2k(while it definitely allows for some sweet toys) is really overkill for adequate gaming. Particularly this late in the console cycle, almost any CPU that isn't total budget crap, along with an $80-$100 video card will run almost anything if you don't crank the pretty all the way up, and will generally support somewhat better looking play than the available consoles. Consoles are still a bit cheaper on hardware(though games can really make up the difference if you buy too many); but this isn't the bad old days when you needed some seriously firebreathing gear to keep up with the PC gaming market.
Also, unless the signal integrity issues are truly brutal, it wouldn't be terribly difficult to produce a CPU that is designed to be 'zillion-little-BGA-balls-permanently-attached' for volume constrained embedded applications and also produce a little PCB card that has an array of BGA pads on top and an array of LGA lands on the bottom, allowing you to turn your BGA-only CPU into a socketed CPU at modest additional expense.
Given the uptick in tablets, ultrathin laptops, and 'every CPU manufactured in the past 5 years is faster than I need' cheapy desktops, I certainly wouldn't bet on CPU sockets getting any more common; but it seems unlikely that sockets would be killed entirely in the more expensive areas.
This is not a big deal. Those of us who live in the north country deal with this every year. We have evolved social methods for handling the lack of sunlight.
I'm not sure that heavy drinking, crippling depression, and widespread suicide would be quite as acceptable on a spacecraft...
Are you familiar with the...somewhat gruesome... assortment of disciplinary tools used to keep sailors on task during ye olden days of wooden ships and iron men(tm)?
I suspect that there will be a certain reluctance to talk about it too loudly; but any serious human space activity will probably some amount of surgical or genetic modification(or a whole lot of drugs).
It isn't ready to go now; but it wouldn't be particularly hard to imagine our research in using stem cells and biocompatible scaffolds to produce replacement organs being applicable to the production of artificial endocrine glands, possibly even with cute features like optical control interfaces, that could be implanted into astronauts.
Further tweaks(like messing with myostatin to cope with muscle wasting in low gravity, or futzing with bone growth regulation to keep your astronauts from landing with skeletons more brittle than your great-grandmother's would probably also be in order).
For very short missions, mere screening for people who aren't claustrophobic and who have the 'right stuff' may be adequate; but it's far from clear that even exceptional human specimens are prepared to endure the conditions of prolonged space travel...
The language is a bit archaic; but Locke really nailed it in his 'Letter Concerning Toleration':
"In the next place: As the magistrate has no power to impose by his laws the use of any rites and ceremonies in any Church, so neither has he any power to forbid the use of such rites and ceremonies as are already received, approved, and practised by any Church; because, if he did so, he would destroy the Church itself: the end of whose institution is only to worship God with freedom after its own manner.
You will say, by this rule, if some congregations should have a mind to sacrifice infants, or (as the primitive Christians were falsely accused) lustfully pollute themselves in promiscuous uncleanness, or practise any other such heinous enormities, is the magistrate obliged to tolerate them, because they are committed in a religious assembly? I answer: No. These things are not lawful in the ordinary course of life, nor in any private house; and therefore neither are they so in the worship of God, or in any religious meeting. But, indeed, if any people congregated upon account of religion should be desirous to sacrifice a calf, I deny that that ought to be prohibited by a law. Meliboeus, whose calf it is, may lawfully kill his calf at home, and burn any part of it that he thinks fit. For no injury is thereby done to any one, no prejudice to another man's goods. And for the same reason he may kill his calf also in a religious meeting. Whether the doing so be well-pleasing to God or no, it is their part to consider that do it. The part of the magistrate is only to take care that the commonwealth receive no prejudice, and that there be no injury done to any man, either in life or estate. And thus what may be spent on a feast may be spent on a sacrifice. But if peradventure such were the state of things that the interest of the commonwealth required all slaughter of beasts should be forborne for some while, in order to the increasing of the stock of cattle that had been destroyed by some extraordinary murrain, who sees not that the magistrate, in such a case, may forbid all his subjects to kill any calves for any use whatsoever? Only it is to be observed that, in this case, the law is not made about a religious, but a political matter; nor is the sacrifice, but the slaughter of calves, thereby prohibited."
Someone who exercises state power('the magistrate') may not either enforce or forbid specific religious practices without doing unjust violence to the religious liberty of others. However, merely attaching the stamp of 'religious practice' to a given action does not render it immune from magisterial power, so long as that power is exercised uniformly, and for the purposes that the magistrate is justly responsible for.
In this case, it would be clearly unjust(and unconstitutional, since the intellectual grunt work on the constitution was mostly done by Lockeian enlightenment types) to, say, suppress the 'Christian Scientists' for their curious abstention from most modern medicine. However, it would in no way be unjust to impose a uniform requirement on all medical workers in close contact with patients that they be immunized against common and dangerous infectious diseases, regardless of whether their objections are religious or otherwise.
I am not an epidemiologist; but it is worth noting that the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons is sort of a John Birch version of the American Medical Association, with some... intriguingly contrarian... theories on a variety of matters.
Whether they are, in fact, correct in this case, and 'herd immunity' doesn't work as expected for some reason with flu vaccines, is a somewhat different question; but I'd treat their pronouncements on matters medical with only slightly less skepticism than Discovery Institute work on evolutionary biology...
What makes GRID any better than OnLive? Specifically in regards to latency, is the lag reduced between controller input and display? Unless nVidia is prepared to upgrade everyone else's infrastructure, I don't see this taking off.
It doesn't do a thing to solve the (significant) 'even customers in the same city have shitty ping, and we can't usefully load-balance our datacenters because adding a cross-country fiber trip totally ruins things, so we have to provision for peak getting-home-from-school/work-and-playing-games time; but let most of it sit idle during the day' problems that helped doom Onlive.
It probably is much better placed than Onlive was to fix the "We basically need an entire computer, or a VM with dedicated hardware passthrough to an entire GPU card, to handle each customer instance. Nvidia is in an overwhelmingly better position to get useful 'cloud' features like being able to carve up a large GPU and allocate resources to multiple low-demand instances, or to have a GPU that can dump video output to a virtual 'screen', with a hardware video encoder that passes the resulting video stream back to be sent over the network, rather than having to do a hardware capture at the DVI port or keep the CPU busy scraping the framebuffer...
So, they can't do much about latency or customer use patterns; but as the guys who make the GPU and write the drivers, they are certainly in a better position to allow efficient slicing up of GPU time and resources(along the lines of what contemporary VM setups can do with CPU and system RAM) than some 3rd party outfit is.
I wonder how difficult automated tattooing would be. If human skin were a well-behaved medium(which it isn't) it would be pretty trivial, you'd basically just need a pen plotter with slightly better vibration damping. Given the tendency to unpredictable elastic deformation and other nuisances, though, you might need a fairly sophisticated machine vision and possibly some pressure sensitive manipulator appendages to track, and where necessary modify, the target skin surface's configuration relative to the tattoo head....
"The basic Polaroid-style printouts will start at about $15 and be ready at the store within five to 10 minutes, Fotobar founder and CEO Warren Struhl told me. Prints on more exotic materials, or with framing and matting, will ship from a manufacturing facility within three days."
As I noticed by reading the article, these guys are offering the same damn thing as their existing competitors. The only onsite capabilities are your basic CVS mini-lab level quick print stuff, albeit with a markup for that iconic polaroid border, and any of the oddities are processed offsite, just like all the online photo finishers who offer all kinds of weird printing options without the trouble of going to a store.
I'm honestly surprised that an idea this stupid managed to get enough funding for a startup, let alone enough to drape Polaroid's necrotic brand across the venture...
There are, already, about a zillion retail photo-printing options available, if you actually need such a thing. Most of the chain pharmacies that used to(possibly still do) offer cheap 35mm processing have a kiosk or two for printing from digital media. They always look a trifle shabby; but the infrastructure is there already, and should retail printing take off in a given market, it'd be cheap and quick for any such location to swap in a slightly nicer kiosk. Office supply places, Fedex/Kinkos, and various other outfits also offer retail printing services(again, while currently rather business-drab, it'd be little more than a firmware update and some new posters if they want to make the process more 'hip'.)
And, for those who don't need instant gratification, pictures on mobile phones are, what, 1-3 seconds away from the internet and its cut-price photo printing services? I'd assume that at least some of them have already released 'apps' to make it easier to order directly from your phone's internal photo storage. If not, they certainly could, and fairly quickly. The various online services onto which photos are commonly uploaded are similarly well placed.
I'm just not seeing where these guys are supposed to fit in a market whose saturation is masked only by customer disinterest...
I'm not sure I've ever seen iTunes earn that many exclaimation points since the days when Apple announced that iPods on Windows would no longer depend on 'Musicmatch Jukebox' for file transfer...
I, for one, will be overjoyed to see the last of Imagination's 'PowerVR' shit, especially on x86, and hope we'll never see the likes of the "GMA500" again.
On the other hand, this report has me wondering exactly what the Atom team is up to. Back when Intel started the whole 'Atom' business, the whole point of having a substantially different architecture, in-order, was to have something that could scale down to lower power in a way that their flagship designs couldn't. Since then, the ULV Core I3/5/7 chips have continued to improve on power consumption, and the Atoms have apparently been sprouting additional complexity and computational power. How much room do they have to do that before 'Atom' evolves itself right out of its power envelope, or Core ULV parts start hitting the same TDPs as higher-power Atoms; but with much more headroom?
The 'full faith and credit' clause explicitly requires each state to honor the assorted official paperwork of the other states.
Arizona's legal trouble had nothing to do with other states failing to give it full faith and credit; but with the feds arguing that Article 6, clause 2:
"This Constitution, and the Laws of the United States which shall be made in pursuance thereof; and all treaties made, or which shall be made, under the authority of the United States, shall be the supreme law of the land; and the judges in every state shall be bound thereby, anything in the constitution or laws of any state to the contrary notwithstanding."
made Arizona's de-facto attempt at doing their own immigration enforcement(generally recognized as an enumerated federal power) null because of the supremacy of federal law already governing that matter.
(The 'you look sorta mexican to me, show me your papers' aspect of it also had people concerned about the implications for the due process and equal protections clauses of the 14th amendment; but I don't think that that ended up being the deciding factor.)
Incidentally, the big 'full faith and credit' case, that has never had its day in court, for whatever reason, is probably the one that would erupt if a homosexual couple duly married according to the procedures of a state where such is legal were to demand that a state where it isn't(or is overtly banned at the constitutional level) give full faith and credit to the actions of the state that married them. That one would get a bit touchy...
Given the mark-up tacked on to anything in earth orbit, NASA could probably be sourcing them from Harbor Freight and they still wouldn't want to drop one...
Oh, I have no reason to assume that they botched the income/cost numbers for each game; but I do have reason to suspect that they may not be accounting for the valuable(and if they aren't lucky, reasonably well publicized, some dumb kid crying over their cyber-pet is definitely human-interest fodder if it's a slow news day) lesson that they will be teaching their customers about becoming invested, emotionally or financially, in Zynga games(or online 'freemium' shit generally) in the future.
If your business model depends on reeling customers in, engaging them over a period of time, and getting them to buy non-transferable objects associated with your ecosystem, you really don't want to project an image of ill-health or unpredictability. Discussions of 'software as a service', which these sorts of online-only/always connected games are essentially the consumer version of, usually focuses on how the model gives the vendor greater power over the customer; but the knife cuts both ways: if the customer realizes that they are at the vendor's mercy, suddenly the vendor's future behavior(and future) become relevant to their willingness to buy.
Since the 'return on investment' is hedonic, rather than monetary(and Zynga customers are highly unlikely to be the most calculating buyers), it's an analogy rather than an exact match; but Zynga is essentially raising the discount rate, to account for additional risk, for calculating the net present value of any in-game purchase or time commitment to their games. That could be a bad idea, especially given the fact that loss-aversion tends to be more emotionally potent in informal decision making than desire for gain.
Unless they accounted for those affects, across their line, I'd argue that they fucked up on this one.
A company, Zynga, runs a business that is based on sucking people in and getting them to engage in small transactions for the purchase of various virtual things, along with incentives to spam their friends.
As a 'cost reduction measure', Zynga abruptly terminates the virtual things of some of their well-sucked-in customers, simultaneously breaking their habitual connection to whatever game they were playing and providing the nontechies with an object lesson in just how ephemeral 'ownership' is in Zynga's horrid little playground.
In what universe, exactly, did this plan make any sense? Did Zynga hire some jackoff from an 'enterprise solutions' firm, who thinks that customers will just have to migrate to the shiny new product because support is no longer available for the old one?
Nobody buys weed by the ounce or pound, they buy it by the gram or kilo. Same with cocaine. Charlie Sheen only buys it by the kilo, never by the pound. Let's face it, metric is already here, just nobody wants to admit it.
Don't forget hard liquor and ammo, both of which go well with drugs and are frequently sold in metric measures(never mind about the delightful metric/imperial overlap caused by US-derived rounds that also have a NATO-standardized military offshoot, sometimes slightly different in certain other respects, leading to wacky fun like.223 and 5.56...)
A surprising amount of American history can be boiled down to descriptions of cool ideas that our original crop of Enlightenment statesmen wrote about, followed by descriptions of our unwillingness to implement them...
I'm pretty sure that the bible didn't say anything in English, even if we can agree on what set of texts constitutes the 'bible'...
(Incidentally, is converting an archaic weight or measure to a contemporary one, presumably with a footnote in the critical edition, any more abusive than the procedures involved in translation from one language to another?)
But seriously, is there all that much difference between any of them? Just because we can trace these two churches back to their wacko founders, doesn't mean the other older churches weren't founded by wackos too.
Alleged theology, and just how much the founder really could have used a stiff dose of Chlorpromazine, are surprisingly poor guides to the contemporary behavior of religious groups once they've had a few decades or centuries to move past the initial 'charismatic leader with band of disciples' stage. The big question is what direction(or directions, sub-sects crop up like weeds) the group drifted on its road to the present.
Why(except perhaps for tax purposes) would a group being recognized as a religion or not so recognized be relevant? Both religious and secular organizations are capable of being criminal organizations, or not, and both are capable of using the sort of ethically problematic coercive tactics most commonly associated with cults.
Certainly, being a well established and respected religion can be very convenient indeed(see also, decades-if-not-more of kiddie rape with near-total impunity); but if you have to fight for recognition as "Well, I guess you technically meet the standards of a 'religion', so we can't legally deny you." you don't automatically acquire the establishment and respect, which are what really count.
I imagine Microsoft may just release a patch that fixes everything into a "classic" view to gain more sales.
What amazes me is that(at least at time of writing) they don't even offer a group policy setting that lets their whiny corporate customers set all their definitely-not-touchscreen boring typingboxes to go directly to desktop by default.
It isn't terribly tricky to script an invocation of "explorer.exe shell:::{3080F90D-D7AD-11D9-BD98-0000947B0257}" on login; but the fact that they don't just offer a GPO setting to switch strongly suggests that somebody at Microsoft is hitting the kool-aide far harder than is advisable.
I just don't understand it. With Vista, the mystery was how they'd managed to get so little done in 6-odd years of development, the core product just kind of sucked. With Win8, they essentially have the (generally well-liked) base of Win7, with a bunch of modest improvements in various areas, and then Metro. All they'd have to do is make it optional(or get really crazy and have it default on or off depending on whether the device has a touchscreen or not...) and everybody would stop whining more or less immediately. It's just sort of baffling.
Shhh... pointing out that some of our enemies are real assholes is supposed to be a magical justification for absolutely anything we do, wish to do, or may have done, however tangentially related. How can you be so mean as to oppose this argument?
I think you miss his point. A 250lb JDAM dropped from a MQ-9 is treated completely differently (in the press) than the exact same 250lb JDAM dropped from an F-16. The only real difference between the two aircraft is where the pilot is sitting. But it is still a human pilot hitting the pickle button.
There is one major difference you are missing: Pre drone, the CIA didn't have much of an air force, and what it did have was exotic recon gear. The conventional military also operates drones, of course, and there isn't much effort made to attribute any given attack to any specific operator; but one locus of dislike for the drone fleet is really a locus of dislike for the fact that the CIA is now in the business of running a rapidly expanding and not-even-nominally-accountable-to-anybody fleet of ground attack aircraft.
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2k(while it definitely allows for some sweet toys) is really overkill for adequate gaming. Particularly this late in the console cycle, almost any CPU that isn't total budget crap, along with an $80-$100 video card will run almost anything if you don't crank the pretty all the way up, and will generally support somewhat better looking play than the available consoles. Consoles are still a bit cheaper on hardware(though games can really make up the difference if you buy too many); but this isn't the bad old days when you needed some seriously firebreathing gear to keep up with the PC gaming market.
Also, unless the signal integrity issues are truly brutal, it wouldn't be terribly difficult to produce a CPU that is designed to be 'zillion-little-BGA-balls-permanently-attached' for volume constrained embedded applications and also produce a little PCB card that has an array of BGA pads on top and an array of LGA lands on the bottom, allowing you to turn your BGA-only CPU into a socketed CPU at modest additional expense.
Given the uptick in tablets, ultrathin laptops, and 'every CPU manufactured in the past 5 years is faster than I need' cheapy desktops, I certainly wouldn't bet on CPU sockets getting any more common; but it seems unlikely that sockets would be killed entirely in the more expensive areas.
This is not a big deal. Those of us who live in the north country deal with this every year. We have evolved social methods for handling the lack of sunlight.
I'm not sure that heavy drinking, crippling depression, and widespread suicide would be quite as acceptable on a spacecraft...
Are you familiar with the...somewhat gruesome... assortment of disciplinary tools used to keep sailors on task during ye olden days of wooden ships and iron men(tm)?
I suspect that there will be a certain reluctance to talk about it too loudly; but any serious human space activity will probably some amount of surgical or genetic modification(or a whole lot of drugs).
It isn't ready to go now; but it wouldn't be particularly hard to imagine our research in using stem cells and biocompatible scaffolds to produce replacement organs being applicable to the production of artificial endocrine glands, possibly even with cute features like optical control interfaces, that could be implanted into astronauts.
Further tweaks(like messing with myostatin to cope with muscle wasting in low gravity, or futzing with bone growth regulation to keep your astronauts from landing with skeletons more brittle than your great-grandmother's would probably also be in order).
For very short missions, mere screening for people who aren't claustrophobic and who have the 'right stuff' may be adequate; but it's far from clear that even exceptional human specimens are prepared to endure the conditions of prolonged space travel...
The language is a bit archaic; but Locke really nailed it in his 'Letter Concerning Toleration':
"In the next place: As the magistrate has no power to impose by his laws the use of any rites and ceremonies in any Church, so neither has he any power to forbid the use of such rites and ceremonies as are already received, approved, and practised by any Church; because, if he did so, he would destroy the Church itself: the end of whose institution is only to worship God with freedom after its own manner.
You will say, by this rule, if some congregations should have a mind to sacrifice infants, or (as the primitive Christians were falsely accused) lustfully pollute themselves in promiscuous uncleanness, or practise any other such heinous enormities, is the magistrate obliged to tolerate them, because they are committed in a religious assembly? I answer: No. These things are not lawful in the ordinary course of life, nor in any private house; and therefore neither are they so in the worship of God, or in any religious meeting. But, indeed, if any people congregated upon account of religion should be desirous to sacrifice a calf, I deny that that ought to be prohibited by a law. Meliboeus, whose calf it is, may lawfully kill his calf at home, and burn any part of it that he thinks fit. For no injury is thereby done to any one, no prejudice to another man's goods. And for the same reason he may kill his calf also in a religious meeting. Whether the doing so be well-pleasing to God or no, it is their part to consider that do it. The part of the magistrate is only to take care that the commonwealth receive no prejudice, and that there be no injury done to any man, either in life or estate. And thus what may be spent on a feast may be spent on a sacrifice. But if peradventure such were the state of things that the interest of the commonwealth required all slaughter of beasts should be forborne for some while, in order to the increasing of the stock of cattle that had been destroyed by some extraordinary murrain, who sees not that the magistrate, in such a case, may forbid all his subjects to kill any calves for any use whatsoever? Only it is to be observed that, in this case, the law is not made about a religious, but a political matter; nor is the sacrifice, but the slaughter of calves, thereby prohibited."
Someone who exercises state power('the magistrate') may not either enforce or forbid specific religious practices without doing unjust violence to the religious liberty of others. However, merely attaching the stamp of 'religious practice' to a given action does not render it immune from magisterial power, so long as that power is exercised uniformly, and for the purposes that the magistrate is justly responsible for.
In this case, it would be clearly unjust(and unconstitutional, since the intellectual grunt work on the constitution was mostly done by Lockeian enlightenment types) to, say, suppress the 'Christian Scientists' for their curious abstention from most modern medicine. However, it would in no way be unjust to impose a uniform requirement on all medical workers in close contact with patients that they be immunized against common and dangerous infectious diseases, regardless of whether their objections are religious or otherwise.
I am not an epidemiologist; but it is worth noting that the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons is sort of a John Birch version of the American Medical Association, with some... intriguingly contrarian... theories on a variety of matters.
Whether they are, in fact, correct in this case, and 'herd immunity' doesn't work as expected for some reason with flu vaccines, is a somewhat different question; but I'd treat their pronouncements on matters medical with only slightly less skepticism than Discovery Institute work on evolutionary biology...
What makes GRID any better than OnLive? Specifically in regards to latency, is the lag reduced between controller input and display? Unless nVidia is prepared to upgrade everyone else's infrastructure, I don't see this taking off.
It doesn't do a thing to solve the (significant) 'even customers in the same city have shitty ping, and we can't usefully load-balance our datacenters because adding a cross-country fiber trip totally ruins things, so we have to provision for peak getting-home-from-school/work-and-playing-games time; but let most of it sit idle during the day' problems that helped doom Onlive.
It probably is much better placed than Onlive was to fix the "We basically need an entire computer, or a VM with dedicated hardware passthrough to an entire GPU card, to handle each customer instance. Nvidia is in an overwhelmingly better position to get useful 'cloud' features like being able to carve up a large GPU and allocate resources to multiple low-demand instances, or to have a GPU that can dump video output to a virtual 'screen', with a hardware video encoder that passes the resulting video stream back to be sent over the network, rather than having to do a hardware capture at the DVI port or keep the CPU busy scraping the framebuffer...
So, they can't do much about latency or customer use patterns; but as the guys who make the GPU and write the drivers, they are certainly in a better position to allow efficient slicing up of GPU time and resources(along the lines of what contemporary VM setups can do with CPU and system RAM) than some 3rd party outfit is.
I wonder how difficult automated tattooing would be. If human skin were a well-behaved medium(which it isn't) it would be pretty trivial, you'd basically just need a pen plotter with slightly better vibration damping. Given the tendency to unpredictable elastic deformation and other nuisances, though, you might need a fairly sophisticated machine vision and possibly some pressure sensitive manipulator appendages to track, and where necessary modify, the target skin surface's configuration relative to the tattoo head....
"The basic Polaroid-style printouts will start at about $15 and be ready at the store within five to 10 minutes, Fotobar founder and CEO Warren Struhl told me. Prints on more exotic materials, or with framing and matting, will ship from a manufacturing facility within three days."
As I noticed by reading the article, these guys are offering the same damn thing as their existing competitors. The only onsite capabilities are your basic CVS mini-lab level quick print stuff, albeit with a markup for that iconic polaroid border, and any of the oddities are processed offsite, just like all the online photo finishers who offer all kinds of weird printing options without the trouble of going to a store.
I'm honestly surprised that an idea this stupid managed to get enough funding for a startup, let alone enough to drape Polaroid's necrotic brand across the venture...
There are, already, about a zillion retail photo-printing options available, if you actually need such a thing. Most of the chain pharmacies that used to(possibly still do) offer cheap 35mm processing have a kiosk or two for printing from digital media. They always look a trifle shabby; but the infrastructure is there already, and should retail printing take off in a given market, it'd be cheap and quick for any such location to swap in a slightly nicer kiosk. Office supply places, Fedex/Kinkos, and various other outfits also offer retail printing services(again, while currently rather business-drab, it'd be little more than a firmware update and some new posters if they want to make the process more 'hip'.)
And, for those who don't need instant gratification, pictures on mobile phones are, what, 1-3 seconds away from the internet and its cut-price photo printing services? I'd assume that at least some of them have already released 'apps' to make it easier to order directly from your phone's internal photo storage. If not, they certainly could, and fairly quickly. The various online services onto which photos are commonly uploaded are similarly well placed.
I'm just not seeing where these guys are supposed to fit in a market whose saturation is masked only by customer disinterest...
I'm not sure I've ever seen iTunes earn that many exclaimation points since the days when Apple announced that iPods on Windows would no longer depend on 'Musicmatch Jukebox' for file transfer...
I, for one, will be overjoyed to see the last of Imagination's 'PowerVR' shit, especially on x86, and hope we'll never see the likes of the "GMA500" again.
On the other hand, this report has me wondering exactly what the Atom team is up to. Back when Intel started the whole 'Atom' business, the whole point of having a substantially different architecture, in-order, was to have something that could scale down to lower power in a way that their flagship designs couldn't. Since then, the ULV Core I3/5/7 chips have continued to improve on power consumption, and the Atoms have apparently been sprouting additional complexity and computational power. How much room do they have to do that before 'Atom' evolves itself right out of its power envelope, or Core ULV parts start hitting the same TDPs as higher-power Atoms; but with much more headroom?
Entirely different points of law.
The 'full faith and credit' clause explicitly requires each state to honor the assorted official paperwork of the other states.
Arizona's legal trouble had nothing to do with other states failing to give it full faith and credit; but with the feds arguing that Article 6, clause 2:
"This Constitution, and the Laws of the United States which shall be made in pursuance thereof; and all treaties made, or which shall be made, under the authority of the United States, shall be the supreme law of the land; and the judges in every state shall be bound thereby, anything in the constitution or laws of any state to the contrary notwithstanding."
made Arizona's de-facto attempt at doing their own immigration enforcement(generally recognized as an enumerated federal power) null because of the supremacy of federal law already governing that matter.
(The 'you look sorta mexican to me, show me your papers' aspect of it also had people concerned about the implications for the due process and equal protections clauses of the 14th amendment; but I don't think that that ended up being the deciding factor.)
Incidentally, the big 'full faith and credit' case, that has never had its day in court, for whatever reason, is probably the one that would erupt if a homosexual couple duly married according to the procedures of a state where such is legal were to demand that a state where it isn't(or is overtly banned at the constitutional level) give full faith and credit to the actions of the state that married them. That one would get a bit touchy...
Given the mark-up tacked on to anything in earth orbit, NASA could probably be sourcing them from Harbor Freight and they still wouldn't want to drop one...
Oh, I have no reason to assume that they botched the income/cost numbers for each game; but I do have reason to suspect that they may not be accounting for the valuable(and if they aren't lucky, reasonably well publicized, some dumb kid crying over their cyber-pet is definitely human-interest fodder if it's a slow news day) lesson that they will be teaching their customers about becoming invested, emotionally or financially, in Zynga games(or online 'freemium' shit generally) in the future.
If your business model depends on reeling customers in, engaging them over a period of time, and getting them to buy non-transferable objects associated with your ecosystem, you really don't want to project an image of ill-health or unpredictability. Discussions of 'software as a service', which these sorts of online-only/always connected games are essentially the consumer version of, usually focuses on how the model gives the vendor greater power over the customer; but the knife cuts both ways: if the customer realizes that they are at the vendor's mercy, suddenly the vendor's future behavior(and future) become relevant to their willingness to buy.
Since the 'return on investment' is hedonic, rather than monetary(and Zynga customers are highly unlikely to be the most calculating buyers), it's an analogy rather than an exact match; but Zynga is essentially raising the discount rate, to account for additional risk, for calculating the net present value of any in-game purchase or time commitment to their games. That could be a bad idea, especially given the fact that loss-aversion tends to be more emotionally potent in informal decision making than desire for gain.
Unless they accounted for those affects, across their line, I'd argue that they fucked up on this one.
So, let's get this straight:
A company, Zynga, runs a business that is based on sucking people in and getting them to engage in small transactions for the purchase of various virtual things, along with incentives to spam their friends.
As a 'cost reduction measure', Zynga abruptly terminates the virtual things of some of their well-sucked-in customers, simultaneously breaking their habitual connection to whatever game they were playing and providing the nontechies with an object lesson in just how ephemeral 'ownership' is in Zynga's horrid little playground.
In what universe, exactly, did this plan make any sense? Did Zynga hire some jackoff from an 'enterprise solutions' firm, who thinks that customers will just have to migrate to the shiny new product because support is no longer available for the old one?
Nobody buys weed by the ounce or pound, they buy it by the gram or kilo. Same with cocaine. Charlie Sheen only buys it by the kilo, never by the pound. Let's face it, metric is already here, just nobody wants to admit it.
Don't forget hard liquor and ammo, both of which go well with drugs and are frequently sold in metric measures(never mind about the delightful metric/imperial overlap caused by US-derived rounds that also have a NATO-standardized military offshoot, sometimes slightly different in certain other respects, leading to wacky fun like .223 and 5.56...)
A surprising amount of American history can be boiled down to descriptions of cool ideas that our original crop of Enlightenment statesmen wrote about, followed by descriptions of our unwillingness to implement them...
I'm pretty sure that the bible didn't say anything in English, even if we can agree on what set of texts constitutes the 'bible'...
(Incidentally, is converting an archaic weight or measure to a contemporary one, presumably with a footnote in the critical edition, any more abusive than the procedures involved in translation from one language to another?)
But seriously, is there all that much difference between any of them? Just because we can trace these two churches back to their wacko founders, doesn't mean the other older churches weren't founded by wackos too.
Alleged theology, and just how much the founder really could have used a stiff dose of Chlorpromazine, are surprisingly poor guides to the contemporary behavior of religious groups once they've had a few decades or centuries to move past the initial 'charismatic leader with band of disciples' stage. The big question is what direction(or directions, sub-sects crop up like weeds) the group drifted on its road to the present.
Why(except perhaps for tax purposes) would a group being recognized as a religion or not so recognized be relevant? Both religious and secular organizations are capable of being criminal organizations, or not, and both are capable of using the sort of ethically problematic coercive tactics most commonly associated with cults.
Certainly, being a well established and respected religion can be very convenient indeed(see also, decades-if-not-more of kiddie rape with near-total impunity); but if you have to fight for recognition as "Well, I guess you technically meet the standards of a 'religion', so we can't legally deny you." you don't automatically acquire the establishment and respect, which are what really count.
I imagine Microsoft may just release a patch that fixes everything into a "classic" view to gain more sales.
What amazes me is that(at least at time of writing) they don't even offer a group policy setting that lets their whiny corporate customers set all their definitely-not-touchscreen boring typingboxes to go directly to desktop by default.
It isn't terribly tricky to script an invocation of "explorer.exe shell:::{3080F90D-D7AD-11D9-BD98-0000947B0257}" on login; but the fact that they don't just offer a GPO setting to switch strongly suggests that somebody at Microsoft is hitting the kool-aide far harder than is advisable.
I just don't understand it. With Vista, the mystery was how they'd managed to get so little done in 6-odd years of development, the core product just kind of sucked. With Win8, they essentially have the (generally well-liked) base of Win7, with a bunch of modest improvements in various areas, and then Metro. All they'd have to do is make it optional(or get really crazy and have it default on or off depending on whether the device has a touchscreen or not...) and everybody would stop whining more or less immediately. It's just sort of baffling.
Shhh... pointing out that some of our enemies are real assholes is supposed to be a magical justification for absolutely anything we do, wish to do, or may have done, however tangentially related. How can you be so mean as to oppose this argument?
I think you miss his point.
A 250lb JDAM dropped from a MQ-9 is treated completely differently (in the press) than the exact same 250lb JDAM dropped from an F-16.
The only real difference between the two aircraft is where the pilot is sitting. But it is still a human pilot hitting the pickle button.
There is one major difference you are missing: Pre drone, the CIA didn't have much of an air force, and what it did have was exotic recon gear. The conventional military also operates drones, of course, and there isn't much effort made to attribute any given attack to any specific operator; but one locus of dislike for the drone fleet is really a locus of dislike for the fact that the CIA is now in the business of running a rapidly expanding and not-even-nominally-accountable-to-anybody fleet of ground attack aircraft.