to kill them, make them suffer, drive them to bankruptcy, etc.
When all you have is military grade signals intelligence gear; everything looks like a nail, right?
Well, I'd trust the dog far more than I'd trust the Winklevoss twins, so that's a good start.
If you are looking to sell financial services more or less everything on that list is a virtue. Volatility keeps boring 'buy and hold' investors away and transaction volumes high; ease of loss encourages the users to leave actually handling the stuff to you, in exchange for some IOUs on their accounts; and utililty for...regulatory arbitrage...is of self-evident value.