Does anybody know what language(s) are used for the "Dead Hand" second-strike control system that the Russians were working on during the Cold War? Personally, I'd nominate them as the programming languages that will outlive us all...
You do realize that, while Hypertransport vs. FSB was a hilariously lopsided contest(and one of the reasons that even the most Intel-friendly OEMs were forced to start shipping Opteron servers in the multi-socket segement), all remotely recent Intel silicon(except Atom, which is off marching very slowly in its own direction) use QPI and integrated memory controllers? It took them long enough; but recent AMD and recent Intel CPUs again have substantially the same layout in terms of interface bandwidth and placement of system RAM.
Oh look, it's another retired general bitching about how much better things were when he led the army. File this one under W for 'Wozniak'.
The Woz probably isn't the best comparison: In this rant, the guy who kicked off MS' Xbox strategy is complaining about how MS is fucking up Xbox strategy. In the case of Wozniak, Apple's original hardware-hacker-geek occasionally laments the fact that a company that bears almost no resemblance to the "Apple" of his era except the name now produces products that don't even pretend to be interested in the likes of him.
Next step would be a CPU class based licensing of Windows.
Not to the degree that the old-school enterprise players (IBM and Oracle, say) do it; but Windows licensing has already been spec based for quite some time now. As far back as NT 4.0, there was 'server' and 'enterprise server'(if you wanted 3GB of RAM per-process and an 8 CPU SMP license).
2000 brought 'server', 'advanced server', and 'datacenter server' (4CPU), (8CPU, 8GB RAM w/PAE), and (32CPU, 32GB RAM w/PAE) respectively.
Oh, you wouldn't literally do it that way, you'd work with the OEM to do a re-badge with your preferred changes(just as the Nexus itself does, though on a much larger scale). My intention was just to note that, given the profit margins that would allow you to do something as inefficient as 'purchase-at-retail-and-tear-up', you really should be able to OEM a top-end device to wrap in bling.
Given the existence of options markets, you could probably assign a market value to parking the thing in some convenient orbit for later use... It wouldn't necessarily be a terribly high market value; but, if you could find an orbit stable enough, the value of an option to exploit some slice of the asteroid at your leisure over the next several decades probably wouldn't be zero...
Without a good parking orbit, and some rather sci-fi hardware already in place to park it, the whole issue is moot, of course.
If their motives were so pure, they might have considered passing a law to deal with kiddy porn and child rape(which would now be in effect) rather than tying action on that issue to successfully ramming through a variety of much more dangerous and ill-considered changes(because of which they now don't have any progress on the issue).
Tackling serious issues is a good thing; but tying them to getting your way on much more controversial(or simply frivolous) issues is about as overt a sign of bad faith as you can exhibit...
Nothing particularly requires that 'performance art' only include things that are legal and/or unobjectionable. However, punishing people for doing things that are illegal for other reasons during the course of producing 'art' is not generally considered to be a restriction on freedom of speech, any more than the illegality of sacrificing babies to satan is considered an infringement on religious freedom...
There are some edge cases that get tricky(mostly on the side of people totally incidentally banning things that are required for speech or religions they don't like); but it isn't a terribly difficult conceptual distinction. Banning a speech act as such is a clear infringement of speech rights; but that doesn't confer any immunity from any other relevant laws on the speaker, should their speech involve breaching them.
We have 'zero proof' that building legal and technical mechanisms suitable for the suppression of a given flavor of content leads to the use of those mechanisms being used for the suppression of other flavors, sometimes including your 'actual speech' category? Srsly?
Mission creep is a well known phenomenon, and it's both easily historically observable that people's descriptions of political and social commentary they don't like frequently ends up tinged with the same vocabulary of condemnation as that used for porn('that's obscene' actually means that that includes some sordid fucking surprisingly infrequently).
On the architectural side, technical and legal mechanisms for efficient content takedowns are virtually content-agnostic. Blacklists, wordlist filters, DMCA takedown forms, any of those can be trivially re-targeted just by dropping some new parameters in to the configuration.
The study certainly does suggest that mice(and some mouse findings) are much more troublesome than previously suspected. On the plus side, the methods that they used to establish that there was a real problem with mice(the examination of gene expression under the various conditions) seem like they might also be broadly applicable for examining the problem of what is and isn't a good model organism for a given problem...
Obviously, in an ideal world further research would confirm that you are on the right track and everything is just wonderful; but by our non-ideal world standards, a paper that hints at how animal models may be more accurately chosen or excluded for given lines of research seems like it could be quite handy.
Aren't there some quotas for printed pages? If there are many good candidates, what do they do with the leftovers? Those don't necessarily have to be bad papers.
My understanding is that researchers shop them around, and that the large number of available journals, some more prestigious than others, and some more narrowly focused than others, is supposed to handle that(there has been some concern, especially regarding papers with negative results, that it may not do so optimally in some respects). If a paper is rejected from the very high prestige, relatively broad journals, it can work down the list toward journals more narrowly focused on its exact topic, and/or work down the list to less selective journals(or other selective journals where their luck is better).
So, any word on how we managed to get from 'researchers identify class of conditions for which mice are an unexpectedly lousy model' to 'drug testing in mice may be a waste of time'?
Being rejected by Science and Nature might also be indicative of being bad science. Not reading the report yet, the options seem to be intellectual dishonesty from some of the most respected sources of science, or the mice findings are fundamentally flawed. On the outset, I think being rejected by big names in science is usually pretty telling.
PNAS isn't exactly some chickenshit vanity press...
That's the part I don't understand: it makes sense that 'luxury' electronics can't actually afford to be much better than much more modestly priced consumer gear; but it is quite mysterious why they are actively worse when the same people who OEM the good stuff would be more than happy to sell you the same guts that you can then cover with artisinal hand-tanned tiger foreskin leather or gold-encrusted ivory or whatever.
Oh, you proles will just never understand what quality really means. In particular, the sapphire-coated screen is much less likely to scratch when your butler or nubile trophy wife is preparing a line of coke for you.
Glass isn't nearly as bad as plastic; but I probably went through 3 iPhones a week back when I was snorting coke off those...
I get it they are to show off how rich you are, but seems like for $10k I would want something a little better specced.
Why do they then always suck? You could get a real top of the line phone and have a custom solid gold body made for it for less and have a better device.
Tech is a pretty brutal market to do 'luxury' goods in. R&D and design costs are extremely high, while manufacturing is (relatively) cheap per unit. So, the guy who is stamping out several million pieces of consumer shit can spend more on making the software not suck and the case(while possibly plastic) elegantly designed than the guy stamping out 1,000 'luxury' devices. It doesn't help that phones are harshly power constrained, so you can't even make something 'better' by splurging on fancy silicon(at least with a desktop, you could shove the fastest i7 that Intel makes and several times as much RAM as the customer could ever need into the chassis as a value-add). The thermal envelope and battery size are so small that mass-market junk, made in huge volume on refined processes, will offer a better experience than any custom or super-overclocked, or 'just-plain-excessive-amounts-of-RAM' configuration would.
This still doesn't explain why 'Vertu' hardware is actively worse than generic Nexus gear, since they could probably just buy Nexus hardware at retail and rip the case off for less money than designing their own hardware; but tech in general is pretty hard to do 'luxury' in.
I can't imagine why a modification to the behavior of a device driver(or possibly the replacement of a device driver, depending on the features of the shipping driver) might require root access... Those lazy developers, they should have just built ad-hoc 802.11 mesh networking support in HTML5 or something.
For users on contract or fixed-price month-to-month, carriers often have an incentive to encourage them to use wifi(unless they think you'll upgrade to a more expensive data plan, or get whacked with overage fees, the less data you use the less you cost; but you still pay the same for the service). So long as they want to continue paying, the carriers would probably be delighted to have them drop off the grid and go mesh out to their heart's content.
Also, internet access in itself doesn't provide a phone number(though you can generally get a VOIP line more cheaply than a cell or landline), so only users who don't actually phone with their phones, or are willing to have phone access only when within range of the wifi or mesh, or who are willing to put up with having both a cell and a VOIP number, are likely to jump from their voice plan.
Plus, wireless meshes can, unless conditions are good, exhibit some pretty tepid latency and packet loss numbers. Well worth what you (don't) pay for bulk data transport; but cuts the utility for latency-sensitive applications.
This is hardly to say that meshes are useless(indeed, they are pretty neat, and certainly a good thing to have in place for resilience purposes and various other things); but they aren't a terribly effective direct competitor to contemporary cellular data standards, or to a one-hop wireless link to a hardline of some sort.
Good for this judge. If someone is systematically benefiting from unethical behavior, we don't want them in our legal, political, medical or other professional systems.
I dunno, there's a lot of risky medical testing that we are currently forced to do on imperfect animal models... Might be the only way that these people could make a positive contribution.
There appear to be a lot of unwanted Kindles selling cheap now... maybe it could be an option for someone like me with some time and very little money. But I think I will wait for the second generation of the Nexus 7 to hit the streets and get a deal on the first generation for a song.
If there are a lot of buyer's remorse/'gifting fail' models floating around, that could seriously change the equation... The delta between sticker prices isn't worth it; but the fleabay/craigslist price hit could easily knock the Kindle right down into impulse territory...
Given the quite modest price delta between the Kindle Fire and the Nexus 7(especially given the latter's slightly punchier specs), how much is your time not worth if you buy the former and do a bunch of messing around to get a only-somewhat-crippled Android 4.0-oddball device when you could get a 'clean' 4.2 device?
I can see doing it once the cyanogenmod, or similar, matures(assuming the bootloader crack holds out), since that should be a fairly swift nuke-and-pave operation that will bring you up to a version of Android that isn't Amazon's listlessly maintained Amazon Consumption Platform edition; but just incremental poking at the stock OS?
"And because they're exclusive, it would be a breach of contract for a film's copyright owner to allow anybody but that distributor to distribute copies of the film in that market."
If the price difference is large enough, the film's copyright owner doesn't have to 'allow' anything, they just have to not have any recourse when somebody in country A buys a containerload of cheap DVDs and ships them to country B. First sale, no unauthorized copies made, etc.
I'm really surprised that they "bowed to pressure". When last I checked, Australian companies could set the price of their goods as they choose and parliamentary testimony had as much authority as the dog and pony shows of the U.S. congress.
The whole thing seems odd to me.
Most organisms of nontrivial size in Australia are virulently venomous. Adobe is quite used to dealing with toothless legislators(and, indeed, found that the Australian ones were no more toothy than their counterparts elsewhere); but there are a number of venom-injecting structures found in nature that are not classified as 'teeth'. Lobbyist boot-camp doesn't train you on how to respond when a parliamentary committee starts making clicking noises and waving their palps at you.
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Does anybody know what language(s) are used for the "Dead Hand" second-strike control system that the Russians were working on during the Cold War? Personally, I'd nominate them as the programming languages that will outlive us all...
You do realize that, while Hypertransport vs. FSB was a hilariously lopsided contest(and one of the reasons that even the most Intel-friendly OEMs were forced to start shipping Opteron servers in the multi-socket segement), all remotely recent Intel silicon(except Atom, which is off marching very slowly in its own direction) use QPI and integrated memory controllers? It took them long enough; but recent AMD and recent Intel CPUs again have substantially the same layout in terms of interface bandwidth and placement of system RAM.
Oh look, it's another retired general bitching about how much better things were when he led the army. File this one under W for 'Wozniak'.
The Woz probably isn't the best comparison: In this rant, the guy who kicked off MS' Xbox strategy is complaining about how MS is fucking up Xbox strategy. In the case of Wozniak, Apple's original hardware-hacker-geek occasionally laments the fact that a company that bears almost no resemblance to the "Apple" of his era except the name now produces products that don't even pretend to be interested in the likes of him.
Next step would be a CPU class based licensing of Windows.
Not to the degree that the old-school enterprise players (IBM and Oracle, say) do it; but Windows licensing has already been spec based for quite some time now. As far back as NT 4.0, there was 'server' and 'enterprise server'(if you wanted 3GB of RAM per-process and an 8 CPU SMP license).
2000 brought 'server', 'advanced server', and 'datacenter server' (4CPU), (8CPU, 8GB RAM w/PAE), and (32CPU, 32GB RAM w/PAE) respectively.
Oh, you wouldn't literally do it that way, you'd work with the OEM to do a re-badge with your preferred changes(just as the Nexus itself does, though on a much larger scale). My intention was just to note that, given the profit margins that would allow you to do something as inefficient as 'purchase-at-retail-and-tear-up', you really should be able to OEM a top-end device to wrap in bling.
Given the existence of options markets, you could probably assign a market value to parking the thing in some convenient orbit for later use... It wouldn't necessarily be a terribly high market value; but, if you could find an orbit stable enough, the value of an option to exploit some slice of the asteroid at your leisure over the next several decades probably wouldn't be zero...
Without a good parking orbit, and some rather sci-fi hardware already in place to park it, the whole issue is moot, of course.
If their motives were so pure, they might have considered passing a law to deal with kiddy porn and child rape(which would now be in effect) rather than tying action on that issue to successfully ramming through a variety of much more dangerous and ill-considered changes(because of which they now don't have any progress on the issue).
Tackling serious issues is a good thing; but tying them to getting your way on much more controversial(or simply frivolous) issues is about as overt a sign of bad faith as you can exhibit...
Nothing particularly requires that 'performance art' only include things that are legal and/or unobjectionable. However, punishing people for doing things that are illegal for other reasons during the course of producing 'art' is not generally considered to be a restriction on freedom of speech, any more than the illegality of sacrificing babies to satan is considered an infringement on religious freedom...
There are some edge cases that get tricky(mostly on the side of people totally incidentally banning things that are required for speech or religions they don't like); but it isn't a terribly difficult conceptual distinction. Banning a speech act as such is a clear infringement of speech rights; but that doesn't confer any immunity from any other relevant laws on the speaker, should their speech involve breaching them.
We have 'zero proof' that building legal and technical mechanisms suitable for the suppression of a given flavor of content leads to the use of those mechanisms being used for the suppression of other flavors, sometimes including your 'actual speech' category? Srsly?
Mission creep is a well known phenomenon, and it's both easily historically observable that people's descriptions of political and social commentary they don't like frequently ends up tinged with the same vocabulary of condemnation as that used for porn('that's obscene' actually means that that includes some sordid fucking surprisingly infrequently).
On the architectural side, technical and legal mechanisms for efficient content takedowns are virtually content-agnostic. Blacklists, wordlist filters, DMCA takedown forms, any of those can be trivially re-targeted just by dropping some new parameters in to the configuration.
Lest this be dismissed as theoretical, observe the Russian experiment.
As for the babble about 'meaning' and 'the sacred', I'm just going to have to admit complete bafflement about what you are talking about.
The study certainly does suggest that mice(and some mouse findings) are much more troublesome than previously suspected. On the plus side, the methods that they used to establish that there was a real problem with mice(the examination of gene expression under the various conditions) seem like they might also be broadly applicable for examining the problem of what is and isn't a good model organism for a given problem...
Obviously, in an ideal world further research would confirm that you are on the right track and everything is just wonderful; but by our non-ideal world standards, a paper that hints at how animal models may be more accurately chosen or excluded for given lines of research seems like it could be quite handy.
Is so-called 'objective reality' also a social construct?
Aren't there some quotas for printed pages? If there are many good candidates, what do they do with the leftovers? Those don't necessarily have to be bad papers.
My understanding is that researchers shop them around, and that the large number of available journals, some more prestigious than others, and some more narrowly focused than others, is supposed to handle that(there has been some concern, especially regarding papers with negative results, that it may not do so optimally in some respects). If a paper is rejected from the very high prestige, relatively broad journals, it can work down the list toward journals more narrowly focused on its exact topic, and/or work down the list to less selective journals(or other selective journals where their luck is better).
So, any word on how we managed to get from 'researchers identify class of conditions for which mice are an unexpectedly lousy model' to 'drug testing in mice may be a waste of time'?
Being rejected by Science and Nature might also be indicative of being bad science. Not reading the report yet, the options seem to be intellectual dishonesty from some of the most respected sources of science, or the mice findings are fundamentally flawed. On the outset, I think being rejected by big names in science is usually pretty telling.
PNAS isn't exactly some chickenshit vanity press...
That's the part I don't understand: it makes sense that 'luxury' electronics can't actually afford to be much better than much more modestly priced consumer gear; but it is quite mysterious why they are actively worse when the same people who OEM the good stuff would be more than happy to sell you the same guts that you can then cover with artisinal hand-tanned tiger foreskin leather or gold-encrusted ivory or whatever.
Oh, you proles will just never understand what quality really means. In particular, the sapphire-coated screen is much less likely to scratch when your butler or nubile trophy wife is preparing a line of coke for you.
Glass isn't nearly as bad as plastic; but I probably went through 3 iPhones a week back when I was snorting coke off those...
I get it they are to show off how rich you are, but seems like for $10k I would want something a little better specced.
Why do they then always suck? You could get a real top of the line phone and have a custom solid gold body made for it for less and have a better device.
Tech is a pretty brutal market to do 'luxury' goods in. R&D and design costs are extremely high, while manufacturing is (relatively) cheap per unit. So, the guy who is stamping out several million pieces of consumer shit can spend more on making the software not suck and the case(while possibly plastic) elegantly designed than the guy stamping out 1,000 'luxury' devices. It doesn't help that phones are harshly power constrained, so you can't even make something 'better' by splurging on fancy silicon(at least with a desktop, you could shove the fastest i7 that Intel makes and several times as much RAM as the customer could ever need into the chassis as a value-add). The thermal envelope and battery size are so small that mass-market junk, made in huge volume on refined processes, will offer a better experience than any custom or super-overclocked, or 'just-plain-excessive-amounts-of-RAM' configuration would.
This still doesn't explain why 'Vertu' hardware is actively worse than generic Nexus gear, since they could probably just buy Nexus hardware at retail and rip the case off for less money than designing their own hardware; but tech in general is pretty hard to do 'luxury' in.
That only works on rooted phones
I can't imagine why a modification to the behavior of a device driver(or possibly the replacement of a device driver, depending on the features of the shipping driver) might require root access... Those lazy developers, they should have just built ad-hoc 802.11 mesh networking support in HTML5 or something.
Does the Dark Knight carry packets around Gotham city on his utility belt or something?
I suspect that they aren't wildly concerned:
For users on contract or fixed-price month-to-month, carriers often have an incentive to encourage them to use wifi(unless they think you'll upgrade to a more expensive data plan, or get whacked with overage fees, the less data you use the less you cost; but you still pay the same for the service). So long as they want to continue paying, the carriers would probably be delighted to have them drop off the grid and go mesh out to their heart's content.
Also, internet access in itself doesn't provide a phone number(though you can generally get a VOIP line more cheaply than a cell or landline), so only users who don't actually phone with their phones, or are willing to have phone access only when within range of the wifi or mesh, or who are willing to put up with having both a cell and a VOIP number, are likely to jump from their voice plan.
Plus, wireless meshes can, unless conditions are good, exhibit some pretty tepid latency and packet loss numbers. Well worth what you (don't) pay for bulk data transport; but cuts the utility for latency-sensitive applications.
This is hardly to say that meshes are useless(indeed, they are pretty neat, and certainly a good thing to have in place for resilience purposes and various other things); but they aren't a terribly effective direct competitor to contemporary cellular data standards, or to a one-hop wireless link to a hardline of some sort.
Good for this judge. If someone is systematically benefiting from unethical behavior, we don't want them in our legal, political, medical or other professional systems.
I dunno, there's a lot of risky medical testing that we are currently forced to do on imperfect animal models... Might be the only way that these people could make a positive contribution.
There appear to be a lot of unwanted Kindles selling cheap now... maybe it could be an option for someone like me with some time and very little money. But I think I will wait for the second generation of the Nexus 7 to hit the streets and get a deal on the first generation for a song.
If there are a lot of buyer's remorse/'gifting fail' models floating around, that could seriously change the equation... The delta between sticker prices isn't worth it; but the fleabay/craigslist price hit could easily knock the Kindle right down into impulse territory...
Given the quite modest price delta between the Kindle Fire and the Nexus 7(especially given the latter's slightly punchier specs), how much is your time not worth if you buy the former and do a bunch of messing around to get a only-somewhat-crippled Android 4.0-oddball device when you could get a 'clean' 4.2 device?
I can see doing it once the cyanogenmod, or similar, matures(assuming the bootloader crack holds out), since that should be a fairly swift nuke-and-pave operation that will bring you up to a version of Android that isn't Amazon's listlessly maintained Amazon Consumption Platform edition; but just incremental poking at the stock OS?
"And because they're exclusive, it would be a breach of contract for a film's copyright owner to allow anybody but that distributor to distribute copies of the film in that market."
If the price difference is large enough, the film's copyright owner doesn't have to 'allow' anything, they just have to not have any recourse when somebody in country A buys a containerload of cheap DVDs and ships them to country B. First sale, no unauthorized copies made, etc.
I'm really surprised that they "bowed to pressure". When last I checked, Australian companies could set the price of their goods as they choose and parliamentary testimony had as much authority as the dog and pony shows of the U.S. congress.
The whole thing seems odd to me.
Most organisms of nontrivial size in Australia are virulently venomous. Adobe is quite used to dealing with toothless legislators(and, indeed, found that the Australian ones were no more toothy than their counterparts elsewhere); but there are a number of venom-injecting structures found in nature that are not classified as 'teeth'. Lobbyist boot-camp doesn't train you on how to respond when a parliamentary committee starts making clicking noises and waving their palps at you.